- Just Another Apps Competition?

The first-ever Evergreen Apps Competition came to a close last night in Seattle as we recognized the top applications developed over the last six months with government open data. Top honors went to Living Voters Guide with other prizes for WhichBus, Trash Backwards and Food Inspector.

I was one of the judges for the event, and, I have to admit, I had a lot of fun downloading and testing the apps on Android and iPhone platforms, as well using some apps on the web itself.   Full results are posted on the Evergreen Apps website and on Geekwire.

“Apps competitions” might seem a little passé these days. It sure seems as if there have been dozens of them, starting with the original Apps for Democracy in the District of Columbia in 2008.   New York City has had at least three renditions of their Big Apps contests and San Francisco continues to innovate with a whole catalog of apps.

What makes this one different?  And where should we be going with Government data and apps contests in the future?

Evergreen Apps is different because it was a joint effort by the City of Seattle, King County and the State of Washington. Three governments at different levels, multiple different open data sites and $75,000 in prizes. Plus, of course, it was held in Seattle, center of the technology world, with over 100,000 people employed by companies ranging from Microsoft to Cozi to Amazon to Google to Socrata to Urbanspoon.

In return for the prize money, the rules stipulate the apps must be maintained an enhanced for a year. That, hopefully, will give some longevity to these apps. Alas, many of the results of apps contests elsewhere have resulted in dead ended apps which no longer work for a whole variety of reasons ranging from changes in the underlying data structure to developers who go on to other things.

A huge issue is sustainability.   One of my very favorite apps from the original Apps for Democracy contest – “Stumble Safely” which maps crime around your present geographic location – appears to be long dead.

Developers and their startup companies can’t live on coding alone – cash really REALLY helps, but apps built on government open data are hard to monetize.

Another huge problem is non-portability. An app built in Seattle with data.seattle.gov information works in Seattle, but not in LA or Chicago or Podunk Center. We need either much better standards for the underlying datasets, along the lines of Google’s GTFS for transit data. Many transit agencies have adopted this format because increasing their ridership is core to their business, and using the standard advances that goal.

As an alternative, we could use a schema and data interchange process to mask the differences in data between different cities, counties and states.

I have great hopes for Socrata, a Seattle-based technology company which hosts the federal data.gov, data.seattle.gov, and hundreds of other government open data sites. They are one of the movers behind cities.data.gov, a first attempt at combining datasets from multiple cities.

If cities.data.gov or maybe a future states.data.gov or even restaurantinspections.data.gov can be made real, then an app writing against those open data sites would work anyplace in the world which contributes data.

Another huge problem is simply the lack of governments who participate. Sure, there are 176 federal government agencies who make data open, thanks to the commitment of the Obama Administration, the United States CTO Todd Park, his Deputy Chris Vein, U. S. CIO Steve Van Roekel and data.gov evangelists like Jeanne Holm. But only 19 cities and counties in the United States, and only 34 states have open data sites. See the list here. And many of those have incomplete or only a few datasets.

When are local and state governments going to “get it” that transparency and open data are a way to enlist a wide site of private companies and developers into helping them better serve their constituents?

Finally, there is the abysmal situation with transparency in lawmaking. Most state legislatures and city/county councils and commissions put proposed laws and ordinances on their websites, but in PDF format or non-machine readable format, making them almost impossible to consume with apps. Is this stupid, shortsighted or maybe intentional? A positive development here is the recent launch of congress.gov, which the Sunlight Foundation hails as putting much more machine-readable bulk data online.

So where do we go from here? My suggestions:

• Initiate a nationwide or at least statewide (for individual states) effort to standardize the format of the open data, or create data interchange software to mask the differences in the underlying data, as Socrata is trying to do.  Collaboration such as that shown by a City, County and State at Evergreen Apps is a great step forward on this path.
• Establish statewide and GSA contracts with private companies to host the data. The State of Washington has done that and it ismuch easier for cities and counties in that state to build their own open data sites. Data.seattle.gov was live two months after we started the project, by using such a contract.
• Pass laws which mandate all data produced by a city, state or county which can be on an open data site is put there. New York City leads the way on this.
• Also mandate city, county and state legislative processes be open with machine-readable data, as congress.gov is starting to do.

In the end, of course, it all comes down to visionary leadership.

