Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Start-Up Taps Obama E-Gov Energy

The Seattle-based start-up that helped fuel President Obama's Web-based transition team donor disclosure effort has changed its name, hired a Washington, D.C. public relations firm and on Tuesday launched a social network that aggregates public data from around the world in a single destination. Socrata, formerly known as Blist, is piggybacking on the administration's zeal for open government by offering a Web site intended to increase agencies' transparency; promote civic participation and community collaboration; and improve policymaking. Building on more than a year of beta test feedback from more than 40,000 public and private sector customers, Socrata.com initially is providing free access to more than 200 public datasets. The Obama administration recently unveiled Data.gov, a Web destination for citizens to gain access to agencies' raw data feeds. Socrata offers a wide range of feeds on everything from government agencies to those bilked by financier Bernard Madoff to seafood and chicken recipes.

"Much has been discussed in recent months about government transparency and citizen participation. Socrata truly allows government transparency to come to life," Socrata CEO Kevin Merritt said in a press release circulated by tech PR firm 463 Communications. "We are providing publicly available data in an interactive, social format that enables citizens, for the first time, to discover, read, manipulate and share publicly available data with a tool we all have -- a Web browser." Until now, sites focused on public datasets have been hard to navigate and often required tedious downloading of raw file-types to proprietary applications for offline use by IT experts, Socrata said. Plus, most of those sites were not engineered for Web 2.0. The firm is backed by Frazier Technology Ventures and Morgenthaler Ventures and raised more than $6 million in its first round of funding.

In related news, the Sunlight Foundation recently launched a contest for to Web engineers to use Data.gov information in creative and helpful ways. First prize is $10,000 and the winner will be announced later this summer. Read more about that effort here.