OpenGov - Open Government Brainstorm

The legacy data held by our government is the largest body of dormant, unassimilated factual nonfiction literature in the history of the world. Millions of pages of scientific papers, proposals, studies, reports, etc. lie fallow, either becaue they preceeded the digital age or have foundered in the backwaters of the labyrinth, with no one to champion their relevance in the 21st Century. Empower each agency (deep down into the bureaucracy, practically to the individual program level) to designate its own Cognitive Archivist, charged solely with the responsibility for assimilating the prior institutional knowledge base toward the extraction of prospectively useful recovered data and 'lessons learned' which may assist the organization in more effectively accomplishing its mission in the future. Since the federal workforce is considerably older than that of the private sector, and will undergo wholesale changeout of personnel (estimated at 600,000) in the next few years, this initiative to build and protect a worker-independent institutional memory should receive a significant high priority from the new Administration. Perhaps more importantly, the Cognitive Archivist can develop these information resources into new knowledge-based services for their agency's user community, academia, and industry at large.