San Francisco, CA - Last Saturday, September 12th, I decided to spend my birthday at an all day design and programming session with CivicDB - A new project inspired by President Obama's January 21st Memo and endorsed by the City of San Francisco.

The meeting attracted developers, gurus and normal citizens wanting to aid in the creation of a free and open database of San Francisco's city government information.

San Francisco City and County Department of Technology's CTO Blair Adams (whose published slideshows make me proud to live in SF) and Jay Nath, the department's manager of research and development organized the event on Meetup.com with the help of Csaba Csoma, a developer from the communty and organizer of the CivicDB meetup group.

  Jamie Taylor, co-author of O'Reilly's Programming the Semantic Web and Minister of Information at Metaweb Technologies made a presentation about Freebase - The community driven database of the world's free and open data.

During the course of the day many different architectures were discussed but the support for the Semantic Web and formats like RDF was clear. This is a win for those who use Linked Open Data - the very real and almost mature semantic web of data that Tim Berners-Lee began fostering a few years after he invented The World Wide Web. 

The SF Data Wiki contains information on the CivicDB Project's scope, roadmap and architecture. Some side-benefits of the project show up in the diagrams. For example, the diagram below shows the data flow through a city department and then out into CivicDB. Implementation in city departments will introduce much needed data standards which will allow more simple interoperation of city departments in the longer term.

I think this project is a big win for open data and the citizens of San Francisco. Seeing our City Government and local development community openly discussing how we should publish our data and how to build solutions together as a team made my day.

To get involved, visit www.civicdb.org