 Thanks for that, over the top, welcome. So, my title is kind of mouthful. It's not even really so important. What I'm really going to talk about is open government. And that means, this is a very broad word. That means a lot of things to a lot of different people. As you might imagine, that's the only kind of word that can really lead to movement, but it also means we have a lot of people working on a lot of different things. There's a whole sector of people working around influence, data around corruption, looking at how lobbyists influence the system. And that's a very valid, very important sector. There's also another, journalists often fall into this. A lot of people, I think the open government is about the Freedom of Information Act. It's about secret courts and FISA and executive privilege and all of this stuff, a lot of the battles that you hear about in the news. And there's also something that's a little more relatively new, which is going to focus on data. So this isn't really going to be a super technical talk like some of the others. I'm going to bounce around and do a lot of different stuff. But a lot of it's going to be about what's been happening with data. The idea now is this government hasn't really concerned itself with data all that much. But right now we want as much as possible. Even the boring stuff, stuff about bats and birds, whatever, and that's not boring to everybody. And we want it in machine-readable formats. And this stuff three or four years ago was very much a pipe dream call on the part of the small open government community. And this stuff is a lot more, is actually happening now. I'm going to show you a lot of examples of that. Another way that people look at open government as a word, as a movement, as this idea of government how it actually acts, how it behaves to a wanted government that's participatory and responsive and transparent in the way it acts. And I come from DC, which is a world of happy hours and meetups and all these bar camps and a lot of focus on new media and all this stuff. And so you hear the term 2.0 going around a lot. We've been used to hearing the word web 2.0 for a while for years now. We know how much it doesn't really mean anything. The term go 2.0 has been a huge word, another big sort of word. It means a lot of different things. And I just have a real problem with, depending 2.0, on the end of things. I mean, we're the people who invented version numbers and no progress means minor version numbers. It means a lot of things. It means a lot of incremental improvement. It means alphas, it means betas. It means people taking risks, it means failing. It means very public failure. It means sorrow and recrimination and betrayal. It means a lot of things. But ultimately, you end up shipping something. So what I want to go over now for a little while is what people in the government and out of it have been shipping. So this has been a lot of stuff happening at the local level and the state level and the national level. So starting out in San Francisco, ignoring the hideous binary header pop is actually quite a bit of data that San Francisco. It's an official website of the San Francisco government. And they put out data about the environment, about housing, about crime. And they have a app showcase of stuff that people who aren't in the San Francisco government have made, including something that probably a lot of people here would find useful. There's a list of cases kept up to date over the last several days, last months, however long, on showing you where all this stuff has been happening. I sort of think of this as the sort of the, there's a lot of different stuff that a lot of this focuses on crime and mobile apps and the bar system and public transit. That's what a lot of people have been building. And that's really useful and really interesting. And crime is actually a fairly heavy subject. Back in 2005, there was something called basically Adrian Holavati, who runs the Django project. I can't look into this, it's not available anymore. But he took the list, the Chicago crime blotter that was being published online since some age came out. And then he basically matched up with Google Maps. This is before the Google Maps API was around. So he actually reverse engineered Google Maps and JavaScript and embedded all the recent Chicago crime under a map. This was a big deal in Chicago. The least of our most weird out-by-this and people were taking it or printing out things from the site and bringing it to meetings around the town. The reason it's not available is because Adrian Holavati eventually went and made, oh, that's not the right, oh, I'm not connected to that. Well, actually, it doesn't really matter because it redirects now to this. So Adrian Holavati has now launched every block, you might have heard of it, which basically takes a whole bunch of different data sources from all over and blends them together for, the idea is actually every block. So they keep tracking different neighborhoods and wards. And that was on the data SF showcase here as every block, which includes, I think, San Francisco, and every block uses data from data SF. Okay, so moving on. This is actually happening in a bunch of different cities. New York City has its own data catalog that it's put out over the last couple of years called the Datamind. And it actually wants to have a contest around it. This is something, and I'll share DC in a second, but it's something that's actually become surprisingly common is local governments running contests to try to challenge developers to build apps for the data that they're putting out. This would