Overheard talking about changing the culture in gov’t IT

The previous approach was to protect everything and share what you must. Now the focus is to share everything and protect what you must. But culturally a lot of people were still very uncomfortable with releasing all that data. Sonny Bhagowalia, as quoted in Sonny Bhagowalia smashes technical, cultural obstacles to sharing government data

Sonny Bhagowalia is the chief information officer at the Interior Department.

We have 24,000 domains in the U.S. government and millions of Web pages. So the idea was to start connecting them and making it easier to find data from all those sites.

Everything we do in our lives is about information and data. I like to say that it’s not about the technology, it’s about the data. And when data is found in context, it becomes information. That whole continuum of data and then information is really where the world is going.