Denice W. Ross

Denice Ross, who served as the nation’s second U.S. Chief Data Scientist, launched the Federal Data Field Guide to help Americans understand and navigate the vast federal data ecosystem. 

“Too often, we think of federal data as limited to jobs, weather, and other high-profile datasets. This Field Guide widens the aperture so data users, advocates, journalists, AI engineers, and policymakers can have a clear-eyed understanding of the full diversity of the federal data ecosystem.”

About

Denice Ross is a seasoned organizer of data colleagues across civil society, academia, tech companies, and all levels of government. She served as the deputy U.S. CTO and U.S. chief data scientist in the Biden-Harris Administration, where she led the data strategy to implement the Biden-Harris equity agenda on issues such as policing, LGBTQI+, disability, military families, Puerto Rico recovery, and gun violence, and established the U.S. Tech Policy Network as a conduit for federal policymakers to easily engage with thousands of state, local, tribal, and territorial tech and data leaders.

Research

The Federal Data Field Guide is a free resource that explains how data collection works across the federal government. The guide addresses a gap: many people want to use federal data but lack basic literacy about the government's collection methodologies, regulatory contexts, and data categories. In this resource, animals serve as conceptual frameworks for the various types of federal data in the ecosystem, including statistical data, administrative data, geospatial data, accountability data, scientific research data, and navigation and reference data. The Federal Data Field Guide provides context and practical use cases that make researchers and journalists more sophisticated users of government information.