Publication: Greenwire
Jenny Mandel
December 11, 2009
A new Energy Department Web site promises energy information for the masses, using data sharing, open-source and social networking tools to reach people beyond government circles.
The Open Energy Initiative is home to more than 60 clean energy resources and data sets, linked by interactive maps and networking sites.
"This information platform will allow people across the globe to benefit from the Department of Energy's clean energy data and technical resources," Secretary Steven Chu said in a statement yesterday as he officially launched the site.
"The true potential of this tool will grow with the public's participation -- as they add new data and share their expertise -- to ensure that all communities have access to the information they need to broadly deploy the clean energy resources of the future."
The OpenEI site is part of a larger, government wide initiative for data accessibility and meets an Obama administration requirement, announced earlier this week, that departments outline how they will open troves of information to the public and increase public participation in decision making (Greenwire, Dec. 9).
The Web site takes a proactive approach to participation. Grounded in open-source "wiki" technology, the same platform that allows any Internet user to edit the popular Wikipedia site, the DOE site gives registered users the opportunity to add and change the information there.
The core of the site is seven "gateway" subjects: OpenLabs, international, smart grid, incentives, buildings, solar and clean energy economy. Each subject area has a main page with a handful of tools and ways to access the data there.
Because the site is still new and will rely in part on users to flesh out its offerings, many of the pages are "stubs," or placeholders, for more expanded content, according to Debbie Brodt-Giles, the team leader for the project with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which worked on the site with DOE.
The wiki structure "means that the world can contribute and the world can also get information out," Brodt-Giles said.
So far, the section on a clean energy economy is the most built out, Brodt-Giles said. A content expert on her team worked to gather and add data sets for that section.
One tool in that section uses a list of companies active in the sector, contributed in part by site users, to map activity across the country. The site reflects seven geographic clusters of activity, but an NREL programmer then used the Google Earth program to show where new activity is springing up. That tool shows another four areas that are emerging clean economy hot spots, Brodt-Giles said.
The Web site went live in October, she said, and so far has had no trouble from unwanted or malicious users editing the wiki pages. But site administrators have the ability to shut down edits on certain pages if necessary.
John Wonderlich, policy director for the Sunlight Foundation, said the wiki format has risks, but can be very useful for sharing information. "The wiki approach shares many of the same risks as face-to-face interaction does, so you never know if a person has a secret point of view or a vested interest in what they're saying," he explained.
But Wonderlich said the format is especially useful for collecting information resources, and presenting noncontroversial information in a way that is widely accessible.
Giving users access to information via a database significantly expands its usefulness, he said.
As an example, Wonderlich pointed to the Federal Election Commission's data on campaign contributions. That data are made available by the federal government, but were initially not easy to access. But the Center for Responsive Politics, a group funded in part by the Sunlight Foundation, took steps to make the data more accessible and searchable, and today, most news stories and studies that cite campaign contribution data credit the group's work.
Brodt-Giles said NREL and DOE are currently responsible for the new Web site but that she hopes to turn it over to a coalition of stakeholders to manage. She has spoken with Google, IBM Corp. and the software company Vulcan, she said, and believes a migration could take place as soon as within the next year.