Mashing up public records

In this 8-minute video interview I conducted Wednesday at the NetSquared conference — notice the venue: Cisco, not a media company — founder-CEO Michael Schnuerle discusses Louisville-based YourMapper.com, a young startup that hopes to make a business in part by helping the public gain public access to public records. The company has already licensed its mapping technology to at least one news publication.

Central to YourMapper’s plan is an open API, which can prove incredibly powerful when paired with the proper datasets. Schneurle even waged a months-long battle with Kentucky officials wielding only the Freedom of Information Act before the state attorney general came down on his side.

As I said in my new post at the IdeaLab, it’s time to give the public true access to public records. Oddly, that rarely happens now, with media organizations playing a gatekeeper role and releasing stories through the editorial process — but rarely releasing the raw data itself.

News organizations ought to create their own open APIs that give users access to public records in their communities. And this is the important twist: Instead of just making the data available internally, for its staff to analyze and reinterpret, news publications ought to bring readers and users into such efforts.

As I said in Tuesday’s post, this is all about enlisting users in a collaborative effort to tap into rich sources of information about what’s happening in local communities. Political contributions, birth records, neighborhood crime, housing sales — data is cool and interesting when interpreted and presented in an engaging way.

Call it data jockey crowdsourcing. I’ll wager we’ll see scores of such efforts in the coming years.

NetSquared contacts

Here are some of the other people I met at NetSquared:

Nick Reville, executive director of Miro

David Selsky, Democracyinaction.org

Darian Rodriguez Heyman, executive director, Craigslist Foundation

Michael Litz, CEO, US, Oneworld.net

Mike Culver, Amazon Web Services

Peter Deitz and Christine Egger, SocialActions.com

Sean Tanner, Research Director MAPLight.org

Jon Warnow, Step It Up (and its new incarnation)

Peggy Duvette, co-director, Natural Capital Institute

Jill K. Finlayson, Web marketing manager, Social Edge

Ephrat Bitton, founder, iCare

Cesar Castro, research director, The Institute for the Future

Wendy Turner, General Manager, Vocalo.org

Holly Ross, executive director, NTen (Nonprofit Technology Network)

Ben Rattray, founder & CEO, Change.org

Bobby Fishkin, CEO, Reframeit.com

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.