I show my stripes as the bohemian academic here, but I don't think that the stick approach always works. As an academic, I'm required by my funding agencies to always provide any data that I come up with that's federally funded, and I have to make that available.
There's a tremendous number of scientists who feel that their data is their own, and they don't want another scientist to make a breakthrough based on the data that they spent time collecting, right? So we find ways around that. We don't publish the stuff that we think could be valuable. We publish enough to satisfy the law but we keep to ourselves the things that are going to give us that Nobel Prize.
So I don't think just mandating it is enough. Rather, I think what we want is creative government employees who understand that, if they need certain kinds of data and certain kinds of expertise, publishing a dataset may be a way for them to get the expertise that they don't have in-house and may be a way to get somebody else to solve problems that they have. I think that we should view open data as a way of providing solutions into government, which is what I was saying about the flow back into government. Can we provide data out there that, if somebody did something with it, I, as a government employee, could benefit from that and improve my processes? If we can get governments to start thinking that way, I think we'll get better data out there.