Mashups in Action: Mashing Makes for Better Government
Even before President Obama took the oath of office and issued his now somewhat-famous Transparency Memo, we saw a rise in the demand for information the general public could see. After almost 2 years of focus, transparency has become staple on every federal agency’s to-do list.
We’ve said it before but it probably bears repeating: technologies like JackBe's Presto Enterprise Mashup Platform certainly have a role to play in initiatives like these. Next week, in fact, we’ll be at the Gov 2.0 Expo in Washington DC and the DoDIIS Worldwide Conference in Phoenix talking about some of our mashup efforts.
Though JackBe works primarily with the agencies themselves, we also see citizen-developers use the Developer Edition of our Enterprise Mashup Platform (available at www.jackbe.com/dev) to create mashups based on publicly-available information. For example, a while back one of our community members built a Crisis Dashboard in response to the earthquake in Haiti. More recently another community member developed a Broadband Applicant Geospatial Mashup App. It is a great example of a purpose-built mashup.
The Broadband App presents a view of how a government agency could potentially allocate federally-funded dollars to support the extension of Broadband infrastructure and education across the nation. This collection of mashups provides deep insight into the companies, locations, projects and loans/grants requested to fulfill the Broadband promise.
Once the basic criteria are selected, several interconnected mashups display information, including:
• Broadband Plan Dollars: Shows the total dollar amounts requested for Broadband infrastructure development, non-infrastructure education, applicant loans and applicant grants needed to fulfill the Broadband promise.
• Filter Broadband Applicants: Allows users to filter Broadband applicants by state, project grant amount, project type and organization. The results are displayed on a map with additional information about the company contact and project title.
• Applicants Details: Provides more detail on the applicant's project description, type and grant/loan requested.
• Org Project Funding Chart: Displays the percentages between the total project cost, the requested loan amount, the requested grant amount and any monetary difference the applicant funds. The chart reflects what project amount would be funded by the government and what project amount would be funded by the applicant.
This App is a great example of how mashups can be applied to an important public issue. It’s more impressive when you remember that is was a citizen-led effort. Mash on.
