I'm pleased to say that Caitlin and James have just finished giving our Open States project a lovely new design. Not only is the site now much more pleasing to look at, it's much easier to see the great progress that's being made by James, Mike and our volunteer contributors. In addition to the five states that are live (and supported by OpenGovernment), there are already another twelve states with "experimental" status. Don't let the scare-quotes scare you, though: while we wouldn't yet recommend building your air traffic control system or pacemaker firmware in such a way that it's dependent on our API coverage of Alaska, the scrapers from the experimental states are well on their way to being declared complete. Developers should confident about building around this data -- rest assured that it'll be declared "ready" soon enough.
Of course, we hope that developers in our community will also consider becoming involved in the project directly -- there's plenty of work to be done.
And it's genuinely important work. State legislatures are where vital decisions are made about civil rights, transportation, education, taxes, land use, gun regulation, and a host of other issues. Far too often, these issues don't get the attention they deserve. It's a simple question of scale: there are a lot more resources available at the federal level for both lawmakers and journalists. That means state governance both requires more transparency and tends to get less of it. We think technology can help make the situation better -- that's what Open States is all about.
There are some interesting opportunities for cross-state work, too. Polisci geeks will probably appreciate the comparative politics opportunities that a common data model and API will allow (Gabriel Florit's already been creating some cool visualization experiments that build on our data). But there are also less academic applications for this information. Consider these two stories that NPR published last fall. They got a bit lost in the pre-election shuffle, but they made a big impression on me.
The gist of it is this: Arizona's controversial immigration law didn't happen by magic. One of the special interests fighting for it was the private prison lobby -- as you might imagine, having more prisoners means more business for them, and they saw increased enforcement of immigration laws as a growth opportunity. So, via an intermediary organization that specializes in this sort of thing, they conducted a legislator "education" campaign, wining and dining lawmakers and sending them home with prewritten model legislation.
All of this is perfectly legal. And, depending on your opinion about immigration, you might even approve of the policy outcome it produced. But it's hard to imagine anyone being okay with the shadowy role that commercial interests appear to have played in this legislative process. If we'd been able to spot the provenance of the legislation earlier, would journalists and organizers have been able to give the people of Arizona a more complete understanding of what was going on? I think so -- I hope so. That's the kind of use that Open States should make possible, and the one I'm most excited about.
Continue readingWe’re Muses!
Our sysadmin extraordinaire Timball was presented with this lovely piece of art at Shmoocon a couple of weeks ago:
(In real life the hard drive platters are shinier than they look here)
The piece was made by a gentleman named Phylum Coredata who said Sunlight had inspired it. We think it's pretty awesome (a proper frame is forthcoming). Thanks, P!
Continue readingSelling Free Data
It wasn't too long ago that I talked about how hard it is to create a business on open data. So it's probably worthwhile to talk about an open data business that popped up shortly after that post: CQ's First Street. As this writeup mentions, it's just one of a bunch of new services that are launching around business intelligence in the government space -- Bloomberg and Politico are also creating subscription offerings designed to help lobbyists and contractors achieve more success.
But what are these services selling? An awful lot of it is already free. Contact info for legislators or their staff. Lobbyist registrations. Legislative info. Campaign finance information. Data about grant and contract spending.
I've linked to Sunlight projects, but of course there are many other great services who offer this kind of data gratis. So if this stuff is free, why are people paying for it?
Well, obviously these services are offering some added value. First and foremost there's the aggregation function: collecting the data into a usefully centralized interface is the core of these products. In some cases they add value by offering data that can't be gotten anywhere else: original reporting, or cleaned or otherwise improved versions of the data (for instance, Bloomberg bought Eagle Eye, which scrubs USASpending data; and Sunlight's staff directory is created from expenditure reports, not the canonical, non-digital staff directories available on the hill). Finally, and not insignificantly, these services have brands and sales staff that help them find paying customers.
I think it's safe to say that helping lobbyists more effectively manipulate congress is not the use of open data that we at Sunlight are most excited about. But we really are glad to see these businesses evolve and succeed: they help create demand for better data offerings (and their staff members often turn out to be the kinds of folks we get along with at conferences).
Still, this is an area where the underlying data is basically available to anyone. Any developer can try their hand at making a better, cheaper service. I don't know if this particular market will be large enough (or free enough from the principal agent problem) to turn into the hyper-competitive race to the bottom that it could be. But I do know that the data you can get for free is going to keep improving -- we're doing our best to make sure of it.
Continue readingOpenGovernment Is A Finalist For SXSW Accelerator
We've been really pleased with the enthusiastic response that OpenGov has received since its launch. Today's brought one more bit of good news: the site's been named a finalist in the Accelerator competition of this year's SXSWi. You can find the full details over at the OG blog. Congratulations to David, Carl and the rest of the PPF team!
And while I've got you thinking about state legislative data, check out what Gabriel Florit's done to visualize data from Open States. It's very neat stuff, and a great early example of the kinds of things that we think the project will make possible.
