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Announced a few weeks ago, via Stephen Collins we learn that America’s service to

increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government.

has been launched.

To me, a hugely important step in the transformation of the concept of government to greater transparency and accountability. Remember, they work for us.

I had the privilege to do a keynote presentation at the CeBIT eGovernment forum in Sydney last week, where I suggested the concept of a data czar in government, whose role is to identify, and facilitate the publication of Austraian Government data. I’d also love to see developer.gov.au – similar to the New York Times developer program

Credit where it is due, the Australian Bureau of Statistics does release much of its data under a creative commons license, where

[p]eople are free to re-use, build upon and distribute our data, even commercially. This makes a wealth of data readily available to the community, researchers and business, facilitating innovative research and development projects based on quality statistics, and promoting the wider use of statistics in the community, which is one of our core objectives

Where will all this lead us? I’m not sure anyone has much of an idea (except maybe Mark Pesce) – but I certainly believe it will transform the way we interact with government.