Fed CTO Aneesh Chopra

Federal Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra spoke at the Open Government and Innovations Conference in Washington, DC yesterday, about the government’s need to play catch up with the private sector’s technological capabilities.

Chopra used competitions like Apps for Democracy and Apps for America as examples of the government’s commitment to the open-government initiative of President Barack Obama.

The Apps for America competition is still open for submission through today. So far only four applications have been submitted. The competition requires applications to use data from Data.gov. Top Dangerous Mines highlights the most dangerous mines in the US based on earthquake data and then there’s the F.B.I. Fugitive Concentration matching game. It’s just like the match game you played with a deck of cards as a kid but this deck has photos pulled from the FBI’s Fugitive RSS Feeds.

Chopra pointed out the importance of accountability for the administration to an open government. “I am equally committed to holding myself accountable, and in turn asking you to hold me accountable, for us to deliver on promises, so that we show progress,” Chopra said.

In 2008, DC’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer created a contest called Apps for Democracy. The purpose of the contest was to create innovative applications that would make information from the DC Data Catalog available to the public.

The contest cost the district $50,000, but the 47 iPhone, Facebook and other applications created for the contest are estimated to be worth $2.6 million.

Adam Boalt, the founder of BOALT Interactive Business, entered the 2008 contest and walked away with the Agency Gold Medal for DCHistoricTours.com. The website is a tourism site created by the people, for the people. Anyone can become a user and create a tour of Washington, DC. You can share your tours with the public or keep them private. The application pulls photographs from Flickr to highlight different parts of your tour or pulls entries from Wikipedia articles providing historical information about specific locations along your tour route. You can also find places to eat along your route with Yelp.

On Thursday, Rebekah Kenefick from DC’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer brought Jim Meyers with Government Technology Magazine, and a film crew to the BOALT office to interview Adam about the Apps for Democracy contest and to discuss the democratization of data or Open Data Democracy as we like to call it. Watch the video below of their visit to BOALT headquarters: