Here's a neat little example of localization. Google found that people in India are often less likely to use proper street names when giving directions than they are to say "turn right at the water tank." And so now, that's how Google Maps India gives directions -- by treating natural and human-made landmarks as just as valid markers as what city planners call their roads. (One wonders what a customized New York City version of Google Maps would look like. If my own experience is any indication, it would never return that "could not recognize that address" error message when you typed in a destination, preferring instead to just make it up.)

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.

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)

(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"...

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.

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.

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.)