Making City Data Open and Usable in Washington, DC
Apps for Democracy Pushes for Open Source Data Visualization Tools
The Washington, DC government is testing out an interesting way to make the data it collects more accessible and useful for the people who live in the city – it’s asking programmers to build open source web applications that use it’s data streams. Apps for Democracy – a contest hosted by the DC government with the help of iStrategy Labs and Mashable.com – is rewarding the makers of the most useful, usable, and inventive apps with small cash prizes and good press.
Hats off to Mayor Fenty and his government for coming up with this idea. Not only is it a great way to highlight that the government has opened up a lot of its data streams – including crime reports, current construction projects, housing code enforcements, and emergency alerts – but also get some get a lot of tools made to display this information quickly and for very little cost (only $20,000 total in prize money). Also if all goes well and great apps are made, the DC government is planning to open up more of its data streams next year.
We’re currently working on two projects for Apps for Democracy. To get you excited… one of them will aim to make Washington, DC more bike friendly by exposing information like bike lanes and bike paths, incidents of stolen or damaged bicycles, local bike shops, and bike rental stations. We’ll build both tools on the open source platform Drupal, which will work particularly well since it’s modular, very robust, and had great modules for sucking in data like FeedAPI.
If you’re interested in submitting a project, hurry. The last day to submit projects is Wednesday and the awards will go out on Thursday.