Improving government transparency online: citizen-engaging technology can make government data available online, easy to access, and understandable

Public Manager, The, Spring, 2008 by Jerry Brito

In 2007, a group of interested citizens collaboratively produced a report detailing how the House of Representatives could use Internet technology to better serve its constituents. In it they explained,

"The notion of structured data is not new to the federal government. The Census Bureau, for instance, has for years not only provided a Web interface for census statistics--that is, a page where users can find simple data such as population numbers-but also the complete set of numeric data files to be downloaded and imported into database and statistics programs. The benefit of a download of the data is that with the complete data set computers can help people delve more deeply into the data and put it in new forms, such as charts and maps, that would be too time consuming to create by hand. Another example is the Securities and Exchange Commission's practice of making investment filings available to the public in XML format through its EDGAR program. Likewise, the Federal Election Commission makes campaign contribution information available in a downloadable structured data format, allowing the public to absorb the information in a variety of ways."

Mashups

When the government makes data available in a structured format, it opens the doors to innovative and enlightening remixes of information known as mashups. Mashups are tools that can potentially be used by journalists, bloggers, and citizens--the Internet's intelligent crowds--to better scrutinize government's activities.

Originating in the music world, the term mashup now also applies to applications that mix together disparate sets of data to create new and unique information. For example, the popular free-classified-ad site CraigsList.com is an almost definitive source for rental housing listings in urban areas. However, the site lists ads in the order that users add them to the site. This means that-using the Washington metropolitan area as an example-one listing could be for an apartment in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of the District and the very next ad for a house in Arlington, Virginia. This frustrated software engineer Paul Rademacher when he was looking for a place to live in SiliconValley in 2004, so he built HousingMaps.com, a mashup of the listings from CraigsList.com and Google Maps. This mashup allows users to bring up a map of the area in which they are interested (say five square blocks in a particular neighborhood) and pushpin icons will appear representing the properties available for rent in that area. Clicking on a pushpin brings up a bubble with the rental listing data, including rooms, price, location, photos, and a link to the actual listing.

What is amazing about a service like Housing Maps.com is that it is a new and unique information source that is richer and more useful than either Craig's List or Google Maps standing alone. What makes it possible is that Google chose to make its maps application interface open for anyone to use, and Craig's List chose to make its data freely available in an open and structured format. Their decisions to support openness and useful data formats allowed for an innovation that neither company could have predicted would emerge.