President Barak Obama was really visionary in demanding open data and transparency from the Federal Government on his first day in office, on January 21, 2009. Then federal CIO Vivek Kundra and CTO Aneesh Chopra carried that ball forward. Mayor Mike McGinn in Seattle launched data.seattle.gov shortly after taking office in 2010 and I was proud to support him in that as Seattle CTO. Other visionary leaders range from Mayor Gavin Newsom in San Francisco to U.S. Deputy CTO Chris Vein in the White House to Mayor Michael Bloomberg in New York City.

But, alas, you can’t legislate leadership. You can only hope voters recognize it and cast their ballots for visionary candidates, and those elected officials, in turn, choose visionary CIOs.

We’ve got a great start on the brave old world of Government Transparency, and, with initiatives like Evergreen Apps, we’ll continue to push the “open data” ball forward.

- The Upcoming White House Datapalooza

What’s a “Datapalooza” and Why is the White House having One?

The last four years have seen an explosion in government “open data” with thousands of datasets posted online for public use. The City of Washington DC, under the leadership of then-CTO Vivek Kundra, was the first to post such data online in a “data catalog”. The effort vastly expanded when President Obama took office and, as one of his very first acts, directed the federal government to be open and transparent. Data.gov now has 172 participating agencies tens of thousands of datasets.

Cities, counties and states have gotten into this “open data” act too – as of this writing 34 states and at least 15 cities and counties have open data sites. And the effort has gone international, with at least 30 nations and other entities posting data.

A whole new industry has spawned, with companies like Seattle’s Socrata (host of data.gov and data.seattle.gov among many others) and Microsoft now powering the open data sites.

Data which has been hard to get in the past is now freely available – government employee salaries, crimes, restaurant inspections and even White House visitor logs are now on these websites. Some datasets are updated in real time – in Seattle if you hear a fire engine screaming past your house, chances are the call is already posted to Fire 911 Calls at data.seattle.gov.

So what?

Have you ever looked at these datasets? Kinda like big spreadsheets. Sometimes with indecipherable pieces of data like “latitude” and “longitude” instead of street addresses. Useful in research, I guess, and also if you are data or tech geek and majoring in geography is helpful too.

How do most people really consume their information these days?

Apps, of course! And not just smart phone apps, but also table apps, laptop apps, web apps, and even TV apps.

The missing link between open data and usable apps is developers.  They create the apps which take the open datasets, make them into apps usable for the typical citizen, and perhaps even mash the data up with other information which might be useful such as a map (plotting those pesky latitudes and longitudes) or traffic information.

Now that data.gov and related sites are online, the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the White House is actively trying to encourage developing such apps by businesses, government employees and, really, anyone with a bit of skill in coding.

Enter the “datapalooza”.

The White House sponsors events they call “datapaloozas” to highlight cool apps which use open data to create information and value for citizens. The next datapalooza is scheduled for Friday September 14th at the White House. It will highlight “public safety” in the broad sense – not just law enforcement and firefighting and emergency medical – but also public health, product safety, transportation, and disaster readiness. It will include not just an “expo” of apps which have already been developed, but also an announcement of new safety data resources about natural disasters and to improve preparedness and emergency response.

A lot of these apps exist already, of course, as a result of apps contests in Washington DC (Apps for Democracy), New York City (Big Apps 3.0), and elsewhere. In fact, I’m presently judging the Evergreen Apps Challenge here in Washington State, with $75,000 in prizes offered by Seattle, King County and the State of Washington – results of that contest will be announced on October 1st.

It will be fascinating to watch results from the “datapalooza” on Friday (alas, I don’t know if it will be live-streamed or not, yet).

And I’ll be blogging more about these results, hoping to see apps not just with a major coolness factor, but also ones useful to keeping you safe every day (think restaurant inspections) as well as during disasters.

If you know of such an app, or have an idea for one looking for development, make a comment to this blog or drop me a line.

Who knows, maybe a “killer government app” is “somewhere, out there”.

Note: Deputy United States Chief Technology Officer Chris Vein spearheads the White House effort. He’s uniquely positioned for this work, as he brought the open data site for the City/County of San Franciso online in his previous position as CIO of the City by the Bay.

