Proposed Open Source Data Strategy for Population Statistic

The federal government has been collecting data on the population of the United States since the first census in 1790. The census is used primarily to fulfill its constitutional requirement to count the population every ten year's. The Census Bureau along with other government agencies collect other data to analyze the characteristics of the United States population. The government has not yet embraced new technology in conducting surveys or gathering the right data. The federal government does a poor job of sharing data between government agencies, forcing some data to be collected numerous times at varying levels of accuracy. It has a poor track record of improving use of technology in the last decades to collect data that is more valuable in solving problems rather than just trend analysis. This study analyzes current government collection and data analysis efforts, suggests alternate data sources and proposes a new strategy for an open source system of population statistics. The results of this study indicate that a strategy that is based on the creation of actionable intelligence and open source data could improve the cost, accuracy, efficiency, collaborative efforts and direction of population statistics collections and analysis. Specifically, the proposed strategy shows how actionable intelligence could be created using current and proposed data sources that are either available or could easily be made available to third parties other than the federal government. Complex questions that could be answered include a definition of poverty and a new way to analyze income by using take home pay instead of gross dollar amounts.