Category Archives: application

A movement to spur innovation and participation in government

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This past weekend, Syracuse MPA grad student Pat Fiorenza spoke about Gov 2.0 at the We Live NY Conference in upstate New York. In a wrap up posted after the conference, Fiorenza touched of what people think about when they hear “Gov 2.0,” including:

Gov 2.0 We Live NY http://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=gov2-0weliveny-110326203550-phpapp01&stripped_title=gov20-we-liveny&userName=pfio9

View more presentations from pfio9

Fiorenza’s recap of his Gov 2.0 presentation also describes both why the idea is important to him and why it’s important to people who aren’t developers.

“Gov 2.0 extends beyond a great programmer – I’ve noticed that when I talk to some people about Gov 2.0 they immediately associate me as a geeky-computer programming-MPA student (only 2 of the 3!). I’ve developed a passion for Gov 2.0 because it holds so much potential for government. It’s about getting access to data and information immediately, improving constituent services, crowd sourcing information, and empowering citizens. Gov 2.0 requires someone to identify an existing problem and conceptualize a solution – then someone to run with the idea and develop the program, with a lot of collaboration in between.”

Fiorenza also pointed the way to Remy DeCausemaker (@remy_d, a “resident hacktivist and storyteller” at the Rochester Institute for Technology’s Lab for Technological Literacy, who also presented on Gov 2.0 at the conference.

DeCausemaker works on FOSS at RIT and CIVX, an open source public information system for raw data. His presentation (PDF) on open government and open data will be of interest to many people in the Gov 2.0 community.

Building a revolution in relevance in an age of information abundance

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Revolutions rooms“We’ve had a decade’s worth of news in less than two months,” Mike Allen, chief White House correspondent for Politico. In the Saturday edition of Politico’s Playbook, Allen looked back at the Arab Spring and Japanese ongoing challenges:

It was Feb. 11 – seven weeks ago — that Mubarak fled the Arab spring, a rolling reordering of Middle East power that could wind up affecting global security as profoundly as 9/11.

It was March 11 – 15 days ago – that we woke to the news of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, which will have ripple effects on the fragile global economy for months to come.

And, oh, we’re in three hot conflicts at once, for the first time since World War II.”

Related, in the NEW YORK TIMES: “Inundated With News, Many Find It Difficult to Keep Up on Libya”

“People interviewed across four states said that at a time when the world seems to stagger from one breathtaking news event to another — rolling turmoil across the Middle East, economic troubles at home, disaster upon disaster in Japan — the airstrikes on military targets in Libya can feel like one crisis too many.”

Through it all, I’ve been following Andy Carvin (@acarvin), whose Twitter feed has been a groundbreaking curation of the virtual community and conversation about the Middle East, including images, video, breaking news and unverified reports.

To wax metaphorical, his account has become a stream of crisis data drawn from from the data exhaust created by the fog of war across the Middle East, dutifully curated by a veteran digital journalist for up to 17 hours a day.

Carvin has linked to reports, to video and images from the front lines that are amongst the most graphic images of war I have ever seen. While such imagery is categorically horrific to view, they can help to bear witness to what is happening on the ground in countries where state media would never broadcast their like.

The vast majority of the United States, however, is not tracking what’s happening on the ground in the region so closely. NEW YORK TIMES:  

“A survey by the Pew Research Center — conducted partly before and partly after the bombing raids on Libya began on March 19 — found that only 5 percent of respondents were following the events ‘very closely.’ Fifty-seven percent said they were closely following the news about Japan.”

Understanding the immensity of the challenges that face Japan, Egypt and Libya is pushing everyone’s capacity to stay informed with day to day updates, much less the larger questions of what the larger implications of these events all are for citizens, industry or government. In the context of the raw information available to the news consumer in 2011, that reality is both exciting and alarming. The tools for newsgathering and dissemination are more powerful and democratized than ever before. The open question now is how technologists and journalists will work together to improve them to provide that context that everyone needs.

Finally, an editor’s note: My deepest thanks to all of the brave and committed journalists working long hours, traveling far from their families and risking their lives under hostile regimes for the reporting that helps us make it so.

Todd Park on unleashing the power of open data to improve health

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What if open health data were to be harnessed to spur better healthcare decisions and catalyze the extension or creation of new businesses? That potential future exists now, in the present. Todd Park, chief technology officer of the Department of Heath and Human Services, has been working to unlock innovation through open health data for over a year now. On many levels, the effort is the best story in federal open data. Park tells it himself in the video below, recorded yesterday at the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia.