- Best of the Web – The Secret Sauce

City of Seattle Web Team

Seattle’s City government website www.seattle.gov has been named the #1 City government web portal for 2011 by eRepublic’s Center for Digital Government.  I was honored to be with the City’s web team in Hollywood for the awards ceremony on September 16th.   Our open data feed, data.seattle.gov received a Digital Government Achievement Award at the same ceremony.

Not only that, but www.seattle.gov has been named the #1 City web portal three times in the past eleven years – years 2000, 2006 and now again in 2011.

What’s the “secret sauce” to winning the “Best of the Web” competition?

To answer that, I’ll share the electronic mail note I sent to all 200 employees of the Department of Information Technology (which I lead) on September 1st:

For all City of Seattle Department of Information Technology staff:

Today, Thursday morning,  September 1st, the Center for Digital Government announced its “Best of  the Web” awards for 2011. The City of Seattle’s web portal, www.seattle.gov , is named the top City government web  portal for 2011. The press release from the Center is online. In  addition, our open data website data.seattle.gov received a Digital Achievement
Award in the government to citizen category. We’ve won the “best web  portal” award three times – in 2000, 2006 and now in 2011. When you  consider there are 275 cities over 100,000 in population, and many thousands of  smaller ones, winning three times in 11 years is a phenomenal achievement.

This honor is a direct  reflection of the hard work of the City’s web teams, especially the central web  team led by Bruce Blood and Jeff Beckstrom, and the data.seattle.gov team led  by Neil Berry and Ben Andrews.

But everything we do in  the Department of Information Technology is a team effort. We don’t have a  great web portal without a great server and unix computing team to do the  hosting. Our community technology folks help those without access to the Internet to get that access and use www.seattle.gov . We absolutely need a great data communications team to maintain our data network and Internet access. Solid 24×7 operations is essential, and our data center staff provide that. Information
security is of paramount importance not just to the web site but also in our web applications and throughout our infrastructure.  And our technology planning and oversight unit helps facilitate a visionary strategic technology plan for the City and our department.

Content for the web site comes from departments, and that requires great partners in our department web  teams and content providers like the Seattle Channel.   That, in turn, requires a strong desktop  support team and good service desk to keep our desktop and other technology systems functional. We need  money and good people to support all this effort, and we have a great finance,  accounting and human resources team to support that.

They don’t give awards for  “best telephone network” or messaging team or communications shop or  telecommunications integration team, but “best web portal” is a  direct reflection of the excellence and commitment by work groups across the
department.

But it is also a reflection of Mayor McGinn’s leadership, especially the thoughtful leadership and decisions of Chief of Staff Julie McCoy, with input and support from many others in the Mayor’s Office, on the Council, and in departments.

In addition to the top honor for web portal, our open data site, http://data.seattle.gov received a Digital Government
Achievement Award in the Government to Citizen category.  I especially want to thank Mayor McGinn, Chief John Diaz, Chief Gregory Dean, and Diane Sugimura for leadership in making departmental data available on that site, and Council member Harrell for his support of funding for data.seattle.gov despite the difficult budgets we’ve recently faced.   They lead a true ommitment to an open, transparent, government for Seattle!

We live in difficult  times. The economy is rocky. Budgets are constrained, and we’ve lost a number  of people and positions. I had a meeting with the Mayor earlier today, talking  about budget. I directly told him that despite losing 27 positions and $11  million in funding over the past four years, our workload has only increased as  the use of technology expands in City government. He  acknowledged that and told  me how proud he was of the continued dedication and skilled work of DoIT’s  staff, despite the hard economic times and the reduced revenues available to  City government.

For one moment today, as  you encounter and overcome the everyday problems and challenges of your job,  sit back and bask in the glory of this achievement.

- Bright Shiny Objects

Why are human beings and governments so attracted to bright shiny objects such as smart phone apps?

I’m sure there is a psychological malady in here somewhere – perhaps a “Bright Shiny Object Syndrome” (BSOS), which also might explain why some people passionately love geocaching and others are inveterate collectors of stuff and still others become compulsive hoarders. And BSOS may be related to that urban legend(?) about capturing monkeys by putting bright shiny objects (BSOs) into a monkey trap.

