TRANSPARENCY

Open Source, Open Data

Citizen-Powered Projects Need Government Info

What if all the raw data from every transaction related to the federal stimulus package was made available for public consumption? Structured appropriately, a web developer anywhere in the country could then point a web application at the data and rehash it however they might imagine. Interested citizens could build a website to filter out all the information related to assistance spending in their county and help their neighbors understand the real impact of the stimulus. Another developer could layer in political contribution information from OpenSecrets.org to produce a map revealing any correlations between campaign contributions and stimulus distributions. As more and more data from government agencies becomes available in formats that are easier to reuse, its real-world impact can compound quickly, and the ways we can answer questions about government spending and practice will be limited only by creativity.

Open data is going to change the way people interact with government online, and the Obama administration’s launch of Recovery.gov could become a test bed for this. George Thomas, the chief architect at the General Services Administration who led the Recovery.gov build using open-source software, has a vision that is making the tech community smile. George and his team are looking into ways to open up the data for stimulus projects in just the way I’ve described. (Technical readers can check out his slide presentation from a public event last weekend that illustrates his plans.)

Projects like Recovery.gov will help this cause if done right, but for a while still, the bottleneck with my “blue sky” dream for improving government transparency won’t be the technology – it will be the data. It has to be available and structured using standard conventions, which just means formatting data in a way that machines can interpret it regardless of software platform.

To give you an idea of just how quickly these open source frameworks can be turned into powerful transparency tools, take a look at the Apps for Democracy contest in Washington, DC last year. In November, the city sponsored a sort of “Iron Chef” competition for web developers to see what they could do with all the data it was releasing to the public. The city had just finished a significant project to make much of the city’s data available for public use and wanted to know what types of information were really in demand so they could help prioritize where the city should invest in opening up. The contest format was a great way to do this because it brought dozens of developers together with no up-front cost to the city, and allowed them to award a financial prize just to those projects deemed “winners.”

Forty-seven awesome submissions later, Apps for Democracy was a huge success. Teams built all sorts of applications, from tools that can help you find a carpool or help you find a parking meter, to apps that send information about the crime level in your neighborhood to your iPhone. By the organizers’ estimate, the project may have generated upwards of a 4000 percent return on investment. As a participant in the process with our team at Development Seed, my company, I was able to personally experience how much power open source provided once the right data was open. From concept to completion in less than 72 hours, we built a site called D.C. Bikes which aggregates data from the city data other online sources to provide a resource to bike commuters and enthusiasts.

The city’s GIS shape files provide the map layer for bike lanes; bike theft data came from city police reports; bike shop locations are included from Google; and tweets about biking in D.C. are piped in from Twitter; finally, the site also shows bikes for sale in D.C. on Craig’s List. All our team had to do was think about the users we wanted to serve and put the pieces together. With a little original content sprinkled in, we were able to offer the cycling community a helpful new resource. Open source tools lowered the barrier to entry for building a site like this because they required no financial investment for proprietary software, and because so much innovation is being done on open source tools to get them ready to facilitate open data projects.

For sure, the site (and others like it) could have been even more useful if more data was available. For instance, if the police department made bike-related traffic accidents visible, we could have mapped them quickly to visualize problem areas along bike routes, and the community could figure out ways to press the city government to investigate and take action to improve public safety. Increasing the volume of available data will have a snowball effect. By opening up the city’s data and encouraging citizens to use it creatively for the public, the government is making DC safer, more accessible, and just plain cooler for its citizens.

To be clear, the point here is the power of data, and not applications. The White House and government agencies will never be able to devote the time or energy to building all the applications that citizens might want – nor should they try. There’s been a lot of talk about the president’s technology ambitions, but the biggest possible online technology win that the Obama administration could achieve would be opening up as much information and data as possible to empower the community to build anything it wants. The potential benefits of this was best put into words by Personal Democracy founder Andrew Raisej at TransparencyCamp this past weekend in DC: “One government can’t solve problems for 300 million people, but 300 million people can solve problems for one government.”

If data and information are open, available, and well-structured, the power of crowds that we’ve seen transform the news industry with the advent of blogging could extend into just about every corner of the web. The work ahead is to just get the data ready.

Ian Cairns is project manager and an online strategist for Development Seed, an online communications strategy shop based in Washington, D.C. For the past six years, Development Seed has specialized in working with large NGO’s, and they have been leaders in the Drupal open source project.

Tags: Data, open-government, open-source

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