Yesterday there was a great discussion on open government data on the “Kojo Nnamdi show”:http://wamu.org/programs/kn/, a news radio program broadcast on Washington, DC’s NPR affiliate “WAMU”:http://wamu.org/. The program talked about some of the ways that government data is being used in the real world and looked at some of the efforts by local governments, companies, and nonprofits to make public data more accessible and used on a larger scale.

Being a local show, one of the topics discussed was the “Apps for Democracy contest”:http://www.appsfordemocracy.org/ for which the DC government made 200 city data streams public and asked local web developers to mash up the data into useful websites. “Eric”:http://www.developmentseed.org/team/eric-gundersen was on the show to talk about two websites that we built for the contest: “DC Bikes”:http://www.outsideindc.com/bikes, a site that maps local bike routes, bike thefts, and bike equipment sales, and “Stumble Safely”:http://www.stumblesafely.com/, which helps people find a safe route home after a night out by plotting real time crime data on a map of local bars.

Here’s a clip of Eric on the show:

You can catch the entire show “here”:http://wamu.org/programs/kn/09/05/26.php#26288, and it’s worth the listen. Chris Wiley, the “interim Chief Technology Office of DC”:http://octo.dc.gov/octo/site/default.asp, Clay Johnson from the “Sunlight Foundation”:http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/, and Tim Koelkebeck, from “iLive.at”:http://www.ilive.at/ — another winner of the Apps for Democracy contest — were all on as well discussing open data.