The Global Architecture & Information Network (GAIN for short) is an initiative to enable more effective government, business opportunities, transparent government and job creation by building on and extending the U.S. leadership success in the internet combined with open source software and industry standards. 

To realize President Obama's Initiatives of transparent, participatory and collaborative government we need pervasive access to information.  GAIN can facilitate access to that information; the ability to link it, query it analyze it and create public forums to help create it.

The core of the opportunity is to create a “network of business and technology information and architectures” that will allow for federation of government and commercial organizations processes, services, data and plans - the Data Cloud.  The imperatives for integration and collaboration are well established: greater collaboration and integration means more effective government, more profitable business, visibility and leadership.  Collaboration, integration and information visibility are the cornerstones of a wide range of initiatives from economic recovery to fighting terrorism as identified in the president's agenda.

The key enabler of the Global Architecture & Information Network is a “backbone” of open source software and government architectures that can lay the foundation for GAIN and spur commercial tools, infrastructure, services and architectures that will build on the foundation provided by the backbone.  This backbone can be provided by a joint effort of government, industry, standards organizations, and universities.

GAIN can be facilitated with open standards and open source, including Model Driven Architecture standards from the OMG and, Linked Open Data and the Semantic Web from the W3C.

Please contribute to GAIN!  Just create a free account (see the upper right corner) and you can post messages, wiki pages and more.