produce the material and often that's what you're interested then. headed the agency come to it in the first place. >> okay. kevin, your turn. ..

[laughter] it's interesting we talk about that i am handling the legislative part of this because i think both the government act was born out of that administration. it wasn't necessarily a response to the secrecy perceived or real of that administration but i don't think it would have happened in this administration because there is so much more productively being attempted so we are forced into a legislative change and we need to start with that for a couple of reasons. one because we are on the topic, number two as we move further to the legislative process we realize that was the cornerstone of the bill for most of the

requesters and number three the rest of the bill in large part is untested. this is the one that's gotten the most focus and limitation. this started way back before -- it wasn't one of the first thing throws in the bill. i was in a long time ago and it was actually this office was motivated by a lack of teeth to foil overall and enforcement and one of the first things we try to do is come up with enforcement and when john cornyn had this idea in his head one of the things he was relying on was texans law but of course the state of texas its big but it's not federal government did. even small federal government big. so, the initial attempt to put teeth into law was to prevent agencies from using certain exemptions and that was met with let's just call it outright hostility by the office is so we had to find something out. so in the end, it was a relief from processing fees that came up but that wasn't quite enough to get things done and on the

back and we were looking at changing the decision which i did win a requesters can get attorneys' fees if they have to go to court but if you haven't noticed, most media entities, not citizens but most media entities don't have that much cash anymore in our going to court to pursue these things, she did a story about how infrequent it is work a story was done where it was highlighted because of the few entities that is going to court on the cases. so we started to look at a key component of this bill in getting things done. it worked and it's still too early to tell, we are really happy about a lot of the things. they have a great staff, small but great. they are getting attention from congress and having testified at least twice, i know twice and attention from the archivists they are on the new artistry are. he knows them and i'm pretty sure he respects. he's given the leeway to do what you need to do. i am a little worried again and of the funding and how much they

are given. they were not funded at all under the previous administration which tried to keep them from being funded, turning my joke into a horrible reality. but, you know, they are up and running now and have good members you heard about. one thing i'm still concerned with as well as the intersection between the two people i am not sure necessarily which has the responsibility for what kind of training and who is supposed to be taken the lead on trading and pushing the agencies to do what? i would like to get my letter of that market was the longest time between mary ann and her staff and it then there's a little bit of melody and we are not sure where that is going. outreach to the requesters has been very good though. so i'm very happy to see that and so overall we are in a good space. other things that we need to look at as major parts of the bill the chief liaison especially in line with the new office is a great thing and this was actually part of an executive order that had been

implanted much earlier by president bush. a lot of that executive order was sort of not -- it wasn't mandatory so we were not sure what to make it. this was a good development and now that it's part of what it's helpful because it gives both of the office is somebody to directly reach out to and it gives somebody with power at each agency an opportunity to change the culture and i think we are seeing the results so it's been great purity buchanan fix that makes it easier, i doubt how that is how any -- >> can you explain that? >> i just saw the two-minute silent. basically lets boy looked on as quickly as we can. it says you no longer need actual court order to get attorneys' fees if you go to appeal an adverse decision. if the government waits and settles and hands you the documents, you have substantially prevailed. but i don't think level of lawsuits has changed much over all and again it's still takes a lot of money to bring the suits,

so i don't know if it is going to be a major fix. again, we knew this was probably going to happen and the agency response deadline, the minimal enforcement of the 20 day penalty hasn't really to my knowledge affected things at all. so i don't think we are going to see that as a major incentive for the news media any way because news media are not the largest, they aren't even closest to the declines being a slight problem when you are using at. i think that, you know, that is that overall the bill is starting to shape the overall culture. i think it is starting. we heard the term yesterday i think it was david up house hearing talk about creating a balance between the requesters and government, and i think that they are intended to help that. we have a long way to go away terms of the culture of secrecy that needs to be changed. >> we have a few minutes. everybody stayed on their time. if any of you have questions or comments you would like to

