Death Of A Service

I just tried to load the website for the Commerce Data Service (http://www.commerce.gov/dataservice) and it redirected to http://www.commerce.gov, which means that the Service is officially dead. I have no idea when it was officially shut down. However, the last snapshot from the Way Back Machine was on July 31st, 2017.

It kinda hurt. I had a moment.

The startup that Jeff Chen and I founded and poured 100+ hour weeks into is no more.
Rather than be sad, it is time to celebrate.

As a team, we ran fast and we ran far.

We created a program to teach Commerce employees human-centered design, agile software development, and data science. A program that is now a model adopted and used by other Federal agencies.

We worked side-by-side with Commerce agencies to deliver over twenty solutions that improve their efficiency and highlight a new way to engage with vendors, staff, and the American public.

We helped to spotlight and engage the private sector and everyday Americans on the power of the data that Commerce collects and makes available for free -- addressing everything from income inequality, to access to opportunity, to the school-to-prison pipeline for minority girls and women, to intellectual property innovation.

We moved the needle on getting the technical infrastructure of the Department more aligned to best practices in today's information economy.

​The world outside of Commerce saw the work & its impact and publicly recognized the team through numerous awards.
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It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. Mostly, it was a helluva time.

Cheers, to the Commerce Data Service (CDS) team.​

For more information on the CDS, see:

• Meet Your Commerce Data Service
• Introducing the Commerce Data Usability Project
• Commerce Data Service: Software vulnerabilities and the impact on our lives
• Goodness gracious, great balls of HAIL!
• The Power of Commerce Data
• Commerce Data Service: Using Weather Data to Protect Lives and Property
• Moving from Open Data to Open Knowledge: Announcing the Commerce Data Usability Project
• Data Usability: A Data Community Priority
• New Commerce program helps people use all that open data
• Data Usability: Mapbox shares how to visualize atmospheric rivers
• Open Data: Empowering Americans to Make Data-Driven Decisions
• An Experiment in Data Skills Training - The Commerce Data Academy
• A Web Analytics Dashboard for the Department of Commerce
• Using Data to Foster "Access To Opportunity"
• Using Data For Good: Helping Girls of Color
• Debating Income Equality? Get The Facts right with this new Commerce app
• Using Data to #HackThePayGap
• Empowering Commerce Employees with the Latest Data Skills
• Commerce On The Cloud
• The Gender Pay Gap Is Even Worse At The Top
• Department of Commerce Honored for Data & Technology Innovation
• Commerce Data Academy — 2016 Federal Tech Program Of The Year
• Commerce Projects named DiG IT (Discovery and Innovation in Government IT) Award nominees
• Digital Government Achievement Award for the Commerce Data Usability Project
• Commerce Data Usability Project — 2016 Federal Innovation Of The Year​

(This post is also available on LinkedIn)