Category Archives: application

CPSC to launch public complaint database at SaferProducts.gov

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As reported today by the Washington Post, the Consumer Product Safety Commission will launch a public database of complaints this March at SaferProducts.gov.

The new public database of consumer complaints is mandated by Section 212 of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 (CPSIA), which was signed into law by President George W. Bush. The CPSIA requires the Commission to establish and maintain a publicly accessible product safety information database that is available to the public. In the 21st Century, that means online, searchable and accessible at SaferProducts.gov.

As Lyndsey Layton points out at the Washington Post, the implementation of the database is not without controversy or political context. Manufacturing and industry groups are concerned about fictitious complaints or inaccurate claims made by competitors. Opponents of the launch of SaferProducts.gov are working against it, arguing that the public database could add additional burdens for businesses in a difficult economic environment.

The CPSC already collects reports of defective products from a wide range of sources, including consumers, health-care providers, death certificates and media accounts.But most of that information is shielded from public view. Until now, the only way for consumers to access safety complaints is to file a public-records request with the CPSC. The agency is then required by law to consult with the manufacturer before releasing information about their products, and the company can protest or sue to stop disclosure. If the agency thinks a dangerous product should be pulled from the market, it must negotiate a recall with the manufacturer, a process that can take months or years.

Under the new system, consumer complaints will be posted for any reader to find at SaferProducts.gov within 15 days after they are filed. When a consumer files a complaint under the new system, the CPSC will have 5 days to notify a manufacturer, which then has 10 days to respond to the complaint by challenging it, submitting a response or arguing that it violates a trade secret. A response would be published online with the complaint at SaferProductsgov, while the CPSC would have to decide to withhold or publish a complaint if a company asserts a false complaint.

This Tuesday, at 10:30 AM EST, the CPSC will host a webcast showing the new SaferProducts.gov report form at SaferProducts.gov/live. Visit CPSC.gov or follow the @OnSafety account at Twitter for updates on the official launch of the site.

In the meantime, consumers can continue to make use of the mobile recalls app that the federal government launched last year at USA.gov. These product recall datasets have been some of the most queried data on Data.gov over the past year, no doubt helped in part by the connected applications.

The CPSC also has a widget that blogs (like this one) can embed with recall information:

Product Safety Recall Info

FCC launches open Internet developer challenge for apps for network QoS testing

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While the technology and political establishment is reeling off reactions to the Federal Communication’s net neutrality vote to approve the first federal rules on Internet traffic will mean for net neutrality, one thing at least is clear: the FCC has launched an Open Internet Apps Challenge on Challenge.gov.

The contest is reasonably straightforward, at least as a proposal; challenge developers to create applications that test networks that inform consumers about broadband Internet connections. Specifically:

The Open Internet Challenge is designed to encourage the development of creative, innovative and functional Internet software tools for fixed or mobile broadband that provide users with real-time data about their Internet connection and, when aggregated, can show Internet-wide patterns and trends.

Apps that can detect, aggregate and analyze such information might be of use to both the agency and consumers alike, in terms of making policy or consumption decisions:

The Open Internet Challenge seeks to encourage the development of creative, innovative and functional applications that provide users with information about the extent to which their fixed or mobile broadband Internet services are consistent with open Internet principles. These software tools could, for example, detect whether a broadband provider is interfering with DNS responses, application packet headers, or content.
These applications should also collect anonoymized data that is useful for network research and analysis that enables the discovery of patterns and trends in Internet openness.
One popular platform for Internet software tools is Measurement Lab (M-Lab), which “is an open, distributed server platform for researchers to deploy Internet measurement tools.” Those interested in running their software tools on the M-Lab platform should contact the M-Lab steering committee, which coordinates research on the M-Lab platform.

The commission is also soliciting research as part of the challenge:

In addition to measurement tools, this challenge also seeks research papers that analyze relevant Internet openness measurement techniques, approaches, and data. The Challenge is designed to encourage and reward the creation of novel, innovative and useful research. The research must be new or recent and directly involve open Internet principles. For example such research may illuminate how widely fixed and mobile networks observe the FCC’s open Internet principles or how advanced network services can be provided in a way that adheres to the spirit of the open Internet. Such research papers need to have been peer-reviewed by a recognized scientific conference or journal and must have been published since January 2007. (Dissertations, white papers and technical reports are not acceptable, but may be referenced for further details within the paper.) Research on Internet openness can improve policy making and advance Internet transparency, which helps to sustain a healthy Internet.

