They'd Check the "It's Complicated" Box; The Oppositional Approach to Getting from Here to Five Million; Transition's Tech Team Taps Beltway and Beyond; Government Guide to Marijuana (Vendors); Nanobama, the Microscopic President; DC's Apps Contest Names Winners; Progressives' Annual Participatory Debrief; and more.

The National Counterterrorism Center has published a huge data set on its Web site. The Worldwide Incidents Tracking System has a few thousand records of violent acts going back to 2004, and it's begging to be downloaded by a Flash guru who can show the government why open data is a good practice.

This is two months old, but we missed it: Chris Kemp, the CIO of NASA's Ames Research Center (the place responsible for the just-launched Kepler satellite and the next-generation Mars rovers), wrote a blog post about the future he envisions for NASA's Web presence:

A long time interest of mine has been how can we weave NASA's data into the fabric of the web, and what that will mean for the future of space exploration...

I will talk about the web as a platform...and how NASA will use this platform to share our data with the world. I will talk about Silicon Valley...about new partnerships that we are forging here. [Ames is less than a mile from the Google campus.] I'll give you my thoughts on how we are teaming up with some of the larger companies here in the Valley to syndicate one of NASA's greatest resources, our scientific data and our out-of-this-world images and videos.

A few days ago, I wrote about Chris Kemp, the CIO of NASA's Ames Research Center, and his experimentation with a more modern information philosophy. His post on the future of NASA's Web presence was soon followed with another on the value of open data: "Why Make a Universe of Data Open to the Public?". One of the first projects to use NASA's opened data is Microsoft's Worldwide Telescope. They are also working with Cisco to build a climate change monitoring platform.

There are countless reasons to open your data: education, error proofing, and the simple fact that government data belongs to citizens are some. But the best reasons to open data are the ones we don't yet realize: you open data not just because it allows you do to X, Y and Z, but because it allows you to do ANYTHING. If NASA's data ever becomes available to independent Web developers, that's when the really interesting things will start happening.

Kemp's plans have internal opponents, though.

Tomorrow at 1 pm--a few hours after Michael Bloomberg's keynote at the PdF Conference--the New York City Council will hold a hearing on a proposed bill to open all city data. Quoting Sam Wong,

The bill will require the City to create a centralized online repository of all publicly available information that is either produced or retained by the City. Furthermore, data published under this legislation will be done so in a format that will be readable by any computer device, whether that is a laptop or a phone. Not only will this collection of information be invaluable to elected officials, other government agencies and public advocates, but it can also be used by private citizens who could use the information in ingenious and unforeseen ways.

It is easy to be an armchair critic of government spending. When you're not on the ground, solving budget deficits is simply a matter of "cutting pork": governments spend money left and right! Finding places to save should be easy.

Two months ago, we found a Craigslist post requesting volunteers to help the city of San Francisco create their own version of data.gov.

The site--DataSF--just launched, and while it's no data.gov, it's definitely a valuable list of data feeds. After browsing through the categories (health, geography, crime, environment, elections, housing, transportation, & public works), it looks like a much better collection than what DC was providing this time last year for their first Apps for Democracy project. (DC's data catalog has since greatly expanded.)

A few months ago, Governor Schwarzenegger used his Twitter account to request radical ideas for solving California's budget crisis.

This request must have gotten a good response, because the tweet has spawned its own Web site for citizens' policy ideas, with a full set of hash tag standards.

The site was launched on August 25. It aggregates all tweets with the #myidea4CA hashtag into a Digg-style vote up/vote down list of ideas. Like Obama's first virtual town hall, the most popular ideas regard marijuana legalization. (Given the recent high-level attention marijuana policy has received in California, this shouldn't be a surprise--nor should it be discarded as a comical foible of online democracy.)

Craig Newmark flew straight to Los Angeles from Dublin in order to share his thoughts on using technology and social media to improve government at the Gov 2.0 Camp LA this past weekend. Newmark, who writes frequently on the topic and has recently been quite active in bringing attention to problems in the Veterens Affairs area, came to speak from a customer service perspective. Although I've seen Craig speak a few times about that, he always adds new anecdotes and provides additional angles on the problem showing how much he thinks about it on a regular basis. But for him, it boils down to the basics. "A lot of customer service is obvious stuff. It's just listening to people." This was the afternoon core conversation on Saturday. (See my earlier post about the conference in general and what transpired the first morning.)

• Norway | When it comes to open data, potential is not enough.
  Norway and the other Scandinavian countries are potential open data champions, thanks to an established tradition of transparency in government. And it's true that there's a lot going on when it comes to open data: some months ago PDF speaker Bente Kalsnes listed an incredible amount of projects and initiatives.
  But apparently it's not enough to reach a noteworthy level.