I was sent a few questions, or things you'd like to know about. I have a bunch of notes about those. I don't know if you're going to ask questions related to what you sent.
As for my background, I've been active in the open data movement in Chicago for about six or seven years. Chicago has gained a reputation as the open data capital of the United States, and even when I travel internationally, people seem to know about Chicago's open data efforts. Government is responsible for some of that. There are a lot of independent designers and developers who've been pushing for open data, lawyers pushing for open data, organizations like Common Cause.
In the United States, the open data movement was initially about people looking for political transparency, wanting to know who was making political contributions. Much of the initial impetus was because, during the Nixon period, the Watergate burglaries were financed by secret corporate donations. The Nixon campaign had caused Common Cause to be formed as a bipartisan Republican and Democratic group that was in favour of transparency in political donations.
From that, government started collecting data. Computers got a lot more powerful. Data was released. The issue of open data is now not only political transparency, it's also efficiency. It's the idea of government as a platform. Whether it's much government data, open data can be used to create businesses like Google Maps or weather reports. Some companies are aiding farmers trying to figure out when they should plant a crop, when it's going to rain, when it's not going to rain, whether they should irrigate, and these kinds of things. There's a lot of efficiency and economic benefits to open data that have come to the fore in the last three or four years as a lot more local and national data has been released.
A couple of weeks ago, the federal government released a bunch of Medicaid paid claim data. There are several other sets of data they're going to release, several other sets of data that have been released. This and other types of data, electronic medical record data, is going to be available to doctors and hospitals and clinics treating Medicaid patients. Much of it's already available. According to the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, patients and doctors treating Medicaid patients are required to be able to receive electronic medical records. That's going to change the whole way people are treated.
Genomic data now is being combined with electronic medical record data to do medical studies without actually having to devise an experiment and do blind tests with control groups and that type of thing. You can just look in the data and look for patterns in that data. So, maybe in women treated for breast cancer, some live and some die. You look at the ones who have lived and you look back through how they were treated. You look at their genomic structure, and you look for particular medicines that can treat different types of diseases based on genetic traits and particular drug regimens.
That's a very broad view of what's going on in open data at the federal level. We could maybe get into the city level and the state level a little bit later.