Submitter:

Name:Owen Ambur

Email:Owen.Ambur@verizon.net

Organization:

Name:Data Transparency Coalition

Acronym:DTC

Description:
The Data Transparency Coalition is a non-partisan trade association of technology companies, nonprofit organizations, and individuals supporting the publication of government data online in consistent, machine-readable formats. The coalition is steered by a board of advisors and led by an executive director. The Data Transparency Coalition is registered as a nonprofit corporation in the District of Columbia and will seek a tax exemption under section 501(c)(6) of the Internal Revenue Code.

Stakeholder(s):

• Technology Companies: Technology companies supporting the publication of government data online in consistent, machine-readable formats. -- The technology companies joining the Data Transparency Coalition are eager to design software packages and platforms that analyze federal data in new, powerful ways. Our members' products and services will use standardized, freely-available federal data to find waste and abuse in federal spending, illuminate systemic risk in the financial markets, and help government and the private sector make better decisions.


• Nonprofit Organizations: Nonprofit organizations supporting the publication of government data online in consistent, machine-readable formats.


• Individuals: Individuals supporting the publication of government data online in consistent, machine-readable formats.


• Trade Associations


• Hudson Hollister: Hudson Hollister is the founder and Executive Director of the Data Transparency Coalition. Prior to founding the Data Transparency Coalition, he served as counsel to the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform of the U.S. House of Representatives and as an attorney fellow in the Office of Interactive Disclosure at the Securities and Exchange Commission. Before his government service, he was a securities litigator in the Chicago office of Latham & Watkins LLP.


• John Runyan: John Runyan is President of Runyan Public Affairs, LLC and is assisting the Data Transparency Coalition with administrative and organizational support. RPA is an independent government relations consulting firm assisting clients with a full range of federal affairs services (www.runyanpa.com).


• BrightScope: Member of the Data Transparency Coalition.


• Elder Research, Inc.: Member of the Data Transparency Coalition.


• Level One Technologies: Member of the Data Transparency Coalition.


• invoke: Member of the Data Transparency Coalition.


• IPHIX: Member of the Data Transparency Coalition.


• IRIS: Member of the Data Transparency Coalition.


• The Maryland Association of CPAs: Member of the Data Transparency Coalition.


• MarkLogic: Member of the Data Transparency Coalition.


• Microsoft: Member of the Data Transparency Coalition.


• Rivet Software: Member of the Data Transparency Coalition.


• RR Donnelley: Member of the Data Transparency Coalition.


• Symplicity: Member of the Data Transparency Coalition.


• Synteractive: Member of the Data Transparency Coalition.


• Teradata: Member of the Data Transparency Coalition.


• Earl E. Devaney: Member of the Board of Advisors -- Earl E. Devaney served as Chairman of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board (Recovery Board) until his retirement in December 2011. On February 23, 2009, six days after signing the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act into law, President Obama named Devaney to head the Recovery Board, which is charged with overseeing spending under the $787 billion program. In announcing Devaney’s appointment, the President said: “Earl has doggedly pursued waste, fraud and mismanagement. He has the reputation of being one of the best [Inspectors General] that we have in this town…. I can’t think of a more tenacious and efficient guardian of the hard-earned tax dollars the American people have entrusted us to wisely invest. As Chairman of the Recovery Board, Devaney oversaw the construction of the first-ever standardized, government-wide spending accountability and transparency platform. Using the Recovery Board's platform, federal inspectors general opened more than 1,800 investigations of questionable grantees and contractors. Nearly 400 people were convicted or pleaded guilty; $15.7 million was recovered from grantees and contractors; and $27 million was prevented from being paid out. From June 2011 until his retirement, Devaney also chaired President Obama's Government Accountability and Transparency Board (GAT Board), which was charged with recommending ways to expand the Recovery Board's spending oversight innovations to all federal spending. The GAT Board released its initial recommendations on December 14, 2011. President Bill Clinton appointed Devaney as the Inspector General of the Department of the Interior in 1999. During his tenure at the Office of Inspector General (OIG), he oversaw the public corruption investigations that led to the convictions of Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff and Interior Deputy Secretary Steven Griles. He also presided over the oil and gas investigations that engulfed the Minerals Management Service from 2007 to 2009. Devaney’s commitment to leadership – he graduated from Georgetown University’s prestigious Leadership Coaching Program – is reflected in the OIG’s #1 ranking among agency subcomponents in both Strategic Management and Work/Life Balance in the highly regarded “Best Places to Work in the Federal Government” 2009 survey. Before becoming the Inspector General of the Department of the Interior, Devaney spent eight years as the Director of the Office of Criminal Enforcement, Forensics and Training for the Environmental Protection Agency. In that job, he supervised all of EPA’s criminal investigators, the agency’s forensics laboratory, and its enforcement training institute. In 1998, he received the Meritorious Presidential Rank Award for outstanding government service. Devaney began his federal law enforcement career with the Secret Service in 1970, following his graduation from Franklin and Marshall College. At the time of his retirement from the Secret Service in 1991, Devaney was Special Agent-in-Charge of the Fraud Division and was recognized as an international expert in white collar crime.