Over at e-patients.net, Pew Internet researcher Susannah Fox asked how community organizations can tap into the health data and development trend that Park has been working hard to ignite. She shared several resources (including a few from this correspondent) and highlighted the teams who competed in a health developer challenge tour that culminated at the recent Health 2.0 conference.

Check out this article about HealthData.gov including footage of Park talking about the “health data eco-system” at the code-a-thon (and actually, the video also features local health hacker Alan Viars sitting there at the right).

Here are 3 blog posts about last year’s event, including mine:

Making Health Data Sing (Even If It’s A Familiar Song)

Community Health Data Initiative: vast amounts of health data, freed for innovators to mash up!

Making community health information as useful as weather data: Open health data from Health and Human Services is driving more than 20 new apps.

The next big event in this space on June 9 at the NIH. If you’re interested in what’s next for open health data, track this event closely.

The US CIO goes to the white board to describe good government

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Earlier this week, United States CIO Vivek Kundra turned to the White House whiteboard to talk about sunshine, savings and service. If you’re unfamiliar with Kundra, he’s the man who has proposed and now is entrusted with implementing sweeping federal IT reform. One of the tools he’s been applying to the task is the so-called IT dashboard, which helps the White House Office of Management and Budget, where he serves to track IT spending. He claims to have reduced federal IT spending by some $3 billion dollars over the past two years with increased tracking and scrutiny.The federal CIO explains more about the results from that work, below.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/all/modules/swftools/shared/flash_media_player/player5x2.swf

UPDATE: As open data consultant Dan Morgan pointed out, however, the Government Accountability Office reported that while OMB has made improvements to its dashboard, “further work is needed by agencies and OMB to ensure data accuracy.”

…inaccuracies can be attributed to weaknesses in how agencies report data to the Dashboard, such as providing erroneous data submissions, as well as limitations in how OMB calculates the ratings. Until the selected agencies and OMB resolve these issues, ratings will continue to often be inaccurate and may not reflect current program performance. GAO is recommending that selected agencies take steps to improve the accuracy and reliability of Dashboard information and OMB improve how it rates investments relative to current performance and schedule variance. Agencies generally concurred with the recommendations; OMB did not concur with the first recommendation but concurred with the second. GAO maintains that until OMB implements both, performance may continue to be inaccurately represented on the Dashboard.

One question left unanswered: Is /good the new /open? Decide for yourself at the new “Good Government” section at WhiteHouse.gov.

Talking about crisis data, social media and GIS on Federal News Radio

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American Red Cross Conference On Use Of Intern...

Image by ShashiBellamkonda via Flickr

Earlier this week, the O’Reilly Radar published a new article about how the Red Cross and the Los Angeles Fire Department integrate social tools into crisis response. This afternoon, I talked with Federal News Radio‘s anchor Chris Dorobek about crisis data for the Dorobek Insider:

Have a crisis? Don’t worry, there’s an app for that.

With the emergence of social media tools, emergency responders have been forced to integrate social media into their crisis response.

During the Gulf Coast oil spill last year, the Coast Guard launched an app where you could actually track the oil. Now the Red Cross and the Los Angeles Fire Department are using Twitter and Facebook in their emergency response.

If you’re in the Washington, D.C. listening area, our interview was on at 4:05 and will be rebroadcast at 6:05 PM EST. For online listeners (that’s you, dear reader) you can listen to the show on crisis data here.

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Transit data as open government fuel for economic growth

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Transportation Camp Big Board

At the Big Board at Transportation Camp NYC. Credit: Transportation Camp

Today in New York City, the attendees of TransportationCamp will look for ways to build a better to and fro. Technologists, trains fans, government workers and East Coast civic hackers have gathered for a sold out two-day unconference at the New York Law School Institute for Information Law and Policy. TransportationCamp East.

They’ve come together to discuss how the modern transit system can be improved, focusing on the intersection between technology, citizens, public data and government. Around the United States, there has been a blossoming of innovation in the city transit sector, driven by the passion of citizens and fueled by the release of real-time transit data by their city governments. These efforts have a long way to go, given challenges of driving interoperability standards to address the break of gauge. As open government moves from theory to practice, what lies ahead for Gov 2.0 will include more innovation in opening transit data as a platform for civic innovation.

