This afternoon, I read that projects funded through economic stimulus dollars will be required to provide information about spending in a reusable data format–that is, Atom or RSS. They even provide a specific data structure. I ask my colleagues–as people who rely on government funding to do our work, do you think it’s reasonable to think that maybe all federally-funded projects, in the future, will require this level of transparency and data reusability?

I think we need to be ready.

Update: I see that ReadWriteWeb has some more commentary on this topic. I still think the writing’s on the wall–trying to figure out how to bring this up at work and be taken seriously.

(Aaron Swartz, via Daring Fireball)