BasicGov / BLOG

A benchmark study developed by Socrata (in collaboration with Sunlight Foundation, Personal Democracy Forum, GovLoop, Code for America and David Eaves) highlights the current state of open data initiatives and how to improve open data moving forward. The overall goals for the study were to:

• Benchmark current state of open data distribution
• Understand perspectives of 3 groups: citizens, government and developers
• Offer government insights into citizen and developer views to help move open data adoption forward

Interesting Findings from Open Government Data Report

Both Citizens and Government employees expressed greater than 60% “agree” for these statements:

• Government data is the property of taxpayers and should be free to all citizens
• In the 21^st century, if government data is supposed to be public, it should be available online
• Entrepreneurs will create new products and services based on the data
• Broad access to government data will help identify and reduce inefficiencies in government operations

Citizens rated “Public Safety” as one of the highest value data categories (57%) and similarly Developers rated this as the highest value data category (77.4%) and Government rated this as the 3^rd highest (81%).

Civic Application Developers are most motivated by “my application(s) can impact people’s daily lives” (43.6%) compared to “it’s cool and challenging” or “I believe in government-as-a-platform”.

You can explore all of the report data online as well as download the full report here http://www.socrata.com/benchmark-study/

Open Data Apps for Cities

So what are some of the applications that are being developed for cities from open data?

Mashable has a list of 5 Open Data Apps that are improving cities.

1. TweetMy311 gives anyone with a smartphone and a Twitter account the ability to report a city-related issue (like a pothole in need of repair) in 140 characters or less.
2. HeyGov! can be used as an alternative method for non-emergency service request or code enforcement input from your citizens.
3. CitySourced provides a free, simple, and intuitive platform that empowers residents to identify civic issues.
4. SeeClickFix is focused on community engagement through various channels. Residents can report issues on SeeClickFix, through their favorite sites via a web widget, or on their mobile device.
5. MojiPage is sort of like iGoogle for mobile devices, and has created a widget for Open311.

Click here to read more about these 5 apps http://mashable.com/2010/08/13/open311-apps/ .

Any other interesting open data apps for cities and citizens that you know of?

According to ZDNet’s article published this week, California is on the right path to reduce costs and greenhouse gases when it set out its goals but it needs some help reporting the progress of these goals, more than email consolidation.

The energy reduction goals are to address the fact that the state spends more than $3 billion annually on IT and 40 percent of office energy costs spent on IT.  What is interesting is the order of priorities of the goals: reduce amount of energy used and reduce total data center square footage being the top listed.

Cloud computing is identified as a solution to reducing energy and costs.

Federal government is pushing cloud computing and virtualization to save $1Trillion.  Local governments are also looking to cloud computing to help with IT budget cuts. According to a national survey conducted by the Public Technology Institute and Input “almost half the CIOs reported that they plan to outsource IT operations, including cloud computing, shared services and software as a service” (source: Government Technology). Click to see list of Government agencies around the world that are moving to cloud computing because of the flexibility and operational benefits.