• Eric Gillespie: Member of the Board of Advisors -- Eric Gillespie is the Managing Partner at Seattle, Washington based Viano Capital, an investment firm focused on data and information services companies. He formerly ran Onvia, a Nasdaq-listed firm that provides research and tools to track, analyze and report the activities of more than 89,000 federal, state and local government agencies. Prior to working for Onvia, he was the founder of The Patent Board, the leading provider of standardized intellectual property data and patent analytics to the financial services industry, and the creator of The Wall Street Journal’s Patent Scorecard. He has also worked for IBM, Scient, CSC and other leading technology companies. As director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute, Jim Harper works to adapt law and policy to the unique problems of the information age, in areas such as privacy, telecommunications, intellectual property, and security. Harper was a founding member of the Department of Homeland Security's Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee and he recently co-edited the book Terrorizing Ourselves: How U.S. Counterterrorism Policy Is Failing and How to Fix It. He has been cited and quoted by numerous print, Internet, and television media outlets, and his scholarly articles have appeared in the Administrative Law Review, the Minnesota Law Review, and the Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly. Harper wrote the book Identity Crisis: How Identification Is Overused and Misunderstood. Harper is the editor of Privacilla.org, a Web-based think tank devoted exclusively to privacy, and he maintains online federal spending resource WashingtonWatch.com. He holds a J.D. from UC Hastings College of Law.


• Beth Simone Noveck: Member of the Board of Advisors -- Beth Simone Noveck is a Professor of Law at New York Law School. She served in the White House as United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer (2009-2011) and leader of the White House Open Government Initiative (@opengov). As a result of the Administration’s Open Government efforts, today every department and agency has an Open Government Plan that outlines specific and innovative commitments to create more effective government. Also hundreds of thousands of collections of government information are now freely available to the public on the Web and citizens have burgeoning opportunities to use new platforms to participate in their democracy. Dr. Noveck served on the Obama-Biden Transition Team and was a volunteer advisor to the Obama for America campaign on issues of technology, innovation, and government reform. She focuses her scholarship, activism and teaching on the future of democracy in the 21st century. Specifically, her work addresses how digital networks impact institutions and how we can use such technologies to strengthen democratic culture. With the support of the MacArthur Foundation in 2011-12, she is developing an agenda for interdisciplinary research on institutional innovation. She founded the Democracy Design Workshop Do Tank, a program for the design of law, policy, and technology to foster openness and collaboration. She envisions the opportunity for institutional innovation as a series of solvable design problems. Together with students at New York Law School and with the support of the Omdiyar Network, MacArthur Foundation and seven leading patent-holding firms, she designed and built the U.S. government’s first expert network (http://www.peertopatent.org). The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Council of Europe and AmericaSpeaks have sponsored her research on online communities by funding then Cairns Project, graphical software to support group formation and collaboration. She also received a grant from ICAIR to support the creation of Democracy Island, an experimental space within a virtual world for research on citizen participation. She is currently working with colleagues inside government and out on the design for “IOPedia,” a platform for mashing up and visualizing public corporate accountability data and tracking the evolution of organizations. Dr. Noveck founded the State of Play conference, the first (and still ongoing annual) conference on videogames, virtual worlds and society. She was named “One of the Hundred Most Creative People in Business” by Fast Company magazine and “One of the Top 5 Game Changers” by Politico in 2010. A graduate of Harvard University and Yale Law School, she holds a PhD from the University of Innsbruck and is the author of Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger, and Citizens More Powerful (Brookings Institution Press 2009), which will appear this year in Arabic and Chinese and in an audio edition (http://www.universitypressaudiobooks.com/detail.php/61), and co-editor of The State of Play: Law, Games and Virtual Worlds (NYU Press 2006). She tweets @bethnoveck.


• Campbell Pryde: Member of the Board of Advisors -- Campbell Pryde is the President and CEO of XBRL US. Before taking on the President and CEO position, Mr. Pryde led the development and maintenance of taxonomies as Chief Standards Officer, playing an integral role on the executive team. Mr. Pryde joined XBRL US from Morgan Stanley, where as Executive Director in the Institutional Securities Group, he managed the equity research XBRL-based valuation framework. He has been involved with XBRL since 2001, and served as Chairman of the XBRL US Domain Steering Committee during the critical initial build of the US GAAP Taxonomy under contract with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Prior to joining Morgan Stanley, Mr. Pryde was a Partner in the Risk and Advisory Practice of KPMG LLP. He is a member of the New Zealand Institute of Chartered Accountants.