have been a really strange concept in 2006, but nowadays this is getting more and more common. So people made all sorts of apps using New York City's data, including how to find the nearest subway stop near you or how to actually basically sort of a taxi social network that lets you post comments on New York City taxis and drivers. It's, people help apps to help other people find school systems. It really ranges all over the board. So DC, the city that I'm from, oh actually I should tell a quick story, is that the New York City Datamind when it launched, this is something what I was saying about how people fail sometimes publicly, New York City Datamind, when it launched, included a spreadsheet of women's issues organizations. And when it launched, I opened up, I, that just happened to be the first thing I downloaded from the website. And they had scrubbed the emails and passwords for each organization from the site, but they had left the secret questions and secret answers as well in this spreadsheet. So actually that made a stir, made a few times and stuff, and it was embarrassing, but nothing, it went all through the rest of the data, there was no other problems. And it's a public success and they've kept up, they've kept publishing stuff to it, and that's really important. But that's actually the sort of arguments when you go and start talking to governments about why they should start putting data online, that's actually what they're afraid of. And it's not so much because government isn't competent or something, just because they actually deal with a huge wealth of information, so the chance of making mistakes is rather high. So DC is a pioneer in a lot of ways. The current CIO of the country, Mr. Kudra, started out as the chief technology officer for DC, running Opto. And his program that got him so much notice is the idea of absolute immobility, which is basically the first, as far as I know it is the first contest that any local government actually put out along with data and challenged developers. And there's something targeted specifically at developers for them to contribute to the city of DC, to try to make the city a better place. And the way that Opto can defend this to the rest of the government is that they basically paid $50,000 to put on this contest and marketing and all this stuff. And they got 47 apps done in a month by various people who just felt like doing something as part of this contest, which they consider a $2.3 million value. It's actually a really easy argument when it's put that way for something like Opto to make to the DC government. And that's something that more and more cities are catching on to. But it's just simply not the way people thought a few years ago. And of course they have a data catalog too, with all sorts of good crime data and economic data, 311 data, pretty much everything. Even in California, I would spend very much time here. This data in California, it's almost put up a data catalog and it has some interesting stuff on it. Oh, thank you for ever said that. I didn't turn off my Twitter notifications. But they have a bunch of different data sets. They actually put a bunch of stuff in Google Fusion Tables, which I'm not really too familiar with. I'm really just letting you know that it's out there, but I haven't explored this very much myself. So this is the national effort. It came about pretty much right away in 2009. And this whole presentation here is about what's been happening largely over the last couple of years and also over what's been happening last four or five. But it really has nothing to do with, in the arc of things, the stuff I'm talking about here doesn't have much to do with the administration. And more just to do it, have things to be done for a long time. So this is a catalog of data and it's not so much about hosting original data that the government produced just for this site. It's actually about taking the data that various federal agencies have been publishing all over the place already, but actually telling people where they all are. So having a central place can go look all this up. So if you're concerned about the, let me call on eggs, you can go and look at the Food and Drug Administration's set of repulse that they actually put out. I mean, this is, in this particular case, an RSS feed, a lot of this stuff is genuinely raw, comes in CSB or XML. They've actually had a bigger focus on RDF lately. So there's stuff in all sorts of formats. And this, I mean, they include links to the census to things all over the place. So now I'm actually gonna get a little bit into some of the things people have done. I'm gonna bounce back and forth, but this is flyontime.us. So this actually came out of a contest that Sunlight ran, which we were inspired by the apps for the mobs contest that PC ran. So we ran a contest called Apps for America. This is actually the second one we ran. And we challenged people to use data in data.gov just to build whatever they wanted. And somebody went and saw the Federal Aviation Administration that went and published all of those crazy statistics that they keep. The FDA actually keeps statistics on how long your plane sits on the tarmac. When its wheels go up and it delays, it suffers over time, when it arrives down at the minute. It actually breaks up all of the delays into fairly granular pieces. So of course it's not a very easy format to process or anything, but it is machine-readable. So in fact, if you go to kayak.com and you go and search for a flight, you might notice that kayak provides a little percentage of time where your flight, the sort of probability of judging by