Socrata

If you’re a government employee – or a member of the government 2.0 community – you have to be on GovLoop. Socrata and GovLoop have teamed up to bring you relevant public sector data that’s sortable, searchable, filterable, and can be published anywhere on the web.

To view the data, sign in and click on the resources tab for “Data.GovLoop”.

So what datasets are on the site? I’m glad you asked…

Web 2.0 Policies and Best Practices
Links to governance policies related to Web 2.0 technologies and social media. Included policies: blogging, comments, internet usage, and general guidance.

Domestic Per Diem Rates
FY 2010 federal per diem rates, effective October 1.

Discounts for Government Employees
Find great holiday deals only available to the public sector!

General Scheduled Rates of Pay for 2009
General Scheduled Rates of Pay for 2009 from US Office of Personnel Management. The locality pay areas and definitions for 2009 are the same as those in effect in 2008.

Top 100 Recipients of Federal Contracts
The contracts database is compiled from the FPDS-NG system. The data housed on USASpending.gov is provided by Federal agencies.

Employee Satisfaction of Large and Small agencies, as well as agency subcomponents
The overall index score measures the performance of agencies and agency subcomponents related to employee satisfaction and commitment.

Government Acronyms and Abbreviations
’nuff said.

GovLoop Member Directory, as well as the community’s favorite quotes

We’ll continue to add new datasets to data.GovLoop, and if you have any recommendations of data you would like to see, please leave a comment below.

The Sobering Facts of Hunger in the United States:

1. 35.5 million people—including 12.6 million children—live in households that experience hunger or the risk of hunger. This represents more than one in ten households in the United States (10.9 percent).
2. Research shows that preschool and school-aged children who experience severe hunger have higher levels of chronic illness, anxiety and depression, and behavior problems than children with no hunger.
3. America’s Second Harvest, the nation’s largest network of food banks, reports an estimated 24 to 27 million people turned to the agencies they serve, as accounted for in their 2006 findings.

This Thanksgiving, Realtor.com has posted a list of 80 soup kitchen and food banks across the US.  Find a soup kitchen in your area and volunteer.

Also, if you want to help spread the word this holiday season, select the “Publishing” tab and embed the HTML in your website or blog. If you have any new food bank submissions, please leave them in the comments or email me and I’ll add them to the list.

If you didn’t see today’s announcement on the White House blog or on the Huffington Post, the White House has released a list of recent White House visitors. I think Norm Eisen from the White House blog says it best:

“Today marks a major milestone in government transparency — and an important lesson in the unintended consequences of such vigorous disclosure.

We previously announced that the White House in December of this year would — for the first time in history — begin posting all White House visitor records under the terms of our new voluntary disclosure policy. As part of that initiative, we also offered to look back at the records created before the announcement of the policy and answer specific requests for visitor records created earlier in the year.

So far we’ve processed 110 disclosure requests from September that yielded nearly 500 visitor records. All of these are now available on the White House website in accessible, searchable format for anyone to browse or download. Consistent with our earlier announcement that we will only release records 90 days or older, this first batch covers the period of time between January 20, 2009 to July 31, 2009. Future batches will be posted on an ongoing basis.”

Kudos to the White House team!

As students and their tax paying parents settle into the return to school, most are in the dark about the unprecedented $100 billion in education funds made available through the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. This historic investment, focused on turning around the nation’s 5,000 worst performing schools, is equal to nearly 16 percent of the nation’s annual expenditures on public K-12 education.

$10 billion of the new funding has been slated for Title I programs to provide additional assistance to schools with a high concentration of families that live in poverty. By looking at the U.S. Department of Education’s website for Title I funding, parents can find nearly 14,000 data points. Making sense of the data; however, requires file downloads and proprietary desktop software. For many economically-disadvantaged constituents – the same constituents who may benefit the most from this information – sorting, filtering, and sharing this data may be out of reach. The average citizen can find information about their next cell phone more easily than they can about their child’s school.

To help average citizens clarify these figures, Socrata transformed the U.S. Department of Education’s data in a Social Data Player, making the data easier to access. Now parents can filter, sort, and share the data without proprietary software. Socrata has also combined data from The National Center for Education Statistics to add much needed perspective of school poverty. The data looks at how many students qualify for free and reduced lunch in each district — a leading indicator for poverty levels at schools in the United States.

By combining the datasets, Socrata provides a resource that allows for a clearer view of where Recovery Act education funds are actually being distributed. A quick scan shows that not one of the schools with the top ten highest percentages of free and reduced lunch is in the list of the top ten schools for highest stimulus funding per child.

Having trouble seeing the Social Data Player? Click here for the full dataset:
http://www.socrata.com/government/Title-I-Grants-to-School-Districts-All-States/xean-ic26

Data.gov is barely three months old and it is just beginning to take shape. More than 100,000 thousand feeds have been made available to the public with the promise of tens of thousands more in the not too distant future. After all, there are more than 24,000 different federal websites that post data.

Is Data.gov perfect? No, of course not.

But its first iteration wasn’t meant to be perfect. It was meant to be a start, and it’s a good one. It was optimized for time to market. In a recent visit to the Personal Democracy Forum in NYC, we were able to hear from the data.gov team and they spoke of taking a start-up like approach to getting a site online quickly, even though it might not be perfect, and improving based on citizen feedback. As a startup ourselves, we at Socrata really appreciate this form of execution because it lets the market — in this case US citizens – validate the approach. As long as the data.gov team acts on citizen feedback and iterates quickly, we think they’ll end up with a better offering in the end.

