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layout: default
title: 'Sloan Funding Dat Development'
author: Waldo Jaquith
---

We’ve got two happy pieces of news at the U.S. Open Data Institute.

The first is that board member [Max Ogden](http://maxogden.com/) is becoming an employee, and we’ll be housing and supporting [Dat](http://dat-data.com/), Max’s data package management tool. Dat is a system for real-time replication, transformation, and versioning of large tabular datasets. Git is to source code as Dat is to datasets. [The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation provided $50,000](http://maxogden.com/) to support taking Dat from an idea to [a pre-alpha stage](https://github.com/maxogden/dat/), which sustained the project until February. Now it's becoming a US ODI project. 

This is possible because of the second announcement: the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has provided $260,000 in funding to support the continued development of Dat. That money will be used to pay Max and two additional developers to spend the year growing Dat into a vibrant, healthy, widely used open source project. Sloan's particular interest is seeing Dat used in the sciences, which produces a great deal of data, but for reasons both cultural and technological, does not generally publish that data openly.

Our thanks to Josh Greenberg at the Sloan Foundation, Casey Dachs at the Miami Foundation, and the folks at the Knight Foundation for making this possible.

Add the text for our Dat/Sloan announcement
Add the text for our Dat/Sloan announcement
