'The Guardian' of government data

On the heels of the United Kingdom's launch of its own version of Data.gov comes a new site developed by The Guardian newspaper that provides access to online government data sites from around the world.

According to this editorial, The Guardian has been pushing for the UK to set up its own site for four years. Whether that means the paper was instrumental in getting the new site up is questionable, but at least it means the newspaper was ready when the site went live.

The Guardian has some highflying ideas of what the revelation of all this data could mean:

“Without the printed word there would have been no informed electorate, no demand for accountability from our leaders and, indeed, no democracy at all. Open data will surely revive it and, in time, could transform it too.”

I guess we’ll see about that. W. David Stephenson, a consultant to current federal CIO Vivek Kundra while the latter was the CIO for the city of Washington, lays out how he thinks this could happen in an op-ed piece in the Huffington Post.

There’s no denying that opening up government data is an inexorable trend, so it will be at the least fascinating to see how it plays out, and The Guardian's site will be a good resource for that. After all, the Brits may have a better idea of this stuff right now, as FCW’s own story seems to suggest.