This is the 2008 Dopplr report for Barack Obama. The travel tracking site is sending out custom reports to all users, but is rather cleverly promoting one for the President-elect. It's probably a safe bet that few folks got around like Obama last year, what with his countless jaunts to Iowa and Hawaii and Iowa and Kenya and Iowa and Kabul and, well, Iowa. Obama's 248 separate trips and 234 days on the road, the report notes, left a carbon footprint equivalent to that of 4.2 Hummers. (And, no, Obama's not actually a Dopplr user. The company compiled trip records from press reports.)

We were curious about just who it was who attended last weekend's Government 2.0 Camp in Washington DC. Who has enough interest in good government to spend their free time brainstorming about the next generation of civic participation? Was this a gathering of, as our new contributing blogger Sheila Campbell recently put it, "we-want-to-reform-government" folks? Was this a meet-up of people toiling away inside government? It's a critical question as Gov 2.0 goes from niche interest to what may turn out to be a significant movement. So we poured the published RSVP list into Many Eyes, IBM's rather remarkable free visualization engine. What spit out the other end is above. Go ahead and click around. Some of the more immediate observations: this was a meeting of both reform government and inside government folks, with a smattering of advocacy, media, and academic people as well. And the Department of Defense had enough people on the scene to take over more than a few lunch tables.

Borrowing a page from Facebook, Andrew Odewahn put together a fun charting of the United State Senate's social graph going back to the 102nd Congress in 1991. "Friendship" here really means voting record affinity. Members are shown to share a connection if they voting together more than 65% percent of the time, and their proximity to one another is based on the level of agreement above and beyond that level. As Odewahn notes, one of the more interesting aspects is the clusters that develop within Republican and Democratic caucuses.

(A plug: Odewahn used GovTrack's scraped data to build his chart -- data that will be much easier to get now that the Senate has adopted XML for votes.)

Neat stuff. You know what I'd also love to see? Any actual social graph of the Senate showing who's attending whose weekend BBQ, playing squash together, and the like. As we've seen, who sits next to each other on Amtrak can be predictive of the very future of the Senate.

(With Micah Sifry)

We're always intrigued when we see inside-the-Beltway groups embracing new technologies, so when we heard about the National Taxpayers Union's new visualization comparing the words being used by President Obama to describe health care reform and the actual words in the House bill, we decided to take a closer look.

National Taxpayers Union is using a pair of word clouds to make the case that the America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 is full of "the oppressive language of big government," while at the same time Obama's speeches are emphasizing more positive concepts like "freedom," "rights," and "choice." Among the words in H.R. 3200 tagged by NTU as oppressive: "regulate," "prohibit," and "taxes"...

We might be computer obsessed here in the United States, but in much of the world, mobile is king. The White House and State Department have been doing an impressive job recognizing that if they're to use digital media to reach target audiences outside the United States, than cell phones and other mobile devices can be a direct line into the pockets and lives of the members of those desired audiences.

Case in point: Obama's recent speech laying out his strategy for the war in Afghanistan. There's a benefit in having citizens of the region hear the President's words directly, but only a sliver of the populations of Afghanistan and Pakistan go online via computer. "Looking at data on Whitehouse.gov," reports the White House blog, "we don’t have a lot of traffic coming from Afghanistan and Pakistan because Internet penetration in the region is relatively low at 2% and 11% respectively. However, mobile penetration is much higher. 52% of the 177 million people in Pakistan have at least 1 mobile device and 30% of the 28.4 million in Afghanistan." To get at that audience, they took a minute-long segment from the President's address that was specifically targeted at everyday Afghanis and turned it into mini videos, complete with local language voiceovers, that can be sent around via cell phone.

The tiny size is a perfect fit for a cell phone screen, and voiceovers eliminate the problem of scrunched, unreadable subtitles. The White House's mobile video clip aimed at the citizens of Afghanistan is available in Arabic, Dari, Urdu, and Pashto (the last of which is the clip up above). Curious what exactly Obama is saying to the people of Afghanistan? It's available in English, too.

I have been dying to use that headline forever, and the Open Government Directive push has made my dream come true. Anyway, one of the "Cabinet commitments" that the White House is highlighting as part of round one of the initiative's launch is a release from the General Services Administration of more than 11,000 FACA records, now live on Data.gov.

FACA, you may or may not know, is the Federal Advisory Committee Act. Passed way back in 1972, the bill's aims were admirable: to impose some order on the hundreds of ad hoc committees, roundtables, and informal advisory groups that were whispering in the ears of public officials. FACA is often talked about as cutting down on the locker-room chatter that shaped public policy at that point. The public, the thinking goes, should know the names, affiliations, and complicating ties of anyone who is shaping the laws and edicts of the land.

Baked into FACA from the get-go was a requirement that a database of standing federal advisory committees be made public. And it has long been, including in the recent era on the General Services Administration website. You wouldn't describe the GSA FACA system as user-friendly, and the new bulk data dump on Data.gov (425 MB, in Microsoft Access format, covering the time period 1997-2008) isn't warm and cuddly either. But that information can now be used to map out just who's serving on the 1,000 or so current FACA-governed advisory committees. We can have a better image of just who is advising government. All that's needed: a mapper, or several.

