data stories

[afeld]

I've had a few discussions recently about some different ways that government data/APIs get used by different groups:

• Civic hackers
  • NYC BigApps (and similar) finalists
  • Everything on I Quant NY
    • Saw a cool talk by the creator recently about his back-and-forth trying to get policy change based on his findings
  • Somewhat tangential: I started a separate discussion about how to connect civic hackers with the appropriate people in government.
• Journalists
  • Data behind the President's 2016 Budget was published – does anyone know if this was leveraged for anything?
• Companies
  • NOAA data being used directly or indirectly by basically every news/weather company/app
  • IRS's e-file provider program: creating an ecosystem of tax filing systems, rather than just building one system in-house
  • More examples from @luisdaniel / @GovLab's Open Data 500
• Across government
  • I met @alldayiwonder recently, who does air quality research for the EPA. He was saying that part of his job (if I remember correctly) involves tracking down building permits, which some states bury as PDFs on a website somewhere, while others need to be requested as hard copy. He was explaining how much easier his work would be if they were available they were easily accessible and parseable, a.k.a how much time (and thus taxpayer money) this could save.
  • CAP ran into an issue recently where having a publicly-available machine-readable list of federal buildings would saved us a ton of back-and-forth emails and calls.

I'm sure there are a zillion great examples I'm leaving out. All of these cases have good stories of how they came to be, how the data was/is used, what change they effected, what economic impact they had, etc. Bonus: these use cases provide concrete examples of how and why data/APIs should be made available, on top of the "being transparent" argument. Advertising for openness!

This might not make sense as "an official 18F project", but at the very least, I'm curious to hear other examples that come to mind. It could be an interesting series of (guest?) blog posts... @melodykramer I will be drafting your mind control media skills 📰 💆 ⚡

/cc @gbinal @kinlane @luisdaniel @philipashlock @rebeccawilliams @seanherron

[melodykramer]

Here are some journalism projects:

• California Civic Data Coalition - also they're currently having a Code Rush
• The Times maintains a campaign finance API, where people can retrieve data from FEC filings
• The Times also uses their Congress API
• EveryBlock
• DNAInfo's reporting on murders in Chicago
• Stacked Up: Looking at Schools in Philly

There are also these projects, which are really, really great ways to think about audience and inclusion and building things with the audience, and not for them.

• Curious City, which pairs people from the city of Chicago with reporters to answer questions that these people have about the city of Chicago (and which have been voted on by a larger community.
• I See Change which is crowdsourcing science reporting and evidence of climate change.
• Listening Posts which are booths set up around the city of New Orleans -- in barber shops and libraries -- which allow people to record audio for broadcast on the public radio station.
• WNYC is working on a way to do something similar with still-existing phone booth infrastructure in parts of Brooklyn. i.e. you go into the booth and record something that goes directly to the public radio station for broadcast.

[melodykramer]

There's also this guide to API's in gov't.

[bsweger]

Not technically a journalism project, but at my last gig we launched State Smart, a site about federal spending in the states that combined Census, USASpending, BLS, and BEA data: https://www.nationalpriorities.org/smart/

Most of our media interest came from regional shops that don't have staff to pull these figures together themselves.

[melodykramer]

From Twitter: https://twitter.com/ptolbert/status/573517121654628353

[rebeccawilliams]

We collect stories like this at Data.gov/impact, please add examples you have there and point folks there! Also, if you want to help hack on a better way to display those impacts please dive in. 😄

I've also gathered some open data reading materials, the Blogs § would probably interest you the most.

A couple things to note:

1. I'd research where the data you're looking at is sourced from: is it federal, state, local, private-sector, etc? I lot of things will seem federal, but are not.
2. I'd also pay attention to whether the data used was available proactively as open data or if the folks using it had to manipulate it (or use a 3rd party manipulated version) to use it because those tell two different stories about the data, the former is "open data is working rah rah!" and the latter is "this data already has a use and it should be released as open data" - hello Congressional legislative data and campaign finance data. In this same vein, pay attention to whether the data was crowdsourced or collected by the story teller or, as is so often the case with news stories, if it was FOI-ed for.

A lot of the gov data use roundups conflate the nuances in the above 2 points and I think it muddies the point(s) they are trying to make.

Also ❤️ @bsweger's work, she knows this.

Happy to chat about this in person too.

With 18F having a hand in creating more open data (FBOpen, DOI extractives data, OpenFEC, the analytics data, etc), it'd be great to hear the stories of why that data needed to be reformatted both for 18F and for the public and how it was done. A Why and How 18F opens data corner or something! Also, always make sure new open data is complying with the open data policy and is on Data.gov!

[stevecarrea]

@afeld it was great meeting you and hearing about 18F NYC. As a federal employee and open data proponent, I am very grateful and impressed with what 18F is accomplishing. Through my work at the EPA, I have learned much about air pollution from industrial sources. I write here as an individual, so these thoughts are my own.

To expand a bit on your post, the best place to start for understanding a specific industrial facility, its basic operation and its inputs and outputs to the environment, is the facility permit. The permit holds basic public information about a facility, including applicable rules they must follow in order to protect public health and the environment. For States that are in charge of administering these important documents, ease of access can vary widely.

This is information, that if provided to the public more easily and in machine-readable format, can provide benefit to an array of users; including government employees who need access to this data, researchers, students, and private companies. This project can serve as an example of the information contained in these permits and the effort involved to parse. I have to thank @EricSchles of NYU who helped take this project off the ground.