Thank you.
Let me be clear, of course, that now I'm back in the private sector as an academic teaching law, so I'm sure current plans are under way of which I may not be aware and can't speak to. But let me give some sense of what was contemplated at the time I was in government when the President made his seminal speech before the United Nations. This also gets to the comments I was making about high-value data.
The idea was to call on each country to do what it can to begin to build this kind of open innovation culture. So whether it is greater transparency for the purpose of government accountability, whether it is more data availability to promote scientific growth and collaboration, whether it would create jobs and economic value, whether it's to build more of a culture of civic engagement, everybody should start thinking about doing what they can and come back together next September, when the UN will reconvene for the General Assembly, and provide a report to one another to begin to foster a community.
Not too long after that speech, the President travelled to India and announced an open government partnership with the Indian Prime Minister. Conversations also happened around the same time on partnership around open government with the Russian government. So I think a lot of conversations are taking place among and between governments to exchange and share best practices, to generate ideas, and for each to figure out the strategy that works within the national political culture and climate for moving toward a culture of innovation and collaboration.
Let me also point out one thing in the written testimony that I did not have time to mention earlier, and that is some of the data about the generation of economic value and job creation that comes from greater transparency. Earlier today I had an opportunity to talk with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who I cite in the paper, and the volume of economic growth that was generated just by putting out weather data. Our national weather service in the U.S. has a billion-dollar budget. Weather.com, one website that was created as a result of open government data, was recently sold for $3.5 billion. NOA estimates that the multiplier of the value they invest in generating and putting out data to the public being generated in growth in the economy is at least 100 times what the agency's budget is.
So whatever the strategy, whatever the reason, whether it's to promote greater accountability and transparency in a traditional sense than we've typically thought about openness as a way of holding government accountable or whether it's to generate economic value, I think different countries will come to this agenda for different reasons but that everybody can get under what I think is quite a big tent of changing the culture, of moving toward greater openness and collaboration.