respond to before we open to the audience. >> i would like to respond on a training question and the chief officer point. going for the second point the officers i agree with it is having the fed now has a statutory mandated position as a tremendous enhancement of operations and that's why the attorney general and his guide lines focused specifically on the fact that the chief officers i think are the key to the foia implementation across the agencies. we built on that by having these extensive chief foia officer reports, so the level of engagement across the agencies is not so much higher than it ever was before halving those officials. so it is tremendous improvement and the report to the attorney general, so it's very -- there are some teeth to it and then in terms of training, the justice department of course does all the training of the substance of foia and that is our mission to encourage agency compliance and

to implement and encourage agencies to implement the attorney general guidelines and the president's directive. but miriam and i have already done some training specifically geared toward power agencies interact with requesters. soviet on training for foia public liaison talking about tips and methods for interacting more cooperatively with request or community and as mentioned we have a conflict dispute resolution training coming up next week where we are joining together. so, we have enhanced training now on lots of different things. >> let me add and melanie and i were discussing this yesterday when we were waiting for the hearing in the house to begin. i think we recognized certainly that the training we are going to be doing next year this

focused on the public liaison's which again is another really strong enhancement from the amendments put that channing will only be on a number of ploch for offers like that so i think we would envision not only targeted training like that but beginning to include that as a regular matter on the other training courses just because we know that is a really important piece of the culture change for sure. >> one of the things, melanie pustay, in our community and melanie mauney want to weigh on lummis, have been curious about and we fasted in meetings and i think that the did said something about it the hearing yesterday and i know you're not going to be a good answer today that if i could get your reaction of the things folks are interested in as if as a result

of the attorney general's memo that reversed the ashcroft amendment in terms of the we will defend you if you have essentially any legal basis for withholding. whether the department has declined under the new attorney general's minow to defend in their withholding of rejections of foia requests. >> i think it's not good for me to answer that specifically, but what i can say is that a great deal of the significance of a much narrower defensive of the standard is that especially now that we are one year into the implementation of the aging guidelines in the justice department to advise agencies from the get go this is the standard that is going to be applied if you get sued for this

request so you need to make sure agencies that you are applying the guidelines to the fullest extent that the initial stage because you never know any which case could go to litigation and a big part of the defense of the standard was to cascade down to the response level and foreseeable harm is the standard to be used. we have been advising agency set the get go in respect of that litigation and it's definitely having an impact. >> that's good to hear. do melanie were kevin have questions for melody and miriam before we open up to the public? okay. let's open this up to the public to our live audience and our remote audience, and again we have got about ten minutes for questions, so if he will go to the microphone and we will start with a live audience.

>> yes, i am from understanding government and i want to follow-up on melanie sloan's question and the major point that she raised which is that as you institute the training programs and try to move the government towards a more open stat there are always going to be acute questions that come up such as the one she described and i'm wondering with the panel's response would be to this question. what happens when a highly political issue is raised? isn't it possible still to have institutional inertia and internal mechanisms basically political reluctance to open up on things that are of urgent importance? as opposed to more traditional foia requests? thank you. >> who were you asking? >> she said your name. i think he was seen based on -- >> melanie pustay, is that you were asking? the panel in general? >> nobody is exactly jumping up

to answer. [laughter] eye or something at the hearing yesterday and i agreed with. i think it was the panelist from judicial watch and this will probably be the only time i deal with anyone from judicial watch, but he did point out that his assessment was sent the administration has been good on pro-active cases that relatively noncontroversial and a lot of the political matters he assist them as withholding, continuing to withhold everything that was just inherently political. and i think it is true. it's always going to be true. it's true of government you can try to hold your secrets as close as possible. some people tend to give it more than others as to how this closure actually helps your image. >> i think there is -- i think there is no doubt that we have tremendous focus on the issue of transparency, tremendous and continued interest and attention to it by the president, by the fact that moreh was here today.

