James Turner from O'Reilly Radar just blogged about open data, Drupal, and specifically Development Seed's work with the DC government's data on StumbleSafely.com, a mashup we did in December using DC government data to map our favorite local bars and the crimes that happen near them, based on the time of day. We now call this an employee benefit :). In the conversation, Eric and James also talked about our current work to open up more data, especially in the international development sphere. If we do this right, the international development agencies we are working with will be able to better communicate about their work and share their project data with other programs internally and with partner organizations. Drupal and Mapnik continue to serve as great tools for this job. Here are a couple of highlights from the interview.

JT: If we focus, first of all, on our government, what are the problems with how the government manages data today? EG: Right. Well, first, a lot of times it's not even released. I mean people aren't putting it out there in any kind of way where we can access it. But even when it is, for example, like a mandate by an agency to report on food prices or a certain statistic, sometimes it's baked into PDFs. And it's put out in a way that you can't really do much with it, you know, interact with it, parse it out, discover what's there....

JT: One of the projects Development Seed worked on was Stumblesafely, which mashed-up bar locations with crime data to help D.C. area bar goers pick the safest places to drink. Can you talk a little bit about the process of building that project and some of the lessons you learned? EG: ... we were able to grab building's footprints, rivers, parks, and also, the alcohol and beverage control license. We turned the shape file for the ABC license into a heat map. So we're able to make the city seem like it was a city at night and showed the glowing happening in the bar district. So those were the datasets we had. But the way, we were able to actually make this all work is because we took that data and were able to build on open source tools, specifically Drupal and Mapnik. Drupal's an open source content management framework, like PHP, MySQL. And Mapnik's a C++ mapping server with good python bindings. ...It turned out when we were down meeting with Mayor Fenty, we heard from the city administrator that the cops were actually looking at it, you know? Yeah. I mean of course they were, right? This is what data visualization's about. I'm not sure the government ever would've paid to have a bar site made, but it's nice to know it happened. And it's a good example from the positive externalities from opening up the data.

You can read the entire interview - or listen to a podcast of it - here.