the past that your flight will be delayed or not. And then they use data from the FAA, and that's part of their business model. So this site is just done for free, it's open source, it's a Rails app. And he took the FAA data and made an actual searchable city, or searchable website, I mean. So that you can actually see what your flight is. So going from San Francisco to DC, you can see what the best time of day is at the time of week in all of these things. Ways, things happen on holidays, and of course that's where it's even telling you the current delay is happening right there and stuff up. And there's much more you can do, and the site of course also has its own little Rust API. So all of the data that was either sort of hard to get from FAA, hard to charge, it's not in an easy format. The stuff that kayak is using to the basis business on is now just even more free, and even more easy to use, because there's a public service. And this was just done as part of this contest, as a random person who wanted to do something good. Bouncing back to something that the government has made, this actually dates back a while. This is USASpending.gov, and the idea is that it's all the things that the government spends on it. So it's the way it's budget breaks down, all the contracts it gets, all the grants that it gives out, loans, all of this stuff. And this was made by a collaboration between then Senator Obama and Senator Cooper, or both of them, who's one of the most conservative, visibly conservative people there is, in the Senate right now. So they both came around, they agreed that this should be better transparency, and so they passed a bill mandating USASpending.gov, which publishes things, and not just in pretty grassy civilizations, but also you can actually get XML, and CSV, and CSV, and all of this stuff. So it's a powerful tool, and this has been around for a while, it's been around since, I'm actually not sure of the date, but three 2008, certainly, I think around 2006. And it's gone through a couple of redesigns, but this is also an example that not all data that's been published is necessarily of awesome quality. I would do remiss in mentioning USASpending, not to mention a project that my organization, some of my foundation just did, we just launched this last week, it's called the Fair Spending. It basically analyzes USASpending.gov's reliability based on other methods of reporting that various government agencies do on how they actually spent the money, and found a, as you can see, well over a trillion dollars of misreported funds. So this is quite another big risk and a failure, and this is pretty substantial, though. This is rather systemic. And some of this is actually just people not taking in the right amount of zeros, and this is really, because we've actually talked to people at USASpending and tracked some of that down. That's some of them, that's not all of it. Because another part of it is really just a function of large bureaucracies and people not knowing what other people are doing, and also it's a lack of priority on ensuring that what they're reporting is accurate, or reporting to USASpending is the same thing as they're reporting to their actual box internally. And that's, this is a tension, right? We want the government to get this out there. We want the government to get data out there, and it's a win when they do, but we also, it's really important to actually ensure this is a good quality that's useful to do. This isn't an example of how bad all attempts are at getting the spending data out there, but it is a useful exercise, a very useful exercise in figuring out what some of the problems are. So, going over to the legislative branch, this is something that's been around for a long time. This is the Library of Congress, it's called Thomas, and Thomas doesn't really put out things in machine readable formats, but it is at least there in HTML, so if you're, that's good. So this does have, for any given bill, it has everything that's ever happened to it, it's entire text, it's co-sponsors and related documents and all this stuff, and even despite the fact that this doesn't put out anything in really, in actual machine readable stuff, people have done good work anyway, so this is probably, I mean this was done in 2004. This is GovTrack.us, and it's a website that not enough people know about, and not enough people really understand the importance of it, because GovTrack isn't only a front end to everything that's happening in terms of bills and members of Congress, but they actually publish all of their data for free in XML for everything that's ever happened. They do this by scraping Thomas and turning this into an actual, like a comprehensive data source that the public can build things off of, and people have built things off of this. So this is Open Congress, this is a Rails app. This has been around for a few years, it's built off of GovTrack's data, which is a turn of the off of Thomas, and you can do, it's everything that you think of it, so it's a community website where people go and actually talk about things and vote on things and you can see what's actually happening. So this is not new, this is not exactly, this has been around for years, this is extremely important, and stuff like this, so stuff like GovTrack going and scraping Thomas to create XML is actually successfully motivated the House of Representatives in the Senate to publish this stuff in XML themselves, at least votes right now. So the voting as it occurs in the House of Representatives is published in XML, this is an example, within a few minutes of its passage. So it's starting