so unlike before the professionals within the agency can rely on the fact that there is really high-level attention to this. that this is what -- you can't get any higher than the president and the attorney general's guidelines are so strong that i am finding that it is very helpful to be able to see this is a presidential priority. this is something that is taken very, very seriously by the top levels of the government, and that i think has a tremendous boost to agency professional supplication on the principles. >> talking a lot about transparency though doesn't actually make the government more transparent. and that's what i feel like we are getting a lot of. a lot of great words how important transparencies and getting great memos but that in itself is not sufficient to make the government more transparent. we need more action. >> i can't disagree with anything that has been set but i

will just add this. in terms of action i think one of the best developments that we have seen from the perspective has been the open government directives, the work is being done on actively making that detective come to life, the open government plans that agencies are working on right now in that connection the group, the interagency group that works on that has put together criteria what we would call bonus criteria were leading practices criteria. we've done that in large part with the help of the open government advocacy groups. and a piece of that really focuses on the and put san a really strong bonus for improving foia administration

and the agencies and also using mediation as a way to resolve disputes. now, i have to tell you in 50 some years i've been working in this area this is the first time i have seen and heard leadership at all different agencies really talking about foia liked you know what is a law and we actually need to do something about it. but not only that, really making it part of the way we work and that is the beginning of what will be a culture change. >> we have two questions from the remote audience and probably only time for one. but this one says foia and related information request reply on having knowledge of an educated guess that information exists in the first place. and it wasn't going where i thought it was going but asking

about saying there are often reports and unpublished documents on secure web sites that could only access if you were in the agency domain. what would the open is the enough what agencies can keep all the off from the public view and if there are things fall off from the public view writing this questioner is getting at are those subject to and looked at as responsive to a foia request? >> that must be for me. the foia request catcher in the agency record and its standard for ayaan and gmc record is very broad set the record is being held by the agency and their computer system wouldn't at all decontrolling. >> you couldn't know it exists. >> now they don't -- it's not unusual obviously nobody knows the actual names of records that a particular agency has.

but requesters can make a request on the topic and it's not uncommon for people to just ask for something thinking maybe this agency has something on this topic but hadn't had any idea whether they will not. that is actually one of the things where the foia public liaison can help the requesters if in fact something that isn't a record of that the agency help request or find. the other thing is the foia requires every agency to publish a foia reference guide and those are available on every agencies website gannet the reference guide describes the types of records that each agency has. so one in answer to this question is if you're not sure what kind of records and agency has the place to go would be the reference guide for the agency which is going to have a description of the records they had. >> jim? it's not on?

>> my question concerns penalties for noncompliance short of litigation. i think we all agree the administration has the religion, the higher level of open government but when it comes down to the grassroots as melanie has articulated their is some real significant resistance that goes beyond the lack of training and be a cultural problem but basically incentives i've been covering an agency for ten years under the bush administration. it had all of axis and compliance with foia and zero other open sunshine things and it still does. the same individuals are involved and i don't -- is there any way to enhance penalties for noncompliance short of litigation?

[inaudible] quote outsourcing consumer complaints. i've got a whole record on consumer complaints that have been ignored over time. why can that be made public? why not crowd source so there is a court of public opinion and at least public shame when these folks over many years have this track record and ignore all of your good training? >> thanks. i think that's to me, too. i think both of the guidelines address the issue of accountability and it's very important to have effective foia had been attrition you have to have accountability and at each agency ultimately the accountability rests with the chief officer. and there are a number of ways the chief officers are accountable. first and foremost will be what

is contained in the officer report because that is the public record of what they have done at the agency, they are public and members of the public can look at them and comment on them. in terms of penalties, it's hard to know what you even envision as a penalty. i think accountability is a more meaningful term to use and the concept of accountability is reflected in the fact that agencies have to make their information public about what they are doing. now patrice brought up before and i didn't get a chance to comment the requesters groups have come to us and talk about the idea of a foia negative ford and we already have a lot of information about agencies available publicly to read the reports are publicly available,

the chief officer reports are. but the idea behind the dashboard which we think is very interesting and we are very seriously considering. i can say that and it's actually the second highest voted on suggestion on open government website where we have members of the public commenting -- today is the last day to want to vote but it's already number two. we've been watching that. we are getting feedback from the public of the idea of wanting to see how agencies are doing and the idea behind the dashboard is that there will be graphic representations how agencies are doing and i like to think if it does that people will want to race to the top as the slogan that is used people will want to be on a chart that shows increasing release, they will want to show they are having decreases in backlogs so that will motivate people, most

agencies to do better. >> and miriam? >> arlan to follow-up with two points. one, it was interesting. at a house hearing yesterday there was one witness and i don't remember who it was precisely, it may have been professor who suggested maybe the president in will be a motivator but i'm not sure that that is a very good motivator. i think instead the accountability starting at the top but one of the things we are looking at recommending and in fact this has been there have been discussions with office of personnel management and that is trying to build into the performance standards for the foia professionals as well as

those who work with the professionals to start searching for and request to have a performance element built in some people are greeted in part on their performance on that. the second thing i wanted to see is please, we would like to hear your ideas for what you would recommend a and the way of both procedures policies, legislative changes because we are going to be looking at precisely those kind of things that might need to be done that could improve things. >> ken, i think you had -- that's going to be the last word. >> my experience by and large as the officers processing the requests are well meaning. they are hamstrung by a number of things. first of all, they are low on the pay scale and the number of leaders telling them what to do. second of all, as we heard before there is not a lot of incentive for them to be overly

disclosing. they could get in trouble in some instances for getting out information, the wrong type of information but they don't get any sort of bonus for giving out information the right way and the performance review that has been in the clinton administration was a great idea, not just the officers, and anybody in an agency out a deal with records. that is a great thing because it's the last word. >> i think melanie has something. >> that's only one part of the problem. you all in the hearing yesterday the last thing asked was for one thing, one or two things that may improve foia and me you didn't see it because it is realistic but it's money. we all know it. these people are on top of anything else are understaffed, overworked, not given the resources to get done with the need to do the house rules on budget expenditures but that is the fix right there for a lot of it.

>> it may be impossible but it's >> i'm sorry we don't have time for a for these questions but thinking the panel for the time and informed engaged discussion thank you. [applause] >> we have the honor of being the ander panel, the final leg of a great event i am very excited because this one turns away from just the policy and looks at implementation and using open government data and getting into the public and innovative ways and useful formats. it's about the technology and the capabilities that are being

explored sometimes inside government but right now outside of government and we have two wonderful practitioners to try to talk about what they've been doing, what has worked, what the problems are, and i'm going to keep my remarks as short as possible to give them plenty of time to show you the kind of projects they are doing because i have to say i've looked at some of them and they are fascinating. they really are. i'm very pleased to welcome her florida beavers the coordinator for the national kids count program at the casey foundation. the project is a website that brings to get their data from a variety of sources on child welfare that allows you to go in and be looking at all of the things you might be interested in. and i have to say as a parent once i got on the site i stayed on the site for quite a while exploring the different pieces of information that were there. and also eric gunderson who was

president and co-founder of the development seed communications and technology consulting group that is working to put down innovative and open source supplications for projects around the world including the u.n. food program and human rights watch and pandemic preparedness with usaid and really exploring using mabus, knowledge management to create very innovative sites. they get some prepared slides and we are going to get into questions after we all present. we will start with laura. >> good after income everybody. thanks so much for giving me the opportunity to share the work that we've been doing with kids count and i was interested to hear the earlier panel and certainly what we do wouldn't be

possible without to make sure the government gives everything we need. so starting with that, i don't have to want to talk so i will try not to talk too fast but i'm going to just take a couple minutes to talk about the casey foundation for those of you that don't know that the annie casey foundation. the annie casey foundation was established by jim casey the founder of ups. he named the foundation with his siblings in honor of his mother. we are the largest foundation in the united states that specifically dedicated to supporting the needs of disadvantaged kids and families. the kids count initiatives is one of the longest running initiatives of the foundation. we started doing it in 1990 so we've been giving it about 20 years. it is an effort to track the wellbeing of children and

provide that the kids with the tools they need to hold policy makers and others accountable to make sure that kids are doing as well as the could be doing in various stages of their lives and different geographies, different levels of government. there's two parts of the kids count project paradigm in charge of the national to count project which includes a data book that we've been doing every other year since 1990 that some of you may be familiar with. and the kids count data center that i'm going to show in a minute but we also have a state kids can't project. their child advocacy organizations in all 50 states, d.c., puerto rico and virgin islands that work with governments of the state level to collect the debt and on child well-being and monitor and track how kids are doing at various plants in their lives and they produce inflammation of the local level as the county and school districts, and i'm going to show you that in a minute the we that we have included the

