Heading 2

• Our 2015 Roundtable on Tracking Federal Spending explored ways to make Federal spending data more accessible, discoverable, and usable. The Roundtable brought together experts within the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) responsible for the release of Federal spending data with a range of individuals and organizations that use that data.

• Several years later, our 2018 Roundtable on Innovating with Federal Spending Data came at an important turning point: Under the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act, which ushered in a new era of transparency to Federal contract spending, agencies began reporting Federal spending data in May 2017, making a new, critical mass of information available for analysis. CODE helped the Treasury Department identify new applications of Federal spending data and develop recommendations for increasing its use and impact. Later in 2018, along with the Treasury Department and OMB, CODE hosted a follow-up Federal Grants & Government Accountability User Engagement Workshop. The workshop highlighted projects on Federal grants and contracts data as part of a tech sprint run by The Opportunity Project (TOP) and gathered input from users and advocates to improve digital tools and platforms before their public launch.

• In 2016, CODE partnered with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to host a series of four Roundtables addressing “wicked problems” in the collection, management, publication, and use of Federal open data. The Open Data Roundtable series addressed key issues in data privacy, data quality, research data, and public-private collaboration. The series and CODE’s report on its findings helped crystallize open data progress made during the Obama administration.

• This work and further research gave CODE the basis to produce the Open Data Transition Report, published just before the 2016 election, which laid out nonpartisan, forward-looking priorities for open data. Several of the report’s recommendations identified needs that were later addressed in a number of ways, including the need for a Chief Data Officer in every Federal agency, improvements in data on Federal grants, increased focus on cloud computing and open science, and the use of data for AI and automated vehicle development.

• After the 2016 election, CODE helped the new administration establish and communicate its commitment to open data through Roundtables on Open Data for Economic Growth and Leveraging Data as a Strategic Asset. This work and CODE’s analysis helped demonstrate that open data is truly a bipartisan priority, and helped set the stage for the development of the government-wide Federal Data Strategy.

• In 2017 CODE held a Roundtable on Data for Automated Vehicle Safety with the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), which brought together thought leaders to discuss how voluntary data exchanges could be set up and used to accelerate the safe rollout of automated vehicles. The Roundtable led to the creation of the Work Zone Data Exchange, which has become a significant part of the DOT’s automated vehicle data program.

• CODE has collaborated with the IBM Center for the Business of Government on different studies on improving Federal data policy and use. In 2019 the IBM Center published our report, Agile Problem Solving in Government: A Case Study of the Opportunity Project, which analyzed a successful program to transform the Federal culture of open data. Then in 2021 the IBM Center published Aligning Open Data, Open Source, and Hybrid Cloud Adoption in Government. In this report we analyzed four governmentwide strategic initiatives – the Federal Cloud Computing Strategy, the Federal Data Strategy, the Evidence Act, and the Federal Source Code Policy – and made recommendations for how they can be better coordinated and implemented.

• CODE is now working on projects to apply AI to make government data more accessible and usable. We’ve launched this line of work with Democratizing Government Data with GenAI: A Roundtable Discussion, a convening held in Oakland, CA at the end of July 2024. This Roundtable on the power of Generative AI was supported by the Kapor Foundation and the Omidyar Network, and held in collaboration with U.S. Department of Commerce data leadership.