Certainly Apple seems to be making a handsome living off BSOS, with over 10 billion downloads from its iPhone Apps store at a 30% cut of the price each.  Apple also receives a percentage from iTunes music downloads, and has capitalized on what I would call “hardware BSO” by being first to market with products like the iPod, iPhone and iPad.  Of course plenty of other companies also cash in on BSO.  A perfect example is all the companies hoping to make money in the forthcoming boom in tablet computers this year.

How does this all relate to government?

Government employees, including senior executives and elected officials, range the gamut from early adopters to tech troglodytes.   And more than a few of them are afflicted with BSO syndrome.   Sometimes that’s harmless, like the employee who has an iPod plus video camera plus digital camera plus iPad and maybe two kinds of Smart Phones.   As long as “he” (they are usually men) uses his desktop computer with Windows XP for work, and operates all those gadgets on his own time, I see no harm in this.

A worse situation is a senior official who directs the government or department he/she leads to adopt the latest gee-whiz gadgets or web applications without connection to either the department’s business strategic plan or a coherent technology plan.  Then that department tries to simultaneously reach constituents – and perhaps obtain input from them – via too many methods, such as:

• a website (and maybe a variety of website domains such as countyparks.gov and parksforall.com and a domain for each major park)
• a variety of online services such as payment engines, permit applications, maps etc.
• blogs (and comments on blogs)
• tweets (and @replies)
• many different facebook pages
• webforms
• multiple YouTube postings and channels, in addition to the municipal cable TV channel
• open data
• smartphone apps
• e-mail
• mass-e-mailed newsletters
• crowdsourcing via a tool such as Google Moderator or Ideascale
• and probably via other bright-shiny-methods.

Sometimes I almost feel I “resemble these remarks” (i.e. have BSO syndrome myself):    The City of Seattle has a number of web applications and “bright shiny objects” such as Citylink – interconnected blogs at citylink.seattle.gov, multiple tweeting departments, a whole set of interactive services for making payments and obtaining information, a variety of Facebook pages and social media sites, open data at data.seattle.gov, a customizable website at my.seattle.gov, an award-winning municipal TV channel and much more.

So I’ll offer some tips – and this is advice the City of Seattle itself doesn’t always follow – on avoiding BSO syndrome in a world of Web 2.0 and Gov 2.0:

1.  Establish the brand of your website and try not to dilute it.  We have established www.seattle.gov as the definitive site for Seattle’s City government.  We actively resist setting up a whole series of competing domains with City information, e.g. seattlewater.gov or twistandsave.com (for a compact florescent bulb promotion).   We host our own implementation of WordPress, so that even the blogs (citylink.seattle.gov) are really part of the website.
I’ll be honest – this tenet is often hard to follow.   Many departments think they have some unique message which has to be communicated in a unique way with their own domain and website.   Sometimes this is just a new departmental web administrator trying to make a name for him/herself as a cool web designer.   Sometimes it is a legitimate request.  And sometimes it is something else entirely.  As CIO I need the wisdom of Solomon to recognize the difference!

2.   Drive traffic and inquiries back to the website from the other media.   When you tweet, include a link back to information on the website or in a blog.  When posting to the department’s Facebook wall, make the post short and succinct (include a photo or two, if appropriate) and link back to more information or an app on the website.

3.   Try to make the website as consistent as possible in look, feel and operation.  Use consistent headers, footers and navigation, as well as the same look-and-feel throughout the site.  Any government is not a collection of independent departments, but one entity headed by a single elected official with a single elected legislative body.  And try to be consistent in using a single payment engine for online payments, as well as “single sign-on” – one userid and password which provides access to all of the government’s online services.

4.   Be judicious in the proper use of tools.  In other words, use the right tool for the job.  Too often we have a hammer, so everything we see looks like a nail, even if in reality it is a screw or window or thumb.  

The best example of this is probably Citizens’ Briefing Book.   In January, 2009, President Obama’s transition team used Google moderator to try and crowdsource the major issues facing the nation.  Ideas such as “legalize marijuana”, “legalize online poker” and “revoke the tax status of the Church of Scientology” bubbled to the top.  Citizens’ Briefing Book is a noble effort, but I seriously doubt the tax status of Scientology is one of the most serious issues facing the nation!  Such crowdsourcing tools are more properly applied to single, specific, issues such as “what do we do with this vacant piece of land” rather than broad ones like “what are our budget priorities”.  Broad-based questions can be easily “gamed”.