to feel possible to actually see votes happening in real time and build apps that respond to that. It's actually something that I and some others in my organization are gonna be working with over the next year or so, but if anybody could be doing this, the Senate also has XML, of course, in a totally different format, there's no communication really between the two bodies that in totally different times, for different reasons, use different unique identifiers. So it's still not trivial, but it's there, and that's definitely important for it. So sticking with the legislative branch at the state level, state level is a really fascinating place because this is often where a lot of things happen that more directly affect people under daily lives. So people are starting a small business in their state, I mean, certainly federal legislation matters to them, but often where they're gonna have what the legislation has the most impact, and they're elected officials where they can have the most impact is gonna be at the state level. Unfortunately, what we've seen over the last few years is that journalist attention and public attention and all of this stuff at the state level has been diminishing as traditional news organizations have been shrinking in favor of blogs and sort of things that are halfway between blogs and reporting and all this stuff. So if I knew how to turn these notifications off, I would, but I did not figure that out because it's not the dog, but I appreciate all of this. So I'm gonna give it a go. If I wasn't on camera, I'd give you a finger. But this is the New York State Senate, and they have an open legislative API. So they actually give out all of their legislation and base it in close real time and JSON and XML. And that's great, but there are 49 other states. And so actually California as well gives out and I could load it up, but California also has a legislative API, and that's great. It's still nowhere near 50 states are giving out their legislative information and anything regarding an open standard or anything like that. So I should also mention that one of the projects Sunlight does is this thing called the Open State Project in which we are working on a whole bunch of different scrapers that go over the various 50 state legislature websites or in some cases their FTP place where they store all of their legislation. And we actually try to make this a standard. It's actually based on, this project in particular is written in Python and based on Mongo. And we store, it's especially important that we use Mongo actually, especially useful. Because as you might imagine, all the different states have extremely different sets of data and requirements and rules and all of this stuff. And it's very useful to have that kind of flexibility even at the database level. And it's actually, it can be very different. Not everybody knows that Nebraska has a human camera legislature, for instance. They don't have two houses in the legislature, just one. And there's stuff that's far more subtle than that that can be a real challenge. And so we actually have, including California, we've started publishing this information so now that we've launched this API where people can start pulling down legislative data in the state level. So that's really cool as well. Okay, so I'm going to go back to my talk here for a second. I think it's really cool. So then I mentioned before that I want to, basically I want to tell a story now about a particular project that I thought was particularly inspiring. So as I mentioned that we hosted a contest around information from data.gov in the last year. And a few, a few Ruby developers, Bob Burbeck, David Roggstein and Andrew Carpenter, who they worked for a school's nonprofit in the West, in the West Coast. And they had never really heard of open government before, but they heard of the contest. They were exposed to the idea of open government. And so they went open around data.gov and they eventually found the federal register. I actually can see a show of hands. Anybody who here knows what the federal register is? Yeah, not very many people actually. Maybe a 15th of you guys. Federal register is one of the more important publications the federal government does. It's the official journal of the government. It covers a lot of things. Any public notices that things are going to happen? Any notices that there are rulemaking sessions about to happen? Chances for public comment? I don't know if you guys are, if you've seen the news of these huge sweeping legislative packages of the healthcare bill of financial regulatory reform. One of the narratives around this too is that the real battle with lobbyists and all the sausage making doesn't just occur when the bill is actually being paid in the past and occurs afterwards when the regulations are actually being drafted. There's an incredible amount of latitude for good reasons. There's an incredible amount of latitude had to actually execute on the law. And so there's a volunteer time where regulations get made. And so the advantage that a lot of special interests and lobbyists have in this process is that they know what the federal register is and that they know where all these things are happening and they will go to them and they will give their public. So these, I'm excited to get to that slide. So these, the federal register is published by the office of the federal register. It's a subset of the government printing office. And so these three developers that I mentioned went and for this contest took the federal register and made something called GoFalls, which was one of the winners of this