In fact, some in the White House are practically begging for someone to use this data dump to shine some light on the people behind the people within government:

[F]or the first time, the General Services Administration will make 12 years of Committee data available for free download on Data.gov, enabling the public to scrutinize a rich universe of information, including 11,430 individual committee records detailing $3.24 billion in related spending for 77,740 meetings and 11,317 reports. The data can now be “mashed up” to generate insight into the range of individuals and interests advising government.

On second thought, this post probably should have been titled "Map the FACA." (Photo credit: wohlford)

To celebrate this weekend's snowpocalypse, the government-data-lovin' city of Washington DC constructed an online "Snowmap" showing where and how city vehicles had plowed and/or salted your neighborhood, with color-code street condition info to boot. In some lucky spots, you can even check out what the slushy view looks like from traffic cams stationed across the city.

If you're a certain sort of person, this is very exciting -- on symbolism, at least, if not on actually concrete meaning. From the White House:

Edward Tufte, Appointee for Member, Recovery Independent Advisory Panel
Edward Tufte is Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Statistics, and Computer Science at Yale University. He wrote, designed, and self-published The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information, Visual Explanations, and Beautiful Evidence, which have received 40 awards for content and design. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Society for Technical Communication, and the American Statistical Association. He received his PhD in political Science from Yale University and BS and MS in statistics from Stanford University.

What that dry bio doesn't tell you is that Edward Tufte has been, for many years, the leading voice on how you can display quantitative information in ways that are both beautiful and edifying all at the same time. For those of us who cherish good design, and think that there's a way to deepen the meaning of politics through the skilled and inspired use of it, well then this is intriguing stuff -- particular given how data has become one of the more prominant veins in political discussion over just he last few years. What do we do with all those terabytes of information? Let's see if Tufte knows. Here, Tufte explains his motivation for sharing his insights with the recovery board:

I'm doing this because I like accountability and transparency, and I believe in public service. And it is the complete opposite of everything else I do. Maybe I'll learn something. The practical consequence is that I will probably go to Washington several days each month, in addition to whatever homework and phone meetings are necessary.

Of course, this being a government enterprise, there's a good chance that Tufte ends up (with no offense intended) as window dressing, with little impact on what actually comes out of the recovery process. That said, at least someone thought it was a good idea to appoint him to this group, and unless he's the zipped-lipped sort, it excites the imagination to think of what sort of book he might be able to pull together from this experience.

Credit: State.gov

This morning, the U.S. State Department rolled a new project that they developed in conjunction with the University of California at Berkeley’s Center for New Media. They're calling it Opinion Space, and I'll admit that I don't yet understand the "why" bit of it (or even the "how" necessarily), but there's no reason for you not to play with it in the meantime.

The gist is that that Opinion Space is a data visualization tool that collects opinions from people, and then bunches them together into hotspots. There's a good chance that you'll find that you're a lot like people living in other places around the globe. At this point, Opinion Space looks very much proof-of-concept. But what's striking is that it seems a lot more like something that you expect coming out of the MIT Media Lab than the United States State Department. It's a redefinition -- or, really, one more tweak in a continuing redefinition -- of the mission and means of U.S. development and diplomacy, and it's been happening under the purview of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at a pretty quick pace.

Back to this particular tool thingy. According the FAQs, the goal of Opinion Space's interface and architecture is to combat three things that are bad about modern "participatory culture." The first is that the data produced in online discussions can be unmanageably large. The second is that people tend to cluster with like-minded folks (see, blogospheres), which leads to "cyberpolarization." The third is that moderate opinions tend to be drowned out by more extreme ones. The hope is that by going the visual, statistical route here, the effect will be to "'depolarize' discussions by including all participants on a level playing field." Plus, people like to look at maps, especially ones with glowy dots.

[MORE] Some initial notes upon playing with Opinion Space: In this iteration, there are two means by which to input opinions. The first is by rating five statements on a sliding scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree; the topics: nuclear weapons, proactive diplomacy, climate change, investment in food, and empowering women.

Neat enough. But it's the second that's particularly interesting. That option is an open "Ideas for Secretary of State Clinton" text field. You can see how that way of getting information in the interface could lead to an interesting clustering of opinions about the role and perception of U.S. diplomacy and development in the world.

The Washington Post's ombudsperson Andrew Alexander has an apology to make. He's super sorry that the Post doesn't do a better job exposing its readers to government data:

[T]he era when paper records were kept in dusty file rooms is fading. Today, "freedom of information" has been expanded to encompass the right to instantly tap vast quantities of public information in electronic form. The contents of these databases, from restaurant health inspection reports to toxic waste citations, help citizens improve their communities and their lives.

The Post has a journalistic obligation and a business imperative to provide easy online access to the data through its Web site. But it's fallen far behind at a time when its readers have a growing number of alternatives.

It's intriguing that some people within the Washington Post enterprise are interpreting the organization's mission these days as being a portal onto minimally-processed government data, and doing it with a thinly-veiled reference to the good ol' days of Watergate. That's reinterpreting "newspaper" to be a news organization, yes. But it's also rethinking "news organization" to include acting as a go-between between the stuff that government produces and the stuff that citizens might like to know about. But hey, as Alexander points out, today kicks off Sunshine Week across the country. No time like the present to start getting better at serving up to readers the source materials of government.

If not for the good of the country, then for the good, says Alexander, of the Post:

The Post should help its readers by becoming a robust online gateway to digitized information. If not, readers' loyalties will shift to another brand.