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I’m speaking on “transparent gov” - will transform gov
By WDavidStephenson | November 1, 2007
Hi, folks.
I’m on the lunchbreak at the New, New Internet conference in VA — absolutely amazing…
This PM I’ll be presenting on what I call “transparent government” (others call it “public data,” “Google Government,” etc. — to my knowledge, there’s no accepted term of art.
I honestly believe this approach, which encourages the public to take public data and interpret it through Google mashups, comparisons, etc. has the potential to improve debate on public policy, creation and evaluation of government programs, and to increase public support for government. How’s that?
My message is that individuals have seized the initiative with transparent government by taking data that otherwise might remain meaningless numbers locked in obscure databases within remote agencies and making the statistics informative and interesting by interpreting them and/or creating visualizations using Web 2.0 tools such as Google mashups.
Among the examples I I’ll cite (long-time readers will remember that I’ve also mentioned others.. :
- Chicago Crime, which displays crime data from the Chicago Police on Google maps to identify crime hotspots and identify crime trends
- Neighborhood Knowledge Los Angeles, which overlays city data about 7 indicators of urban decay, such as code violations and unpaid property taxes on maps to identify declining areas in time for city agencies to intervene
- illegalsigns.ca, which illustrates how someone with a passion for a single issue (in this case, illegal billboards in Toronto) can combine data, photos and Google maps to call attention to the problem and assist government agencies with enforcement.
I’ll also praise the District of Columbia’s Citywide Data Warehouse, which uses RSS, XML, and Atom feeds to release data from 150 sources, ranging from crimes to pothole reports.
I’ll detail the steps agencies need to take to make transparent government a reality, including four that agencies haven’t taken so far:
- creating an attractive web site where people could post and share projects (sharing encourages others to add their own and to critique and improve others)
- creating an easy-to-use tutorial that would guide the public through the “transparent government” process
- publicizing the program to encourage participation
- creating a built-in review process to encourage agencies to review the citizen-participation projects and insights they may provide.
I’ll conclude with a warning that while “transparent government” may worry agencies because of the potential loss of control, citizen initiatives such as Chicago Crime show the trend will continue anyway, and that the more agencies become active participants, the more likely they will be to benefit from citizens’ insights and to avoid errors caused by faulty or misunderstood data.
I hope to have the text of the speech up tomorrow upon my return from DC, with lotsa links and illustrations, and the conference proceedings will be on the web soon — will post a link.
Meanwhile, play amongst yourselves.
Technorati tags: publicdata government transparency transparent government e-democracy crowd-sourcing Google mashups crowdsourcing smart mobs swarm intelligence emergent behavior government IT government politics collaboration location-based services geo-spatial web web 2.0
Sphere: Related ContentTopics: technology, empowering public, policy and politics, collaboration, e-gov transformation | |