Will it take off? Another challenge, so to speak, might be the incentives. The winners will earn a free (up $500/person in travel expenses) trip to FCC headquarters in Washington, DC, where they’ll go to an FCC Chairman’s reception, present their work to the Commission, receive plaque and “have their apps and research featured on the FCC’s website and social media outlets.”

It’s also not clear how the development community will feel about the FCC after today’s hearing on somewhat controversial net neutrality rules, for which a public document still hasn’t been published online. Geeks and government have converged at the FCC before. If this challenge is going to take off, they’ll need to do a lot of outreach to encourage the development community to participate, which in turn will likely also mean exactly what the new open Internet principles will mean in practice. Stay tuned.

What was the story of the first FTC online privacy chat? 17 questions and answers.

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http://storify.com/digiphile/the-federal-trade-commissions-first-twitter-chat.js

Mark Zuckerberg talks with President George W. Bush at Facebook Headquarters [VIDEO]

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Today, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg interviewed George W. Bush, the 43rd President of the United States.

http://cdn.livestream.com/grid/LSPlayer.swf?channel=facebookguests&clip=pla_0da9c42f-9499-4c60-8069-e306dd089fc3&autoPlay=false

Bush missed few opportunities to plug his new book in the first half of the discussion or to poke some fun at Zuckerberg. Promoting for the book to be expected, given that Facebook’s headquarters were the major stop on the California leg of his “Decision Points” book tour. Less expected was the moment when the two men bumped fists over Zuckerberg’s success without graduating from college.

Bush and Zuckerberg also talked about how he’s adopted technology since leading the Oval Office. After he left D.C., “I became a BlackBerry person,” said Bush. “Now I’m an iPad person. And I use the Facebook.” (According to CNN, Bush’s favorite iPad app is Scrabble.)

Like Zadie Smith, who wrote about her Facebook experience in “Generation Why,” Bush doesn’t use Facebook in the same way as the average citizen. He’s a public figure, and when he says he has “over 600,000 friends on my Facebook page,” it means that many accounts have “Liked” his account, not that he’s radically exceeded the limits of the social networking giant’s social graph. Likes and friends are not at all the same thing. For the sake of reference, President Barack Obama has some 16,891,000 “Likes” on Facebook, very few of whom are likely his “friends” in any real sense.

Bush and Zuckerberg reflected upon a more serious use of social networking and online platforms as well. “One way we’re trying to advance freedom is by using the Internet,” said Bush, citing the work of Oscar Morales and his One Million Voices against FARC.

In a rare moment of praise for the Obama administration, Bush also said that “I think they’ve handled Afghanistan well.”

He reflected on the dynamics within China, the rising power in the East, connecting its voracious consumption of natural resources, connecting it to keeping internal order. “To create 25 million new jobs a year, you have to have a lot of natural resources,” he said.

Zuckerberg asked the question of the moment near the end of the hour-long interview: What is the impact of Wikileaks?

“I think it’s going to be hard, in some cases, to earn the trust of foreign leaders,” said Bush.

Gov 2.0 Startup Lab at George Washington University

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Today at George Washington University, GW Office of Entrepreneurship & iStrategyLabs is hosting a “Gov 2.0 Startup Lab” to highlight the opportunities around civic entrepreneurship. According to the event organizers, the event “will stimulate new ideas and bring together collaborators for the 2011 GW Business Plan Competition with $50,000 in prizes, and further establish GW as a hotspot for innovation and entrepreneurship.” The livestream is embedded below:

Liveblog here:

Gov 2.0 Startup Lab at GW

Follow the #Gov20gw hashtag for the Twitter backchannel:

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Open data: accountability, citizen utility and economic opportunity

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datagovconference.jpgIs sunlight the best disinfectant, as Supreme Court Justice Brandeis famously said?

This week in Washington, D.C., hundreds of experts have come together at the International Open Government Data Conference (IOGDC) to explore how data can also help citizens to make better decisions and underpin new economic growth. The IOGDC agenda is online, along with the presenters.

“Since the United Kingdom and United States movement started, lots of other countries have followed,” said Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. Canada, New Zealand, Australia, France and Finland are all working on open data initiatives.

As he noted with a smile, the “beautiful race” between the U.S. and U.K. on the Data.gov and Data.gov.uk websites was healthy for both countries, as open data practitioners were able to learn from one another and share ideas. That race was corked off when former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown asked Tim Berners-Lee how the United Kingdom could make the best use of the Internet. When Berners-Lee responded to “put government data on the Web,” Brown assented, and Data.gov.uk was born.

