My colleague Simon nails the link between the Obama team’s idea of openness and what we are trying to do with aid data:

The pitch for the idea states:

“We can unleash a wave of civic innovation if we open up government data to programmers. The government has a treasure trove of information: legislation, budgets, voter files, campaign finance data, census data, etc. Let’s STANDARDIZE, STRUCTURE, and OPEN up this data.”

Quite. This is exactly what we want to do with aid data!