Yes, so let me speak to both of those.
First, I think it's not to be discounted, the value of what we might think of as civic hacking or civic participation or civic engagement of all these varieties. The value that has to us as citizens in a democracy should not be underestimated, obviously.
That said, there are wonderful examples of businesses being founded using open government data. Unfortunately, they are examples at this point. We don't have systematic data yet, and that's something that is imperative to work on. Obviously, there are great stories about things like weather services, and NOAA has a website, economics.noaa.gov, that features all of these stories about new jobs, new businesses, and new wealth and value that's being created as a result of their data that's being put out. There are stories like that of the GPS industry, of the genomics industry, none of which would exist without open government data.
I'll give you just one recent example. The Department of Labour has a wonderful new data inventory, their enforcement database, and as a result of the open government movement they're putting out scads of data sets, including information about the fees that employees pay to their companies' retirement plans. There is a little start-up called BrightScope, which has been written about, which discovered this data and used it to build the BrightScope business, which essentially is intelligent. In the same way that there are businesses that track intelligence about mutual funds, they track intelligence about retirement plans. Their entire business is based on government data. From one year to the next, in the start of the Obama administration, they went from zero to 30 employees, if I recall correctly. This story has been written up recently in the press as a result of government data.
Now that I'm out of government and I'm back in the research world, one of my primary focuses in the coming months will be the intersection between job creation and economic value and open government data, so that we can make the case that open government is not just a nice-to-have for our democracy, but is also must-have in really tough economic times.
I think the question is very well put, and we ought to have even better and more empirically grounded answers than I can give you today.