The Sunlight Foundation announced the winners of their "Apps for America 2: The Data.gov Challenge" at the O'Reilly/techweb Gov 2.0 Expo Showcase in DC yesterday. The web applications were to be built with data available from the U.S. Data.gov site. And the prizes go to...

First prize: DataMasher.org. Combine and compare government data at the state level.

Second prize: GovPulse. Making Federal Register access easier.

Third prize: ThisWeKnow.org. Find government info by zip code.

Prize for best data visualization: QuakeSpotter.org. Global view of earthquakes with links to quake-related tweets.

Get complete information from Sunlight's press release.

The one-day Gov 2.0 Expo is over, and the two-day Gov 2.0 Summit (with bold face names) is in progress. They are tweeting up a storm over at the Hyatt, using the hashtag #gov2s.
[Update: They are using the #g2s tag, too.]

I will blog more later on how the Gov 2.0 Expo went.

As noted here earlier, Sunlight Labs has announced the three finalists in its "Apps for America 2" competition. One of those is DataMasher which enables users to "have a little fun" with government data "by creating mashups to visualize them in different ways and see how states compare on important issues. Users can combine different data sets in interesting ways and create their own custom rankings of the states."

A post about this on slashdot prompted a reply, Lies, Damned Lies, and DataMasher that worries that "in practice DataMasher would end up mostly generating a lot of bad information." The reply continues:

The site as it exists now seems to encourage you to think about issues in a really simplistic way (with a simple arithmetic combination of two numbers on a state by state basis) that's going to mislead more often than inform. The devil is always in the spurious correlations, and DataMasher just doesn't give you ability to get at that sort of thing (nor do most people have the understanding of statistics anyway).

...Statistics are extremely useful in determining public policy, but only if used carefully. There's already so much bad use of statistics in our public policy debates, and DataMasher seems perfectly designed (unintentionally, I'm sure) to exacerbate the problem.

I am very sympathetic to this argument but would add an additional caveat to it. Any tool can be misused or used badly. Decades ago, some statisticians were upset when commercial software like SAS and SPSS were being introduced because it allowed anyone to run a regression without knowing what it was or how to do the math or whether they were regressing variables that made sense. While it is certainly true that the design of tools can encourage misuse or bad use, it is also true, I think, that even well-designed tools can be used badly and even bad tools may be better than no tools because they can encourage imagination and exploration and curiosity. Those can lead to better, more informed questions and analysis.

For libraries and service providers there is another side to this story. As tools like DataMasher become more available and easier to use, it actually creates new challenges for information service providers. Rather than making our jobs easier, the availability of these kinds of tools actually makes our jobs more complex. Rather than pointing at a reliable book of statistics, created by government statisticians and published by the government, we now have 'raw' sources and sources that require more understanding and skill to use and interpret accurately and responsibly. Where once we tried to make sure that the people we helped looked at footnotes and table headers so they understood statistics, now we are faced with helping people use raw data and helping them produce their own statistics. Every library will have to decide on what level of service to provide in situations like this. No library should avoid addressing the service implications of the availability of new sources of information -- no matter how good or bad they are.

The Sunlight Foundation has announced three finalists for their Apps for America 2 Contest. Sign up for a free account and Vote for the winner!

The finalists include:

GovPulse.usis a "Federal Register browser" allowing you to browse the by agency, category or date. The visualizations are pretty cool too.

ThisWeKnow.org allows you to explore government data about your community. I did a search for my city, and it gave me a summary, but I also can look at how many people in my county were diagnosed with Cancer. Dang!

DataMasher lets you mashup two different data sources and you can share/comment on others. Sunlight Foundation really likes this mashup: High School Graduation vs Guns in Household.

Thank goodness for data.gov and the opening up of more government data so we can make cool applications like these!

If you are going to the ALA Annual 2009 Conference in Chicago next week, please come to the "ALA Unconference" where I will be leading a broad discussion on Friday, July 10th from 11:10-12:00 on the library's role in current & emerging trends of civic engagement, transparency, preservation and access to Government information. The supporting materials and presentation will be linked in the Unconference wiki.