The federal government is certainly making a valiant attempt to put more data online and improve the site, but we all recognize the enhancements that need to be implemented – namely making the data machine readable and easy to access and socialize by non-technical citizens. Yet, are we at the point where competitive sites to data.gov need to be launched to show that the private sector can do it better?

The Sunlight Foundation has announced plans to launch a National Data Catalogue to go above and beyond what data.gov offers. “What we’re doing is taking the concept behind data.gov, which Vivek Kundra’s team has done so wonderfully inside the government, and we’re stealing it. We’re going to do our own data catalogue that can extend, I think, beyond the reach of what the executive branch can do,” Clay Johnson, director of Sunlight Labs, told Federal News Radio.

We applaud the resourcefulness and tenacity of the Sunlight Foundation but believe there is a happy medium. Much of the functionality that the Sunlight Foundation has outlined for its National Data Catalogue is exactly what data.gov needs. Therefore, let’s work with the federal government to augment data.gov. The destination is already there. Now, we need to make it more accessible and social. A consistent theme within 21st century government has been the concept of private-public partnerships. Data.gov is a project where the government, private industry, and non-profit advocacy organizations can work together to create a site that will enable increased citizen participation and the ability to create significant economic stimulus.

Let’s give data.gov a chance by working together to parlay a wide variety of points of views and expertise.

Now isn’t the time to give up on data.gov – it’s a new and ambitious effort — it is the time to put all of our energies behind it.

Post Offices are starting to feel the effects of technology and modern communication. E-mails and online payment options are replacing good old snail mail.

According to USPS, up to 1000 Post Office locations will be earmarked for closure in the near future.

Check here to see if your Post Office is on the list of closures.

It’s been all of over the news, and it might run out of funding any second, but Edmunds.com has been kind enough to compile a list of more than 1000 vehicles that qualify for the program. With the Social Data Player, you can sort, filter, and search the data; as well as easily grab the player and embed it in your site (click the “publishing” tab).

Looks like NY State is making it easier for citizens to connect with the CIO and Office of Technology. If you’ve ever wanted to be Facebook friends with New York, or see their “tweets”, you now can. This effort is certainly in the spirit of President Obama’s goals of transparency, and Empire 2.0 has launched so that citizens can “Connect, Create, Collaborate” (as the tag line states). To become a fan of the CIO/OFT on Facebook, visit http://www.facebook.com/nystatecio, and follow them on Twitter at @NYStateCIO.

Socrata was recently featured on ABC News’ Ahead of the Curve – check out Kevin’s interview in the video.

View the video

In the video Kevin walks through how we are making data social and understandable by a non-technical audience.  To interact with the bird strike dataset that he references in the video, view the bird strike map on Socrata.com or interact with the tabular data in the Social Data Player below.

Dioxane. Epoxybutane. Trichloroethane. Dimethylhydrazine. Want to know the risk level of carcinogenic air pollutants in your county? Check out the Social Data Player below (See the “Total” column — all risk figures are per million residents):

Recently, the EPA made this dataset publicly available. This dataset is one of more than 240,000 government datasets which are expected to come online within the next month, many of which are hosted as downloadable CSV files. Providing downloadable files is a great first step for improving government transparency; however, the process of downloading the file and analyzing it with desktop software is cumbersome for non-technical audiences and makes it difficult to share with others online.

With the Social Data Player Platform we think agencies can usher in a new era of government transparency, by engaging the largest number of citizens possible. With the Social Data Player ALL citizens with a web browser can:

• Access the data directly in any website that contains the Social Data Player – there are no files to download or software to install. For dataset publishers, embedding the player is as simple as inserting a small snippet of HTML code into their site
• Easily search the data, and create filters, quickly finding the toxic cancer risk in the counties important to them



• Comment and rate the data, engaging in a discussion that might unlock new discoveries or questions about the data’s validity



• Share the dataset, as well as their personal filters, across popular social networks like Twitter or Facebook. Unlike an offline .CSV file, the data and discussion can be shared easily online, utilizing the connectedness of social networks to reach the largest number of citizens.

Not only do non-technical citizens benefit from accessing the data in a Social Data Player, but so do more technically-inclined audiences like software developers and scientists. With a Social Data Player, the data is instantly machine-readable via the Socrata API, as well as downloadable in popular JSON and XML formats.

Content managers benefit too. With Socrata Analytics – which is included in the Social Data Player Platform — content managers can track citizen participation. Socrata Analytics makes it easy to trend dataset access and track the proliferation of datasets on 3rd party websites.

Available Now

Today we’re excited to announce the commercial availability of the Socrata Social Data Player Platform for national, state, and local governments that want to transform the way their audiences consume and share public datasets. The SDPP includes the Social Data Player, capabilities for easy dataset uploading by content managers, the Socrata Application Programming Interface (API) for providing developer access to datasets in a machine-readable format, Socrata Analytics, and Socrata’s data storage and delivery network, which lowers the cost of delivering data online. To learn more visit our site or contact us.

If you are interested in getting started now with Social Data Player Basic, simply sign up for a free Socrata.com account and upload your datatset. Socrata Social Data Player Basic is our free entry-level offering allowing you to upload data to Socrata.com and then embed a Social Data Player on your site.