Free the Data!

data

by James A. Bacon

I’m not sure if this idea will lead anywhere but it’s worth a try: The Commonwealth of Virginia has released an open data set of job postings in the state with the hope that someone will come up with innovative ways to use it.

The initiative arises from an executive order by Governor Terry McAuliff establishing the Commonwealth Center for Advanced Research and Statistics that, according to the Washington Business Journal, aims to improve labor market, workforce and education data.

“The data is available, and now we are gearing toward finding ways to make insights,” said Kim McKay, a research and policy analyst at the Council on Virginia’s Future, one of the program’s sponsors. “It’s important to note that this is a early stage pilot program.”

“This is the first time any state has taken online job postings and curated it for public use,” said Aneesh Chopra, co-founder of Arlington-based Hunch Analytics and a former secretary of technology of Virginia. “The governor made the goal to make the labor market work better … and this is a down payment on the idea.”

Chopra hopes that businesses will start finding uses for the data, just as the weather forecasting industry created applications that fed off government-compiled weather data.

Bacon’s bottom line: I’m not smart enough to imagine how the data, comprised of public and private job listings dispersed across multiple job sites, can be used. Maybe someone will come up with a brilliant idea, maybe nothing will come of it. In either case, state government is spending next to nothing to make the data available. It’s worth a try. Perhaps this initiative will lead to the liberation of other data sets and spark the creation of entirely new information products.