Here is where the rising trend of open government data starts to get particularly exciting. The well-known and well-established National Democratic Institute (NDI) partnered with the creative firm Development Seed to make use of the data put out by Afghanistan's Independent Election Commission on this summer's very troubled vote there that raised questions about Hamid Karzai's supposed re-election. That voting data came in the form of a 2,500 page PDF. Exciting reading, yes. But not all that user friendly. So the NDI project extracted that trapped data. More than that, though, they blended it with local numbers on the security situation in Afghanistan as well as the ethnic makeup of the people living in the communities around the various polling places.

NDI has been using the resulting Afghanistan election data brower internally for a while now as it attempts to understand the fraud and uncertainty surrounding those elections. But the data browser is now open to the public, on Afghanistanelectiondata.org:

Afghanistanelectiondata.org is designed to allow users to explore, analyze and visualize the preliminary presidential results for the August 20, 2009, elections. This data was released by the Independent Election Commission of Afghanistan (IEC) on September 16, 2009, in a 2,500 page PDF, a format that made efficient analysis of the data difficult. As part of its 2009 Afghanistan Election Observation Mission, the National Democratic Institute (NDI) partnered with Development Seed, a Washington, D.C.-based online communications consultancy, to develop this site and make the results more accessible to election observers, analysts, journalists, policymakers and the general public. By incorporating other data sets, such as the distribution of ethnic groups and security information, this site could facilitate a better understanding of the manner in which these factors affected the August 20 elections.

Stuff like Obama's Open Government Directive can start to get dry and even seemingly inconsequential without real world examples of how boring ol' government data can improve real lives and real political engagements. Here's one. Development Seed has a great post walking you through the process of creating -- and using -- the Afghanistan election data browser.