In many cities, the future of open transit data is already around us, but the promise has yet to be fully realized. The case for open data in transit is made in the video below:

A Case for Open Data in Transit from Streetfilms on Vimeo.

An “open data project that I’m fond of that started very early in the open government process is GTFS, the General Transit Feed Specification,” said Tim O’Reilly.

That’s the data standard that lets transit districts feed their bus and train arrival times to applications like Google Transit, or any of the many smartphone apps that help you plan your trip on public transit. This standard started as a collaboration between Google and the city of Portland, but is now available from many cities. It’s a great example of how governments can think like platform providers. They have to equip their buses and trains with GPS, and report out the data. They could report it just to their own bus stops and train stations, or they could make it available to third parties to deliver in a hundred ways. Which is better for citizens? It’s pretty obvious.”

For passionate civic advocates like Laurel Ruma, a colleague at O’Reilly Media, getting real-time transit data in Boston was better than winning the World Series. (That might have been a harder sell in 2003, but table that for now). The decision to release and support open transit data online has spawned a new ecosystem of mobile applications, many of which are featured at MBTA.com. The addition of real-time transit data could add more value to the apps offering help for MBTA riders that went online in 2009, like the Mass Transit app that has been making money for SparkFish Creative.

It’s that kind of economic value creation combined with civic utility and accountability that has many people in the open government community excited. “Transportation has been a breakout segment of the “Gov 2.0” space over the last several years — it’s an issue with direct impacts on every citizen, and an area where we are seeing tons of innovation right now,” said Nick Grossman, director of civic works at OpenPlans. “Agencies are re-thinking their tech and data strategies, entrepreneurs and “civic hackers” are building tools at a furious rate, and the public is benefiting in tangible ways. We are excited to bring together many of the players in the space for two weekends of discussing, debating, and building at TransportationCamp.”

The unconference organizers posted the http://transportationcamp.org/topics/”>discussion topics online before Transportation Camp kicked off, so virtual onlookers and on-site participants alike can get a flavor of interests that range from walking to to cycling to ride sharing. (No evidence of transit via horse, mule nor camel is to be found, no doubt because of the changing face of New York City versus their utility).

“We are honored to be partnering with former White House deputy CTO for open government Beth Noveck and the Do Tank & Democracy Design Workshop at New York Law School, said Grossman. “Beth’s and the Do Tank’s work has been an inspiration for all forms of collaborative work around civic issues, governance, and democracy.”

TransportationCamp West will be in San Francisco March 19-20. Both of the unconferences are sponsored by NYC-based nonprofit OpenPlans. ”

“TransportationCamp is all about building connections across a widespread sector, from public officials, to software developers, to academics, to urban advocates and interested citizens,” said Grossman. “We hope to not only address some immediate issues (such as working on technical data standards), but also plant the seed for longer-term partnerships.”

Luke Fretwell captured an extensive Q&A with Grossman, were he talks more about TransportationCamp’s objectives and transportation’s impact on the bigger issues around Gov 2.0 and open government.

Follow @transpocamp and the #transpo hashtag on Twitter today and over the coming weeks to watch the discussion data unfold in real-time.

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Frank Hebert posted a recap of Saturday morning at Transportation Camp at the camp blog.

USA.gov adds 1.USA.gov URL shortener for civilian use

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Last year, the United States General Services Administration (GSA) launched the Go.USA.gov URL shortener at the Gov 2.0 Expo in Washington, D.C. Today, USA.gov soft-launched a way for citizens to create shortened USA.gov URLs as well. Whenever someone uses Bit.ly (or any service that uses Bit.ly, like Tweetdeck or the Twitter app for iPhone) to shorten a .gov or .mil URL, the link will be converted to a short 1.USA.gov.

For those feeling a bit dizzied by acronyms, URL stands for “uniform resource locator.” A URL is the Web address, like, say, govfresh.com, that a citizen types into a Web browser to go to a site. Many URLs are long, which makes sharing them on Twitter or other mobile platforms awkward. As a result, many people share shortened versions. One of the challenges that face users is that, unless a citizen uses one of several tools to view what the actual hyperlink is below the link, he or she might be led astray or exposed to malicious code that was included in the original link.

