There has been a fascinating thread going on over on James Fee’s site about a web mapping application built by Morris County, NJ to view their public geodata. James’ blog post and the comments to it all decry the lack of usability and shortcomings of the site, and how it is “par for the course” in regards to most state and local web mapping applications.

While all the criticisms are valid, I think in general we expect too much of budget strapped governments. Most times they just do not have the specialty skills to develop robust and intuitive web application to expose their data to the public. In the United States and other countries there is a mandate to make relevant data available to the citizenry (when security and privacy are not compromised). Often this gets interpreted as creating web applications around the data like the Morris County example. The end result can be a service that is not used by the citizenry and a poor use of tax payer resources.

An interesting alternative promulgated by Adrian Holovaty is to make the raw data available to the public instead. Then let the market create innovative web applications around the data that better serve the public. Adrian’s EveryBlock project is a great example of the potential of this concept. In fact they have just announced three new cities Washington DC (our home base), Seattle and Boston.

Developing a compelling user friendly application like EveryBlock is just not something a local government is well equipped to do. The market does a far better job of building web applications that the public finds compelling. To do this well, though, they need great data to drive them. Federal, state, and local governments do a top notch job collecting data, it just needs to be made available to the public (open market) to innovate with. If governments can make their data available to the public in open standard formats that are easily accessible, I believe they will see a proliferation of services like EveryBlock that create real value for citizen tax payers.

Government, “let your data go” and it will come back to you ten fold in innovation, economic growth and well served citizens.

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