CitiVox Pushes Data-Driven Government

Agreed that it's probably not wise to take too dewy-eyed a view of entrepreneurs. That said, I believe that startups' motivation to create apps like this may be different than that of new firms engaged in social networking or search. Perhaps I'm being naive, but data-driven government doesn't spring from the same place as sharing your latest party photos.

Great -- and sobering -- example of the school systems analyst, Modza. That is precisely the kind of thing this kind of approach is meant to reveal.

I'm all for it. Whether these kinds of systems really get off the ground is another matter. I think the "systems analysts" may resist.

I seem to remember two other young guys that do not want to do any harm. Whether they are or not is quite a lively and ongoing debate. 

And, more importantly, we cannot know all of the fall-out (good and bad) from these types of privately-held aggregations. 

@Michael - Citivox is a commercial business, no doubt, but I think you sell the civic motivations short. There are easier ways for tech companies to make money than creating a fundamentally open platform for visualizing public government data. They have elected a harder path, and having met the young founders, I have no reason to doubt their sincerity.

In my view, these kinds of projects represent the best combination of public and private - using information collected as the legitimate mission of government agencies in ways that are innovative and responsive to market pressure, which is the legitimate role of an entrepreneurial company in the private sector. Together these are creating a public benefit at lower cost and greater utility to taxpayers. If it works, it will make government better at governing and more responsive to citizens without giving away power to private interests. IMO, that is a rather compelling vision for 21st century governance. If anyone deserves to make a profit, it is those capable of innovating in these kinds of broadly-beneficial ways.

I understand the move to privatiize everything, but we are starting to see what that creates. CitiVox is motivated to make money, first and foremost. The rest is ancillary. 

And, Mary

You pretty much made my point by saying "that kind of thing". Data is great, but how it is presented and by whom has a huge impact. 

I not only agree with Rob, but would argue that the ability of the system to take in multiple sources of data actually improves the ultimate data value. But the issues CitiVox and its ilk address are the visibility of the data, and the visualization, hence ease of interpretation and analysis, not the reliability. After all, the same data was available to the governments -- it's what they did with it that is the ultimate issue, and the more eyes on it, the better the odds that the data will be scrutinized and any flaws exposed, and the wider variety of viewpoints will lead to a greater range of possible solutions not only to the quality of the data but of the policy decisions that address the society's problems.

As an example, here in Santa Fe, the public school system collects and analyzes the data on student performance, and has been showing modest improvements year over year. That is, until a discrepancy emerged between the school system's data and the state's data (initially explained away as measuring slightly different things) and new school board members asked to see the raw data, and one finally asked the school system's analyst the right question. She revealed that she had thought it was a good idea to remove all poorly-performing students from the data, and just analyze and show publicly the progress of students already performing at or above average.

The public "knew" the schools were doing a bad job, but couldn't prove it until they were able to examine the raw data directly.

But there is a silver lining. At least the students who were performing well continue to do so. Slightly.

Hey folks - thanks for the comments and questions. My understanding is that Citivox primarily uses data sets generated by government agencies themselves - tax records, street maps, police crime statistics, zoning regs, etc. It's part of the whole Data.gov/open records initiative that we're seeing, led by cities like New York and San Francisco. In terms of citizen input, it aggregates across multiple sources - phone, email, text, etc. There's no reason to assume this input is any more or less reliable than the kinds of inquiries and complaints that government gets from more traditional sources - it's just more visible to decision makers.

I echo your concern, Michael. Any system that relies on citizens to submit data will have its flaws. The problem is similar to the problem we face with Wikipedia... data like this has to be reviewed with skepticism.

I can't speak for Rob, but I think the kinds of sources that would be idea here are factual ones -- records of motor vehicles, crime stats, traffic info, voter records (general), that kind of thing. There's been talk before about this type of input being used to achieve better analytics for cities and municipalities.

Good point -- there's nothing like bad data to kill a good system.  It's a pity that we always have to design with that (or malicious users) in mind.