Cities at Forefront of Data Transparency Efforts

If you’re looking for signs of the emergence of “Government 2.0″, you may want to focus your energies at the municipal scale. In the last year or so, several cities have begun offering up much of their data to the public, free of charge. Most of those releases have been aimed specifically at programmers and the technology community, who’ve been turning data sets about things like public transit and crime records into smartphone applications.

Tech-oriented cities – like San Francisco, New York and DC – are probably moving the quickest in this direction.

SpotCrime, a crime data aggregator featured in DataSF.org's showcase

New York City has released much of its data through Data Mine – and is actively courting application developers with NYC BigApps, a software challenge offering $20,000 in cash prizes (and a dinner with Bloomberg) to the best entries. And NYC’s public transit arm, MTA, announced yesterday that they’ll be releasing their transit data to the public. That’s big news, considering the MTA has ridership of around 11 million. DC, Vancouver and others are releasing their city data as well – see this blog post for a rundown of the “6 Governments Who Set Their Data Free.”

We’re particularly excited about San Francisco’s data transparency outlet, DataSF.org. According to the website’s blog,”This initiative set out to share as much City data as possible with the public as well as provide an opportunity to vote and comment on datasets.”

A clearinghouse of government data from a wide variety of departments and issue areas, DataSF.org has around 100 download-ready datasets already up. A public vote for new data is already happening, and the site boasts an impressive showcase of the  hyperlocal apps already created from existing data.

“The new web site will provide a clearinghouse of structured, raw and machine-readable government data to the public in an easily downloadable format,” says San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom. “For example, there will be updated crime incident data from the police department and restaurant inspection data from the Department of Public Health. We imagine creative developers taking apartment listings and city crime data and mashing it up to help renters find their next home or an iPhone application that shows restaurant ratings based on health code violations.”

Mainstream media has picked up the scent – with two particularly well-done stories on CNN and in NYT – and significant movement toward open data is already happening at the federal level with Data.gov. But while the ways nonprofits might take advantage of newly offered municipal data are many, free data about the nonprofit community itself is still hard to come by. Imagine if the philanthropic community had a rigorous means of understanding which nonprofits needed what, when and where. Without open data, those efficiencies just aren’t there.

The movement from municipalities is very encouraging – let’s see if nonprofits can get a foot in the door.