This new service will make it easier for people to know when a short URL will direct them to a trustworthy official U.S. government site. “The whole idea is to improve people’s experience when dealing with government information online,” said Jed Sundwall, a contractor for USA.gov and GobiernoUSA.gov. “We keep USA.gov in the domain for usability reasons. It’s crystal clear, worldwide, that 1.USA.gov URLs point to trustworthy governmentt information.” Adriel Hampton talked with Jed Sundwall about Go.USA.gov on Gov 2.0 Radio last year. For more on how Go.USA.gov URLs work, watch Michele Chronister’s presentation from the last year’s Gov 2.0 Expo, below:

The new shortener began appearing online this Friday. According to Sundwall, ABC senior White House correspondent Jake Tapper was the first to use it when he linked to a PDF containing new unemployment information at the Bureau of Labor and Statistics: “For those asking follow-ups on unemployment, here’s the BLS link http://1.usa.gov/XUtpL”

Tapper is not alone, as many others have used the 1.USA.gov URL shortener simply by using the tools there already knew. “The beauty is that Jake used it without knowing he was using it,” said Sundwall. “We’re trying making it easy for anyone to identify .gov information as it’s being shared online,” said Sundwall.

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1.USA.gov FAQ

Following are the GSA’s answers to frequently asked questions about 1.USA.gov.

Why did we use 1.USA.gov when go.gov or 1.us.gov would be shorter?
Including USA.gov in the shortened URLs makes them more intuitive and meaningful to users worldwide. Many Internet users may not realize that .gov is the exclusive top-level domain of the U.S. government, and USA.gov adds valuable context to the short URLs.

What if I don’t want a 1.USA.gov URL?

You can replace 1.USA.gov with bit.ly or j.mp. For example 1.USA.gov/12345 will go to the same place as j.mp/12345 or bit.ly/12345.

Is Bit.ly owned by the Libyan government?

No. Bit.ly (@bitly is an American-owned company based in New York City. While .ly is the top level Internet domain assigned to Libya, this does not mean that Libya has any stake at all in Bit.ly, the ability to access Bit.ly’s data, or the ability to control Bit.ly’s servers. On the Quora website, Bit.ly’s CEO has addressed what would happen to Bit.ly if Libya were to shut off Internet access in Libya. Regardless, we use .gov URLs, and none of the servers that power this service (or any of Bit.ly’s servers) are located in Libya.

Who uses a similar service with Bit.ly?

C-SPAN: http://cs.pn
NY Times: http://nyti.ms
NPR: http://n.pr
Facebook: http://fb.me
Pepsi: http://pep.si
Economist: http://econ.st

What does this mean for Go.USA.gov?

We will still maintain Go.USA.gov as an option for government employees to use as a URL shortener, and Go.USA.gov URLs will continue to work.

Correction: an earlier version of this story referred to the new shortener as 1.GO.USA.gov, as opposed to the shorter version. We regret the error.

Question Time 2.0: GOP Leader on Quora, Rep. John Garamendi on Reddit

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Last month, Matt Lira, a member of House GOP Leader Eric Cantor’s staff, asked how the United States Congress should use social media to enhance the legislative process on Quora, the hot question and answer website of the moment. To date, he’s received 19 answers, many quite substantive.

Today, Representative John Garamendi (D-CA) asked the Reddit community for “as many questions as he could get through” when he returned to the page at 8 PM tonight.

My name is John Garamendi, and I am a Member of Congress representing the 10th Congressional District in Northern California. Ask Me Anything. I will be back at 8 PM EST/5 PM PST today (Wednesday, March 2) to answer as many questions as I can get through.

I previously served as California Lieutenant Governor, California Insurance Commissioner, Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Interior Department under President Clinton, a state legislator, and a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer.

Garameni offered his House.gov website, YouTube channel and @RepGaramendi Twitter handle and Facebook page for Redditors to find him. When a member of the community expressed skepticism that it was “really him,” he tweeted that “Today I will join @reddit at 8PM EST for an #AMA Ask Me Anything. Thread will appear here: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA.”

As of 6:40 PM EST, there were more than 1400 comments on the thread, with many substantive questions voted to the top. The online public will see how frank he’s willing to be in that context.

Whether this is a success or not, it’s good to see representatives exploring new platforms for participatory democracy. They may be far from perfect but the moderation mechanisms on Reddit and Quora, along with their associated communities, hint at the ways that the next generation of e-democracy platforms will evolve. Tune in at 8 PM EST to see if Representative Garamendi takes the top questions on the forum.

