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Challenging Obama supporters to use data viz to help draft platform
By WDavidStephenson | July 17, 2008
Hi, ya’ll. I’m sweltering in Austin, attending the Netroots Nation (née Yearly Kos) conference. Pass the ribs, please.
In my speech tomorrow 
I’m going to throw a little gasoline on the fire by challenging the attendees to get up to speed on data feeds and data visualization quickly, so that they can contribute both data and visualizations that can be cited, debated, etc. by those attending the series of “Listening to America” events that the Obama campaign and Democratic Party will sponsor nationwide next week to help draft the Democratic platform.
I will note that Obama’s white paper on technology specifically mentions data feeds and pilot programs to involve the public in decision making as part of his efforts to improve governmental transparency.
To prime the pump and show people how easy it is to scrape data and to turn it into visualizations, I’ve created a “topic hub” on IBM’s Many Eyes visualization site, called “Obama platform,” with data and visualizations on topics as varied as Iraq spending and foreclosures. I hope you’ll check it out — http://tinyurl.com/568obs — see for yourself how easy it is to upload data and to then try alternative forms of visualization to determine which best makes your point.
Let me conclude as I will at the conference:
“for years activists have demanded a seat at the table to help influence pending legislation, debate national priorities, and hold agencies accountable. Now the tools are available to allow this type of participation, and I challenge activists to use them and play a role in governing as well as electing new candidates.â€
PS: Parts of my presentation were originally part of a white paper on data streams and visualization that I co-authored for the nGenera Government 2.0: Wikinomics, Government and Democracy research program.
Technorati tags: technology publicdata public data dataviz government transparency e-gov e-government 2.0 e-government transparent government e-democracy crowd-sourcing wisdom of crowds RSS crowdsourcing smart mobs swarm intelligence emergent behavior government IT government politics collaboration geo-spatial web web 2.0 Listening to America Democratic Party Barack Obama Netroots Nation
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