The geekdom of crowds: the Obama administration experiments with data-driven democracy.

• Author: Homans, Charles
• Position: Barack Obama

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My favorite bar in Washington is the Raven Grill, a shoebox-shaped (and -sized) dive in the city's Mount Pleasant neighborhood. The second half of the bar's official name is a total lie, unless you count the overpriced beef jerky on the shelf next to the liquor bottles. But the beer is sold at prices otherwise unheard of in D.C., the north wall of the men's bathroom used to feature some very nice anatomical artwork, and the jukebox has been strategically stocked to thwart even the worst taste (the only real hazard is Bob Marley's "Legend"). Most crucially, the Raven is an easily walkable twelve blocks from my row house in neighboring Columbia Heights. The only real problem is that in the past year, those twelve blocks have been the site of seven robberies, eight assaults, and two homicides.

I know this because of a free, online computer application called Stumble Safely. The program plots recent criminal activity--what happened where, when--on a map of the neighborhoods surrounding popular nightspots in Northwest D.C., in a spattering of gray and red dots. Heading to or from the bar, I can find it on the map, select the relevant time of day, and look for the clusters of clots to see which corners might be worth avoiding. I can click on locations and get the police report of what exactly happened there: whether it was, say, a guy in a mask robbing a convenience store on 14th Street with a sawed-off shotgun (as happened around midnight on a Tuesday in January), or just someone's cell phone getting snatched up the block (11 p.m., August 28, 14th and Columbia Road). In short, any D.C. resident with an iPhone and a signal can now carry more crime data in his or her pocket than beat cops in even well-wired police departments had in their squad cars fifteen years ago.

Stumble Safely was designed by Eric Gundersen, the president of a small D.C.-based tech consulting firm called Development Seed--and, as it happens, a former bartender at the Raven, where I met him for a beer on an evening in early June. Gundersen is a tech guy in the freewheeling Silicon Valley mold, a bearish twenty-nine-year-old with a scruffy beard who dresses like a bike messenger--when I met him he was locking up an immaculate new creamsicle-colored fixed-gear bike in front of the bar--and lives on a houseboat on the Potomac River, tied up at D.C.'s southwest waterfront. As we settled into a booth by the jukebox, Gundersen explained that Stumble Safely was more a demonstration project than anything else--he wanted to show people the power of well-arranged government data. Development Seed, which Gundersen had cofounded five years ago while he was working on a master's degree in international development in Peru, had designed software and Web sites for the World Bank, the World Food Program, and the U.S. Agency for International Development, among others, building tools to map food aid deliveries in sub-Saharan Africa and flu pandemics in the developing world. "Maps forever have been about telling stories," Gundersen said. "A lot of the stories we work with are very complex--information from thousands of school districts, or all the bird flu data in Southeast Asia. But we wanted to tell stories that people would understand."

In October, Gundersen and his Development Seed colleagues entered a contest hosted by the district government, called Apps for Democracy. The contest was the brainchild of Vivek Kundra, then the district's chief technology officer, and it was conceived in order to try out a theory that Kundra, a thirty-four-year-old veteran of the Northern Virginia IT community, had: government data were useful in the government's own hands, but radically more so when people outside the bureaucracy had access to them. Advances in computing power, Internet connectivity, and open-source software development over recent years meant that more people were able to do more things with data; applications like Google and devices like the iPhone had increased the appetite among even the technologically semiliterate for the stuff.

Kundra figured there were probably plenty of civic-minded geeks in the district with the ability to provide information-based government services better than the government itself could, or come up with new ones the city bureaucrats had never even thought of. Why not open up all the information the city could to them and see what happened?

Kundra's office made feeds of raw data--records of everything from trash collection to government employee purchases, provided in easily downloadable formats--available on the district's Web site, and offered a prize to the programmer who made the most enterprising use of them. Forty-seven entries...