The numbers vary. In the City of Chicago everyone always said there were 800 and some data sets, and I just talked to a guy who is in charge of the data sets yesterday and he said there are something like 550 data sets. The Obama administration originally, when they announced data.gov, said there were 190,000 data sets or something like that. Now they've reduced that to 54,000 data sets.
Even though the federal government in the U.S. has released lots and lots of data sets, and there's been a lot of data released for a very long time—weather data, satellite data, road-related data, geographic data—really, going back 20, 30,or 40 years, there's a study recently saying that even with all the open data efforts in the U.S., less than 10% of federal agencies actually release significant amounts of data. Much of that is because they make a fair amount of money by selling data either to other agencies or within their own agency. It's kind of a net wash. One agency is paying another agency for data, and the other agency is receiving income, which doesn't make much sense when you're within the same organization but it's part of the accounting rules that's creating inefficiency there.
We would like to see lots more data. There is a lot of data all over the world. We're members of the international Open Data Institute. We're the Chicago node. The U.K. has made tremendous strides in releasing data. France is releasing quite a bit more data. We have a fellow in our office right now who's in charge of the open data portals for the Dominican Republic, which didn't have a particularly democratic government for a very long time. Even there, there's an alliance of progressives and conservatives who want to release data for budget accountability, political accountability, so you can have an alliance among both sides of the political spectrum. We've been talking with them and learning a lot about what's going on there.
Things are happening. There's an effort in the Philippines, and even Russia is taking steps towards releasing more data. There are about 17 nodes in the Open Data Institute worldwide now. We were the first node just last October, and between then and now there are 16 more nodes. Many of them are in countries that were not democratic 10, 15, or 20 years ago.