Continue readingWhy Aren’t There More Open Data Startups?
It's a question I'm seeing asked more and more: by press, by Gov 2.0 advocates, and by the online public. Those of us excited by the possibilities of open data have promised great things. So why is BrightScope the only government data startup that anyone seems to talk about?
I think it's important that those of us who value open data be ready with an answer to this question. But part of that answer needs to address the misperceptions built into the query itself.
There Are Lots of Open Data Businesses
BrightScope is a wonderful example of a business that sells services built in part on publicly available data. They've gotten a lot of attention because they started up after the Open Government Directive, after data.gov -- after Gov 2.0 in general -- and can therefore be pointed to as a validation of that movement.But if we want to validate the idea of public sector information (PSI) being useful foundations for businesses *in general*, we can expand our scope considerably. And if we do, it's easy to find companies that are built on government data: there are databases of legal decisions, databases of patent information, medicare data, resellers of weather data, business intelligence services that rely in part on SEC data, GIS products derived from Census data, and many others.
Some of these should probably be free, open, and much less profitable than they currently are*. But all of them are examples of how genuinely possible it is to make money off of government data. It's not all that surprising that many of the most profitable uses of PSI emerged before anyone started talking about open data's business potential. That's just the magic of capitalism! This stuff was useful, and so people found it and commercialized it. The profit motive meant that nobody had to wait around for people like me to start talking about open formats and APIs. There are no doubt still efficiencies to be gained in improving and opening these systems, but let's not be shocked if a lot of the low-hanging commercial fruit turns out to have already been picked.
Still, surely there are more opportunities out there. A lot of new government data is being opened up. Some of it must be valuable... right?
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OpenGovernment.org is Live!
I'm proud to announce that OpenGovernment.org is now live with our first five states! If you're a regular reader of this blog, you've already heard a lot about the Open States project, our effort to collect states' legislative data in much the same way that we do at the federal level. We hope that that data will be used in a lot of different ways, but we think that OpenGov will be one of the most important. Our friends at the Participatory Politics Foundation -- the same people behind OpenCongress -- deserve a huge hand for making OpenGov what it is.
This is just the beginning, of course. We're excited about working with PPF to build out both Open States and OpenGov to include more states, more tools and more useful information. But today's launch is an important milestone.
But I'll keep this short -- I'd rather you spent your time on the site instead of reading my thoughts about it. If you'd like to hear more about our vision for the project, have a look at Ellen's announcement post. Otherwise, head on over to OpenGovernment.org and have a look at what we hope is the future of state-level legislative transparency.
Continue readingLooking Back on 2010
It's been a busy year in the Labs. In a few days we'll filter back into the office, rested, recharged and ready to tackle 2011. But before then, let's take a second to recall everything that happened in 2010.
I should start with the most important stuff: the people. We added a bunch of new teammates this year. Andrew, Chris, Alison, Caitlin and Aaron have all proven to be great additions to Sunlight; we're lucky to have them. We also had some folks move around within the Labs. Ali officially became Sunlight's Creative Director; Ethan took over the Data Commons Project; and Kevin grabbed the helm of Subsidyscope. And I stepped into Clay's shoes partway through the year when he struck off in search of a new adventure.
We put all that new talent to good use: in 2010 we built a ton of stuff. Here are some -- but by no means all -- of the the things we made this year:
Continue readingThe Pentagon/North Pole Connection
There's recently been a lot of discussion about government secrecy: how much of it is desirable, and how and when that secrecy must be violated in service of the greater good. Unfortunately, we now found ourselves in the position of having to make such a disclosure.
Many of you may be familiar with NORAD's Santa Tracker. As the story goes, back in the late fifties a typo on an ad for a hotline to Santa misrouted calls to the predecessor of the North American Aerospace Defense Command. The colonel on duty instructed the men answering the phones to report Santa's position to the children who called, and a new tradition was born. It's grown from there: there's a Twitter feed, an iGoogle gadget, Google Earth functionality, a mobile site and even an SMS interface. It's all a charming way for a defense agency with a very serious mission to get in the holiday spirit. Or is it?
Continue readingAnnouncing Checking Influence
This morning the Data Commons team released their newest tool: Checking Influence, a bookmarklet that lets online banking users gain insight on how the merchants with whom they do business are influencing our political system. We think it's a great example of the future of influence disclosure -- hopefully you'll agree.
But I won't prattle on about it any more here. The announcement blog post goes into more detail. I hope you'll give that a read, and give the tool a try.
Continue readingWhat Can Recovery.gov Tell Us About Ice Cream?
It's been a while since recovery.gov was in the headlines. ARRA money continues to go out the door, but it's safe to say the program is winding down. The Administration has been taking a quiet victory lap, including this charming video, in which Vice President Biden calls up an ice creamery in Santa Cruz that got off the ground thanks to a Recovery Act loan:
Here's a crazy idea: why don't we look up this loan on recovery.gov and see what else we can discover about it?
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