"We know Americans want the kind of immediate access to government that the Internet can provide - they're connecting with Congress on Facebook, asking President Obama questions over Twitter and can now bring Washington right into their living room using our new Sunlight Roku apps," said Gabriela Schneider, Sunlight's communications director. "We hope to prove to all branches of the federal government that they should make their work available in open formats, because Americans are, indeed, interested in knowing and engaging more with their government."

Word of Mouth

In the weeks since their release, the apps have been downloaded thousands of times without any promotion, suggesting that there is real interest in tracking the events in Washington among the owners of the one million Roku boxes that have been sold to date.

According to the Sunlight Foundation, at last count the White House app is the most popular, with downloads to 6,489 accounts. The Congress app is on 2,800 accounts and the Supreme Court app on 3,016 accounts. The White House app is built around the video and text feeds from WhiteHouse.gov. The congressional app pulls from Sunlight's own real-time API, which any developer can do if they wish. (The code for all of Sunlight's APIs can be found at the Sunlight Labs github page.) The Supreme Court app is limited to audio, due to the prohibition on video recording in the highest court in the land, which it pulls from the Oyez Project.

The release of these apps follows the considerable success of the Sunlight Foundation in releasing apps that help make government more transparent. The Real-Time Congress iPhone app has now been downloaded 24,469 times, according to Sunlight.

The open source Android version of the Congress app, however, has proven to be much more popular, with over 400,000 downloads to date since its release and between 60,000 and 80,000 uses a week, based on the API calls its users have been making.

Open government? There's an app - and an API - for that

The use of these apps, as a whole, highlights both an evolution of open government advocacy and an important trend for non-profits in general to internalize: in 2011, making more open data available using APIs, embeddable media and applications for mobile platforms or appliances enables an organization to reach far beyond a single website. White House and General Service Agency (GSA) officials in charge of the federal .gov review process appear to have internalized the same message, which will be important as the GSA moves forward with its Mobile Gov initiative.

While Washington tends to lag behind the private sector when it comes to technology, some pockets of innovation have emerged. As Steven VanRoekel, the new federal chief information officer, begins his first full week on the job Monday, it's worth noting that during his time at the FCC, he said, "everything should be an API."

If VanRoekel can include moving forward on that vision for open data in the context of his priorities, which include cybersecurity, moving to cloud computing and mobile government, citizens will see more apps that spur better decisions and new businesses.

The Sunlight Foundation's own Sunlight Health app already demonstrates one possible direction. Imagine if liberated financial data were to be baked into more apps in the future.

From census data, to cadastrial maps, everyday a new data set pop ups on the Web, as a quick glance at the #opendata hashtag on Twitter shows.

For example, the Icelandic startup Datamarket.com provides a fully flavored set of functionalities to visualize the data. Data time series could be visualized with several different types of charts, allowing the users to add dates, grabbed from the Guardian archive. The result is a handy way to make explicit the correlations between trends and historical events. Then, end users could access the data through REST APIs or export them in CSV or XML. Links to diagrams could even be shared on Twitter or Facebook, making Datamarket a fancy and pragmatic tool.

Factual, another platform recently raised $25 million dollars in a Series A funding, mainly impresses for its ability to join data sets. Different data sets are represented with different tables, slightly similar to a relational database where end-users could make projections, selections and joins on table fields. Then, some applications could be build on top of the aggregated data and the result embedded in a third-party website.

CKAN Data Hub is a remarkable initiative led by the Open Knowledge Foundation. It is probably the largest hub in terms of indexed data sets. Released as an open source project, it offers API access to search and browse the index, but it's not equipped with an explicit mechanism to directly manipulate the indexed data. However, what strongly differentiates CKAN from the others, is the emphasis it puts on data licensing: every data set can be published using any of a number of open licenses. Most of them are directly endorsed by the Open Knowledge Foundation, a group that is playing a leading role in this field.

The last goodie is Talis's Kasabi, which was demoed at the last Semantic Technology Conference in San Francisco. Kasabi offers interesting innovations powered by a pragmatical use of Semantic Web technologies. For any given data set, users can design their own REST APIs and re-publish them on the market, hinting at a forthcoming revenue model. What makes Kasabi one step ahead of others is the powerful mechanism provided by SPARQL to slice, select and remix the data. Once a query has been defined, the user could completely customize the response using an XSLT transformation. Under a certain perspective, Kasabi could be seen as an engineered showcase for the potentials of the entire Semantic Web technologies stack.