Also, please come to the LITA BIGWIG Social Software Showcase to discuss and learn about Government Information Mashups! I will be presenting on this topic and would love to have you help out and/or join in on the conversation! The presentation will be posted on their website but the face to face portion of the BIGWIG Showcase presentations will take place Monday, July 13th from 10:30am - 12:30pm in the McCormick Convention Center West, Room W-184.

Legistalker - The latest online activity of Congress Members.

Legistalker makes it easy for you to stay on top of what your elected officials say and how they vote.

Legistalker was created by Forum One Communications as an entry for the Apps for America competition. The ever-growing database is updated every 20 seconds, and relies on data from Twitter, YouTube, Capitol Words, literally hundreds of different news sources, and others.

OpenRegs.Com To Launch Soon, National Journal, "Tech Daily Dose." April 14, 2009.

According to this brief announcment, OpenRegs.com, will take the daily XML feed of the Federal Register and offer a different view of the information. The .com site will provide greater flexibility in finding and following government regulations and will be more dynamic and user friendly than the .gov site. It is being developed by one of the co-creators of the government accountability Web site StimulusWatch.org.

Thanks to BoingBoing.net for posting about NASA's "remixable videos", audio clips, and images, as well as a DIY Podcasts page.

You can mix and mash these video clips with NASA images and your own narration, original video, special effects and transitions. Preview the video and download the clips you want to use in your creative masterpiece.

I hope the collection grows. It looks like the only remixable videos so far are about spacesuits.

Anyway, I thought this would be fun for those of you who love mashups! I become more and more impressed with the NASA website and all the cool stuff it has to offer. I hope they continue to post more remixable videos and audio files for us to download and manipulate.

Govtack.us has announced some major new features!

• Site Updates in September, December 2008, by Josh Tauberer, December 20, 2008

The enhancements include:

Bill text pages have hyperlinked tables of contents, highlighted and side-by-side view modes for viewing changes to the bill over time, permanent links to a particular paragraph within the bill, and more. You can now make a comparison of the voting records of two members of Congress. There are links from members of Congress to videos of floor speeches and some financial statistics. There are widgets and APIs. There is a lot more; follow the link above for the complete list. Lots to use and re-use!

Thanks Josh!!!

Have you used OpenCongress.org recently? Are you aware of all its cool features, from RSS feeds to Facebook widgets? Check it all out is this short screencast:

• OpenCongress.org: What’s Happening In Congress? by ryanne, November 2, 2008.

Are you a techie who has a passion for government information, transparency, coding, mashups, and/or web 2.0 tools? Then sign up for the Apps for Democracy contest!

In conjunction with the DC Government’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer, the contest is offering $20,000 in prizes to be given to 60 different creators. The goal of the contest is "to reward technology developers with cash prizes and public recognition for creating applications that are useful for the DC government and the citizens, visitors and businesses of Washington, DC."

For more information, visit the Apps for Democracy website, and you can follow the contest on Twitter or through their Facebook Group.

Dang...if only I was better at coding...

If you're like me, you want to keep track of the presidential race between Barack Obama and John McCain. I thought I'd share a few sites that I've bookmarked in order to keep up to the minute. My favorite site is Electoral-vote.com. E-V collects national and state polls and shows a nice map of the current electoral vote count. As new state polls are released, the maps, spreadsheets, tables, graphs, etc. are updated. There's also a comparison for that day in the 2004 presidential race, roll-over stats for how each state voted since 1992, and tracking of Senate and House elections.

Another site of interest is FiveThirtyEight "electoral projections done right." This one has lots of graphs, "tipping point" states, a return on investment index and more. 538 (the # of electors in the electoral college of course :-) ) also tracks governors' races. It's run by Nate Silver, a writer and baseball statistician. You know how crazy baseball fans are for data, so you know that this site is sucking up as much data as they can, chewing it up and serving it up in lots of different ways.

Also check out RealClearPolitics. This one pulls together news, blogs, editorials, polls and electoral maps (although the mapping feature is only for presidential race).

