About the Author:  Sean Gorman founded FortiusOne in 2005 to bring location based analytics to the mass market. Sean brings over 10 years of experience at the forefront of the geospatial revolution as a researcher, practitioner, and entrepreneur at FortiusOne. Through both academic and entreprenurial efforts he has been working to make geographic data more accessible to the public since 1997 culminating in the creation of GeoCommons – a crowd-sourced repository of statistical data and social feeds that can be easily mapped, remixed and reused by non-technical users. Sean has been featured in media such as, Wired, Der Spiegel, ABC, Washington Post, Business 2.0, MSNBC, CBS and CNN. He also holds a PhD. From George Mason University in Public Policy where he was the Provost’s High Potential Scholar and was the recipient of the Fischer Prize. He has published dozens of articles on geographic data sharing and analysis, and authored the book Networks, Complexity and Security: The Role of Public Policy in Critical Infrastructure Protection. Read more from this author

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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