UPDATE: The Congressman did, in fact, log in to Reddit and answered questions for nearly an hour. Here’s the the top-voted question, by “anexanhume”:

John,
I am curious as to whether or not you believe that it is possible to be a politician that reaches any major political office (say for instance, state legislator or large city mayor as the least important office) without owing either a person, political organization or corporation some sort of favor for reaching your office. Moreover, is it ever actually possible to vote on your principles consistently without the fear of losing reelection or angering someone who helped you get where you are?

Representative Garamendi answered:

Thank you for the question. It’s a good one. I believe I vote consistently with my principles. Obviously there are some political interests who align with me more than others, and that will be somewhat reflected in whom they choose to support. And like everyone, there are personal opinions about individuals that I sometimes keep to myself for the sake of congeniality and relationships.

So the answer to your question is I honestly don’t think I “owe” any group my allegiance. I’ve been in public policy enough that I doubt there’s a single group left in America that has given me a 100% report card every year I’ve been in office.
Ultimately, public policy is about choices and compromise. When I’m on the House floor, after all the debate is done, after all the deals have been struck, I’m left with a choice: Yes or No. This means I’ve voted for bills that had elements I didn’t like (I was disappointed the public option wasn’t in the Patient’s Bill of Rights for example) and voted against bills that had some good policy (I voted against tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires even though the bill contained an important extension of assistance for people looking for work). It’s clichéd at this point, but we shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

He answered two anonymous questions as well: Do you think a representative is elected to execute his own moral compass? Do you think a representative is elected to reflect the opinion of the constituency?

Good questions without an easy answer, but I’ll try. I fight tirelessly for the people of the 10th Congressional District, and luckily, priorities like transportation investments, job creation, Delta protection, health care access, fighting for veterans, ending the war in Afghanistan, and equal rights are both popular in the district and at the core of my policy goals.

My constituents have chosen me to be their voice in Washington, and that literally means making hundreds of decisions every week. I don’t expect anyone to agree with every decision, and there are times when I have access to more information than the public. Have I taken positions that a majority of my constituents disagree with at one point or another? Probably, but that’s the beauty of democracy. Every two years, the people have a chance to reevaluate who they’ve chosen to represent them.

There’s more on the Reddit thread, including answers on the budget, unions, entitlement reform, the financial crisis and more.

Apps for Amsterdam catalyzes civic hacking in Netherlands

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Application contests, data camps and hackathons are showing how civic coding can put open government data to work. In the Netherlands, Apps for Amsterdam has launched to try catalyze the development of software that puts the city’s open data to work. If you’re interested in open government in the Netherlands, here’s your chance to hack the government – for good.

The new competition is backed by the Waag Society, the city of Amsterdam and Public Hack. There’s an upcoming open data hackathon in Amsterdam on March 12th, for those interested. Below is an account of the launch curated by Rolf Kleef using Storify:

http://storify.com/rolfkleef/apps-for-amsterdam.js

Crowdsourcing where to put QR codes in NYC

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This February, New York City adopted QR codes in a significant way. “QR” stands for “quick response” codes. QR codes enable somebody with the appropriate software and hardware to quickly scan a code for information from any direction. As TechCrunch reported, NYC will put QR codes on all of its building permits.

The QR codes will link users to a mobile version of the Department of Buildings Information System, and will give them the option to click a link that will initiate a phone call to the city’s 311 phone service, where they can register a complaint about noise, safety or other concerns.

As permits at 975,000 building and construction sites that already have them are replaced, they will have QR codes added; all New York City permits are expected to have QR codes by roughly 2013.

QR Code on Love ArtPhoto illustration by Zachary M. Seward based on a photo by Chris Goldberg

QR codes can be scanned by smartphones equipped with relevant software in much the same way that a handheld scanner can scan the more familiar horizontal barcodes used globally in shipping and retail industries. Their use is hardly limited to building permits, however, as Zach Seward pointed out at the Wall Street Journal:

In 2011, you’re likely to see more QR codes on billboards, print publications, museum placards — anywhere with limited space and lots of information to convey. On city building permits, scanning the QR code will direct you to a website with more information about the construction project, if you’re into that.

But the New Yorkers who responded to Sterne are more excited about the prospect of applying QR codes to the city’s public-transit system. One  common suggestion: place them at bus stops, where schedules aren’t always displayed and are often out of date.

So where should New York City place QR codes? As Seward reported, New York City’s chief digital officer, Rachel Sterne, is looking for ideas. Seward captured her questions and the responses of citizens (including this correspondent) using Storify:

http://storify.com/zseward/qr-codes-in-new-york-city.js[View the story “QR codes in New York City” on Storify]