AppFactory

Open Government in DC - What data sets are people interested in?

Here is a chart which shows the distribution of data downloads by the public from data made available by DC... Total is 600,548 downloads. Image courtesy OpenSF.

Blocks And Lots - 48 Data Sets - 5,636,937 records

Here is the detail of the data available in the Blocks And Lots API.
Blocks And Lots DataSets Dec 8, 2009

NYC Takes First Open Gov Steps....

NYC Open Government Bill (Draft)

Original document is here.

Tim Berners-Lee on Open Government - "Raw Data Now" Rally Call

Great video from Ted. Transcript:

TBL: In fact if you're responsible -- if you know about some data in a government department, often you find that these people, they're very tempted to keep it. Hans calls it database hugging. You hug your database, you don't want to let it go until you've made a beautiful website for it. Well, I'd like to suggest that rather -- yes, make a beautiful website, who am I to say don't make a beautiful website? Make a beautiful website, but first give us the unadulterated data, we want the data. We want unadulterated data. OK, we have to ask for raw data now. And I'm going to ask you to practice that, OK? Say "raw."

Audience: Raw.

TBL: Can you say "data"?

Audience: Data.

TBL: Can you say "now"?

Audience: Now!

TBL: Alright, raw data now!

Audience: Raw data now!

TBL: Practice that. It's important because you have no idea the number of excuses people come up with to hang onto their data and not give it to you, even though you've paid for it as a taxpayer. And it's not just America. It's all over the world.

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The open government part starts about 10 mins in.

It's Called Open Government

One of the many powers of the web is it offers easy mass communication. In a world filled with 140 character Twitter messages, though, some of the earlier web technologies, like web portals, email, instant messaging, and RSS, now feel like yesterday. Or even the day before.

Combine this with the arrival of a new president promoting openness and transparency, and the opportunity for innovation using this new mass communication feels like it is upon us in a big way. And one of the many areas where this innovation is occurring is in government itself.

It's called open government.

Open government goes something like this: government is made up of large, complicated, inefficient organizations. Rather than government organizations building more computer systems for communicating with the public, open up internal government systems to the web and let the public take care of the rest. Send a tweet Instead of filling out a form to report a pothole, or in NYC by calling 311. And rather than going to a web portal (like www.nyc.gov), government can be freed from these responsibilities by opening its computer systems so that the public can develop its own computer systems using mass communication tools and data provided by government. Fred Wilson, the NYC-based venture capitalist, in a recent post illustrates the possibilities by using his Blackberry to snap a photo of a pothole, uploading it to Yahoo's Fickr, and twittering its location to a public address accessible by everyone, including the city. Fred's scenario is hypothetical, at this point, but exciting.

The Sunlight Foundation, the pioneering not-for-profit focused on open government, recently held a contest where developers submitted applications they built using openly available government data. The result was some really useful applications that government agencies could never build. Take a look at Fillibusted and Legistalker to see two of the contest winners. Both systems could have real effect on the legislative process.

In NYC there is currently growing energy around an idea called Open 311. It pits yesterday's idea of "e-government" against today's "Open Government". The power of e-government was that it improved the public's ability to transact business with government thru the phone and the web.  In NYC the e-gov focus was on creating a unified customer service center and eliminating the frustration and impossibility of searching thru city agencies to find what you needed. It was a big winner for the city, and for Mayor Bloomberg.

With Open 311 the idea is to chop off pieces of services offered by the city that the public can do better and cheaper using Twitter, Flickr and other mass communication tools.  Plus, as Sunlight has shown, Open 311 would surely attract software developers with an itch for civic activity to work for free.

Now, governments like NYC taking in information may be harder than making information available. For example, a pothole is not just a pothole. The NYC DOT web site explains that there a number of different kinds of "street defects" in addition to potholes, like cave-ins, hummocks, and others, and that there are multiple agencies who may be responsible. A 311 operator has the advantage of a computerized "knowledgebase" (which the city spent a lot of effort developing) on his/her desktop to engage a caller with specific questions. The DOT's web site has structured forms that capture data in a way that is useful to them. A Fickr photo and a Twitter message, which doesn't have to follow the rigid structure of a form, may not enable DOT to find and fill the hole in the street. So, these kinds of details would need to get sorted out between the public and the city.

