Recently, TOPP Labs embarked on a joint venture with Transportation Alternatives to build a “Candidate Survey” website, showing New York users how their local political candidates responded to a TA survey.

TA is going to build the public-facing site, and TOPP is going to build a back-end service that does geographic lookup of candidates based on the user’s address. Our service will be publicly available for other uses too.  (If you’re paying attention to such things, you might wonder why we need a new service and don’t just use the Votesmart API or the Mobile Commons Legislative Lookup API. Well, MobileCommons only provides lookup of districts, not the candidates within those districts; and Votesmart has some info on local officials, but not unelected local candidates.)

The big sticky issue that’s come up is crowdsourcing the data. Some people at TOPP really want to make the candidate data editable by the public.

We’re not doing anything as critical as counting votes on this site, but recent elections have shown that disinformation is still a problem, whether perpetrated by pranksters or partisans. For example, there were several cases of bogus fliers just before the 2008 election.

I think a totally open system is too risky. Our demo of the back end service at http://pvoter.org/ is currently totally open; anonymous users have free reign to edit or delete information about candidates, or even add fictitious candidates (if you can figure out how; it’s not hard). It would be easy to deface TA’s website or anything else that used the service.

What’s the solution? Restricting access to some “trusted” users? Open editing with moderation by some “trusted” users? No user editing at all?

Comments welcome.

Who knew there are over 3000 block parties in New York City each summer?  Well, we’ve just launched BlockPartyNYC.org to be the go-to site for everything block party.  The site both contains information to assist you in throwing a block party, and allows you to promote your block party on our interactive map.  You can also sign up for weekly notifications of block parties in your neighborhood.

The tricky part now is to draw enough interest to get the bulk of the 3000 block parties registered on the site without which our weekly notifications would be less useful.  Our partner organization on this project, Transportation Alternatives, is in contact with the Upper West Side Community Board to encourage them to register each block party they approve.  We hope to also work out similar partnerships with other Community Boards.  As a return service, we have developed a widget for inclusion on Community Board sites that lists their upcoming parties.

Behind the scenes is a PostGIS database we use for its spatial queries.  The site is built in pylons and Wordpress, and the mapping is done using OpenLayers.  The site was built to facilitate re-skinning for other purposes.  If you are interested in using or developing with the open source software we wrote, the Block Party project page has the details.

So check it out!  Find out when parties are coming up in your neighborhood.  If you know anyone throwing a party, get them to register it on the site, and, don’t be shy, go and throw a party yourself!

Some CapitolCamp inspired wiki-thoughts:

My first session was facilitated by Karen A., who works in Senate Tech Services. Karen came with a kernel of an idea for a ‘New York State Senatepedia’…a wiki where people could explain Senate jargon, document the histories of different legal actions, and connect items with related information.

A Senatepedia has a ton of merit. It would facilitate peer-to-peer learning between private citizens. It would put in plain view the machinery of the NY Senate. It would be a living document, with articles updated over time by interested citizens (wikis that follow twists and turns can get really active). And it would be a large-scale shared archaeology project that could make visible what are today largely invisible topics, histories, and relationships. Ultimately, it would help the public follow and assess the legislature.

For those who pick up a new app every day, wikis are as basic as water, but when integrated into public processes they can have real transformative power. At the federal level, OpenCongress.org (don’t miss their wiki) offers a lot of great information. Senatepedia would be a similar – though surely not identical – venture at the New York State level. There is a lot to be said for a state legislature that would embrace such a concept and treat it as a serious resource by integrating it with the other information on NYSenate.gov.

The alternative – an edited dictionary about the Senate, produced by Senate staffers – would require a comparatively large investment, and it could become stale fast. Remember the last time you landed on a ‘More Info’ page and found a list of broken links? Yuck.

Karen’s Senatepedia idea encountered a fire-hose of input. We talked a lot about risks. I don’t know about Karen, but after all that feedback I might not have felt empowered to actually begin the project. The experience was instructive. Roadblocks and responses:

1. Moderation was a big concern. If you let the public edit your site, they will go crazy! They might lie! They might link to porn! We would need a full-time moderator!

Whoa, there. There is no incentive to contribute to a community (and a wiki is a community) if the site sponsor doesn’t value that contribution. You don’t encourage contribution by controlling the content in a top-down way, and re-editing every article is a bit silly anyway.

There are probably, say, a couple of thousand people across New York State who really care about the intricacies of the Senate’s legislative machinery. This group is a nascent community of interest. A set of people scattered across the state who may or may not know one another. These folks come across awkwardly at cocktail parties. “Well starred bills have been around since 1974, when they came about as a way to…” Total snooze at the party, but for someone, somewhere, this knowledge is powerful. The better citizens understand their government, the more they can do to help it work.

Imagine if this distributed cabal of citizen experts were set loose upon a Senatepedia, to explain and edit and debate. These are the stewards of quality and community, the people who make peace by setting the basic rules of the road (stay on topic, cite your sources, be respectful).

Wikipedia started with simple rules, and over time the site has evolved along with the community (see, for example, warning notes on controversial articles and rules on handling disputes). Those who contribute a lot gain the authority to moderate. A lively Senatepedia community would function similarly. A few passionate people can prune a large garden, making it ever easier for casual users to contribute. Ian pointed out that the smallness of the initial community is part of the point: the purpose of the wiki is to distribute knowledge more widely.

2. False legitimacy also came up. Some were concerned that visitors to the site would think of the information on the wiki as immutable, each word ‘vetted by the New York State Senate.’

This point is valid. The ‘discuss and consense’ areas of wikis are too often hidden. Most Wikipedia readers never realize that many articles are the result of an ongoing discussion that is happening elsewhere.

As a timely example, the article on the New York State Senate saw some action today due to drama, and updates to the article were not without controversy. But few people visiting the article would ever notice, unless of course they happened to click on the tiny Discussion tab.

Making the Discussion portion of a wiki more visible would reinforce the notion of the website as a living, community-created document, and it could create new incentives to contribute (both to the discussion and to the article itself). Including recent discussion or information about recent contributors in the sidebar might go a long way. Streetswiki literally ‘puts a face’ on contributors, a reminder that ‘people just like you’ wrote the articles.

Good page layout, in particular clarity about which content is wiki content, also helps avoid ‘false legitimacy.’ Clear design can remind people that the wiki is community-created and distinct from vetted Senate resources.

3. Incentives. Would people really contribute? If you frame Senatepedia the right way get #1 and #2 right, you have a pretty good shot. There are plenty of incentives to contribute to a wiki: sharing new information, correcting someone else’s infuriating mistake, seeing your name in lights, gaining virtual street cred. Latour laid out similar incentives years ago when studying publishing scientists (research funds aside), and plenty of sites reward superstar community members.

Senatepedia is a great idea, and straightforward best practices from other successful wikis could really give it legs. I hope the NY State Senate considers setting it up.

Short(er than this post, I promise) thoughts about CapitolCamp.

We’ve just released a plugin for WordPress that allows comments to be located on a map.  We saw that some of the issues we are exploring on Streetsblog and GothamSchools have an important geographic aspect to them and that the discussions that were taking place around these issues would be enhanced if each comment could be plotted on a map.  The “Comment Geo Maps” WordPress plugin was thus a natural solution.

The plugin allows editors to turn a post or a page into a geo-based comment map.  The post format is good for time-sensitive topics like mapping participation at a city-wide event and puts a map at the top of the regular list of comments. The page format is good for more permanent topics like mapping dangerous NYC intersections and fills the whole page with a large map beside a column of comments. People can then leave comments and location information which are geo-coded and become points on the map.

See the page format live at GothamSchools.org.

A screenshot of the page format

A screenshot of the post format

To read more about this plugin, see its project page.  Feel free to use this plugin in your own blog and let us know if you have any comments or suggestions.

In a previous post I said there is “no one answer about what you will get out of this information”. This is probably true for data generally. But it’s not how a lot of people get interested in open government.

For instance: the TIF data I noted in that previous post. Many of the people who are eager to get that data are eager because they expect to find evidence of terrible corruption. And they may very well do so. But this stance is something of a problem for open government.

There are disinterested observers and there are… interested observers. Around government there tends to be more interested observers than otherwise. People who have an agenda. They might be generally disguntled. They might want to attain government contracts. They might have a political viewpoint. They might feel slighted by particular politicians, or even feel particular politicians are their enemies.

These people have one answer they want to get out of government data. Maybe they want to make someone look bad. Maybe they want to advocate a particular position. When they find data that supports that they are happy, and when the data doesn’t support their goal it is ignored.

I think this is a big part of why well-meaning politicians might be against open government, they see it as just one more tool for people to snipe at them. And looking at the advocates they might not see open government as a principled stance in favor of transparency, but as a specific effort to disrupt the political status quo.

At the Chicago Open Government meetup someone mentioned that they had a friend in government who was interested in attending (mostly as a citizen), but the person was uncomfortable that it might reflect badly on their job, that the group would be seen as partisan. And many efforts to use open data are partisan. The group has decided to explicitly separate the principle from the members’ personal agendas for this reason. I think this is wise.