Following the 5 stars

Even if those platforms, and other well-known products such as Microsoft Azure or Infochimps, are concretely sustaining the tendency to open up the data, there are still obstacles to a harmonious and integrated data consumption. Data publication techniques, for example, vary from simple database exports with CSV files to sophisticated Semantic Web-powered platforms, such as data.gov.uk. This heterogeneity raises development costs and acts as a barrier to the development of an enterprise reuse of the data. Costs raised by all the implementation tasks needed to access the data, make them coherent with a specific application domain, curate them and, finally, generate business value from their usage.

Even if some markets are facing the need to standardize their internal representations, there's still a lack of Web-wide integration among different data sets. It's nearly impossible to link and access to different data sets published on different markets.

In addition, even when data are directly published on the Web, they do not really benefit from the web model. This lack has been recently pointed out by Tim Berners-Lee who proposed the 5 stars of Linked Open Data: a handy way to judge the data quality with regards to the license and the syndication technology used to expose them. The Linked Data paradigm is seen as a key to tackle the main issues related to data integration. The "webby way to link data" foresees unique URI-referenced entities linked together, machine-readable representations and open licenses as the main foundational ingredients to achieve web-scale open data consumption.

Datamarkets: quarterbacks in the emerging data economy

We can reasonably expect data markets, or whatever we'd like to call them, will play a prominent role in the emerging data economy. Once the revenue models for data publishers are clearly defined and accepted, and once a critical mass of 5-star quality interlinked data sets become available, a new wealth of opportunities for developers will emerge. In some sense, a virtuous revenue model should encourage big owners to open their data sets, consumers to offer their APIs with flexible pay-by-use fees and the various markets to compete on the value-added services they will be able to provide. The mission is all about building an ecosystem, rather than merely develop vertical search engines.

The idea of "open government" got a boost last week with the launch of OpenGovernment.org, a joint project of the Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation. Similar to sibling project OpenCongress, which launched in 2008, OpenGovernment makes it simple for the average citizen to see inside the workings of their local and state governments.

Curious what bills are in the pipeline? Or what money is being spent where? OpenGovernment lays it all out in a clear and concise format that could help to create a more informed and participatory citizenry. Not only does OpenGovernment make it all accessible, it makes it interactive too.

With the beta launch, it will be opening up the local, city and state level governments to citizens' eyes in California, Louisiana, Maryland, Texas and Wisconsin. According to the launch announcement, the project will pull together "official announcements, news coverage, blog posts, social media alerts and more to give a truly illustrative picture of local government." Beyond third-party content like blog posts, the site also links directly to the full text of bills, legislators' voting records and spending data culled from FollowTheMoney.org.

OpenGovernment doesn't simply make it easy to access and understand government data, it makes it easy for users to interact around it. Users can gather around an individual bill and discuss the bill in comments. The site even offers RSS feeds for individual bills, so you can keep up with when actions are taken regarding that particular item.

Click for full image.

The announcement notes that "This is indeed a beta version of the site, so keep in mind that we expect there to be a few kinks, and much more data & features are forthcoming." So far, so good, we have to say.

If you're one who likes to keep informed on matters of the public interest, definitely consider giving OpenGovernment a perusal.

First Lady Michelle Obama, a leading advocate for eliminating the problem of childhood obesity, launched the Apps for Healthy Kids challenge earlier this year on the ChallengePost platform. Her challenge offers "$60,000 in prizes to create innovative, fun and engaging software tools and games that encourage children directly or through their parents to make more nutritious food choices and be more physically active."

With this new government contract, ChallengePost will be the official platform on which challenges from government agencies like these are built. These open, crowd-sourced challenges are valuable because they inspire innovation and creativity focused around a specific problem in the public interest. Whether it's helping kids discover healthy eating habits, or creating apps that help the public better access government data, ChallengePost and the U.S. government will be hosting a number of challenges in the coming years.

"We're extremely excited to be working closely with the government, and to use challenges to help solve problems, generate ideas, and increase innovation," said ChallengePost CEO, Brandon Kessler.

Full government integration of the platform will begin in July as agencies will then be able to post problems and invite the public to vote, pledge money and judge solutions. It's great to see the government making strong attempts to offer a more open and transparent system to the public, and with ChallenePost's help we may soon be seeing some innovative applications that leverage government resources.

Like the creation of railroads and highways fostered economic development in the past, giving software developers access to a landscape of municipal data could be the beginning of a foundation for a new era of innovation.

The full text of the resolution has been posted as text (from a PDF) on the same blog.

