For Release Sunday, July 27, 2008
© 2008 Washington Post Writers Group
By Neal Peirce
What do America’s state and local governments do with the boatloads of information they’re continually collecting, from zoning permits to illegal billboards, police arrests to public health indicators?
As far as most citizens know, the data disappear into a black hole. Government information specialist David Stephenson likens it to the final scene in “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” when the Ark of the Covenant is boxed and moved to storage in a government warehouse. The viewer just knows the Ark will never be seen again.
But now there’s pressure to break the information loose, disclose it to the public, combine and mix and use it in creative ways. The movement is variously called e-government, transparent government, “Google” government, or Web 2.0.
What’s Web 2.0? We all know Web 1.0 — the original Internet, a dramatic invention but in reality just one-way communication through static web pages. Web 2.0, by contrast, is interactive, personalized, a platform for collaboration. It’s Facebook and You-Tube with their 80 million users. It’s real people interchange, it’s Wikipedia where you and I can be creators and contributors. And (in “geek-ese”) it’s the highly interactive world of blogs and wikis, RSS and podcasts.
Proponents claim Web 2.0 represents an historical opportunity to break down government’s walls of secrecy, of data held behind the walls of siloed departments. Inside government, 2.0 lets workers compare notes and think fresh about problem-solving across organizational lines — especially liberating for younger employees who might otherwise be reluctant to buck hierarchies to expose their ideas.
But open the same sluice gates of data to the public, argue former Indianapolis Mayor Stephen Goldsmith and others, and citizens can look inside the maze, assemble data their own way, and often help solve problems they consider the most acute.
Web 2.0 impacts government many ways. One is simply whistle-blowing — take IllegalSigns.ca, a clever Toronto “mashup” of government data and Google mapping. It pinpoints location of illegal billboards and holds city government accountable for action to remove them.
In Los Angeles, academics and neighborhood activists are collaborating to apply city data to identify blocks with suspiciously high numbers of such negative indicators as code violations and property tax delinquencies. The idea: use “real-time” (current) data to pinpoint problem areas before they escalate.
There’s data for everyman, too. The web site www.crimereports.com is trying to get police departments nationwide to show, and renew daily, data on ccriminal activiity by precise street location. A scattering of cities have agreed, among them San Jose, Calif., Columbus, Ohio, Reno, Nevada, and Washington, D.C. (You can test the system yourself — enter a well-known address such as 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C.).
There’s a fascinating twist to the Web 2.0 story — Its lead city is America’s often-maligned national capital. 2.0 expert Stephenson argues convincingly that “Washington Mayor Adrian Fenty, and his Chief Technology Officer, Vivek Kundra, are this country’s hands-down leaders on use of data feeds and data visualization.” The District of Columbia is providing, in fact, 215 real-time data feeds on every area from zoning permits to health care to potholes, available to government workers, indeed any web user through its Citywide Data Warehouse (http://data.octo.dc.gov).
Why? I asked Kundra. “There’s very little government does that needs to be locked up, sealed, behind closed doors,” he replied. Recalling his wonder on coming to America at age 11 (he’d been born in India, raised in Tanzania), Kundra talks with excitement of learning of government focused on serving citizens. America’s Founding Fathers, he notes, “understood that government must be practiced in the public square — that absolute power is ripe for corruption. This is why we in the D.C. government have mounted more data feeds than anywhere else in the world.”
The data is used constantly by Washington’s “CapStat” sessions at which Fenty and his chief administrators assemble department heads and probe for explanations and answers to tough problems — an iteration of the CityStat system that Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley invented as mayor of Baltimore.
But Washington now aims further — to make citizens co-producers of problem solutions. “Our dream,” says Kundra, “is to have activists out there looking at our data, slicing and dicing it and providing approaches and connections we may not have thought of.”
Could the idea of an electronic commons, a new civic switchboard, materially improve city governments across the U.S.? Could it also draw younger idealists into government as the baby boom professionals start to retire in droves?
That’s the hope. And there’s an even wider possibility. Governments everywhere are facing local versions of the toughest challenges of the times — energy, global warming, immigration and others. Narrowly conceived solutions born inside government hierarchies won’t do. So how about engaging citizens as co-producers of answers and ideas in the virtual world’s public square? Could we advance government itself from 1.0 to 2.0? Why not?
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Neal Peirce’s e-mail is nrp@citistates.com
