Last month Socrata announced that we were commissioning an Open Government Data Benchmark Study to assess the state of the nascent Open Data movement. Via that announcement we also invited participation from advocacy groups who are passionate about this subject. We are honored that we have been joined in conducting this study by the Sunlight Foundation, Personal Democracy Forum, Code for America, GovLoop and David Eaves.

The study was to be conducted in three phases, with each phase surveying a different group of stakeholders. The first phase, which was completed last week, surveyed more than 1,000 mainstream American citizens to gauge the impact of the Open Government Data movement on them. The third phase, which begins September 7, 2010, will survey application developers in order to benchmark their experience in finding and integrating public government data in civic applications.

The second phase of the study begins today, and we need your help. If you are a public servant involved in data transparency, would you take the survey? It’s anonymous. In order to offer a complete picture of the state of Open Government Data, the researchers conducting the survey need to hear from people on the inside – both the government leaders and the in-the-trenches workhorses who are bringing the promise of Open Data to life. If you work for state, local or federal government, will you take the online survey?

The third and final phase of the study will start September 7. The final results of this important study on the state of Open Data in government will be available by the end of September, 2010.

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.

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.

“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!

$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

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.

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.

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.