BIG DATA
BIG DATA
BIG DATA
‘We need more data!’ Steve Ballmer releases USAFacts to provide info on government spending
Former Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Steve Ballmer released his new project into the wild: a website that gives people easy access to government data without taking them on a maze-like journey into confounding digital archives.
USAFacts is pretty much the everyman’s website for access into what the government is spending money on. It’s also a massive data vault containing statistics relating to such things as how many Americans are suffering from anxiety or how many refugees have been entering the United States over the last few decades. USAFacts gives you the numbers, and also what the government spends on the problems.
When Ballmer (pictured) retired from Microsoft at the age of 57, he bought the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team, but according to reports he was still left feeling fairly redundant and so he set his sights on philanthropic work. According to the New York Times, this drove him on a mission not to throw money into charities, but to understand “what really happens” to the money the government is entrusted with.
Working with academics, economists and Seattle design studio Artefact, USAFacts is a nonprofit, nonpartisan initiative to inform the public where all the money goes. The free public service aims to keep expanding, hoping it says on its mission page to “spur serious, reasoned, and informed debate on the purpose and functions of government.”
Ballmer wanted to ask some pretty heady questions, such as ‘Whom does your government serve?’ In the tech world, if Ballmer wanted to know what a company was doing with its money, he would look at its 10-K filing, which is what he compares USAFacts to. “We need more data,” Ballmer has said, alluding to the supposition that issues such as poverty remain intractable partly because people just don’t know what the government is doing.
The U.S. government has tried to be more transparent, giving the public sites such as OpenGov. But Ballmer’s resource feels more approachable, laying out the information in a way that virtually anyone could understand. It’s less a government’s attempt to lay out its actions than a civilian’s understanding of what the public wants.
Image: Microsoft Sweden via flickr
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