Let’s #HackTheIsland
Something beautiful is happening in Puerto Rico. For the first time ever, the government is opening a good amount of datasets and APIs to the public. Even better, this is happening only three months after the Governor signed an executive order asking all agencies to implement and release APIs for their data. Hopefully, this is just the beginning.
This may come as no surprise to anyone living in a big city in U.S. Most of them have similar initiatives already, but in Puerto Rico this is a major leap forward. For years the administration was either apathetic or inefficient at opening up their datasets. In the rare cases in which datasets were opened by the local government, they either lacked quality or were lost among a sea of dead links in websites with a “best viewed in Netscape Navigator” stamp.
These soon-to-be free resources include a dump of the historical corporation registry of the island, web services for geo data about electric outages and crime reports from the Police Department. According to Puerto Rico’s CIO, Giancarlo Gonzalez, every agency will be opening some kind of dataset or web service starting this week.
As important as this step is, there has to be a call for action to citizens to act and make use of these newly available resources. To this end, the office of the CIO organized a summit and a hackathon where anyone will be able to use these resources to develop prototypes, do analyses on the datasets and hack something together. This is an amazing opportunity for us citizens to show the government that opening up is completely worth it.
I believe these developments go beyond any philosophy of openness. Having been in San Francisco for the last three years, I have seen what a place full of highly motivated individuals, interesting problems and opportunities look like. Puerto Rico needs to fuel this thirst for innovation in its citizens. Some individuals are already organizing to create diverse efforts such as Startups of Puerto Rico, but having the government in the side of innovation and openness will not just contribute to this momentum, it will multiply it.
Economic development through technology has been successful in different countries, states and jurisdictions. The important thing is to remember that we are competing in a global economy, and we must export technological services to the world. By opening up government data, we’re providing plenty of opportunities for entrepreneurial development through Technology as an economic driver.
- Giancarlo Gonzalez, Puerto Rico’s CIO via /r/puertorico.
This is happening, let’s seize the opportunity.
PS: I’ll be participating in the hackathon from San Francisco. I just open-sourced a library to create interactive maps of Puerto Rico called AtlasPR, which you can download and fork from the government’s Github account. Finally, I’ll have office hours via Skype for a few hours in the morning with whoever wants to use the library or wants my advice about their projects. Please sign up for a slot if you are interested.
