Mashalist

Data That Talks

Parke Wilde raised an important issue on his U.S. Food Policy blog last week: As public data becomes more accessible, we should focus on ways to pull together disparate bodies of data.

Parke explains how he used data from the Environment Working Group and CSPAN to show overlap of federal farm aid and campaign contributions.

The challenge, as Bill Allison put it on the Sunlight Foundation blog (where I found Parke’s post), is that “these disparate sets of data don't talk to one another.”

Dan Gillmor and his Berkeley class seem to be focusing on this problem. Their project in California’s 11^th Congressional district seems designed to pull together public resources (including data, I assume) to make it easier for citizen journalists to cover the race.

Opening up data the way folks at the EWG, CSPAN and many others are doing, makes it possible for masses of curious citizens to poke around and expose government rottenness. 

But to really get the masses poking around, the data needs to be highly accessible. One part of that is being able to pull together similar, separate bodies of information

Publish Data – It’s Good for Business

In an important post earlier this month, Adrian argued that news organizations need to move away from the “story-centric worldview.”

Instead of grinding information they collect into unstructured stories, he said, news sites should build operations that collect structured data and repurpose it in as many useful ways as possible.

He’s exactly right, and I’d add one point: Publishing structured, community data is good for business. 

Data? Good for business?

In cases where it’s the best way to consume information about a community, absolutely.

Think about how newspapers used to make money: Their articles were the best sources of information about their communities. That meant community members had to read the paper and businesses had to advertise in the paper. A paper’s business was built on its status as the best source of information in the community.

Today articles are not always the best sources of information.

Consider standardized testing results. If you’re a parent looking into local schools, you care about test results. But you don’t want to read an article summarizing results from across your county –- you just want to see the raw results in your town. Same goes for many other forms of data –- crime reports, campaign finance data, election results, census data, etc.

To remain the best source of information in their communities –- to protect the foundation of their businesses -- news organizations need to publish data as easily as they publish articles.

Collecting and publishing data the way Adrian suggests will also help news organizations defend against challengers.

Structuring and cleaning data is a lot of work. If your operation collects clean, structured data and takes advantage of that data, upstart publishers will have a tough time competing with you. Brad Burnham explained the idea of data as a defensive tool on the Union Square Ventures blog.

If you’re still not convinced, consider these successful online publishing businesses: NYTimes.com/movies, ESPN.com and Yahoo! Finance.

These sites all run articles, but none of them are designed with a singular focus on articles. They’re all built with the understanding that users want information that comes in many forms –- charts, showtimes, prices, video, you-name-it. Data is so important to The Times that it just bought a company that provides data for its movies section.

The community news sites that grow into successful businesses will be the ones that follow this model –- the ones that invest in data and publish information in the most useful formats possible.

Reigning In Freedom of Information Requests?

From last Wednesday's USA Today (via IRE):

The federal government will pay a Texas law school $1 million to do research aimed at rolling back the amount of sensitive data available to the press and public through freedom-of-information requests ...

Jeffrey Addicott, a professor at the law school, said he will use that research to produce a national "model statute" that state legislatures and Congress could adopt to ensure that potentially dangerous information "stays out of the hands of the bad guys."

"There's the public's right to know, but how much?" said Addicott, a former legal adviser in the Army's Special Forces.

"There's a strong feeling that the law needs to balance that with the need to protect the well-being of the nation. ... There's too much stuff that's easy to get that shouldn't be," he said.

Where’s Our Data-Driven Government?

Here’s a good one: Greenwich, Conn. First Selectman Jim Lash is facing fines from the state’s Freedom of Information Commission for allegedly withholding town GIS data (via All Points Blog).

Lash originally argued that disclosing the data would be a security risk, but the Commission disagreed with him and ordered him to turn over the data. Now he’s dragging his feet. 

This guy is like a librarian who thinks his job is to protect the books. Of course you need to deal with security and privacy issues, but the attitude is completely wrong. Local public officials should be in the business of providing their community with as much data as possible.

Actually, I think open, well-structured data is one of the most important things a town leader can do for his or her community.

As community dialogues move online to places like Coastsider, Baristanet and H2otown, it’s becoming easier to incorporate data into the discussion. This elevates the discussion and makes action easier. We know that because it’s exactly what’s happening at today’s most open, data-driven companies. So, how about data-driven government?