A quick clarification. A few days back, I wrote about an email survey from Organizing for America that asked supporters, among other things, how they've been connecting to OFA online. That wasn't, as I had said, a survey of the full base of OFA contacts on the future of the organization. Instead, says an OFA contact, the organization emails 1/53rd of its full list each week to continually get a pulse of what they're thinking. This just happened to be my week. I regret the error.

Credit: Wordle

FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver recently had a neat post that made use of word clouds to visualize the differing tones of the Gallup survey responses of those Americans who are pro- and anti-health care reform. Around these parts, its raised the idea that the smart uses of word clouds are too few and far between. That, in turn, inspired the production of a word cloud of Connecting America, the national broadband plan released by the FCC yesterday. Frankly, this word cloud doesn't really seem to provide all that much insight into that document. But it did take quite a while to feed 360 pages of report text into the Wordle engine. So here you go.

Credit: Baloulumix

Turns out that cab drivers in New York City were, shockingly, overcharging passengers at a rate of $8 million over the last two years, reports the New York Times:

Using G.P.S. technology installed in cabs, the commission discovered more than 1.8 million trips where passengers were charged the higher rate. The total amount of the overcharge was $8,330,155, or an average of $4.45 per trip, the agency said. The agency said that drivers manually switched the meter from the standard rate of 40 cents per fifth of a mile to the 80-cents-per-fifth-of-a-mile rate that cabbies are allowed to charge in Westchester and Nassau Counties, but not in New York City.

To combat the overcharges, the commission said that within two weeks, a system would be installed in all taxis that would post an alert on the back-seat television screen when the meter is switched to the higher rate code. The alert would stay on the screen until the passenger acknowledged it.

Government data-wrangling has perhaps never found so high a calling.

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.

Credit: daleonsouth (Photo caption: "Discovered I was without internet a couple of days ago...")

Just days before the Federal Communications Commission is set to make its über-exciting announcement of its new national broadband strategy, the Commission has launched a pair of web tools that empower citizens to measure the current state of American broadband.

The first new web tool from the FCC is the Broadband Speed Test. Input your street address, and the tool uses either the Ookla or M-Lab measuring programs to assess just how fast your Internet connection is, on four metrics -- upload speed, download speed, latency, and jitter (which seems to measure the stability of your hook-up). The exciting bit there is that, accompanied by a push for broadband labelings akin to nutrition labels, consumers might now have a better sense of just how big and steady a pipe they're paying for, and how big and steady a pipe they're actually getting.

The FCC's second new web tool is a "Broadband Dead Zone" tool with which Americans can let the federal government know that they're not getting broadband in their homes, and whether or not they'd like to be.

On one level, the Broadband Speed Test and Broadband Dead Zone finder are a pair of nifty consumer-empowering tools. But they're also more than that, in an institutional sense. Accurate real-time data on where broadband runs in the U.S., how expensive it is, how reliable it is -- that's treated like the Queen's jewels by the telecom companies. Coping with the current state of U.S. broadband is difficult when you're oblivious to what the current state of U.S. broadband really is. What we're looking at here is an attempt to give the government a bit more of an even hand in that relationship.

Not bad for a couple of basic web tools.

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.

Credit: Erik Mallinson

From O'Reilly's Laural Ruma comes a pointer to a bit of news from the UK. Actually, it's new news coverage of an old doing, but, hey, it's new to us,! In short -- because this is going to be interesting to a limited number of people (even more so than normal) -- but the happening is that the British Government appears to be transitioning away from applying that strange beast known as the Crown Copyright to online materials. Instead, by May of this year, government information in the UK published online will be covered by a new license that is "interoperable" with a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License...

Credit: U.S. Army

Say you're a U.S. Army solider suddenly dropped into Seoul, South Korea, where you don't know how to speak the language, how to abide by local customs, or even how to find a decent place to get a fortifying bowl of hot steaming noodles. The Army has an app for that.

Or, hopefully, it will have several apps for that, if all goes well with the Apps for Army contest that kicked off yesterday. The two-and-a-half month long contest is offering soldiers and other Department of the Army personnel cash rewards for web and mobile applications that tap into two Army resources.

The first is the Army's cache of operational data maintained by the Army CIO's office; think statistics on IED explosions in Iraq. The second is the vast stores of experiential data held by troops and civilians personnel that help advance MWR in Army-speak, or Morale, Welfare, and Recreation. Someone somewhere in the history of the U.S. Army has probably already asked and answered every question likely to confront a soldier. Apps for the Army aims to unleash that information to make it useable, in the office or in the theater, by the men and women of the military -- including through location-aware noodle bar locators.

The strategic contractor behind the project is iStrategyLabs, the same firm that helped kicked off the "Apps for X" craze of tapping into official data with the city of DC's Apps for Democracy project in 2008. Contest registrants will have access to the Army's Rapid Access Computing Environment, a.k.a. RACE, their custom cloud computing platform. Some $30,000 in prize money is available for the best apps.

The contest runs through May 15th and is open to the first 100 U.S. Army personnel who register, either military or civilian. Contractors are ineligible. By limiting the competitor pool to just U.S. Army employees, Apps for the Army shares something in common with the Obama White House's SAVE Award that drew ideas on bettering government from federal employees.

"We're building a culture of collaboration among our Army community to encourage smarter, better and faster technical solutions to meet operational needs," said Army CIO Lt. Gen. Jeff Sorenson in a release announcing the launch of the contest.

Credit: iTunes Store

One step closer to the dream of canvassers everywhere to have a two-way, digital, portable voter file in their pocket is MiniVAN Touch, the just-released iPhone app version of the Voter Activation Network data program used to power a great deal of Democratic campaigns and the field organizing efforts of a wide range of progressive groups. The target audience: existing VAN clients, as it requires users to already have a way to log into the VAN.

"We definitely feel this has a broader audience than the Palm app it replaced," VAN new media director Mike Sager tells me, "because it is so easy to use and troubleshoot. We think lots of candidates themselves will carry the app when they go door to door."

Are we nearing the promise land of the paperless campaign? Perhaps not quite yet, but Sager says that the iPhone version of VAN can at least cut down on the vast amounts of time and effort that can get wasted during the course of a campaign's pounding of the pavement or working of a crowd. "The app is dramatically more efficient than walking with paper lists," says Sager, "as it eliminates all the follow up data entry -- press one button, and your contacts are recorded in VAN."

Rollin' rollin' rollin', keep them data rollin': A herd of federal agency data was taken in from the pasture on Jan. 22. // Photo: Bureau of Land Management

Not to knock the plight of the wild North American horse, but it isn't clear to me how population counts of wild burros and mustangs are the most important data the Department of the Interior has to offer for its eager public.

Along with every other federal agency, Interior had until Jan. 22 to respond to a Dec. 8 directive from Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag by posting, on the Obama administration's Data.gov open government data repository, three "high-value data sets." Their response was a list of volunteer opportunities from serve.gov; a list of government recreation facilities; three data sets concerning wildland fires; and an elaboration on the United States' dwindling stock of wild mustangs.

So I asked Interior: What makes the wild American donkey so important?