ments to track their own progress, but as a way to enable citizens to work together to improve it.

Much of the excitement revolves around municipal initiatives. “Cities are where most people understand their government and interact with it,” says Jen Pahlka, the founder and executive director of Code for America, a nonprofit organization that connects developers with municipal governments through a year-long fellowship program, a “brigade” of volunteer professionals, and a soon-to-be-launched start-up incubator. Thus far, Code for America has leveraged public data to help citizens to keep up with legislation in Philadelphia, browse public school information in Boston, and locate retailers that accept food stamps in every city in the U.S.

 

Data Transparency

Organizations like Code for America are part of an increasingly vibrant ecosystem that works to promote data transparency. Typically, data advocates balance basic work to open new datasets and encourage the adoption of global standards with purpose-driven projects like creating apps and application programming interfaces (APIs). The Washington, D.C.-based Sunlight Foundation, for example, employs a team of investigative journalists to obtain data, such as information about political junkets and contributions, through Freedom of Information Act requests. It also houses a policy team that engages in direct lobbying, a team that organizes volunteers, and a lab whose 20-odd developers focus on making data more accessible.

Sunlight’s first API, launched in
2007, leveraged work by Joshua Tau-
berer—a software developer who, in
2004, launched GovTrack.us to aggre-
gate federal legislative data—to cre-
ate a site that helps people find and
contact their congressional represen-
tatives. “It’s now evolved into some-
thing that provides better results than
official government sites since we of-
fer geographical lookups based on
latitude and longitude,” asserts Tom
Lee, director of Sunlight Labs. More
recently, Sunlight has released APIs
that track the development of legis-
lation and can detect, for example,
when legislative language moves be-
tween different statehouses or from
interest groups into law.

sunlight foundation
APis can track
the development
of legislation
and detect when
legislative language
moves between
different statehouses
or from interest
groups into law.

then contacted agencies, like Health & Human Services, whose data was inaccurate. “We brought them all this negative attention, but by and large, people in government are trying to do a ton with very limited resources, and what they need are better tools,” says Lee.

The British government’s counterpart to Data.gov was launched in January 2010 at Data.gov.uk. Built under the direction of Nigel Shadbolt, a professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Southampton, and Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Data.gov.uk now offers more than 5,400 datasets, including detailed crime statistics, government spending data, and health indicators like hospital infection rates.

To date, dozens of Data.gov.uk-powered apps have been created that enable citizens to do everything from researching and comparing nursing-care facilities to viewing scheduled road closures across the country. Shadbolt and Berners-Lee, director of the World Wide Web Consortium, are now leveraging their work on the site to create a new government research center, the Open Data Institute. “The mission is to extract not just social value or efficiency for the public sector, but actual economic value in terms of businesses that might develop and promote and use data,” says Shadbolt, who is crafting the Institute’s implementation plan.

Indeed, getting companies and citizens actively involved is one of the biggest promises of open data, according to advocates. The discussion is often framed in the larger context of what is known as Gov 2.0—going beyond data publication to crowdsourced information solutions. “There’s an interesting question about whether we can build enough capability and infrastructure to allow people to be creative around these assets,” says Shadbolt. SeeClick-Fix, a Web site and mobile app that enables U.S. citizens to report non-emergency neighborhood issues like potholes and streetlight outages, is a popular example. Borne of Web designer Ben Berkowitz’s frustration with the graffiti on his house in New Haven, CT, it has since grown into an 11-per- son start-up that works with city governments across the country to manage quality-of-life service requests and get usage analytics.