W. David Stephenson: Automated Data Feeds Make Smart Regulation Possible Now
"The District of Columbia, long plagued by corruption, began a transparency initiative under former Mayor Anthony Williams. It shifted into high gear under Mayor Adrian Fenty, and CTO Vivek Kundra. They now publish, on a real-time basis, more than 260 different data streams of statistics as varied as violent crime, building starts, and even requests to fill potholes. All of those statistics are available for anyone to analyze and interpret, and current uses range from tracking development around the new Nationals Park to showing crime reports on a Google Map.
Equally important, District agencies use the same data feeds internally to deploy their workforces more effectively, and break down barriers to cooperation between agencies.
If the same system was applied to banking, critical statistics could flow automatically to federal regulators, while also being available to the banks' own staff -- many of whom have never had real-time data access in the past. Combined with innovative web-based tools to turn obscure data into easy-to-understand visualizations, for the first time the workforce, as well as regulators, would have the kind of real-time information that's essential in today's global economy, whether to regulate businesses or to run them.
Furthermore, if the data were automatically "scrubbed" of identifiers and any kind of information that might be a legitimately competitive concern, it might also be possible to aggregate and publish the data externally, so that the general public, media, and scholars could also subscribe to, analyze, and scrutinize the information on a real-time basis."
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