information on the data center. as i mentioned the kids come project has been going since 1990 and about ten years ago more or less, we started really creating on-line data systems to support. we have been established these relationships with data providers and state, local and federal government and have been collecting data for many years and had a wealth of information and started to taken advantage of the technology and put it out there and the way people could understand. the latest version is the kids count data center. it is a site that allows you to do a whole lot of things with data including ranking states, cities and counties on different indicators of child well-being, make maps and graphs that can be indicted on your own website or used on power plants and i'm going to just show you that capacity in a minute. it is a warehouse now the

contains between 700 to 1,000 indicators of child well-being. so it is a pretty huge warehouse of information. we've got about 3500 geographies now. the data is available on lots of different areas of child well-being on demographics, economic well-being, health, safety and risk. we have child welfare data does encompass a whole lot of the things we think are important for children and families. the data is available that the national state county school district level. sometimes the city level. it depends on the state, and you can get -- we do slices on the data by age and gender, ethnicity, immigrant status depending on the indicator. we get our information from two main places. first is the national statistical sources like the national center for health statistics like the census bureau, national center for education statistics and then

from state agencies themselves and this is the work done by the kids count network in every state. and something that was mentioned earlier about the need for dollars to make this happen is even more -- is even more an issue with the state level i would say that the federal level. these state agencies that we rely on to the data and the federal agencies rely on to get their data are getting crunched like never before and the data folks are the first ones pushed out the door when push comes to shove in a lot of places. so i'm going to very quickly show the data center itself. this is the home page at datacenter.kidscountcenter.org. i will show the data across that is comparable for all 50 states that we collect from the federal statistical agencies and everything i'm going to show you you can also do with the status of the data is collected by the

guarantees from the state agency you can do the same things with. just very quickly, you click on that and get the next page where it gives you this category that i mentioned before and you click on the plus side and then it expands. this is education. you will see that there. we've got data on early education, school age, young adult, test scores and i am just going to click on the fourth graders who scored below the basic reading level. the state from the national assessment of educational progress so it is comparable across the states. the first thing you did this ability to link the state's on this particular measure which is fourth graders who score below the basic reading in 2007 massachusetts did the best on this and actually going to be releasing new data this next week if you're interested. then if you click on the tab of up to can make a map of the data and i just circled the toolbox because the tool box allows you

to very easily e-mail to share increased book, it ritter, something like 50 other social networking sites even knew there was 50, there's probably 100 networking sites, and then they add image to the site which i'm going to show you in a minute is the content indication piece of this so that these maps can be embedded on any blog or website in a real-time way so that when we update the data it gets updated on those websites as well and you can download the data if you are a researcher. this is an exodus of cbs news that the story last year and used and in that it was our maps on the page through the website. very quickly created additional tools and this is all evil thing as technology does and the internet does every year there are ten things we can do with it but we created something called

a widget which is the box on the right-hand side that is a piece of code that can be ended on any website and contains we selected ten indicators in the book and last year's which it we've had bought a mobile enhanced site because we feel like in the book we've produced all along which is kind of big, a lot of people brought them with this to meetings and we felt like we couldn't go completely online. we need to create something easily accessible on blackberrys and iphone because if you are in a meeting and what to do with the statistic is when you are talking to the school board on teen pregnancy in york county and you don't have it in front of you nisha need to be budgeted easily and there's not a lot of sites that do that so we did create a mobile site that allows you to get some of the information on the website and the easy way orontes to get letters and you can follow less.

