opening up US government to web developers

San Francisco's "open data" initiative got support from Vivek Kundra, President Obama's CIO

On Facebook you can read:

"Gavin Newsom Launched a new initiative with President Obama's CIO, Vivek Kundra to save taxpayers money by opening up government to web developers. Ask your city to join the effort"

It is very clever that this "Open 311 API" initiative, is advertised on Facebook as a way to save taxpayers money. I expect that very soon under preasure of the citizens local governments will follow San Francisco example. This means lots of new smartphones applications !

This is what Vivek Kundra writes himself in his blog about this initiative:

"Through this approach, new web applications can mash publicly available, real-time data from the cities to allow people to track the status of repairs or improvements, while also allowing them to make new requests for services."

I hope that in near future we will hear about similar initiatives in Europe. Which European country/city will be the first one?

What will be the first smartphone applications taking advantage of this?

My iPhone applications: Trein

One of my most favorite iPhone applications, I use almost every day,

is Trein (Dutch for train), the application developed in 2008 by Dutch student Dennis Stevense.

This application is a result of an idea to use public data available on Dutch Railways mobile portal and present the iPhone user with useful information such as departure times, depature platform and most important of all, the details about train delays.

I downloaded this application after a cancellation of my train trying to find out if there was any problem causing longer disturbences on the way to the airport. I have heard about such applications and it took me a few minutes to find and install this one on my 3G iPhone.

How accurate the information you get from the Trein application might be, shows my recent experience, when after arriving at the station in Best I heard an announcement about a change of platform of my train to Schiphol. I started my train application and not only saw that the platform was changed but also that the train was delayed by three minutes!. This information was missing at the station. Among all waiting passengers probably I was the only one not surprised with this delay.

The application got lots of publicity and was selected as the best iPhone application in 2009 by iPhone users.

However, Dutch Railways were not happy with the success of this application and tried to stop its distribution due to no permission for usage data from their web server, but without success.

This case shows how important is access to real time data to deliver customer experience.

You can expect that in the future enterprises will try to monetize own data by exposing them via public interfaces in return for a percentage of revenue from the application using these data. This will accelerate innovation and we can expect in future thousands of applications built by third parties and not by enterprises themselves.

Exposing own data to the external world is becoming a new trend and will stimulate innovation in bringing new applications on the market.

Recently Gawin Newsom, Mayor of San Francisco announced a strategy of giving access to the city data.

" Last month, at WordPress headquarters with leaders from the technology community, we launched www.DataSF.org. This new web site is designed to improve transparency in government, increase access to City data, and engage our highly skilled workforce to create apps from that data.

The idea behind the site is to open up San Francisco government and tap into the creative expertise of our greatest resource – our residents. We hope DataSF.org will create a torrent of innovation similar to when the developer community was given access to the platforms behind popular technologies and devices like Facebook and Apple’s iPhone"

This is a really great vision which I believe should also be adapted by enterprises with the objective to improve customer experience and monetize own data.

I believe that it is a matter of time when Dutch Railways will follow the example of San Francisco and will give access to their data enabling designing even better applications then the Trein