Policy Vet Hart to Head Up Data Coalition

Open data has a new champion. 

Nick Hart has been named CEO of the Data Coalition, an open data trade association, and interim president of the Data Foundation, an industry-focused open data research organization. 

His experience mostly stems from work with the US federal government. He was director of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Evidence Project, where he remains as a fellow, and previously was its policy and research director. His PhD is in public policy from The George Washington University, and he also holds advanced degrees from Indiana University Bloomington in environmental science and policy. 

“Ensuring policies are effectively designed to encourage responsible data use offers great benefits for the American people,” Hart says.

In his new role, Hart will drive the Data Coalition’s policy agenda, which advocates for a government-wide open data policy, and open data for management, regulatory compliance, and laws and mandates. He will direct thought leadership, programming, and education with an aim to elucidate the value of open data for government and society.

“The Data Coalition has long advocated for modernizing the US financial regulatory reporting system so that reported data can be more useful,” Hart says. “This requires shifting reported information from unstructured documents into searchable, standardized, and machine-readable data.”

The Data Coalition hosts an annual RegTech Data summit, and when asked about how capital markets plays into the organization’s mission, Hart highlights the Coalition’s ongoing support of the Financial Transparency Act (HR 1530 in the 115th Congress), which he calls the first regtech legislative proposal in the US. 

“The proposal would direct the eight major US financial regulatory agencies to collect and publish the information they collect from financial entities in an open data form, electronically searchable, downloadable in bulk, and without license restrictions. When government information is reported and published as data instead of documents, it reduces regulatory burdens on businesses, gives the public and investors better access to information, and boosts our ability to find, and prevent, instances of fraud,” he says. 

The organizations are based in Washington, DC.