How the U.S. Chief Technology Officer Is Making Data Awesome

Todd Park, Chief Technology Officer at the White House, gave the audience at the 2012 Social Good Summit on Saturday a high-energy lesson in the importance of making government data more useful and available to anyone.

Park, who previously served as Chief Technology Officer at the Department of Health and Human Services, became the White House’s second CTO in March of this year.

“We’ve really embraced the power of open innovation,” said Park, who broke his job down into three primary tasks: making new data available to the public, take already publicly available data that’s unusable and make it usable, and making entrepreneurs and innovators aware of government data.

“You take the data that’s already there and jujitsu it, put it in machine-readable form, let entrepreneurs take it and turn it into awesomeness,” he said. “It’s about turning government into a platform for open innovation. Data by itself is useless. I can’t feed my baby daughter data, as much as I’d love to because I love data. It’s only useful if you apply it to create an actual public benefit. You need appliers â€" you need entrepreneurs to know data’s there available in order for them to turn it into awesomeness.”

Park, however, encountered a problem with that step.

“95% of entrepreneurs who could turn our data into awesomeness didn’t know what HHS stood for,” said Park, speaking of his time at Health and Human Services.

To change that, Park’s offices â€" both at HHS and now at the White House â€" have held hackathons, “datapaloozas” and other events geared towards eliminating the barriers between entrepreneurs and government data.

“In March of 2010, we persuaded some very skeptical entrepreneurs to check out some data we made available,” said Park. “Fast forward, two years later in June of 2012 we held our ’2012 Health Datapalooza.’ There were 1600 entrepreneurs over 2 days, 242 companies competing for 100 spots to present amazing innovations powered by open data from the government and other sources.”

SEE ALSO: Is Crowdsourcing the Secret to Creating Innovation in Government?

For Park, it’s always a good day when open data projects don’t put a new burden on taxpayers.

“One of my favorite parts about these 242 companies, guess what the total total taxpayer expenditure was? Zero,” he said gleefully. “We took data that was already paid for and jiu-jitsued it into the public domain. We got awesomeness in the form of products or services helping tens of thousands of people improve their health service experience around the country.”

Park also pointed to data.gov, the federal government’s online home for a wealth of machine-readable, cost-free data.

“There’s so much data it’s a little overwhelming, we had to create specialized communities,” said Park. “There’s health.data.gov, energy.data.gov, education.data.gov, it’s awesome stuff. Check it out and see what you can do with it.”

Park also came with an announcement: on Monday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will be introducing the Equal Futures Partnership to encourage young girls to become leaders in democracy, part of which will be the Equal Futures App Challenge.

“We want apps that leverage open data, promote civic education, inspire girls to envision themselves as public leaders,” said Park. “Apps that educate girls about gender gaps in elected office, apps that connect girls to inspiring role models by providing access to biographies and articles, apps that teach girls about what it takes to run a successful campaign.

How does Park view the future of open government and open data? In a word, it will be awesome.

“We’re committed as a government to make more and more data available in machine-readable form,” concluded Park. “There’s already so much we’ve seen that’s awesome, we know there’s more awesomeness to come.”

Images courtesy of Flickr, jdlasica

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Read more of Mashable’s coverage of the 2012 Social Good Summit:

Day One: