Where 2.0 Preview: Eric Gunderson of Development Seed on the Promise of Open Data

by James Turner | comments: 2

When we think about how government uses geographic information, we tend to think about USGS maps or census data, very centralized and preplanned projects meant to produce a very specific set of products. But Development Seed believes that there is a lot more that could be done if these types of data could be mashed up easily with each other as well as with alternate sources such as social networks. Eric Gunderson, President of Development Seed, will be speaking at the O'Reilly Where 2.0 Conference in June, and he recently took some time to speak to us about the potential benefits that open access to government data brings.

James Turner: Can you start by talking a bit about Development Seed and how you came to be involved with it?

EG: We're a strategy organization in Washington, D.C., and what sets us apart from a lot of other strategy organizations in town is the fact that we do a lot of the building. And we build [it] all on open source tools. We particularly work with international development organizations, and the knowledge silos there are pretty fierce. For the last couple of years, we've worked on a lot of projects where you have really good data and bad technology's slowing it down. So we work on a host of projects whether they're internal internets or external mapping sites.

JT: If we focus, first of all, on our government, what are the problems with how the government manages data today?

EG: Right. Well, first, a lot of times it's not even released. I mean people aren't putting it out there in any kind of way where we can access it. But even when it is, for example, like a mandate by an agency to report on food prices or a certain statistic, sometimes it's baked into PDFs. And it's put out in a way that you can't really do much with it, you know, interact with it, parse it out, discover what's there. So that said, that's starting to change. I mean there's been some folks that are saying, "Wait a minute. We've already collected this data, and if we spend a little extra time packaging it, we can put it out there. And it will essentially have a whole new lifecycle and start adding value back to the community--the tax payers that paid for it."

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