San Francisco Gets Its Very Own App Store

by Nathaniel Whittemore · 2009-09-25 10:22:00 UTC
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San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom

Thought that application stores were just for iPhones? Think again. As more and more government data - everything from demographics to crime - goes online, administrations at all levels are getting more creative about how to let people interact with that data. This morning in a guest post on web2.0 blog Mashable, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom announced the launch of an app store for city data.

The launch of the app store follows last month's launch of DataSF, a clearinghouse for city information that includes data sets like information about elections, environment, health, crime, and more. In conversations with local tech luminaries like "Web2.0" term coiner Tim O'Rielly, there was a lot of excitement around the idea of an app store to showcase the work of developers crunching the data from DataSF.org.

The public launch of the DataSF Showcase is meant to help people better access the applications being built, as well as incentivize new developers to build tools. The sample applications the site has launched with include some pretty interesting things. There are a number of the crime-map-mashups one might expect, and an alternative trip planner that brings together data about public transportation. One of the most interesting applications is Cabspotting, which uses GPS data from the city's Yellow Caps to create maps of where cabs are at any given moment.

In his launch post on Mashable, Newsom writes that "In San Francisco we are trying to turn government into an organizing platform for civic engagement by giving our residents the tools to build the kind of government that works for them." This is the sort of rhetoric that gets people excited about the internet's power to reengage democracy in new ways. With the Application Showcase, SF is one step further in actually living up to that promise.

(Photo: bkusler)

Nathaniel Whittemore is the founder of Assetmap. Previously he was the founding director of the Northwestern University Center for Global Engagement.
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