When exactly one year ago Tim O’Reilly, the founder of O’Reilly Media and visionary of the Web 2.0 movement, proposed Gov 2.0, most people couldn’t conceive of our government becoming a transparent “enabler.” Yet, just one year later, and a year and a half after President Obama wrote he wanted "unprecedented level of openness" in his administration, 272,677 federal databases are open to public access on the www.data.gov website.

Instead of squirreling away data in dark corners in Washington D. C., declassification has increased public access. The technology community has translated the raw data from a bunch of impenetrable databases to real-time, useful tools easily accessed on websites and/or as smart phone applications.

Local innovation
Over here on the west coast, the City and County of San Francisco, led by CIO Chris Vein and his innovation team, are creating our City’s version by allowing similar access to San Francisco’s data. Over 150 data sets have been opened. Mining of these data by local developers has enabled people, organizations and businesses to improve the performance of local government, and increase citizen participation. The resulting smart phone apps make our lives easier by creating convenient access to health, living, transportation and other info.

In San Francisco to date, 50 phone apps have been developed with functions from crime-spotting to bicycle trip or public transportation route planning, restaurant inspecting to finding recreational opportunities to play with our kids. The complete app list is online at http://datasf.org/showcase/.

Here is an overview of how our data has been put to use:

Avoiding Crime
CrimeSpotting, SpotCrime, CrimeReports, Your Mapper, SpacialKey, CrimeDeskSF, and Are You Safe San Francisco are apps and/or websites that aggregate SFPD crime data and plot them on maps to visualize spatial locations of criminal activity. Each app has a different perk such as sending email alerts when incidents occur in your neighborhood.

Coordinating Transportation
Getting around SF can be tough. The options include BART, MUNI, bicycle, ferry, taxi, cars, and walking. Transportation apps help us figure out how to get from point A to point B using real-time trip planners, maps, and GPS locators, aligned with transit route schedules. Routesy, RailBandit, BARTArrivals, Dabnab, iCommute SF and a handful of others map out public transportation options for getting around SF. The real-time feature on Routesy helps you time exactly when to be at a MUNI stop so you can stay in bed as long as possible and still make it onto the bus.

Some non-public-transportation options include: Cabulous which helps passengers and taxi drivers find each other; and Bay Tripper which assists with planning a trip along bike routes.

CycleTracks works the opposite of other apps. Instead of providing information, The County Transportation Authority collects tacking information from bicyclists while they ride to understand cyclists’ needs and improve routes.

Helping Families
After School Special combines data from San Francisco schools, libraries and restaurants so parents can plan after-school activities and see how children's nutritional options compare by neighborhood. Mom Maps helps find fun and kid-friendly parks, playgrounds, restaurants, museums and indoor play areas.

Identifying Trees
SF Trees will tell you both the Latin and the common name for 65,000 trees from the Golden Gate Bridge down to Daly City. While Urban Forest Map also calculates how many tons of carbon dioxide the trees are removing from the air.

Finding Parking
Can’t remember where you parked you car? The Original Parking Locator organizes parking locations and accumulates clues to lead you back to your car. Accessible Parking SF displays blue zone parking spots within a given radius from a destination. Parkzing helps avoid parking tickets by comparing your parking location with street cleaning schedules. Then it sends reminders when you need to move your car.

Eating
It’s all well and good that Auntie Jane likes a restaurant. But what do the real inspectors know? Using data from the Health Department CleanScores, Restaurant Inspector, and SparkleDine help us choose clean and safe eating options. And Restaurant Inspector even lets us report unsanitary conditions back to the Health Department.

Day-to-day Living
Ecofinder helps find out where to recycle and properly dispose of just about everything. Enter a street address into EveryBlock to find news, police calls, building permits, restaurant inspections and much more, updated throughout the day, every day. SF Way is the smorgasbord app. It provides over 50 categories of information including transit, restaurants, nightlife, public restrooms, and traffic.

In conclusion
The smart phone apps are evolving as innovative developers become more adept at translating gov’t data into usable information. The first generation apps mash the data then present it in easy-to-understand formats like colored dots on a map (for example CrimeSpotting). The information provides a real-time look at our surroundings so we can make important decisions like where to live, or eat, and when to flee the scene.

The second and third gen apps allow us, the users, to provide feedback so that the data sets become smarter (for example CycleTracks and Mom Maps). When moms took pictures of hazardous conditions at a park and uploaded them to Mom Maps, the City responded by increasing maintenance and fixing the reported problem. Because users contributed back to the data sets everyone benefited and government’s role changed from “controlling” information to enabling us to share the controls and the responsibility.

The second and third gen apps also have GPS-location-coordinated tools that help us track ourselves, our friends, and monitor things like airplanes that are delayed.

Not surprisingly, San Francisco is on the vanguard of the Gov 2.0 movement. As one of the most pioneering places in the country, we are lucky to have a large, inventive developer community and dedicated City staff determined to democratize public sector data and drive innovation.