When President Obama appointed his new federal CIO, Vivek Kundra, last week, Kundra announced ambitious plans to "democratize" federal ernment data by making it aessible in open formats and in data feeds. His plan calls for the creation of a single point of aess to all public federal information. The idea is to enable the data to be aessed by developers whose applications will open up federal data to the sunlight of millions of citizens by enuraging them to scrutinize how the Revery Act’s dollars will be spent.

As chief technology officer for the District of lumbia, Kundra raised the bar by making ernment data more readily aessible to its residents, leveraging pre-existing Web 2.0 technologies like Facebook and YouTube.

Federal agencies are now banding together to plan for how they are going to provide this information in an open, standardized manner that enables citizens to efficiently and aurately mine data, make mparisons, and perform analytics across all ernment sectors.

All this aessible data sounds well and good until you start looking at it from a developer’s point of view — there is currently little or no uniformity across ernment agencies for reporting granular federal financial data. With billions of dollars being funneled in grants, loans, and loan guarantees, there needs to be a standard ‘open’ format and shared re-usable taxonomy for both applications and reporting.

What Can We Anticipate from Kundra?

While Kundra’s announcement caused quite a stir in the technology sector, it still remains to be seen if he will have the authority to mandate change or if he will just be a technology advisor to Obama. His role may be limited to making technology remmendations which then have to be adopted into individual agency policies instead of presenting a mmon technology policy for the ernment as a whole.

One can only hope that one of Kundra’s first remmendations includes leveraging what has beme the de facto global financial reporting open standard — XBRL — to tag and track the billions of Revery Act dollars. The Obama Administration has mmitted to enabling an unprecedented level of transparency and aountability so Americans know where their tax dollars are going and how they are being spent.

Kundra will have to look no further than to the U.S. SEC’s use of RSS feeds and FTP s to post the recent filings as XBRL. The SEC’s bold move enabled developers to build applications to nsume and analyze the data in almost real-time with levels of data auracy and granularity that uld never before be achieved with screen-scraping from untagged data or PDF formats. Previously, the information was only available in normalized data feeds from pay-per-view data aggregators. In another enuraging example and move towards transparency from China, the Shenzhen Stock Exchange (SZSE) recently announced that it has rolled out a platform enabling the download of listed mpanies’ information tagged with XBRL. As the global financial mmunity moves to free up data in a more aessible manner, the time is now for the U.S. federal ernment to take similar actions.

It remains to be seen if XBRL will be adopted to track the disbursement and use of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds, enabling more effective regulation and providing investors nsistent, mparable reporting on the existing pool of securitized assets. Hopefully, Kundra will be listening when XBRL-US presents its report to the Domestic Policy Submmittee of the Oversight and ernment Reform mmittee in a hearing today in the U.S. ngress on “Assessing Treasury’s Efforts at Preventing Waste and Abuse of TARP Funds.” Yet another opportunity to leverage open standards to aid in federal transparency efforts.

In a recent memorandum, the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) Director, Peter Orszag, describes a planned May 5^th launch of a series of Award Transaction Data Feeds. All federal agencies will now be required to provide all Revery Act assistance transactions in the standard format currently provided to USASpending.. In the memo, Orszag placed a high priority on delivering an “aurate display” of information related to the Revery Act on Revery.. Federal agencies are now scrambling to ensure they mply and that all reporting related to Revery Act funding is mplete and aurate.
It’s not a “window to the federal data” that will allow developers to leverage and create valuable applications, but rather aess to the raw data itself, preferably with open standards-based tags from a shared mmon federal taxonomy of terms. We’re tired of screen-scrapping and trying to data map disparate data sources across federal ernment agencies. Hopefully federal agencies like the OMB will listen to Kundra and take a page from Facebook and the iPhone and create an open standards-based platform. Then, the application developers will me in droves.
Building an app is easy when you don’t have to worry about shifting data sources, proprietary platforms, and an ever-changing myriad of web services.

Creating a mprehensive Plan

The key to the suess of this plan is to ensure that there is some agreement across all federal agencies that defines a shared mmon ‘open’ data standard and identifies how deeply they are willing to push the tagging of data gathered into the llection processes for Revery Act funding applications and into the financial reporting between the federal, state, and local agencies who are to be the recipients of the Revery Act funds. Currently, the plan is to only go one level deep — the federal agency will require recipient reporting only from the primary agency receiving the funds.
For instance, a grant uld be given from the Federal ernment to State A, which then gives a sub grant to City B (within State A), which hires a ntractor to nstruct a bridge, which then hires a subntractor to supply the ncrete. In this case, State A is the prime recipient and would be required to report the sub grant to City B. However, City B does not have any specific reporting obligations — nor does the ntractor or subntractor — for the purposes of reporting to the Revery. web.
In Spain, XBRL has been used right down to the municipal level for the reporting and monitoring of Local ernment Budget Reporting; there’s no reason not to enurage all levels of ernment agencies to increase information sharing.

Kundra’s Potential Impact on XBRL 

Kundra uld really drive XBRL forward by insisting that all the data, right down to actual recipients, be made available as long as that data did not breach privacy and security of individuals. As aounting packages and ERP vendors like SAP are all adding XBRL export functionality to their offerings to facilitate SEC filings, it would be a natural next step to get XBRL-tagged reports all the way down to the ntractor and sub-ntractor levels.
Obama’s team should really take a close look at the Dutch and Australian efforts to breakdown the ernmental information silos with their move to a Standard Business Reporting (SBR) approach. The Dutch and Australian ernments regnized the interdependent nature of ernment agencies and the increased need for information-sharing via a standards-based approach and are relying heavily on the XBRL standard in their e efforts to give their untries an extra edge of efficiency.

Kundra should urt developers by providing an open standards-based, open source tool chain, giving examples and explaining in clear language how to create applications in the same manner that Apple and Facebook have done. If built on the solid open data standard foundation laid by U.S. SEC and the XBRL nsortium, this should ensure — as long as data is free and open — that applications will flourish and shine some long-awaited sunlight on ernment spending. 

Empower the world’s developers to make the Rever. data more useful and understandable for users rather than creating reliance on Federal ernment ntractors to develop more webs for displaying data. Developers everywhere are eager to create meaningful applications that will nnect users to financial data and solve real-world problems. Free the data, and the application developers will follow.