The residents of Gunnison, Colo., will be happy to know that according to the government their town is the cleanest in the country. The same cannot be said for the close to 4,000 residents of Springdale, Pa., the country’s most polluted area. Did you know that the town with the lowest unemployment rate is in Montana, or that 90 percent of people in DuPont, Wash., have relocated in the past fifteen years?

ThisWeKnow.org makes it easy for a regular Joe to see what the government knows about his town... or anyone's town, for that matter. Freshly presented, in a convenient list form that any reader of Men's Health or Cosmo will appreciate, the data on factories and pollutants, crime rates, citizen demographics, and the breakdown of home owners vs. renters is available to any person with access to the internet.

Wanting to improve “citizen empowerment,” the web application development/data analysis firm GreenRiver teamed up with web design studio Sway Design, led by Ellis Neder, and Intellidimension, a semantic web database company to create a tool that was citizen-oriented.

“We built this as a front end to data.gov,” says GreenRiver’s Managing Director Michael Knapp in an interview with OhMyGov!

ThisWeKnow primarily gets its information from data.gov, a federal website set up in late May 2009 by Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra that aims to make government data available to the public. ThisWeKnow takes that data and makes it more accessible and practical.

“We wanted to make a website that was aimed at citizens instead of researchers and developers,” says Knapp. ThisWeKnow also gathers information from geonames.org and govtrack.us.

For the geeks out there, ThisWeKnow is written in Ruby on Rails and communicates via SPARQL to an RDF database. RDF, or Resource Description Framework, is the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard for encoding information.

The developers came up with the idea two months ago after seeing an advertisement for the Sunlight Labs’ “Apps for America” contest. The contest was created by the Sunlight Foundation, in conjunction with Google, O’Reilly Media, and TechWeb, to spur ambitious developers to create cool, useful, informative applications with government data—specifically in this case, around the release of data.gov. Winners of Apps for America were announced earlier this month at the Gov 2.0 Expo Showcase in Washington D.C.

ThisWeKnow ended up placing third in the contest behind DataMasher and GovPulse. “We were delighted to be one of the finalists; there were a great group of developers there,” says Knapp.

Knapp’s goal with ThisWeKnow was to create a website that helped people break down barriers in the sharing of information. “This was a project that we did not just for our clients, but for ourselves,” says Knapp. In all, the development team spent around 350 hours building the website. 

The current version of ThisWeKnow is considered a “phase one,” and according to Knapp there is still a lot of work to do. One of the issues that need to be addressed soon is funding. Currently ThisWeKnow is an entirely volunteer project. But for the developers to be able to scale the website, they need funding. Knapp is in the process of applying for grants.

Another thing that ThisWeKnow knows it has to improve is data gathering. Coding on some of the location names is confusing, resulting in mix-ups like mistaking Angel City, Fla., with Los Angeles. Though we all know L.A. as the “City of Angels,” Knapp noted that their app showed L.A. “to have a much higher crime rate then it really did.”

So far, there is also no standardization of data. Certain facts need to be broken down more specifically. For example, the government publishes data on the number of people who have cancer in a certain area, but that data is not broken down by age. Everything is lumped together.

Finally, Knapp wants users to be able to provide more feedback about the site. There is currently a page on the site that allows viewers to give their impressions of ThisWeKnow, but Knapp wants to go the extra mile. “We want our users to be able to make this site completely their own, to tell their own stories,” says Knapp.

Knapp wants to set up a voting system, where the users can determine what statistics show on the home page. Presently the home page shows the locations ranking in the top five for most/fewest toxins, highest/lowest unemployment, most nomadic, and highest percentage of people with cancer.

ThisWeKnow is well on its way to providing the unique service it set out to do, and others are beginning to take notice. Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy (D) recently praised ThisWeKnow for being “designed to make what was once a difficult and time consuming process into a faster and more streamlined experience.”

Because of a website like this, those people from Gunnison can pat themselves on the back (with no risk of coughing) for living in the cleanest town in America. Knapp certainly hopes so.

“There is this great technology that people don’t know about and we wanted to do something about that,” he said.

More Gov 2.0 Coverage:

[+] Foodsafety.gov: Keeping your dinner plate safe

[+] Utah's State Website Sizzles