Policy Wonkery

So, I watched this movie last week for the second time, just to show it to my girlfriend. I highly recommend it.  Most of my previously reading about alternative energy taught me far more about how wind power kill birds than about the consequences of hydraulic fracking (the process of injecting a chemical water mix into the earth while drilling for natural gas).  This movie explores the dangers of this process, which carries major effects for the environment and the health and economic well-being of people across the United States.

Also, some great related news: the state of New York — the subject of much scrutiny in Gasland — is close to passing a bill that would take decisive action to place a temporary moratorium on fracking. Here’s hoping for a happy ending.

Today a great video come out of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority. It demonstrates how new technologies empower municipal government to adopt efficient pricing models. Also, really cool visualization; congratulations to whoever put this together.

SFpark Overview from SFpark on Vimeo.

I was saddened by an article I first read on SlashDot that seemed to acquire little media attention.  Recently, a high court determined that the government has the right to revert something in the public domain back to private ownership, reversing a ruling from a lower court. (A wonderful discussion of this issue was written up in TechDirt.)

My frustration lies with implication that the government can claim eminent domain and take private property as long as it serves a “public use”.  Just today I read in the New York Times that the state of New York is taking several blocks in Harlem to resell to Columbia University.  While eminent domain can certainly have beneficial outcomes, it evokes a rage in property holders, even though they’ve been compensated. Reflecting on this, I realize I have a right to be angry, too:  I have not (yet) been compensated for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

I want my money as a collective owner of the public domain.  The black and white movies, classic books and photos that we collectively owned were stolen.  If the government sees a “public use” in taking from the public domain, or ruling in favor of those who take from the public, I’m fine with that. I just want to be compensated.

In the lawsuit against “illegal music downloader” Joel Tenenbaum, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) claimed that each act of infringement, or song, was worth $22,500.  Since the RIAA has already gone through all the trouble of determining the worth of a song, the rest is easy. Now, to exercise the totally legal right to remove private property from the public domain for “public use,” the RIAA follow the government’s model and compensate the American public for every work they remove from the public domain. Looking just at the music collection, that’s about $22,500 x 300 million (Americans), or $6,750,000,000,000.00 per song.

Now maybe instead of paying what you owe, the RIAA can let the 15% of Americans who admit to piracy (a felony) just put it on their tab. Seems like a fair deal to me.

Note: This is just a modest proposal. Of course copyright reform would also be acceptable…

In the fight to liberate government data, Washington, DC is a leader. The current Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the US, Vivek Kundra, was recruited from his position as the CIO of DC for doing an awesome job. One of his more successful projects was starting Apps for Democracy. This national apps contest challenged the private and civic sectors to build applications and tools off of government data.

I bring up Apps for Democracy because last week at Digital Capital Week — the so called SXSW of the mid-atlantic — I listened to Bryan Sivak (who filled Kundra’s shoes as DC’s new CIO) speak about how the DC’s local government is opening up even more public data. Now you can access information on the municipal run Circulator buses. (The metro and other bus systems are run under the transportation authority WMATA.)  Check out the Chief Technology Officer’s labs page here to see the data for yourself.

Looking at this page, I was reminded about the transformative role Google has played in making transit data public. Having helped design common (open) technological standards, Google empowered developers to build Android and iPhone Apps, mash-ups, and of course improved Google Maps.

The DC government provides Circulator data in three different formats: KML, GTFS, and CSV. A KML file is the file format used for Google Earth, originally invented by Keyhole, Inc. (which was purchased by Google in 2004).  GTFS or General Transit Feed Specification format was originally called the Google Transit Feed Specification and only went public in 2008. CSV files in the transit database provide additional information and weekly updates with GPS data points of every city bus every 15 seconds.

Google’s specifications have made releasing transit information easier than ever before, and both (the KML and GTFS) are essentially open file formats. The Open Geospatial Consortium has given its seal of approval to KML, and GTFS was released with open-source editing tools.

Transit data is essential public information that empowers anyone armed with wifi or a smart phone to control their travel from beginning to end: knowing when and where to arrive for transit and how long it will take to get to a destination gives a person an incredible amount of agency.  Although I’d like to see more file formats like OSM for Open Street Map or more information like the GPS located CSV data, the important thing is to just get the data out there. And for all its successes, there’s a lot more DC could be doing on this end. Last week techPresident reported that London is setting up its own apps challenge — and that they  released all of their transit data.  Liberating this data is a global challenge, but one we can be active in. Check out the GTFS exchange website to see if you should be contacting your local transit authority.