(3 Nov 2021) The Show US the Data virtual conference held on October 20, 2021 was a great success with over 500 registrants.It showed that automated search and discovery tools were possible to develop and that those tools could be used to find and close some gaps between what agencies know about how their data are being used and how much data is actually taking place. A broad community of stakeholders are ready to work with agencies to close gaps, with agencies agreeing there was a great deal of potential to move forward with use cases that highlight the value of their data in supporting evidence based policy-making.
From the summary of the report:
“The conference, which was organized by former Federal CIO, Suzette Kent, former US Chief Statistician, Nancy Potok, and Julia Lane, all of the Coleridge Initiative, and Howard Ratner of CHORUS brought together a wide diversity of public data users, data producers, researchers,
academic institutions, publishers and federal agencies. A recording of the conference is now available.
The core of the approach is to automate the search for and discovery of the use of federal datasets. Agencies can then respond to the Evidence Act, researchers and academic institutions can receive credit for promoting and supporting data use, and publishers can foster
the reproducibility and replicability of empirical research. The conference highlighted new tools that were developed through a Kaggle competition, which can be expanded to include the usage of data in government reports, the press, and by the public at large.”