and i just wanted to show and a sample of the widget which was indicted on this blog. this is what we are working on now. we are going to be getting congressional district data to the site in the next six months or so. it's in progress for about 30 of the indicators and we will be building on that. we are adding more to the child welfare data. we are working on a mobile phone application with probably on iphone and blackberry and designing customizable widgets. so that's it. >> great. thank you. we are going to turn to eric who will talk about some of the projects that development see it has been working on a little bit more international and also talking about open data and to some extent also open source. eric? >> thank you. of the afghanistan election was

august 25th. the days immediately following the election the national democratic institute called and said the data that was coming in and was looking a little funny and basically this is the most exciting slide of the presentation here. [laughter] this is exactly what was coming and despite what we might have seen on advertisements in the metro the adobe pds are not a way to increase open data for open government. [applaus is a contest example where bad technology is actually inheriting the flow of information. we were brought in to look at the data set or actually interval three datasets. we wanted to see what the independent election commission findings were in the final vote count happened so by medicine today released karzai passed the 54%. we also use the data from before the election where they had a

listing of all polling centers, geographical toward omans, district level estimated voter turnout and finally, we had some easy cd of the allowed usin and that was down to the provincial data and all the data looked like that. this isn't a great way to work as a team to make decisions. what we needed was a data browser to live out of the pds and work with it. what we ended up making parts of iraq released afghanistan election data. and the ndi chose toeleasehe data in preparation for the 2010 election and here is what it looks like. we were able to pull out the data to show a national view of what was happening and then we can quickly call over to a huge map of afghanistan and when you

are seeing here is afghanistan at the time of the election had about 400 districts and we are doing here is tagging and doing the density points down to the district levels we didn't release for security reasons but we were able to actually run equations seeing in this case show me all polling stations that have 600 ballots which in the case of afghanistan is 100%. and 95 per cent towards the single candidate. just wait to start identifying something that might be happening. and but in the case of afghanistan like a lot of things, the details of complex a matter and to often people try to oversimplified the situation. we heard pundits talk about the security matter, did ethnicity matter? we wanted to make through the data browser a structurally increase complex at a polling and external data sources like ethnicity in this case digitized

soviet maps from the 1960's that have the most accurate ethnic breakdown of afghanistan and then allow the actable breakdown for karzai and abdullah to read it ethnicity matter? let's look at this on the map. then being able to interact with aveda and click on a specific point and go to the district in this case and on these pages we started using other datasets and poland from different sites. here you see the percentage of fogle and urban population, population numbers and this is essential to certain contexts especially when you have a lot going on. and it just helped the analysts to be the site was originally billed as an internal site for the partners in kabul and also back in d.c.. the data filter that i mentioned on the front page of the map that actually follows you through the sites say you can still see the query that i am

running from 600 votes. what is squall about that is it is actually highlighting the centers listed on this page that meet that criteria. so i can click on a polling center and go all the way down to see the results for the particular station in this case these are actual ballot boxes and the map stays with me. you are seeing the voter turnout in this case. everybody voted at the center and they had strong feelings about who they voted for. this was an open data feed and getting the data and we also wanted to make sure that we were able to get the data out so journalists and folks on the grnd were able to export this and work with it and exile. clearly we were working with the firemen and want to print the reports and spread these things over the table and talk about some of the data sets usi the tools in this case using managing news which is built on top of -- the same components

power and white house got a glove or the central in this project. so, how close are we? okay. and again, what we need with tools and the emerging data is ability to increase complexity. we heard about security. in this case we were able to as the afghanistan national security levels from the week before the election august 13th and digitized the pds and start showing here is in red negative roofed levels and did that correspond to fraud. i don't know what for its personal data sets and if it's open you can start merging in different ways. here we can just pan over like mobil map and see there is voting in enemy controlled territory is that good or bad for democracy. no idea but at least we start seeing this happening and are able to visualize more complex

situations and not have the analysis looked up because the people using this our country experts come election experts and too often you ship this off to put points on the mat. the actual people that should be adding value and fleeing with the value that comes with the data isn't happening. finally, on the open data track making some of the maps were key from the security map it is the data we ended up sending but logistics also matter. we see the donkeys walking with the ballot boxes and we need to make really rich apps in this casee pped io the nasa's data before this was cool in this town. they set up the shovel and did their radar of the entire world and through that you can feel about the different shades and now we can pan area and to overlays with the maps and we

