Uncle Sam In Your Pocket

As anyone who’s ever been the victim of a mugging can attest to, street crime leaves its victims feeling vulnerable. The simple act of navigating through a city becomes fraught with danger: Who knows what lurks around the bend? A pioneering new tool designed for the iPhone can provide some psychological relief. It tells individuals who’ve paid 99 cents to download the application how safe they are in any given neighborhood with a graphic “Threat Meter.” Below the meter is a constantly updated feed, direct from the police department that lists the number of homicides, assaults, robberies, and car thefts recently committed in the area.

For now, the app only works in Washington. That's because D.C. has taken the unusual step of publishing its crime reports—real-time data that in other cities is buried in inaccessible databases—in an open Web syndication format. The constantly updated crime feed is just one out of almost 260 that the city government provides through its online data catalog, available free for the taking to anyone who has a use for it—in this case an iPhone application developer.

To be sure, most government-generated information is freely available. But it’s usually in a format that workers at various agencies deem acceptable for their own use: paper files or their electronic equivalents. If D.C.’s crime statistics had been made available in, for example, Word document files, that information would have been as good as useless. But because it is available in multiple formats through D.C.’s data catalog—in XML, spreadsheets, Web syndication, and in Keyhole Markup Language (KML) readable by geographic browsers such as Google Maps—things like the D.C. Threat Meter suddenly become possible.

What would it take for the Threat Meter to go national? The technical challenge is trivial: It simply requires already existing government data be released in machine-readable formats. The cultural challenge, however, is enormous. Bureaucrats on all levels—national, state, and municipal—must go from being archivists and data hoarders to being real-time disseminators of sharable, actionable information.

On the national level, the burden of implementing the policy falls to the General Services Administration, also known as the federal government’s I.T. department. “We need to anticipate the public sharing of information from the moment government agencies start collecting it,” says Rezaur Rahman, a co-chair of the technology and innovation committee at the GSA. “If you don’t do that, you end up with a closed infrastructure." To push this, Rahman and several of the federal government agencies' top Web managers are nudging the agencies' directors and staff to create and save content they create in sharable, machine-readable formats, and not wait for the techies to do it for them retroactively.

Prior experience indicates that it will be an uphill battle. Owen Ambur, the XML guru at the GSA under the last administration, reports that other government agency leaders “didn’t want to use new tools, and weren’t serious about sharing data across agencies,” he says. Data sharing simply wasn’t a priority—except for intra-agency national security information. The intelligence community has made progress with Intellipedia, an internal wiki designed to enable the agencies to share useful information with each other. The State Department has its own version called Diplopedia. And the Department of Defense has established a new board to coordinate the use of emerging technology tools across the Army, Navy, and the Air Force.
However, priorities are expected to change with the new administration. President Obama has already issued a memo and executive order directing the White House’ hands-on federal managerial arm, the Office of the Management and Budget, to make sure that federal agencies get with the e-Government program. Washington’s Chief Technology Officer Vivek Kundra is expected to be asked to spearhead that effort as well as act as a vocal advocate of cross-government collaboration.

The Sunlight Foundation, a non-profit watchdog group that funds projects that use Web technology to open up government, has also long been pushing for these sorts of changes. Greg Elin, the group's chief data architect, points to USASpending.gov as good example of what happens when the Federal government starts to clean up its data in the way the D.C. city government has already cleaned up theirs. USASpending.gov is, as Obama puts it, a "Google for Government" in that the project takes publicly available data about federal contracts that the government awards and makes it easier to search. All of the spending data is available to the public in raw, organized formats rather than as tidy summaries, and the site provides APIs, which allow software developers to create new applications that plug into USASpending.gov's databases much as Facebook apps plug into Facebook. Elin doesn’t know of any cool new apps that use the USASpending.gov dataset yet, although he’s quick to say that’s not the point. It’s the creation of the opportunity to use that data that matters.

The ultimate vision is of government that operates like a suite of iPhone apps. Pull out your handset, and not only is there a Threat Meter, warning you of crime conditions on the next corner but a full Bloomberg-like terminal of useful government information. Surfers, sailors, and fishermen will have customized tide forecasts and ocean buoy data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Farmers might have a mash-up of NASA-supplied satellite photos, National Weather Service forecasts, and Farm Bureau Reports that predict the price of corn come harvest time. Financial types will be able to know what the SEC knows, when they know it. If government data is given back to its citizens in a usable form, government services have the potential to become as good as the citizens they serve.