Yeah

... think, my understanding is it's like- A subscription service for mailing stuff? I have- Oh, right, okay ...

I don't know.

[laughs] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, they're down 70% from their all-time high, and the interesting thing was, um, when they were around their all-time high, I actually made a video on them, uh, because their numbers looked really good.

And I said that- Oh, right ... on the surface their numbers look great, but if you dig a little bit deeper, a lot of their performance in the past is dependent on this deal with the USPS.

[laughs]

And so why does that largely invisible role then make the health of federal data so important?

That's so important because people, like you said, it's not top of mind.

They don't see it, but they need it.

They need it to understand to understand the country.

Government policymakers at the federal, state and local level need it to really decide how to create good policy that benefits the American public.

We're in an election year.

I think people wouldn't necessarily realize how much they rely on government data to understand via the media and via even political candidates what's going on in the country and how they want to vote.

Talk us through that.

And so why does that largely invisible role then make the health of federal data so important?

Yeah, it's so important because people, like you said, it's not top of mind.

They don't see it, but they need it.

They need it to understand the country.

Government and policymakers at the federal, state, and local level need it to really decide how to create good policy that benefits the American public.

We're in an election year.

I think people wouldn't necessarily realize how much they rely on government data to understand via the media and via even political candidates what's going on in the country and how they want to vote.

Talk us through that.

When you've looked across that landscape, what are you seeing now?

Yeah, it's, it's a great question.

About...

You know, when we started, we, we realized actually pretty quickly that we believe government data itself is absolutely the best in class, but the tools themselves are sort of all over the place, right? They've always been pretty inconsistent.

Some are amazing, some are pretty awful and [chuckles] hard, hard to use.

But this last year has really led to, uh, some questions about what's happened to them, especially as we've had stories about things going offline and we've heard one-off anecdotes, and we thought what we really needed was a level of quantitative understanding of what actually happened with government data at, at the federal level.

And w- we had started a year ago, uh, something called the Federal Data Excellence Program, which was our intent of being able to share what are the best federal data products and raise them up and give an award to them as a way for, uh, other federal agencies to understand what really the North Star could be.

As you look back now, what did that period reveal about which data functions were resilient and which ones proved maybe especially vulnerable to disruption?