are also pulling street maps like wikipedia for the folks and they actually at the time of this had the best road data in kabul so we were able to put rhode overlays, political boundary overlays and have these nice shades. and then by being able to overlay the data we were able to say in some of these hard to get two areas, could more fraud be happening? especially what does this mean in the case of the runoff because originally there was to be a run off after a bunch of ballots were thrown out. and in this process it dragged on and people started freaking out the sun was coming. sui decided to make winter maps. nasa is radar data so we were able to look at the data and adjust the snow line to 1800 meters and pan the country white and allowing us to say where could we have logistical issues out there and we were able to, it was kind of a trick

on the gse site but we were able to look open data from nasa in the case of wheat january, 2006 imagery showing the january blizzard. so, all of those maps were made from the open data. all of this that you see are made from open source. >> thank you. i want people to start lining up, and i do have one or two questions for the panelists and that we will shift to the questions here. my first question for both of you is these are fascinating examples of bringing together various databases and data sources to provide a rich and full picture. but the question is should the government be doing this? is that the goal to have the government do this or should the government be facilitating groups such as yourselves making

it easier for other groups to be the innovators? either path you might think is the eckert half what is the biggest barrier going further down that path? >> i would say as far as the annie casey foundation, we are a foundation and we fund groups to collect this information, part of what we try to do is build the capacity to do the database advocacy with the advocates across the country so, whether or not the government provided that information in an easy way or difficult way is we would prefer easy and for them to be able to do the work they need to do. there still needs to be folks to take this information and put it in front of policymakers and the media and also connect policy that the data is what it is but unless there is a policy

solution attached there is only so much you can do with it. i think from our perspective it would be great and i would say for the government to do what we are doing and part of what we try to do with kids count is make the information really easy to understand, really accessible for the average advocate not somebody who necessarily knows how to do that g.i. s mapping and that there are people who need to have this boiled down in a way they can take it and use it in their everyday work and write their grand proposals and do the things they need to do to really improve the lives of kids where they live. so on the one hand i think that might be a hindrance of making the season to understand. the other thing i would say is money especially of the state level but the folks who are collecting the data at the state level or pressed like i said like never before. so right now in the current

budget situation i would say that is probably the number one barrier. >> the u.s. government should not be doing visualizations with the data. they should really focus in the resources they have on just opening up the data. there are plenty of ngos and developers that the data was actually opened up a better we could pay our own pictures with that. i think if obama was running around 15 years ago saying there is a big open date initiative it would have been called industry subsidy. i think there is a convergence happening right now between open source software and open the door in the sense that it allows independent developers to do so much more with this. and really open up and tell different stories. i think the timing of this is exciting. >> what you think the biggest barrier to the gun that is is the resources? technical capacity? >> so, i think media over the

past couple of years there has been subculture that has taken awhile to change. i do see it actually changing pretty fast and i see a lot of people in the government wanting to try to be more open. there are more technical and team hurdles to overcome. they are kind of looking at this like we have to be open government in this wonderfully on funded open government directed and maybe if i have enough money in my account this year i can actually achieve some of those and start positioning when funds will come in 2011 or 2012. what if they just started focusing on open data to improve the efficiency of the team? what is open data starts when you do the data collection keeping it in good formats? focused on just flexibility within your team being able to craft and design this? i think that is going to help the agencies actually assess what they should be opening up and get the internal efficiency

wins because this open data honeymoon is going to end in a year or two and people will immediately went to be like how are we going to pay for this? i think open data is by definition increasing efficiency with agencies so that it actually pays for itself and we need to start identifying fat now and it does and international development corporation. >> agreed to read we have a question here. >> i am from the voice foundation. want to ask a question here to especially kids count because when i heard you i felt that anyone who went in and looked to a specific part of the data on children in a state would love to be able to add that specific point, a bigger point, the able to identify those who have digested the data in an understandable way so that it doesn't have to be an individual. it is and everything managing and understanding that he would immediately have a record, and that specific data point that you have been there, that you

have been analyzing the afghan election results, all of those have been and presence. that would be extremely useful to bring the information to a manageable and an understandable level. >> so i guess really facilitating the network with it is geographic or a particular election -- >> [inaudible] the government puts it, that's where the link should be. not somewhere else. right there. >> have either of you tried to facilitate that kind of that working through the data, true interest in the data? >> because the casey foundation is committed to improving kids' lives, it's part of our mantra and we get drilled in our heads when we walk in the door to get the job, so we work with -- when