Berners-Lee explored the principles of open linked data that underpin data.gov.uk and open government. Specifically, he emphasized his support for open standards and formats over proprietary versions of either, inviting everyone present to join the W3C open government data working group.

Berners-Lee also reiterated his “five star system” for open government data:

  • 1 Stars for putting data on the Web at all, with an open license. PDFs get 1 star.
  • 2 Stars if it’s machine-readable. Excel qualifies, though Berners-Lee prefers XML or CSVs.
  • 3 Stars for machine-readable, non-proprietary formats
  • 4 Stars if the data is converted into open linked data standards like RDF or SPARQL
  • 5 Stars when people have gone through the trouble of linking it

“The more transparency there is, there more likely there is to be external investment,” said Berners-Lee, highlighting the potential for open government data to make countries more attractive to the global electronic herd.

Will open data spread to more cities, states and countries, as HTML did in the 1990s? If the open standards and technologies that Berners-Lee advocates for are adopted, perhaps. “The Web spread quickly because it was distributed,” said Berners-Lee. “The fact that people could put up Web servers themselves without asking meant it spread more quickly without a centralized mandate.”

Putting open government data to work

Following Berners-Lee, federal CIO Vivek Kundra highlighted how far the open government data movement has come in the short time since President issued his open government memorandum in January 2009.

Kundra remarked that he’s “seeing more and more companies come online” in the 7 countries have embarked on an open government movement that involves democratizing data. He also reeled off a list of statistics to highlight the growth of the Data.gov platfrom.

  • Within the boundaries of the United States, Kundra observed that 16 states and 9 cities have stood up open data platforms
  • 256 applications have now been developed on top of the Data.gov platform
  • There are now 305,692 data sets available on Data.gov
  • Since Data.gov was launched in 2009, it has received 139 million hits.

The rapid growth of open government data initiatives globally suggests that there’s still more to come. “When I look at Data.gov platform and where we are as a global community, we’re still in the very early days of what’s possible,” said Kundra.

He emphasized that releasing open data is not just a means of holding government accountable, focusing three lenses on its release:

  • Accountability, both inside of government and to citizens
  • Utility to citizens, where, as Kundra said, “data is used in the lives of everyday people to improve the decisions they makes or services they receive on a daily basis
  • Economic opportunities created as a results of open data.

Kundra pointed to a product recalls iPhone app created by a developer as an example of the second lens. The emerging ecosystem of healthcare apps is an example of both of the latter two facets, where open health data spurs better decisions and business growth.

“The simple act of opening up data has had a profound impact on the lives of ordinary people,” said Kundra, who pointed to the impact of the Veterans Administration’s Blue Button. Over 100,000 veterans have now downloaded their personal health records, which tundra said has stimulated innovation in blue button readers to connect systems from Google or Microsoft.

“I predict that we’ll have an industry around data curation and lightweight applications,” said Kundra. “The intersection of multiple data sets are where true value lies.” The question he posed to the audience is to consider how the government will move to towards an API-centric architecture that allows services to access data sets on a real-time basis.

When asked about that API strategy and the opportunity costs of pursuing it by open government advocate Harlan Yu, Kundra said that he follows an “80/20” rule when it comes to the government building apps vs third parties. “Do we want to be a grocery store or a restaurant when it comes to the Data.gov platform and movement?” he asked.

As a means of answering that question, Jeanne Holm, the former chief knowledge architect at the NASA Jet Propulsion and current Data.gov evangelist, announced a new open government open data community at Data.gov that will host conversations about the future of the platform.

Kundra also made three announcements on Monday:

  • A new Harvard Business School case study on Data.gov, available for free to government employees
  • A United States-United Kingdom partnership on open government, which will include an open government data camp later this week
  • The release of a concept of operations for Data.gov, embedded below, which includes strategic goals for the site, an operation overview and a site architecture.

Data.gov Concept of Operations v 1.0 http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf

What do the two technology leaders see as a vision for success for open government data?

For Berners-Lee, it was to be able to directly access data from a dashboard on laptop, rather than indexes and catalogs on Data.gov and data.gov.uk. He talked about accessing open government data that wasn’t just machine-readable or linked to other sets but directly accessed from his local machine, called through powerful Python scribts.

In contrast, Kundra talked about being able to go to a store like Brookstone and “in the same way you can buy alarm clocks with data in the weather channel,” how data from federal agencies had been employed to provision objects from everyday life.

