ReadWriteWeb

Ambitious but largely defunded open government data platform Data.gov is now working with counterparts at India's National Informatics Centre to offer an open source body of code known as the Open Government Platform or "Data.gov-in-a-Box."

It's the kind of move that, in theory, the political Left can support because of its impact on transparency and government accountability and the political Right can support because it puts government in a role that emphasizes facilitating innovation and economic development. It sounds like a very smart way to deal with the declining financial support for Data.gov itself. It could be a big win for developers everywhere and for the people who love to use the apps they make.

When the annual budgets for e-government initiatives including Data.gov were slashed by 75% last month, it didn't look good for the tech side of transparency. Today federal CIO Vivek Kundra has adressed the fate of these e-government programs in a letter to congress: "No project will go unaffected" he said.

Data.gov, the repository for publicly available data that was promised as a platform to power software and analysis created by and for the public, will remain open. But "there will be no enhancements or other development to address needs for improvement." According to an analysis of Kundra's letter by the watchdog Sunlight Foundation, Data.gov may slow drastically in its efforts to both offer more data and ensure the quality of that data. Other programs, specifically the Fedspace social network for collaboration between federal employees and the Citizen Services Dashboard for reviewing the quality of federal services, will be shut down.

Data.gov is a recent example of our ability to gather, store and analyze enormous, unprecedented quantities of information. Projects like these have the power to change our lives by driving transparency, accountability and collaboration. Data.gov is a testament to the times we live in and what we can do with big data technologies. But, perhaps more importantly, it is a testament to the big data community and the talented people behind the data who are dedicated to making it meaningful to the rest of us. It's time to bring these folks out of the shadows.

Federal government transparency programs, including data resource directory Data.gov, face across-the-board budget cuts by 75% in the latest version of the federal budget to emerge from Congressional negotiations.  According to the Sunlight Foundation, an independent transparency watchdog organization,  the "electronic government fund" faces cuts from a $34 million budget down to $8 million.  

We reported earlier this month that a Congressional proposal would cut the budget for programs including Data.gov, USASpending.gov, the federal cloud computing initiative and more. Those programs faced cuts down to $2 million, a virtual death sentence.  

Poet arrested by Bahrain security. After reciting a satirical poem during the Bahraini protests, Ayat Al-Qormezi was arrested. Her parents were tortured by gunmen, who told them their four sons, who had been forced face-down onto the floor, would be murdered before their eyes if they were not told where their daughter, the poet Ayat, was.

Mahmood Al-Yousif, the Bahraini "blogfather" who was arrested last week, was freed shortly thereafter due in part to pressure from the U.S. government.

Will the U.S. exert equal pressure to free a young lady whose fame is mostly as a poet? Will Bahrainis agitate for her release?

Two years ago the incoming Obama administration launched a number of ambitious websites, most notably Data.gov, that were dedicated to offering public and government data to the outside world. The stated intention was to foster transparency and offer a platform for the development of new software and services. It appears those experiments may be over for now.

Today the Sunlight Foundation and Federal News Radio reported that the public projects Data.gov, USASpending.gov, Apps.gov/now, IT Dashboard and paymentaccuracy.gov as well as a number of internal government sites including Performance.gov, FedSpace and many of the efforts related the FEDRamp cloud computing cybersecurity effort would be taken offline in coming weeks due to budget cuts by Congress. Perhaps things like electronic government, software platforms and public accountability were just fads, anyway.

Update:. We're hearing from several places that there's a potentially viable effort to save these sites and organizations. Here is one perspective on that and you can also see the Sunlight Foundation's Save the Data petition. See also Alex Howard's in-depth reporting on this news published on Friday.

The federal government sure loves cloud computing. And now it's using the foundation it built in the cloud to create a mobile apps store for citizens and government agencies.

The federal budget for IT services has $35 million set aside for introducing mobile technologies. The money is part of a $79 billion IT budget, down from $81 billion last year.

A new website dedicated to making non-personal data held by the U.K. government available for software developers has launched today with the help of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. Data.gov.uk is being slammed with traffic but six months after the U.S. government opened its Data.gov site the U.K. site already has more than three times as much data than the U.S. site offers today.

At launch, Data.gov.uk has nearly 3,000 data sets available for developers to build mashups with. The U.S. site, Data.gov, has less than 1,000 data sets today.

Spotted this evening on the U.S. government's public data web site, Data.gov. A Republican programmer at captcha provider reCAPTCHA having some fun?

Hat-tip ReadWriteWeb's Marketing manager Elyssa Pallai, who stumbled upon this humor gem today.

Are you pissed off about potholes, graffiti or broken street lights? Similar to the Federal government's efforts with Data.gov and Google's recent Public Sector release, CitySourced is offering users a chance to take government matters into their own hands. This year's TC50 third place runner-up, CitySourced is a crowd pleaser on a number of levels. If you're the type of person who writes letters to congressmen, editors and counsillors, you're likely to help power this app.