we work with communities are now aware of for we are working with them around, we bring the data pieces most of the time by the government to help them with their decision making process. so, we certainly have the net but we were it is driven by the community and the data is brought in to help them as they move along with their decisions. we have thought about and i'm not sure if this is exactly what you are getting out, but now because we are starting to open up and do more social media kinds of stuff online having the ability to let people comment on the data to let people have conversations with each other, that's not what you're talking about? okay. maybe i'm not getting it then. >> a point to pick up the data, the official data, you should have been identified that you have been present, that you have been manipulating the data or done something with the data interpreting so that any other citizen that goes there says whoever else has been here,

where can i build the group that is interested in this point? and create a circle because that is the way that you get some decent and not the citizens to be analyzed on one issue. >> i will say just from my point of view while it is an interesting idea and i see what you're talking about, there is also a privacy concern in terms of there's a lot of people who want to look at this data for whatever reason they don't want someone to know they looked. there are people who work for corporations or work for an educational system who might be coming in to look at the data and have problems with it and they don't want their superiors to know they looked at it so i know there is a privacy concerns of if he made it automated what i think be off-putting to a lot of people. but a voluntary one which is what you guys have been doing with posting it on facebook and allowing people to actually pull from the system and promote out to people this is what i'm

looking at and this is what i find interesting. >> did you have anything? >> so one last question that i had was as we move forward, and it was something that laura said that prompted me to think about it, this tension between the complexity of the dfa and the complexity of the tools because all the capacity that the tools can do but sometimes it can be a bit overwhelming versus designing it for ease of use, intuitive use, there is a struggle there and do you always lean towards the easing intuitive or do you try and really tapped into the full capability and then instead try to educate people as to here is what you need to do and here is the tutorials we are going to bring you along with us to a whole new level. >> i will say ideally we would be able to do both, but we have really focused in on the first

because our audience really is a lot of people who are doing advocacy on their own and they need one piece of data. the one piece of day data they need to take to the city council with them and on that day they need to be defined in the ten minutes they have before they run out the door to that meeting were media who on the decline just give me that thing i need a really fast and i will leave you alone. so there is certainly that is the audience that we have worked with for 20 years with kids count. the idea we talked about using more open source data functionality with what we do it's something that we would like to be able to do in the future, but the folks who can do that kind of work are secondary audience for us. as of that is definitely -- what the -- it is a new capability. its new technology that we would love to be about to explore more.

>> we are often times during kind of like a lightweight visual that targets a more general audience but then allowing you to quickly to build down and go into the weeds. it is especially important for the people in the town that want to get to a specific number as you mentioned. there's a lot more interest now in allowing a data portability to other sites which is also where you were going. organizations are seeing major advantages to power other sites data. they are very clearly influencing how somebody else is talking about the numbers. this is incredibly powerful. and so there is as agencies, as organizations are able to do more like a building of other people's data sets, that includes incentives to build more api as a way we're an organization can expose their data in a way that makes it easier for people to build widgets and visualizations on top of severe is it about a chicken and egg like to buy build the api or july wheat and assess who has an aggregate or

on their site and that kind of stuff or how does this work? and i think it's been a little bit of back-and-forth the last couple of years but it's moving and you are seeing a lot of people justify the expense of writing at api. opening, the process of opening the data isn't cheap. >> well, i would really like to thank both of our panelists for their time and for the lively debate making us aware of the fascinating web sites. thank you very much. [applause] we would especially like to thank all of our sponsors for today's program including and especially the center for american progress and of course you, all of you in the remote audiences and panel of guests, all three panels for joining us today. more open and accountable government at every level is up to all of us. we invite you to join us in our

work. open the government bought or set up in you to create this discussion. it's the open government directed at google.com, it is a google group. and of course we invite you to come to our site to get more information about today's event or sunshine week which ends today, please go to www.openthegovernment.org. thank you very much. [applause] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] ..