This is an exciting time for cities working with data, as the literacy level for visualization appears to be rising by the day, driving growing demand and opportunity for new and interesting ways for people to interact with their digital civic infrastructure. And as the field grows, we’re also experiencing challenges and real questions on the role that cities take in providing the base layer of services and truths that residents and workers can rely on. We’re looking forward to examining these phenomena in a setting where the mutual goal is to make a difference now and build the pathways to more digitally efficient services throughout urban America.

As said before, this event is invitation-only so why am I writing about it? Hopefully the good folks at Stamen will hear this call for making the content accessible to a broader audience. Having the the talks as a podcast or the slides from the presentations on Slideshare would be wonderful…

From the USA to Australia and New Zealand to the United Kingdom. All data repositories are searchable directly from The Guardian’s search field making it even easier to find relevant data.

Via DataBlog from guardian.co.uk

The IT Dashboard is a new website enabling federal agencies and the general public to view details of federal information technology investments.

The exciting part about this news message is the fact that the IT Dashboard is available to the general public. This means that government data is shown transparently to the people and tools to examine the data are also provided. According to Tim O’Reilly there was a big discussion about the workload of maintaining the data. Having this data public creates the urgency to keep it up-to-date, clean and making decisions based on what the data shows.

The visualization methods are rather crude. Pie Charts, Bar Charts and the indispensable Gauge show the basic data. Unfortunately the creators couldn’t resist the temptation to add some 3D to the graphics. A customizable Treemap visualization let’s the user drill down into more complex datasets. All the visualizations are created in Flash by using the Fusion Charts library.

All the datasets are also available as XML Feed or CSV. Furthermore, custom Data Feeds can be created and downloaded by chosing the source, selecting the required fields and adding filters for agencies. This seems to be another strong feature of the website and could provide interested users with exactly the data they are intersted in.

Read Tim O’Reilly’s View on the IT Dashboard.

It’s official description goes as follows:

Data.gov includes a searchable data catalog that includes access to data in two ways: through the “raw” data catalog and using tools. Please note that by accessing datasets or tools offered on Data.gov, you agree to the Data Policy, which you should read before accessing any dataset or tool. If there are additional datasets that you would like to see included on this site, please suggest more datasets here. For more information on how to use Data.gov, view our tutorial.

Infosthetics.com pointed out that these datasets are hardly accessible or understandable by the majority of people. Raw and machine-readable data is very interesting for developers to use it in their applications but for average readers it’s not suited to provide much insight. The data is the foundation from which understanding may arise if it’s communicated in a clear and understandable manner.

Let’s imagine a place where this data may be communicated in a more human readable way. The reader could choose a dataset, use an appropriate visualization method, mash the data with other resources, see what other users have done with the data and share his thoughts and insights. Does this ring a bell? Well, this is something already happening on the Many Eyes website or in the NY Times Visualization Lab. Maybe these forces could be grouped together and thus help making use of the data easier for the audience.

The Sunlight Labs have initiated the second installment of their Apps for America competition. The project rewards the best application built with data from the Data.gov website. It’s supported by Google, O’Reilly Media, and TechWeb.

Via Infosthetics.com and SunlightLabs. Hat tip to chino.