And the winner is…

One of the most interesting digital initiatives on Obama’s government was the site data.gov. Basically, the federal government has taken a wide range of data that already existed inside the government and make them public. What before was followed only by administration employees suddenly was opened to the entire world, for anyone who wants to snoop in, in the hope that smart people go look into and go help to improve the government. Based on it, a non-governmental organization pro-transparency called Sunlight Foundation has made a very interesting contest called Apps for America. The idea is simple: to award the developers that made the best applications for Internet based on data from the data.gov

The award delivery was made in Washington at September 8th, during the Gov 2.0 Summit. We were there and we had the chance to interview the great winner, Joe Pringle who earned a prize of 10,000 dollars for the help to make the excellent DataMasher. The DataMasher allows you to take two series of data from data.gov to make relations. For example, you can find if there’s correlation between the number of fast-food stores per capita and the diabetes index in a state (answer: there is. The state with more diners, Louisiana, is also the second one with the great percentage of diabetic adults. And the disease lower indexes are all in the states from the American northeast and west where there are few fast-foods). Or it’s possible to compare expenses with education and school performance. Violent crime and poverty rate. Organic food availability and obesity rate. Campaign contributions and federal expenses. And so on. With DataMasher any citizen can become a researcher with new information about public administration.
In this interview, Joe talks about the Apps for America, discusses the future of the government and philosophizes about the viability of a direct democracy.

Denis Russo Burgierman