- Gordon Gecko, Wall Street
Corporations exist in a continuously changing ecosystem, with behavior strategies, evolution, cooperation, competition, camouflage, mimicry, and yes, extinction. The environment is constantly changing; disequilibrium is the norm.
Similarly, the governments of countries exist in a complex global ecosystem of competition, trade, and war. Some countries are up, some are down, and many are in the middle – and these ranks evolve due to many factors. Even Gecko himself compares the fictional Teldar Paper to “that other malfunctioning corporation, the U.S. of A.”
If the federal government doesn’t want our country to go the way of the dodo, it needs to adapt to changing times – and changing technology, including the many emerging Web 2.0 tools. One Gecko-ish malfunction of government is that it collects a huge amount of data with which it does hardly anything truly useful. Crime statistics, labor trends, pothole locations and many other interesting bits haven’t often been easily accessible, and that strategy doesn’t serve the public well.
Information Innovation
No longer. Innovative people are finding interesting uses for government data. Witness just one example, SpotCrime, a comprehensive private sector mashup of crime reports and real-time interactive maps for not just every state in the U.S., but also many countries around the world.
Using SpotCrime-DC for about 5 minutes, I quickly learned of three recent robberies occurring very close to my home – all between 7:00 and 7:30 am. (Note to self, no morning jogs around the neighborhood.) No one is uninterested in this topic, whether you are protecting your family or just scoping out the competition – but without this simple to use mashup, the information would be overwhelming, confusing, and inaccessible (although technically it is “publicly available.”)
The U.S. government has more than just crime data, though. They have massive storehouses of geographic data, labor statistics, transportation information, census data, genealogies, environmental and ecological trends, economic indicators, and statistics on aging, to name a few. There is literally something for everyone.
Now, a lot of this data is already publicly available; but in what formats? Take this example of the top 100 growing counties in the U.S.. However, you have to download the data in an Excel spreadsheet or as a .CSV file – how many people even know what to do with a .CSV file? And what if you can’t afford Excel, or don’t have it handy when you want to use the public data?
Public Incentives, Private Competition
one example. In what can only be described as a very hip initiative, the District of Columbia’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer is collaborating with local interactive content agency iStrategyLabs to launch an innovation challenge called Apps for Democracy (disclosure: Mashable is a media sponsor).
This contest, open to absolutely anyone, aims primarily to visualize DC’s open, public data for the greater good of citizens, visitors, and local businesses. These public service developers will compete for both cash prizes and public recognition.
The District of Columbia is thinking very broadly about the products that will result from the innovation challenge – in play are Web applications, widgets, map mashups, iPhone apps, Facebook apps, and more. Unquestionably, this effort can serve as a model for the federal government to enhance its massive data stores by offering incentives for open-source efforts by outside developers.
Organizations like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) already have public, fun competitions like the Urban Challenge, so why not something similar to build widgets, games, and apps?
Finally, a good reason to hack the country.