Gray Brooks on the U.S. government and the GSA Open Data Intiative

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Gray Brooks on the U.S. government and the GSA Open Data Intiative

API Economist: Back in May 2012, the White House launched their Digital Strategy: Building A 21st Century Platform To Better Serve The American People. One of the key tenets of that strategy was to make open data content and web APIs the foundation of the platform. How is the GSA doing on implementing this strategy, and what are some of the biggest challenges you face?

Gray Brooks: Along with all the other agencies actually implementing the Digital Strategy, GSA reports on its progress at GSA.gov/DigitalStrategy. There's also a JSON and XML version available at /DigitalStrategy.json and /DigitalStrategy.xml. We use those because we want to have the progress that agencies are making per‑item and per‑subsection parsed out very clearly, so that information is available not only to the OMB and the White House, but also to everyone else.

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Kin Lane on spreading his API evangelism to the community and the government

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Kin Lane on spreading his API evangelism to the community and the government

API Economist: How did you become the API Evangelist?

Kin Lane: I was the VP of Technology at an events management company, WebEvents Global, leading their technology and architecture. I ran all SAP events, including Sapphire for two years. I was also involved with TechEd and a lot of the North American events. I was brought on to move them out of the data center and be more elastic in the cloud, and meet the demands of the global events. I moved it into the Amazon Cloud and re-architected the whole system using APIs and Amazon APIs. I loved APIs. But I wanted to do something else. I started studying the API space. I quickly realized that there are a lot of technical pundits in this space. But no one was keeping eye on the business of APIs, the myriad of tools it takes to be successful, nor approaches to evangelism and marketing to developers and the whole politics of APIs. So I launched API Evangelist and just started studying this space. Three years later I'm still doing it.

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