Under the Obama Administration there has been a big push for making government-developed and sponsored data and datasets more widely available than was previously the case. The online focus of this effort can be found at data.gov. Whenever possible Space College will encourage the open dissemination of data along the lines that the U.S. federal government is pursuing.
However, Space College realizes that datasets can – and are of need to be – proprietary, preliminary, or otherwise not immediately amenable to open distribution. That said, Space College feels that an emphasis on open data distribution can encourage its participants to be thinking of ways to share and collaborate so as to make more data available for wider access than it might otherwise have been.
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