It may not be long before residents of the cities covered by EveryBlock decide to contribute their own user-generated data to flesh out the picture that city officials might prefer to hide. EveryBlock founder Adrian Holovaty tells me that his team is figuring out ways for users to connect directly to each other through the site. Forums that allowed people to congregate online by neighborhood or interest would enable EveryBlock users to become their cities’ watchdogs. If city agencies still won’t say how many potholes are left unfilled after thirty days, people could share and track that information themselves.

Such a joint effort is no stretch to young people who have grown up online. Consider just a couple of examples: since 1999, RateMyTeachers.com and RateMyProfessors.com have collected more than sixteen million user-generated ratings on more than two million teachers and professors. The two sites get anywhere from half a million to a million unique visitors a month. Yelp.com, a user-generated review service, says its members have written more than four million local reviews since its founding in 2004. As the younger generation settles down and starts raising families, there’s every reason to expect that its members will carry these habits of networking and sharing information into tracking more serious quality-of-life issues, as well as politics.

Cities Lead the Way

Recognizing this trend, some public officials are plunging in. In his “State of the City” speech in January 2008, New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg promised to “roll out the mother of all accountability tools.” It is called Citywide Performance Reporting, and Bloomberg promised it would put “a wealth of data at people’s fingertips—fire response times, noise complaints, trees planted by the Parks Department, you name it. More than five hundred different measurements from forty-five city agencies.” Bloomberg, whose wealth was built on the financial-information company he built, says he likes to think of the service as a “Bloomberg terminal for city government—except that it’s free.”

Bloomberg’s vision is only partly fulfilled so far. A visitor to the city’s site (nyc.gov) would have a hard time finding the “Bloomberg terminal for city government” because it’s tucked several layers down on the Mayor’s Office of Operations page, with no pointers from the home page.

Still, the amount of data it provides is impressive. You can learn that the number of families with children entering the city shelter system is up 31 percent over last year, and that the city considers this a sign of declining performance by the system. Or you can discover that the median time the city department of consumer affairs took to process a complaint was twenty-two business days, and that that is considered positive! Another related tool, called NYC*scout, allows anyone to see where recent service requests have been made, and with a little bit of effort you can make comparisons between different community districts. New York’s monitoring tools still leave much to be desired, however, because they withhold the raw data—specific addresses and dates-of-service requests—that are the bones of these reports. This means the city is still resisting fully sharing the public’s data with the public.

Compare that to the approach of the District of Columbia. Since 2006, all the raw data it has collected on government operations, education, health care, crime, and dozens of other topics has been available for free to the public via 260 live data feeds. The city’s CapStat online service also allows anyone to track the performance of individual agencies, monitor neighborhood services and quality-of-life issues, and make suggestions for improvement. Vivek Kundra, D.C.’s innovative chief technology officer, calls this “building the digital public square.” In mid-October, he announced an “Apps for Democracy” contest that offered $20,000 in cash prizes for outside developers and designers of Web sites and tools that made use of the city’s data catalog.

In just a few weeks, Kundra received nearly fifty finished Web applications. The winners included:

  • iLive.at, a site that shows with one click all the local information around one address, including the closest places to go shopping, buy gas, or mail a letter; the locations of recently reported crimes; and the demographic makeup of the neighborhood;

  • Where’s My Money, DC?—a tool that meshes with Facebook and enables users to look up and discuss all city expenditures above $2,500; and

  • Stumble Safely, an online guide to the best bars and safe paths on which to stumble home after a night out.

The lesson of the “Apps for Democracy” contest is simple: a critical mass of citizens with the skills and the appetite to engage with public agencies stands ready to co-create a new kind of government transparency.

Under traditional government procurement practices, it would have taken Kundra months just to post a “request for proposals” and get responses. Finished sites would have taken months, even years, for big government contractors to complete. The cost for fifty working Web sites would have been in the millions. Not so when you give the public robust data resources and the freedom to innovate that is inherent to today’s Web.

The Whole Picture

So, how will the Web ultimately alter the nature of political transparency? Four major trends are developing.