Open government is the subject of this week's podcast with Dan Thomas, who directs Washington DC's DCStat program, and Suzanne Peck, chief technology officer for the city. I first met Dan at our SOA forum in November. Recently he contacted me about an exciting new initiative that soft-launched last week: live data feeds that will enable any interested citizen to track the performance of agencies that deliver city services.
As a proof of concept, I made this quick-and-dirty mashup that projects data about street repaving and gutter repair onto a map of DC. It's exciting to imagine all the ChicagoCrime.org-like application these data feeds will open up, and how much more easily they'll be accomplished when it's not necessary to scrape websites for the data.
Very cool stuff!
Update: Transcript available.
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2006/06/23.html#a1475