Wizards of Transparency
Tucked away in a Pioneer Square building, some of the human machinery of the U.S. government’s transparency program hums along, sharing a treasure trove of data with consumers. Providing this service is Socrata Inc., a 4-year-old Seattle startup with just 20 employees.
They sit at computers, surrounded by bare walls in a fourth-floor office, acting as behind-the-scenes wizards of Data.gov, a web address that is also a program aiming at putting server-loads of government information at every consumer’s fingertips. A variety of buzzwords have been coined to identify this effort, among them Government 2.0, Open Government and eGovernment.
On the local level, this means that a Ballard resident can instantly call up the reports on crimes occurring within a few blocks of his house or the location of bike racks near his favorite movie theater—all because the city of Seattle is using Socrata’s platform to put its data online quickly and in a consumer-friendly format. Seattle pays Socrata to host the data and translate it into consumer-ready form. The data may go in one end of this pipeline as bare spreadsheets—lists and lists and lists—and come out the other end organized to display as a map or a graphic table.
Socrata CEO Kevin Merritt was a software architect and director of operations at Microsoft before he left to found Socrata in 2007. He won a $46 million, 5-year contract for Data.gov platform development in October 2010 from the General Services Administration. This single contract represents almost 20 percent of the company’s revenue, Merritt says. Socrata’s other big clients include Medicare and the cities of Chicago and San Francisco. It recently partnered with the government of Kenya on one of the largest open-data projects anywhere, centering on information provided by various Kenyan ministries as well as the World Bank. The World Bank itself is a client, providing access to worldwide information that may allow analysts to reach new economic conclusions.
Socrata is privately held, with venture capital coming from Frazier Technology Ventures and Morgenthaler Ventures. Merritt is bullish on his company’s prospects going forward, partly because data sharing can save money. “Transparency,” he says, “isn’t a Democratic or Republican issue. Our platform can help [government agencies] to be more efficient.”
What began as a top-down request from the Obama administration asking agencies to publish data has morphed into what Merritt sees as a decentralized push in which agency heads discover their own
Comments
Post new comment