Portland joins San Francisco, Chicago and Vancouver, British Columbia as cities with major initiatives to offer municipal data in formats that will enable independent developers to build new applications leveraging that data. Making municipal data openly available for developers could be the contemporary economic equivalent of paving roads and installing electricity that can be used to open new businesses and better serve the people living in that city.

Portland, Oregon isn't new to tech innovation, of course. It's a place where the city bus system has its own app store, it's home to red-hot mobile development shops like Small Society (built iPhone apps for Starbucks, WholeFoods etc.) and Urban Airship (iPhone push infrastructure) and it's the home of Linux creator Linus Torvalds, wiki inventor Ward Cunningham and one third of the staff of ReadWriteWeb - amongst other geekery.

What could come next? How about more cities getting on board, a national or international standard for municipal data and delivery of that data in real time? One Prefecture in Japan has announced that it will promote the mobile Augmented Reality app Sekai Camera to display historical data about locations in the area. Seeing individual cities move in this direction is a great start.

What US city will move in favor of open source and open, structured data next? Seattle? New York? Someplace in the Mid West? Place your bets now as these are unlikely to be isolated developments.

Photo: "Max" Creative Commons by Stu Seeger.

Upon the appearance of a tenuously connected web of blogs, sites, wikis, and forums, many were excited about the refreshing availability of public channels for dialogue between ordinary Americans and policy makers when it comes to deciding what the 21st century American government will look like. On the other hand, the participation in these initiatives has been dwarfed by what one might see on ICanHasCheezburger. In spite of what could be seen as lackluster citizen response, The Open Government initiative's final drafting phase, which was to have closed already, has been extended until July 3.

Phase One: "Thousands" Participated

The first phase of this program was a public online brainstorming session, which began May 21 and ended June 2. According to an Office of Science and Technology Policy blog post:

Some suggested creating a government-wide intranet and social networking tool to share contact information, resources, and otherwise facilitate collaboration. Others looked to flexible, third-party Web 2.0 tools, such as Wordpress, Wikimedia, Ning, and Drupal to strengthen collaboration. Still others recommended the use of Strategy Markup Language (StratML) to enable potential partners to more easily discover each other based upon common missions, visions, values, goals, objectives, and stakeholders.

While the site stated that mere thousands of participants were logged, it also contained language indicating that the most enthusiastic and engaged users were federal employees already working within government agencies.

Phase Two: Around Four Thousand Mini-Posts

An Open Government Dialogue page was then created - and largely ignored by users - as a second phase for discussion in this initiative toward openness.

What started off as a good idea apparently devolved into typically polarized flame threads and partisan insults. Serious suggestions about healthcare reform received comments numbering in the single digits, while politically weighted one-liners about Sarah Palin prompted hundreds of responses. Moderation of inappropriate or irrelevant topics and comments seemed as absent from the discussion as the deep thoughts of policy wonks who could have helped elevate the conversation. The Open Dialogue was closed, according to the site, on June 26.

Phase Three: Extended With Fewer Than 1,000 Participants So Far

An Open Government Directive page for a drafting phase has now been extended until July 3. Although the OSTP blog states that "well over 100 drafts of open government recommendations" were submitted by users, contributors number just 201 users, and fewer than 1,000 ratings have been registered by the site.

For example, what should have been a hot topic (enabling citizens' participation in government using new media) on the wiki-like MixedInk site only had 18 contributors.

Making Sense of the Numbers

Although measuring engagement isn't necessarily always a numbers game, when online debate, collaboration, and conversation is a stated goal of a project, it would seem that a higher percentage of the target audience (Internet-using Americans) should have been involved, if only through comments and ratings.

Millions of Americans have Internet access - around 75 percent of the population, according to a Nielsen report - and around 70 percent of those users are also using social media, according to a study from MarketTools. Even if we generously estimate the number of Open Government Dialogue participants at 10,000, the results are disappointing:

As the Open Government project's third phase draws to a speedy close, we are left wondering whether the initiative ran too silent and too deep for the average American to know or care about it, let alone feel that he or she could contribute to a meaningful, measurable dialog.

Do you think the U.S. government did an adequate job of publicizing its Open Government efforts? Do you think political and technology bloggers with a critical mass of traffic should have done more to spread the word and encourage user participation, much in the way that music television channels consistently harass youngsters to "rock the vote"?

Do you think that trends of citizen apathy have finally peaked to a point that - even when tools for participation are free and available via a simple Internet connection - no one cares enough to weigh in?

Or do you think that engagement measurement for this project is skewed, that meaningful and representative conversation actually has occurred through the Open Government websites? We look forward to reading your thoughts and encourage U.S. citizens to drop by the drafting phase website, as well.