Governments essentially run on logistics, the political game of governing people and moving money is all about juggling a lot of different data points. As a result, governments produce, study, collate, curate, and stack away a great deal of data—the United States government and all its myriad organs are no different. The result of this nature means that governments contain a lot of dark data—data that would otherwise be accessible if it weren’t stored in grim recesses of some near-forgotten archives and if people actually knew about it.

Open government initiatives concerning data generated by public resources and funded by the public interest have been in the news a lot. In fact, President Obama signed the Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government his first day in office which called for “a new era of open and accountable government meant to bridge the gap between the American people and their government.”

Of course, this sort of action requires an infrastructure of discovery. In walks Phil West, Microsoft’s Senior Technology Architect for its Office of Civic Innovation with a solution. Simon Owens at TheNextWeb writes about Microsoft’s newest projects to bring dark government data into light,

It wasn’t unheard of up until this point for government agencies to release some of their data, but for the most part it was unwieldy and not entirely accessible for the average user. “I use the term ‘dynamic data,’ and by that I mean data that is consumable by an application directly,” West said. “In the previous iteration, you downloaded a huge spreadsheet and you just looked through it, and you better know what you were looking for. We proposed to advance it to the point where the agency has a responsibility to curate the data and get it out there so that someone can easily grab it, whether it be through a web page or an API for a smart phone, an iPad, or another device.”

This is not an easy task given that there is often no budget set aside for many of these projects. A lack of resources gives agencies little leeway or impetus to take on such tasks, and there are often few staff members who are assigned to initiate and manage them. This does not preclude them from Gov 2.0, however, as Microsoft and other companies have open source platforms for them to use. Often times it’s possible for them to create an open API on their own while only having to pay to host the products on Microsoft’s Azure cloud.

I’m not surprised that Microsoft is the contender in this sphere, especially noting that Google has already shown a great deal of sheer capability when it comes to bringing together vast data sets and making them accessible. In fact, they’ve already created their own open government data project with the Google Public Data Explorer. Of course, anything that MS can do to take away as much data stranglehold from Google that they can will help their bottom line. The two corporations have been on a collision course when it comes to data for a long time now. As a powerful software technology company, with their own cloud platform, they’re also well positioned to insert themselves into the evolution of open government clouds.

Also in the open cloud ecology happens to be TechAmerica’s Cloud2, or Commission on the Leadership Opportunity in U.S. Deployment of the Cloud, which could change the face of cloud-computing when it comes to government. The US government isn’t a single entity that can go with one company—it’s an interrelated network of multiple organizations all of which are producers of data and customers of data. While major corporate interests (like Microsoft and Google) want in on this bandwagon, the United States will probably benefit more from standardizing an initial framework to work within before the data gets carved up.

The requirement that whatever the open, public cloud runs on must be open source will help keep private interests from slicing out pieces of the public pie and putting them into proprietary architectures; but it’s equally important to make the different slices as interoperable and as accessible as possible. Government transparency assists not just the public—by permitting media and John Q Public to look at the data as it appears—but it enables the various organizations within the government to better inform themselves. A multitude of politicians and departments depend on research produced by other departments and not having to do the work all over again could save a great deal of money.