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.

Looking for a good transit app? There's a site for that. The good people at FrontSeat.org, makers of "software for civic life" like WalkScore.com (which promotes car-free living by providing a personalized "walkability" rating for any address) have unveiled their latest project: City-Go-Round. The site is a searchable database of public transit applications (apps) available in cities across America. Visitors also see a list of which transit agencies make their data publicly available to software developers and which agencies do not.

“We are calling on transit agencies nationwide to open their data and follow the lead of the Open Government Directive issued this week by the White House,” said Mike Mathieu, founder and chairman of Front Seat. “City-Go-Round’s transit apps are a concrete example of how open data can improve citizens’ lives on a daily basis.”

The White House has just released its Open Government Directive, long-awaited by transparency and "government 2.0" advocates, and at first glance, the meat on the bone looks pretty juicy. (Or, if you prefer a vegan metaphor, the sauce on the seitan looks pretty, um, creamy?) Nancy's got a sharp and detailed write-up here, and since I've been stuck in a meeting all day, I'm only going to add one additional wrinkle on a topic close to my heart that I think is worth highlighting, nay, hailing.

To me, one of the most important parts of the new directive is in this paragraph, in the section on "Publishing Government Information Online":

b. To the extent practicable and subject to valid restrictions, agencies should publish information online in an open format that can be retrieved, downloaded, indexed, and searched by commonly used web search applications. An open format is one that is platform independent, machine readable, and made available to the public without restrictions that would impede the re-use of that information.

Here's a neat little civic engagement project to get started on tomorrow. Google and the Pew Center on the States have been working for years now on something called the Voting Information Project, aimed a solving one of democracy's most annoying information problems: people, often times, don't know where to vote, how to vote, and whose names are going to be on the ballot when they get there. Many of us rely upon local newspapers and other civic-minded new organizations to inform us on the basics of election day, but we all know how well that business is going. Besides, state and local election boards should be the final stop for verified and trusted information on the ABCs of voting in the United States of America. America still has some distance to go before we correct all the structural inequalities around American elections, and in this particular case, the web can help.

Only, the thing is that as we arrive at Election Day 2009, there are just 10 states in the union (Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, or Virginia -- plus the city of Los Angeles, a place unto itself) that are publishing data in an open, structured format of the kind recommended by the Voting Information Project. You've been paying attention, and you know that that leaves forty U.S. states, plus a couple districts and territories, that aren't playing along -- and might benefit from a kick in the pants from the public making the case that not knowing the very basic facts about the very basics of democracy is something whose time has passed.

Yesterday, New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg announced his "Connected City" initiative, rolling out a series of programs aimed at transforming how New Yorkers interact with and get services from city government. Building on his administration’s valuable 311 program, he promised to make government more accessible by translating city websites into six languages, distributing more information via Twitter (follow @311nyc) and social networking sites, enabling users to fine-tune their usage of NYC.gov around their personal information needs, and creating a free iPhone application allowing people to submit quality-of-life complaints to 311 directly from their phone.

The quality of the dialogue on the Office of Science and Technology Policy's Open Government blog continues to improve, day by day. Clearly, the folks running the show are learning as they go, and trying to tweak how they blog about policy so that a useful conversation can flourish. But the process still leaves a lot to be desired, which may be more the fault of the topic at hand and the tools available, then the specific choices being made by the OSTP's team. Should we drawing big conclusions from this experiment? Or should we treat is a big experiment, but just one of many that need to happen before we can draw firm conclusions about the prospects for involving the public in developing policy using online collaboration tools? (I think the latter.)

Here are some examples of what I mean. First the good news: The majority of the comments now appearing on the OSTP blog are serious efforts by citizens, and in some cases domain experts, to engage with the questions on tap...

It's time to open up the public's data, argues John Geraci, a leader of DIYcity.org. What follows is his open letter to the Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg. The arguments he makes are applicable to every government body: federal, state, municipal and county.

Via National Journal comes the news that OpenSecrets.org, the Center for Responsive Politics' money tracking website, will soon be offering up its bread and butter: financial data detailing the role of money in politics. According to official organizational history, the first iteration of Open Secrets was an actual book -- 1,300 pages that analyzed the impact of cash in the 1988 elections, published two years after the fact. The site has since evolved into a real-time digital watchdog over everything from members of Congress' personal member finances to the funders of 527 groups to congressional travel habits to the endless cycle of staffers between official Washington and the lobbying world. From an email announcing the change:

For the first time in CRP's 26-year history as Washington's premier money-in-politics watchdog, we're making our most popular data archives fully available to the public for download -- for FREE. Putting our vast data on campaign finance, lobbying and the personal finances of lawmakers in more hands will put more eyes on Washington. More people counting cash will lead to more people making change.

For all but commercial users, the content will be released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. Commercial users will be subject to a fee. But you'll have to wait a bit longer: the data won't become available until next week.

Economic recovery -- and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in particular -- is big business in more ways than one. Firms and individuals with years of experience wading in the flow of government monies are working to figure out their place in this new world order. Onvia, a Washington State company that connects would-be contractors with government contracts -- has released Recovery.org. (Count Joe Biden extraordinarily confused.) The company is making the argument that it has taken them ten years and more than a hundred employees to develop the contacts and subject-matter expertise necessary to track government contracts all the way down to the local school board or highway authority or mosquito abatement program that actually doles out federal dollars to contractors. The Onvia site is offering up what they know on ARRA contracts for free. (The company's hope, of course, is that you might find their information valuable enough to pay for a fuller taste.) OMB's Recovery.gov has its head in the right place, the company argues, but the job is simply too big and too complex to approach from the top down. Do they have a point? One piece of evidence in favor of their interpretation: USAspending.gov, the product of legislation co-sponsored by a junior senator by the name of Barack Obama, is still struggling to drill down to the subcontractor level some three years after its launch.

(In case you're wondering on Onvia managed to get their hands on the Recovery.org domain, the company says that they leased it from a substance abuse rehabilitation service before Obama announced the name of his site. Lucky break!)

As U.S. demand for clear and consistent financial information grows, and big government players like the SEC lean on big business to start adopting standardized ways of reporting their internal information out, data advocates are looking east -- to the Netherlands, that is. Amsterdam has embraced what's known as the "Dutch Taxonomy Project," a government-wide effort to use the XBRL data standard. Standing for eXtensible Business Reporting Language (EBRL is not nearly as sexy an acronym), XBRL borrows thinking from the semantic web, namely that calling concrete items reliable and reasonable names helps us to turn cold hard data into meaning. Yesterday, techPresident contributor David Stephenson talked up what we can learn from the Dutch experience on Federal New Radio: "[I]t really reduces the amount of forms you have to do, and at the same time, there's a tremendous benefit from a regulatory standpoint for protecting the public." That first bit -- that XBRL can help reduce paperwork and lower the cost of regulatory compliance -- might prove to be the key to selling big business on the wisdom of a standardized taxonomy. On the off chance that you haven't kept up on your Compliance Week RSS feeds, let me point you to a piece from Neil Baker where he makes that case. Again, the Dutch experience might prove instructive. Amsterdam has estimated that XBRL might save companies some $500 million in compliance costs each year. With the U.S. financial industry going through some tough times, now might be the window during which those sorts of savings look particularly attractive.