MikeBloomberg get ready. Open Government just might be able to provide you -- and the city -- with some new wins. (133 characters)

Defining "Open Governement Data Priciples"

From OpenGovData.org (Dec 2007):

Government data shall be considered open if they are made public in a way that complies with the principles below:

1. Complete

All public data are made available. Public data are data that are not subject to valid privacy, security or privilege limitations.

2. Primary

Data are collected at the source, with the finest possible level of granularity, not in aggregate or modified forms.

3. Timely

Data are made available as quickly as necessary to preserve the value of the data.

4. Accessible

Data are available to the widest range of users for the widest range of purposes.

5. Machine processable

Data are reasonably structured to allow automated processing.

6. Non-discriminatory

Data are available to anyone, with no requirement of registration.

7. Non-proprietary

Data are available in a format over which no entity has exclusive control.

8. License-free

Data are not subject to any copyright, patent, trademark or trade secret regulation. Reasonable privacy, security and privilege restrictions may be allowed.

Compliance must be reviewable.

With Sun Acquisition Talks, IBM Tests US DOJ

IBM lawyers, stung by antitrust violations back in the 1960s, are generally considered the "anti-sales" team and have a big seat at the table in every deal. Without them, IBM would probably be even bigger.

The potential purchase of Sun signals that in the current climate IBM's defensive antitrust policy has changed.

More CDS Winners Surface, AIG is Middleman

Though the AIG retention bonuses are center stage at the moment, in the case of some hedge funds, AIG is just the middleman facilitating the transfer of much, much larger amounts of taxpayer money to people who bet against the mortgage market and won... and who couldn't have possibly expected that their money would come from the taxpayer.... 

From today's WSJ:

Some of the billions of dollars that the U.S. government paid to bail out American International Group Inc. stand to benefit hedge funds that bet on a falling housing market, according to people familiar with the matter and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

AIG stood to earn a fraction of a penny each year for every dollar of protection it sold, according to securities filings, meaning it made less than $10 million annually on the $1 billion in insurance.

AIG Money Trail Widget - or Exxon Valdez Hits the Beach Again

I made an AIG Money Trail Widget that summarizes who got what.

Of course AIG publishing this info provides some transparency in to just how wrong things are with AIG... but not enough.... Aren't these banks just the first stop on a multi-stop journey for that money? Will we find out who the banks clients are? How many countries received bailout money? etc. etc.

Were any bank clients speculators who didn't actually own the underlying securities that the swaps covered? If the answer to the last question is "yes", how much public rage will there be about this?

How big is this spill?

A.I.G.'s Biggest Counterparties

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Government Business & Legal american internation A.I.G.

AIG Bailout Disclosure, The Fed's Open Government Test

Who is profiting from the CDS fiasco?? Did anyone buy the AIG CDS, or any other CDS, not as insurance to cover losses in CDOs they own, but as investments, betting that the CDOs held by others would fail? If such people are out there, will we find out who they are? And, if we do find out who they are, will the public be outraged by such speculation or applaud such a smart investor as being the last man standing?

When I wrote this back in November, the public outcry over the Fed's support of AIG had not risen to its current level. Now that the Fed has pumped so much tax payer money into AIG, the equation has changed.

Large institutions who themselves have collected piles of Fed money, and who also have collected on the AIG bailout thru the backdoor (as AIG counterparties), are in the early stages of being vilified.

Hedge funds, on the other hand, that speculated on AIG (or other CDSs) and have not received Fed bailout dollars, are being applauded as smart investors.

With this as a background, last week the Fed's Vice Chairman Donald Kohn admitted to the Senate Banking Committee that Fed bailout money was paid out by AIG to other firms, but wouldn't say to which because the Fed fears that this disclosure would undermine 'public confidence'.

If Open Government is to mean something, the Fed will need to openly publish the list of firms. Not doing so because it might undermine public confidence, suggests that the Fed is out of touch with what's driving public confidence.  Anyway, the WSJ has already published at least a partial list -- Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Merrill Lynch, Société Générale, Calyonl, Barclays, Rabobank, Danske, HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland, Banco Santander, Morgan Stanley, Wachovia, Bank of America, Lloyds Banking Group -- that as AIG counterparties indirectly reaped $50 Billion of bailout funds.