To be fair, there’s a long way to go yet before that vision becomes reality. As Andrew Odewahn pointed out at Radar, earthquakes are HUGE on Data.gov, consistently bringing in the most downloads, even ahead of those product recall data sets. While provisioning recurring visualization in the Popular Mechanics iPad App might be useful to the publisher, it’s also a reminder that the full vision for delivering utility to citizens through open data that Kundra hopes for hasn’t come to fruition as a result of Data.gov – yet.

POPVOX tries to bring the voice of the people into Congress

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The explosion of social media use in the United States has been greeted with enthusiasm by digital evangelists who argue that online platforms will be an upgrade on the existing communications systems between citizens and Congress. After the 2008 and 2010 elections, it’s clear that while social media now plays a role, the voices of citizens aren’t necessarily being heard in Congress any more effectively. Where phone calls used to swamp Capitol Hill switchboards, now, email, tweets and Facebook comments can overwhelm Congressional staffers. That reality was articulated in a speech by Marci Harris at the Gov 2.0 Summit this year, embedded below:

Two months later, Harris’s new company, POPVOX*, has announced its public beta, aiming to “bridge the gap between the input the public wants to provide to Congress, and the information Members of Congress need to receive.”

“Constituent communications are overwhelming Congressional offices,” said POPVOX CEO Marci Harris in a prepared statement. Harris, who has worked as a Congressional staff member, understands this issue better than most. “Members of Congress really do want to hear what constituents have to say. Unfortunately, today’s communication tools dramatically increase the ability to generate messages going in to Congress without helping Congress handle the influx. The increasing emails, Tweets, Facebook comments, petitions, form letters, faxes, etc. are having the unintended effect of turning genuine citizen engagement into unintelligible noise.”

The approach that POPVOX takes to this information flood is to act as a platform for citizen-to-Congressional staff communication, identifying citizens as constituents to staffers, guiding visitors to pending legislation and publishing data-driven dashboards that show the organizations that are lining up on the issues. The customers for POPVOX are the advocacy organizations that want to get more awareness of their legislative lobbying and to partners with similar advocates.

“Many grassroots campaigns don’t take into account that Members of Congress have limited ability to respond to general expressions of outrage or support. They can introduce, co-sponsor, or vote yes or no on a bill. That’s about all they can realistically do,” said Harris in her statement. “By focusing the POPVOX platform on pending legislation and not general ‘issues,’ and making comments on POPVOX public, searchable and sortable by anyone, we are able to turn constituent voices into something that a legislator can actually use.”

According to POPVOX, the service has already been used during its pre-beta release by organizations that oppose H.R. 4646: Debt Free America Act or those that support H.R. 676: Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act or by the Association of Flight Attendants to build support for H.R. 915: FAA Reauthorization Act of 2009. A number of bills up for consideration during the lame duck Congressional session this winter have also been receiving user comments, including H.R. 1751: American Dream Act and H.R. 3458: Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009.

POPVOX, a nonpartisan corporation, joins an increasingly hot space. TechCrunch covered Votizen in September, another startup which has received $1.5 million dollars to “make sure government representatives hear your voice.” Sound familiar?

As Jason Kincaid noted, “The startup sprung, in part, from the success of a Votizen-powered Twitter campaign earlier this year that was held in support of the Startup Visa. Thousands of people tweeted their support for the bill, and Votizen actually delivered their messages by hand to the appropriate people.” Another firm, Frogloop, coordinates social media campaigns in support of advocates’ issues. FireSide21 provides a suite of technology tools for constituent communications, including CRM, email marketing, telephone town halls and more.

The open question for POPVOX now will be whether their platform can reboot the relationship between citizens and legislators, and do so sustainably, effectively and profitably. Given the historic low ratings for Congress, there’s certainly plenty of room for improvement.

*DISCLAIMER: Tim O’Reilly, my publisher, provided angel funding for POPVOX. He calls it “a kind of Google Analytics service for politics, bringing visibility and actionable insight to both Congressional staffers and advocacy organizations.” My choice to cover the beta launch startup did not come as the result of his request nor that of Harris, who I met for a briefing on Capitol Hill earlier this year.

What’s the value proposition for open government data?

