Open up your mind and say, ahh...

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Don’t be surprised if you learn something from a kid in kindergarten, or third grade. It happens to me all the time. Even Lisa Jackson, the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, learns from the little ones once in a while. Her agency recently handed out President’s Environmental Youth Awards to students who came up with projects like collecting their town’s cooking oil for recycling into biofuel and distributing it to charities, building an environmental education center out of green materials, and starting a class on recycling. OK, so maybe these kids have already graduated from kindergarten or the third grade.

They’re from schools all across the country:

• Westerly, Rhode Island;
• Syosset, New York;
• Bethlehem, Pennsylvania;
• Gainesville, Florida;
• Addison, Illinois;
• Lubbock, Texas;
• Bettendorf, Iowa;
• Bigfork, Montana;
• Pleasant Hill and Martinez, California;
• Homer, Alaska.

The winning PEYA projects, as they call them, include TGIF, which stands for Turn Grease Into Fuel. Thank goodness.

The project was done by the Westerly Innovations Network/Westerly Middle School in the nation’s smallest state.

“This group of middle school students, who are passionate about community service, decided to do their part in tackling global warming by creating a sustainable project to collect the town’s waste cooking oil, refine it into biofuel, and then distribute it,” according to the EPA.

“The students presented their project to the local town council and convinced them to place a grease receptacle at the town’s transfer station to collect waste cooking oil from residents.”

The students also convinced 64 local restaurants to donate their waste cooking oil, a byproduct of fried foods. And they worked with a local company to collect the oil and sell it to a refinery for recycling into biofuel.

The students then used the money they received from the refinery to purchase biofuel for local charities. And around and ’round we go.

So far, the TGIF project has collected more than 36,000 gallons of waste oil, produced 30,000 gallons of biofuel a year, and kept 600,000 pounds of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, the EPA says. Local charities have received 4,000 gallons of biofuel and helped 40 families with emergency heating assistance.

Now that just makes you feel warm inside. How many other states and schools could this program be expanded to? Do you know of any examples? Let us know in the comments.

The sustainable students from Rhode Islanda and elsewhere will receive a plaque and a trip to Washington, D.C., to pick it up.

Geoff Livingston co-founded Zoetica to focus on cause-related work, and released an award-winning book on new media Now is Gone in 2007.

Open data is the big trend these days when people talk about “Government 2.0.” In reality, the open data movement has just begun, with governments finally starting to release data en masse in an effort to promote transparency. While projects like Apps for Democracy have received significant media attention, we are just at the dawn of the government open data app movement.

“Open data apps are becoming ever-more effective, but insofar as they have actually had a dramatic ‘effect’ on the systems that most influence our lives, we still have a long way to go,” said Jake Brewer, engagement director for the Sunlight Foundation. “I always say that until my mom or dad in Middle Tennessee are actively using open data apps that our community creates, we haven’t gotten there yet. At this point, it’s clear open data applications are in their infancy from the relatively low number of new apps being produced and the usage stats of those apps once the initial buzz factor dies down.”

Here’s a look at how public sector open data apps are evolving.

Transparency Fosters Better Citizenship

Citizens often get frustrated with their local, state and national governments, but they rarely understand how much demand the system faces. Lack of transparency into governmental departments and processes can leave the average American bewildered. Apps can change that with transparency.

“This transparency makes it possible to track how well the city is keeping up with requests, their performance over time, which neighborhoods are getting help first, etc.,” said Jennifer Pahlka, founder and executive director of Code for America. “[W]hen you see the other requests in the queue and realize that your issue is one of thousands in your community, it’s not just the government who becomes accountable; you start to be held accountable as a citizen as well.

“If you could see a list of all the lights that weren’t fixed in your city, and see that a dozen people had complained that there had been a spike in crime under another broken light in another part of town and that people were really suffering because of it, you might you think to yourself ‘hey, it’s more important to fix that light than my own,’” explained Pahlka. “This is a moment of citizenship, when the needs of the larger group take precedence over the individual’s needs.”

Improving Application Access

Some apps, like SeeClickFix, have been wildly successful, but in general, open data applications don’t always make the impact that designers would like. Not every American has an iPhone— far from it. Ad Mob statistics show only 10.7 million units in the United States. Pragmatic accessibility for the average citizen can be a difference maker.

“A lot of people started to make iPhone apps with this public data, which is great, but for many cities there isn’t a high overlap between bus ridership and iPhone use,” said Christopher Csikszentmihalyi, Director, MIT Center for Future Civic Media. “We are currently deploying a public/private initiative called LostInBoston which includes a cheap LED sign that shows real-time estimates of when the next MassDOT bus is coming.

“If government were to do this, it would probably take many years and be incredibly expensive. We are looking at a couple of hundred dollars for a sign placed on private property, in the window of a restaurant or corner shop,” said Csikszentmihalyi. “Business owners get customers coming in because pedestrians know they have a few minutes … Bus drivers are excited because an informed rider is a less hostile rider.” While this is a relatively narrow application, it shows that not all open data applications have to be “Web 2.0″ for citizens to really benefit.

The Secret Sauce for a Better App

Given what’s already been released, some best practices are starting to emerge. For example, two-way engagement has become a critical success point for some applications. Pragmatic use for real needs is another important factor.

“The best applications are those that are built with cross-cutting teams of data providers, community users, and app makers,” said Lucy Bernholz, president of Blueprint Research & Design. “Ecofinder in [San Francisco] is very cool — it solves the problem of knowing where to recycle various household goods at the point in time when you need that info.”

“While much of the open data initiative has been about making government data public, getting citizen data to the government and to the rest of the public — whether complaints or other information — is also important,” said Csikszentmihalyi. “The state of Ohio has no online way to complain about a well that is leaking, nor does it keep a record of complaints by citizens. A new family can move into a house with a well on the property, but have no way of knowing if that well had previously blown out or exploded.”

How Can Government Help?

As local governments ban together to create data standards via Open311 and as the Federal Government’s data.gov initiative continues, we are seeing more data hit the market. Local, state and Federal Governments alike are early in the process of providing open data. One thing is clear — government’s role should be about enabling data application development and facilitating improved processes from the public sector to increase transparency and open data.

“Government’s role really should fall on the ‘enabler’ side when it comes to apps, by releasing all their public data online and in real-time,” said Brewer. “Once data is released, citizen developers and designers — ‘civic hackers’ — can go to town with the released data, innovating and creating utility for the public.”

“Think about how technology companies launch platforms,” said Pahlka. “They employ a small army of developer relations professionals who seed the market and enable an ecosystem around their technology. Developer relations isn’t a function government is used to providing, but they are learning how to do it.”

Image courtesy of iStockphotoiStockphoto, DHuss