Happy Freedom of Information Day everyone.
Ever since I started my MLS, I wondered if there was a way to integrate my undergrad degree and interest in politics, government, and policy. After all, they’ve been a part of my life since I was 16 and went on Close Up Washington.
Then I listened to this interview with Vivek Kundra, the first White House CIO and “First Geek.” Kundra wants to leverage information to open up government (Open Government Initiative), make it easier to use and more user friendly:
Why is it that I can go on, whether it’s Turbo Tax or Tax Cut and file my taxes and have access to them for the last three years, yet when you go to IRS.gov, you don’t have access to that information? Why is it that the student aid application process has been so complicated for so long? (Kate: so true, so true. The first time I did my FAFSA it took me almost two hours!) It’s more complex than filling out the 1040 form. Why is it that it takes over three years to actually file a patent?
And that’s what we need to do, is we need to start putting the people who are using these systems at the center, not people who are managing these systems.
The end goal with this is to engage people in creating government. He’s having third parties create apps for flight data (FlyOnTime.us). You can rate datasets on data.gov. It’s user centered design. And I like it a LOT. It reaches out to people in clean, simple language, in a medium they understand (Web 2.0, the Internet) – but the point is that it reaches out to citizens. Promoting information literacy outside the classroom!
Now all this is not new, it has started on the local level. (Plenty of anecdotal evidence in this CNN story.) The District of Columbia’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer has a “Digital Town Square” where you can get Twitter accounts for city services and other city data, and an iPhone app to report trouble spots. San Francisco has a Facebook app for paying parking tickets. Newark Mayor Cory Booker uses Twitter heavily to the point where residents could send him tweets during snowstorms on Newark roads not plowed, and he would get on it and send the plows. He even used Twitter to ask elderly/disabled if they needed help shoveling their sidewalks – and then showed up himself to do so. (Best. Mayor. Ever. Made me proud to have once been a part of that city.)
More work needs to be done. First, it’s not as easy as saying “hey, we have open source software – we’re open government!” The software is a means to an end. Consider this from Gunnar Helikson (and thanks to U of Maryland Ph.D. student and open government fan Justin Grimes for retweeting the article):
Although I love the software, and could talk for days about why the government should be using more of it, it’s the process that creates this software that is most valuable to the goals of collaboration and participation. (Source)
The point is that the data needs to be open source and useful, not just the way to get to it. So we have to work on both the data and the user interface being more open, free and usable. And in both cases, the federal government has a ways to go.
There’s a lot of government data sets (I heard 167,000 alone on data.gov), data centers (around 1100), and data websites (around 24,000). (All these stats courtesy of a recent talk by Kundra at the University of Washington.) That’s a glut of information and it’s probably not the best organized. Where to go? What to see?
Data.gov attempts to corral all this information. It’s a start, but not perfect – not really usable. There are various download options, but not all are available. I went to look at “Census of Agriculture, Race, Ethnicity and Gender Profile Data” and wanted to download it in Excel format for easy sorting and manipulation. I was only able to download it in CSV. It opened in Excel, but is that going to be the case for the average user or student? Is Joe Farmer or Jane Student going to know how to open and use these data sets?
The metadata also needs serious work. Take a look at the keywords for the Census of Agriculture data (scroll halfway down the page). There’s a lot of them. Who designed these keywords? Users? The government? Are these standard subject headings? Is there a way to link these with a library catalog and use LC or DDC subject headings?
Now don’t get me wrong, I still have an interest in academic libraries and reference services. This now opens up one more window of opportunity for me when considering employment. Because open, free, useful government information should be a right, not a privilege.
[...] go before we can check it off as complete, especially in the realm of datasets. You’ll recall my experimentation with government datasets that illustrated this point 100 percent. The report touches on several aspects of the datasets that [...]