Cities are opening up. Thanks to a lot of hard work from projects like Open311, The Sunlight Foundation, and OpenPlans, cities are beginning to share their reams of municipal data, electronically, with citizens. Once out in the open, that data will be the feedstock for mobile and web applications that’ll give us real-time smarts about our transportation systems, our neighborhoods, our city infrastructure, the status of local government proceedings, and much, much more.

What if the nonprofit community tapped into these streams of valuable data (soon to become a flood)? The opportunities for nonprofits to get smart about what’s needed from them and where (and map it!) is huge. And that goes for philanthropy too: The potential for better collaboration between funders and fund-ees is immense — and exciting.

As Lucy Bernholz, friend of this project and expert on all things philanthropy has written, “By becoming open resources, public data have gone from being a byproduct of action to being a source of greater community and citizen engagement, profound innovation, and, in extreme cases, a tool for lifesaving and rebuilding communities. Philanthropic data – particularly grants data – are ready to be used for similar kinds of good. The information that is already reported by foundations holds untapped potential for fueling engagement, action, and innovation in communities if it is made open, public, and accessible.”

To move this agenda along, she’s holding  a Philanthropy DataJam. Happening on May 10th, 2010 in Washington DC, discussion during the DataJam will spring from the following questions:

“Imagine if communities, donors, journalists, and funders had easy access to grants information from foundations. What new insights could we gather about needs and opportunities in our communities? How might foundations and individual donors work together, or foundations and public funders? What untold stories about local heroes might the media tell?”

If you’ll be in the DC area on May 10th, be sure to swing by! The DataJam will be held at the New America Foundation, 1899 L Street NW, Washington DC from 12:30 to 2PM. Luckily, for us non-DC residents, the event will be video streamed (and possibly Skyped) as well. Follow the #GiveData hashtag on Twitter during the event for more.

For further interest, check out Lucy’s great “Open Philanthropy: A Modest Manifesto.” and her blog post on the DataJam, here.

The Tides Foundation – known especially for their work in fiscal sponsorship – launched their first blog recently with a post titled “Why Does Infrastructure Matter?” Ellen Friedman, the Tides Executive VP, writes:

“If we don’t pay attention to the infrastructure we are putting in place to support the work necessary to implement our visions, the lack of strong organizational practices and efforts will ultimately cause us distraction from our work, at best, and at worse, result in the dissolution of the very organizations we have created to do the work. I believe that efficient operational infrastructure, like that provided by Tides, is a critical part of facilitating social innovation and making the world a better place. Good nonprofit infrastructure provides a strong foundation on which to build solid programmatic work.”

This sounds right on all counts, and it strikes me that “infrastructure” is a great way to think about what we’re trying to work towards with Nonprofitmapping.org. Like a city and its roads, bridges, water manes and subways, the nonprofit community could use a support structure of widely accessible, low-cost infrastructure on top of which their real work – changemaking – can happen.

Open source infrastructure” might get even more to the point. Imagine if both nonprofits and philanthropists had free access to timely and comprehensive data about who’s doing what, where. And what if the tools and knowledge for visualizing that data in maps, graphs or infographics was also free and open source? Today’s mashup culture could make short work of these kinds of free resources, and churn out some insightful and surprising new knowledge about the nonprofit world.

The initial driving goal for our team – mapping the effects of the economic recession on nonprofits – brushes against an even broader question: How might the information gap between nonprofits and foundations be filled in more substantively? One could imagine both questions being answered with the creation of an open-source data infrastructure for the nonprofit world – a project that’s ambitious, but also screams for a collaborative approach. Thankfully, that approach appears to be on the upswing these days, made possible, not surprisingly, by the Web.

We hope to put a finger on new tools and resources coming available in this vein (think ManyEyes and Data.gov), test them out, and report back with critiques, suggestions and insights. We aim to bring original things to the table too, like the Nonprofit Data Scorecard, which we think will help to build a fertile soil for the kinds of open source infrastructure the Tides Foundation points to. Will all this add up to a new culture of collaboration sprouting through the cracks in the post-recession nonprofit pavement? We hope so!

Image credit: Flickr/joguldi, Creative Commons license.

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.

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