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This weekend, I asked the Govloop community to tell me about the value proposition of open government data. Today at the International Open Government Data Conference in Washington, I’ll deliver a presentation that incorporates much of that feedback. I’ve embedded it below:

Value proposition of open government datahttp://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=value-prop-open-data-101116104203-phpapp02&stripped_title=value-proposition-of-open-government-data&userName=digiphile

The audio livestream for my presentation and those of my fellow panelists will be available below:

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Geeks hacking smarter government: Kickstarter’s Andy Baio joins Expert Labs

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As Anil Dash blogged earlier today, Andy Baio has joined Expert Labs as a project director for ThinkUp App. According to Dash, Baio will be working as a “Director of Hacks,” focusing on making better use of the data collected by apps like ThinkUp.

Andy’s new role marks the beginning of a whole new phase for Expert Labs; We’re now very tightly focused on working with agencies that want to get crowdsourced feedback, and the biggest request those agencies make is to better understand the ideas that people submit. We’re answering those requests with smart tools for presenting, visualizing, sorting and filtering ideas and suggestions that come in through Facebook and Twitter.

In short, we’ve already got the ability to collect responses to policy questions through a social network, and now we’ll be able to turn those responses into real insights.

In his own blog post about on joining Expert Labs, Baio elaborated further on the mission he’s taking on:

Our goal’s to help government make better decisions about policy by listening to citizens in the places they already are: social networks like Twitter and Facebook.

Our first project is ThinkUp, an open-source tool for archiving and visualizing conversations on social networks. It started with Gina scratching a personal itch, a way to parse and filter @replies. But it’s grown to be something more: a tool for policy makers to harness the collective intelligence of experts.

There’s tons to do, but I’m particularly excited to tackle ThinkUp’s ability to separate signal from noise, making it easier to derive meaning from hundreds or thousands of responses, using visualization, clustering, sentiment analysis, and robotic hamsters. I’m planning on building some fun hacks on top of ThinkUp, as well as keeping an eye open for other vectors to tackle our core mission.

And his motivations for going to work in open government:

So, why would I go to a Gov 2.0 non-profit? For three main reasons:

It’s important. To tackle our most serious national issues, we need better communication between government and citizens. I want my son to grow up in a world where he doesn’t feel disconnected and disillusioned by government, and I want government to meet the needs of the people, rather than favoring those with the most money or the loudest voices.

It’s exciting. Technology is quite possibly our best hope of breaking down that divide, using social tools to disrupt the way that governments are run and policy is made. I love designing and building tools that use social connections to tackle difficult problems, and it feels like government is an area ripe for disruption.

I love the team. I’ve known Anil and Gina for years and have long admired their work. They’re both extraordinarily talented and creative people, and I feel lucky to call them both friends. The opportunity to work with them was too hard to pass up.

Welcome to the Gov 2.0 community, Andy. I saw him hard at work at the first FCC Open Developer Day in Washington this week, where we talked more about what it means to have members of the technology community work on technology to make government function more effectively.

When high profile members of the Web 2.0 community pitch in, their networks will learn more about what’s going on. Call it “digital diffusion.” That attention, scrutiny and tinkering is likely to be a good outcome for everyone.

For more on that count, I interviewed Expert Labs’ Gina Trapani at the FCC about ThinkUp app, the apps that came out of the developer day and this issue: what does it mean when geeks try to help government work better. It was a great conversation and I encourage readers of this blog to embed it elsewhere.

HHS CTO Todd Park on HealthData.gov, Text4Baby and open health data

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The first chief technology officer of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Todd Park, has been working hard to make community health data as useful as weather data. If that vision for open government at HHS matures, the innovation released in the private sector could meet or exceed the billions of dollars unlocked by GPS or NOAA data. To see the first steps in that direction, look no further than the healthcare apps that have already gone online, like the integration of community health data into Bing search results.

Park shared the next step in opening up health data last month out in California, when he announced HealthData.gov at the San Francisco Healthcamp. When interviewed yesterday at the mHealth Summit in Washington, Park shared more details about HealthData.gov, which he says will launch in December. He also shared a new goal for text4baby yesterday, which has now grown to be the biggest mobile health platform in the United States: 1 million moms by 2012.

HealthData.gov will be a new part of Data.gov with a health data catalog, including a roster of new public and private applications using the data, said Park. The site will launch with a new tool, a “Health Indicator Warehouse” with over 2000 metrics for United States, state and county health. HealthData.gov will also host an online community dedicated to health data, which should allow practitioners, technologists and entrepreneurs to learn from one another. The site is the next step in the framework HHS has created for government to act as a platform through the Community Health Data Initiative. The next question will be whether these applications lead to better outcomes for citizens and businesses that expand, bringing on new workers. Measuring that meaningful outcome will require more time.