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.



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