Latest news with #dataTransparency
Geek Wire
22-05-2025
- Business
- Geek Wire
Steve Ballmer's USAFacts hires new CTO, who calls access to non-biased data ‘everything right now'
Megan Winfield. (Photo via USAFacts) Megan Winfield has been named the new chief technology officer at USAFacts, the nonpartisan, not-for-profit organization started by former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to provide data-driven context on everything from the economy to immigration to crime. Winfield is relocating to Bellevue, Wash., from Lexington, Ky. She's been the CTO of Campspot, the platform that helps campers find destinations, for almost three years. Prior to that she was senior director of software engineering and digital for Hilton, the global hospitality company, where she spent more than seven years. As CTO, Winfield will lead USAFacts' engineering organization and sit on the leadership team, helping to ensure that tech decisions align with strategy and mission at the nonprofit. Winfield is intrigued by the problems that USAFacts is trying to solve for the American public, and the technical challenge of tackling it all. 'Access to data is everything right now,' she told GeekWire. 'I feel like transparency, non-biased data, is such a critical part of something that a lot of different parts of the public are hungry for at the moment.' She also sees an inflection point with AI and the tools that are available now to handle large data sets and parse those into something useful. USAFacts was started in 2017 by Ballmer, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Clippers NBA team. It employees about 47 people and is led by President Poppy MacDonald, who previously led Politico. The site draws on information from 100 government databases and regularly crunches numbers in an effort to take the pulse and track trends in America — without the noise and bias that overwhelms so many Americans who regularly turn to cable news or social media. Winfield said she considers herself a civically involved person who has personally experienced the frustration of not having transparency and useful data. 'I think it's a really key time to be thinking about a truly unbiased source of data and really making sure that people understand that that's what USAFacts represents,' Winfield said. Related:
Zawya
19-05-2025
- Business
- Zawya
Central African Republic Implements the Enhanced General Data Dissemination System (e-GDDS)
With the successful launch of the new data portal— the National Summary Data Page (NSDP) — the Central African Republic has implemented a key recommendation of the IMF's Enhanced General Data Dissemination System (e-GDDS) to publish essential macroeconomic and financial data. The e-GDDS is the first tier of the IMF Data Standards Initiatives that promote transparency as a global public good and encourage countries to voluntarily publish timely data that is essential for monitoring and analyzing economic performance. The launch of the NSDP is a testament to the Central African Republic's commitment to data transparency. It serves as a one-stop portal for disseminating various macroeconomic data compiled by multiple statistical agencies. The published data include statistics on national accounts, prices, government operations, debt, the monetary and financial sector, and the external sector. The launch of the NSDP was supported by an IMF technical assistance mission, financed by the Government of Japan through the Japan Administered Account for Selected Fund Activities (JSA), and conducted in collaboration with the African Development Bank (AfDB) from May 12 to 16, 2025. The mission was hosted by ' Institut Centrafricain de Statistique et des Études Économiques et Sociales,' in close collaboration with the Bank of Central African States (BEAC) and the Ministry of Finance and Budget. With this reform, the Central African Republic will join 75 countries worldwide and 33 countries in Africa using the e-GDDS to disseminate standardized data. Mr. Bert Kroese, Chief Statistician and Data Officer, and Director of the IMF's Statistics Department, welcomed this as a major milestone in the Central African Republic's statistical development. He went on to express that the country would benefit from the improvement in data transparency and that the IMF stood ready to 'continue supporting the authorities in further developing their statistical systems.' Distributed by APO Group on behalf of International Monetary Fund (IMF).
