Building Skills – and Careers – in Open Data

A core part of the GovLab’s mission is to help build both awareness and mastery of the skills needed to drive governance innovation on issues that touch people’s lives. We are, therefore, most pleased to announce the launch on 6 July in Washington, DC, of the US Department of Agriculture’s first Open Data Summer Camp with a pilot program focusing on open data visualization designed and delivered by the GovLab Academy, with funding and other support from Monsanto, Hewlett Packard, Leidos, Dovel Technologies, Binary Group, and IBM.
The Camp will provide, at no charge to participants, 2 highly-interactive 2-week sessions: one for DC-based middle school students 12-14 years old; the other for high school students 15-17 years old. Each cohort will divide into small project teams working, with expert coaching and guidance, on a different food- and/or agriculture-related problem using an official module of USDA-provided open data. [To see a full syllabus for the program, click here.]
Joyce M. Hunter, The USDA’s Deputy CIO, Policy and Planning, has guided this effort with the clear understanding that, as federal agencies and departments work to make more and more of their data open, all entities that use such data to make decisions will increasingly need a workforce with ever higher levels of data-relevant skills. The goal of the Camp is, obviously, not to try to cram an extensive data-oriented curriculum into 2 weeks during a single summer. It is, rather, to provide the kind of hands-on experience that builds awareness and excitement that, in turn, can influence students’ later choices of courses and even careers.