[Thanks David Weinberger/JoHo for the RealClearPolitics tip!]

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has just announced the "Google Earth Outreach" partnership with google earth. The program will allow humanitarian agencies the ability to use Google Earth and Maps to "highlight their work on behalf of millions of refugees and other populations of concern in some of the world's most remote and difficult areas." All one needs is to download the google earth application and the UNHCR kml file, then launch the app and open the kml file (KML = Keyhole Markup Language). Navigate to a region -- like Chad, Iraq, Colombia or the Darfur region of Sudan -- and you'll get access to news, video and other information about the situation and daily life/struggles of refugees.

Check out the google earth gallery for other KML files that people have built -- from world energy consumption to Death valley driving tour to Yosemite 1/2 dome hikes to the Burke and Wills expedition of 1860! I haven't yet come across an FDLP KML file, but perhaps one of our readers would like to start one? It's as easy as creating a google map and clicking the button "view in google earth" at the top right of the map. This will automatically generate the KML file. You can then send it to admin AT freegovinfo DOT info and we'll post it to the site.

TechSoup's NetSquared mashup challenge pays out a total $100K this year to the best of 122 submitted projects.

I'm going to have way too much fun browsing through the project proposals. Casting my votes, though, is already proving difficult... Using user downtime? Massive mashup calendars? Warnings for hidden corporate abuses every time I make an online purchase?

Ohboyohboyohboyohboy.

And of course, many of these envisioned projects would not even be imaginable were it not for widely available and mostly reliable government information data sources.

An interactive web service created by federal scientists on the University of Arizona campus in cooperation with the state of Arizona Department of Water Resources with funding from the U.S. Geological Survey "brings formerly hard-to-get water information as close as a mouse click." (UA-based scientists make water data easy to find on Net, by B. Poole, Tucson Citizen, 03.14.2008)

• Arizona Ground-Water Conditions Interactive Map

Data for creating and presenting the layers of information on ground-water conditions came from the USGS National Water Information System (NWIS) and the Arizona Department of Water Resources Groundwater Site Inventory). A document describes how the site was created: An Online Interactive Map Service for Displaying Ground-Water Conditions in Arizona, By Fred D Tillman, Stanley A. Leake, Marilyn E. Flynn, Jeffrey T. Cordova, and Kurt T. Schonauer. USGS, National Water Availability and Use Program, Open-File Report 2007-1436, U.S. Geological Survey, Reston, Virginia 2007.

The Geological Survey map complements Arizona Wells, produced by Sustainability of semi-Arid Hydrology and Riparian Areas (SAHARA), a University of Arizona-based group that aims to foster information exchange. Arizona Wells includes much of the data used in the Geological Survey map and water quality data from the Arizona Department of Water Resources.

One of the reasons we need open, re-usable, downloadable government information is so that sites like these can be built to create new information and to make information that was once hard to use, easier to use. As the Tucson Citizen article says, "Before such interactive maps, the public had to find the data, then interpret the numbers and codes in the databases."

Congresspedia.org has just launched a new site called "Wiki the Vote," a project to build citizen-written profiles on each and every candidate for Congress in 2008. What a cool new tool. Not only will it be collaborative in terms of reader-editors, but collaborative in terms of data -- collating campaign contributions from Open Secrets campaign database together with reader-submitted information on every Congressional candidate for the 2008 cycle.

The project is starting with nearly 300 basic profiles to be expanded and updated by citizens, journalists and even the campaigns themselves (or those of their opponents). Unlike Wikipedia, people connected to the subjects of articles are free to add to them as long as their contributions are rhetoric-free and comprised of fully documented, verifiable facts. The citizen editors are assisted and fact-checked by professional editors.

The first set of articles is based on confirmed candidates according to 2008racetracker.com and will eventually expand to cover every candidate on the ballot in the primary and general elections next year. When the OpenSecrets.org 2008 congressional campaign contributions database goes online in a few weeks, the candidate profiles will also display live feeds tracking the money race and who is funding it.