5.  Dilution of effort.   Some governments or departments are huge, and can devote a lot of people and resources to maintaining a vast variety of social media and web channels for information.  A San Francisco or Seattle can have numerous Facebook pages and twitter accounts.  

But in every case – large or small, governments should start with just a few social media channels tailored to their communities.   Some communities will rarely use twitter, or will rely on traditional sources (TV stations or newspapers) for information.  Others will actively get information from blogs or Facebook postings.   Trying to do too much – too many social media channels – will be difficult to keep operating and only confuse the public or weaken their confidence in government.

6.  Fail fast.   If you try a new social media channel and it doesn’t resonate with constituents, close it down and post a “nothing to see here anymore – see our website” notice on the door.

7.   Assign responsibility.  Most departments will assign their public information staff the duty of updating social media and insuring accuracy.  In Seattle, the Police and Fire and Transportation PIOs will tweet as they speed to an event or incident, and then tweet again as well as blog about what happened at the incident.  The tweets link to the blogs.   With the demise of the traditional media (television, newspapers), the rise of neighborhood blogs and ubiquity of computing devices (computers, tablets, smartphones) in the hands of the public, this approach also is the fastest way to get information to everyone.

Ten years ago, in 2001, the year of “A Space Odessy” and HAL, who could have imagined today’s environment of Facebook and Twitter and blogs and smart phones?  What will the social media and constituent relationship landscape be like in 2021 or even 2016? 

Perhaps, instead of titling this post “Bright Shiny Objects”, the title should be “Bright Shifting Objects” as we continuously roll with the changes in technology.

- Hackathoning Government

Update 08-25-10:   I’ll write another post on the results of the Tinkerstorm, but the Tropo Blog has a list of results and awards here.

“Hacking” has a bad connotation. We’re going to change that in Seattle this weekend with the Open Government Hackathon. The Hackathon is the culmination of of Geek Week here in Seattle. Yeah, yeah most of you non-Puget-Sounders think every week is Geek Week in Seattle, complete with nerdish denizens such as Microsofties, Googlers, Socratians, IBMers, Tropons, Amazonians, Pirilloians and now even Facebookers.

Geek Week is the creation of local Geek King Chris Pirillo. I envy Chris, with his 85,326 Twitter followers compared to my mere 2,232 followers. We both come from humble backgrounds in Iowa, and made it to Seattle to seek our futures in the Pacific Northwest.

Chris found his future and part of it is Geek Week and Gnomedex. The 10th Annual Gnomedex “Conference of Inspiration and Influence” is happening on Friday and Saturday, August 20th and 21st.

As Gnomedex winds down on Saturday at 5:00 PM, the Open Government Hackathon winds up. The Hackathon is sponsored by two phenomenal local tech companies, Socrata and Tropo. Socrata has made its name making data open and transparent, most notably with data.gov and data.seattle.gov (well, and a few other sites).

Developers will converge on the Edgewater Hotel on (duh) Seattle’s waterfront. They’ll have 24 hours to use government datasets to create interesting applications. At 5:00 PM on Sunday, we’ll be judging applications for those which are most useful, interesting, unique or maybe just cool. There will be a number of prizes – hackers will get codes for some Amazon Web Services usable to deploy and test apps there and other prizes include a Flip HD camera, year membership in Amazon Pro and even an iPad – gee, if Microsoft or Google or Facebook made a nice slate computer, maybe that could be the prize. Perhaps next year!

Read more about the Hackathon on Chris Pirillo’s blog here, or the Socrata blog here, or the Tropo blog here.

In any case, it will be wonderful to see what sorts of applications the hackers develop, all with the intent not of hacking into government, but rather of making data held by government more accessible to citizens, residents and the people government serves.

Note: I’m especially proud of data.seattle.gov, with over a hundred cool datasets of information like fire department 911 calls, active building permits, and public toilets. That’s an initaitive of Mayor Mike McGinn and the City of Seattle’s Department of Information Technology, and we’ll be adding a lot more data to the site over the next couple of months, including police crime statistics, police 911 calls, and business licenses. You can already view crimes and 911 calls plotted by neighborhood on My Neighborhood Map here, powered by Microsoft’s Bing Maps and the employees of City government. The data feed of this information to data.seattle.gov will be active soon.