contest because it was that impressive and that it took something that is very important. And they started actually showed it in a very relevant way. So it showed it by stuff that's happening now. You can see it automatically geolocated me. There's somewhere around San Francisco and it's showing me events that are happening near me. Things that have opened in the last few days, closed in the next seven days. Showing little spark lines for activity of what's happening in all different federal agencies and sectors. And that's really cool. That was a really great project. This is a Rails app and it's open source and GitHub. So what was especially cool about this though as time went by, is that eventually in March the government called and thought this was wonderful. Like office of the federal register could tell pretty quickly that this was the right way to go. This is way better than anything that they're doing already. So they wanted to work with these guys and make it actually happen. And they were serious. So they got through some routine. They brought in these three developers that is sort of a subcontractor, an existing contract. So they didn't have to go through a formal request for proposals. And then when they were going through the process they actually really wanted to take some risks. The design that these guys originally proposed for this new federal register site is fairly conservative and that's not what the government wanted. So they wanted something really, pretty, really daring, a little notably different than what people expect from the government website. And of course this would never have been possible if they didn't get actual buy-in from the top of the agency. So they're actually able to make something happen in three months, which is not the usual time frame for government projects of any kind. Even things much smaller than their registered. And so the developers in question here, Bob and Erin, it's true, cut their hours at work, that they're nonprofit by 40%. Their employer was extremely gracious in this regard. And of course they ended up benefiting later. It is a lot of the expertise and all the challenges that these guys had to go through to make the site. They're able to bring back into the work at the end of it. It's still quite a good sacrifice. And this website is Ruby on Rails, Amazon EC2 is what it's hosted on. It's still open source. The government also does an open source launch. It's not something that the government lawyers tend to understand very much. They tend to be wary about it, but they just did it. And so now we have federalregister.gov. This is an actual brand new piece of government property. This is an official website for the federal register. It is a wealth of information on it. Broke it down by sat there. The people at the GPO actually made a video trying to help people understand how to use it. It was a great deal of commitment. It's just launched a couple of months ago. And this is, I think this is amazing. I think it's absolutely amazing that just because these three guys felt like doing something on their own, essentially on their own top. Well, it was on their own time, for doubles. And then they made it work to actually work with the government making something brand new. I think Bob is here. He said he would be. Yeah, okay. This year, honestly, he probably gave us, I think he and his team is over on the blocks. What I've gone under is something of a sea change. And I know that, as I said, it's not about a particular administration. It's not about the politics of the matter. The stuff is going to happen anyway. The stuff is going to happen. There's going to continue happening. The momentum is way too great for it to not keep moving. The thing that the sea change about it is the government is actually viewing developers as one of their customers. And that's, frequently when you go to government and you try to argue with them to put out stuff like their records in CSB or in XML or whatever. Well, their argument is that that's not what citizens want. Citizens don't get that. There's no point to it. The government's trying to be better spent making visualizations. It grabs at the station. And changing their minds on that, I'm convincing them that there is a significant minority of developers that can act as a force multiplier. On that data, they can go out and create their own apps, mobile and website apps. To do that is, the fact that it's happening is very significant. And as I've shown, developers are starting to get back to government. Not just the Bill Pauls guys, but people all over the place. People that have come to various hackathons and meetings, show up at government meetups. People who actually go and talk with people in the local government. There's all sorts of things happening. I hope that that's been clear. I also hope it's been clear that there could be a lot cooler stuff happening. There's, I mean, I'm showing a lot of data, these data catalogs and stuff, but there's a lot more that can be done. There's a huge amount of potential. And a lot of people in government have worked really hard to create that potential. And I would call it something more like government 1.3, where we are right now. It's, there's been a huge amount of advances and getting all the stuff done is a huge win. But there's so much more to do. The trend is very positive though. And so I want to put a little bit, it's about America, it's kind of hard for a lot of people to talk about in an honest way. But, and you know, when you look at stuff through the lens of secret courts and executive privilege and all this stuff, people have a lot of complicated feelings about America. And that's well understood. But there's a lot of things that are very good about what the US has stood for in regards to open government. America is the first country in the world to have a Freedom of Information Act back in the 60s and it's been strengthened in generations since. It's in 2000, the year 2000 that, I say the year 2000, it sounds like the future, but I assure you it's the past, Britain had its own Freedom of Information Act. And it's actually even better than ours. The Verge Freedom of Information Act, why don't I spoon this up? And they actually accept electronic Freedom of Information requests and they have to respond in the same format that they got. So this is a website made by my society where you can submit Freedom of Information requests through the site and the site will request on your behalf. And when it gets the electronic response, it'll publish on its websites. And then you have a public record of all these Freedom of Information requests happening publicly. Not, it's actually not something that we can do yet. But this is something that America is led on. There's also something that's unusual about America is that all of the government's information that it produces, it's records, it's data, is public domain. That is not at all the case in every country, even though it sounds like something that we should, that it should be, but it's something that we take for granted. So we have a lot of freedom here instead of a really amazing example. What we do continues to matter. When we do something like putupdata.gov and we have various cities and states doing their own data catalogs, this is stuff that a lot of other people from around the world take notice. But when citizens actually step up and make things an outfit and you can actually viscerally see this relationship developing, it's another thing that a lot of countries notice. So what we do here matters. But it matters in the strength of its citizens and it's you guys. So, I mean, as far as what you guys should be doing, as far as the challenge is, I mean, it's difficult, but it's also easy. You should be talking with other people. There are various meetups that happen at cities all over. I know Bob is trying to start one here in San Francisco. There's stuff that's been happening in New York City for a while. They've been, there's an open government meetup in there that's been doing a lot of work on COVID 311 standard for 311 requests. Actually, the White House has taken up and started working with them on. There's a lot of different kinds of data out there that's coming up or that is out there now. There's state legislative data that I talked about. The 2010 census is basically done. They'll publish their data next year. The 2000 census has been out for a while and the data is machine readable if you can understand 300 page PDFs, document how to read through their bit limited fields. Hopefully it'll be a little better this time around, but even if not, people have written Ruby libraries and other libraries around this data and the census data is some of the most valuable, rich data that a government produces ever. So that's gonna be something to look for. There's a lot of data around money and politics coming out. One of the things that some of it's worked on is transparency data where there's campaign contributions and the federal and state level lobbying data, grant data, and this stuff is all being offered via API, and lots of other people have done this too at different levels. Open Secrets offers off data about what's happening at Consent Capital, and that's stuff that not only needs a lot of apps built around it, but also needs a lot of analysis, a lot of attention. And also it's important to know that people of the government actually will help you, that most people are very friendly. And as I said, the reason that it's not about the administration or other politics is that what's been happening, it's really been happening at a level of civil service, that there's a lot of people in the government who really believe in doing this stuff. And the thing that's gonna let you, one of the reasons that people in the government will help you is that you guys in this room, you're not a crazy person. If you look at a lot of the participation sites that the government has set up, you will see that there are a lot of crazy people that call the government to be the defensive, take no risks, this thing that they are. But you're not crazy, and it will become quickly apparent that you're not, and I think you'll find a lot of allies who have ideas that you want to do. So I would say to all of you, just look around you, look around what's happening in your local community. San Francisco has a lot of problems. Besides how awesome San Francisco is, obviously. It also has a lot of visible problems. So this is the state of California, this government is a mess. And so you should find plenty of inspiration for things around it that you want to do. And it also might be things that just you care about. Maybe you care about public gardens and public parks. And then it's like, maybe you care about parking because you even have a car and you commute to work. It doesn't really matter, it's just a different way of thinking about what's around you. So all I can really say is just be a part of public life and start caring and just know that a lot of other people are caring and working on things right now. And it should be a commitment to government 1.4. It could be anything at all. And that could mean a lot of different things, but I'm sure you'll find something. So thanks very much for your time.