In just two days, Iowa voters will cast the first votes in the 2012 campaign at their traditional straw poll. The Iowa Straw Poll – so named because the results are non-binding and thus “as sturdy as straw” - is the first major event of the campaign. The nation’s political focus turns to Iowa starting tonight as eight of the announced candidates take the stage for the Fox News Ames Debate.

Iowans are rightfully proud of the role they play in presidential politics and take their responsibility seriously. They research the candidates. They investigate the issues. They’re engaged in the political process. That’s why the state makes for an interesting window to view the candidacies and issues through Google’s own data. As the country looks to Iowa, we thought it would be useful to examine what people in that state and across the country are searching for related to the 2012 Republican nomination.

Here’s what we found:

• Michele Bachmann is the most searched announced candidate in Iowa right now, and nationally by a large margin.
• Add in the names Sarah Palin and Rick Perry, and Bachmann still has the edge in Iowa.
• But nationally, Perry becomes the current leader of search. 
• The most searched for issue in Iowa and across the country is jobs - by large margin.
• And finally, the State of Iowa leads by a HUGE margin the number of searches for [butter cow]

Heading into the weekend, [Michelle Bachmann] is the most searched-for announced candidate in Iowa. She’s taken off and now far surpasses any other declared candidate, especially those that are attending the Straw Poll. If you look at the pack together, Congressman [Ron Paul] trails Bachmann in the number two spot, as do searches for Governor [Tim Pawlenty], Senator [Rick Santorum] and businessman [Herman Cain].




Nationally, the same trend stands up, even when those candidates who are skipping the Straw Poll are added to the mix. Across the country, more people are searching for [Michelle Bachmann] that are searching for Congressman [Ron Paul], Governor [Mitt Romney], Speaker [Newt Gingrich] and Ambassador [Jon Huntsman].




However, the search landscape changes dramatically when we include two much-discussed potential candidates: [Rick Perry] and [Sarah Palin]. In Iowa, where she has focused her campaign, [Michelle Bachmann] retains her search lead, but across the country she drops to the number two spot behind the currently surging [Rick Perry]. Without even entering the race, Governor Perry finds himself leading in search today. Perry has some strong search momentum as more voters across the country turn to Google to find out more information about his potential candidacy.




So that covers the candidates, what about the issues? In Iowa, the candidates are talking about health care reform, the national debt and ethanol among others. But, the top concern - and most searched issue in Iowa and across the country - this year is [jobs] - by a HUGE margin.

Republican Party officials are expecting more than 10,000 voters to cast their vote on Saturday in Ames. But, that’s not the only big event taking place over the weekend. Celebrating more than 150 years, the Iowa State Fair includes highlights such as the the “fry everything” food booths to the famous butter cow. Don’t know what a butter cow is? It is a life-size bovine crafted entirely of butter and it is a huge part of the tradition at the Iowa State Fair. Iowa leads the country - by a huge margin - in the number of searches for [butter cow].

Here at Google, we are serious about our role in helping voters find information that is useful in the political process, and that’s why we’re heading to Ames to participate in the Straw Poll with our Soapbox. We’ll also be here from now until the General Election to help bring you a front-row seat to the race through a regular look at what’s happening online.

Posted by Ginny Hunt, Google Politics

What do you get when you mix a city government that is prioritizing its digital presence with a homegrown, budding tech community? Reinvent nyc.gov, the City of New York’s first ever hackathon - an event where engineers meet to do collaborative programming. Held this past weekend at the entrepreneur campus General Assembly, the top prize at the hackathon was not money, but something even better: breakfast with Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

To call redesigning nyc.gov a challenging task would be an understatement: Since its launch in 1996, nyc.gov has expanded from around 1,000 pages to over 500,000, covering every city agency and task force. The number of yearly visitors to City-run web pages (33 million, or 24 million for nyc.gov) is approaching that of visitors to Central Park (37 million), according to New York City’s Chief Digital Officer Rachel Sterne. Of course, over the course of 2 days, the goal was to generate ideas and prototypes for the redesign.

The event kicked off with welcomes from city officials who framed the event and gave a glimpse of the city’s digital future. Deputy Mayor for Operations for New York Steve Goldsmith said, “we want to be transparent in a usable way, and encourage collaborative decision making.”

As a tech partner, Google demoed developer tools for Maps, YouTube, and Android, and held office hours for the over 60 participants from New York to Kansas to California. As teams formed, a few of us also participated as designers and developers.

The Google team (from left to right): Ginny Hunt (Public Sector & Elections), Jeffrey Posnick (YouTube), Jenny Ye (Public Sector & Elections), Adam Koch (Android), Hilary Worden (google.org), Arnaud Sahuguet (google.org)

Less than 36 hours later, submissions were in, and the demos began. By and large, teams presented UIs that were search-centric, user-focused, and social. Some envisioned the new nyc.gov as not only making it easier to find information but also making it easier to connect with city officials and other New Yorkers. Participants also voiced their hopes for more machine-readable data and more APIs. After the judges deliberated, awards were presented in the categories of Best Use of Local, Best Use of Social, Best User Interface, Most Innovative, and Judge’s Choice. Moving forward, we hope that the New York City moves quickly in its redesign of nyc.gov and uses some of the new ideas produced this weekend.

Participants and judges gather for demos and awards (photo from NYC Digital)

Hackathons organized by cities are not a new phenomenon - earlier this month, Google Chicago hosted an Apps for Metro hackathon with the City of Chicago - but there’s much more that can be done. Rachel Sterne, who worked to put together Reinvent nyc.gov, wrote about the advantages of city-led hackathon efforts. Perhaps NYC Digital’s slogan - “technology in the public service” - sums it up bests: by opening up access to more interesting, real-time data and and making the public sector more participatory, governments will be able to tap into engineering resources of its citizens and build a sustainable community of civic hackers. 

Posted by Arnaud Sahuguet, Product Manager, google.org and Jenny Ye, Public Sector & Elections Intern

Posted by: Alon Halevy, Senior Staff Research Scientist, Google Research

One of the things I most enjoy about working on data management is the ability to work on a variety of problems, both in the private sector and in government. I recently had the privilege of serving on a working group of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) studying the challenges of conserving the nation’s ecosystems. The report, titled “Sustaining Environmental Capital: Protecting Society and the Economy” was presented to President Obama on July 18th, 2011. The full report is now available to the public.

The press release announcing the report summarizes its recommendations:

The Federal Government should launch a series of efforts to assess thoroughly the condition of U.S. ecosystems and the social and economic value of the services those ecosystems provide, according to a new report by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), an independent council of the Nation’s leading scientists and engineers. The report also recommends that the Nation apply modern informatics technologies to the vast stores of biodiversity data already collected by various Federal agencies in order to increase the usefulness of those data for decision- and policy-making.
One of the key challenges we face in assessing the condition of ecosystems is that a lot of the data pertaining to these systems is locked up in individual databases. Even though this data is often collected using government funds, it is not always available to the public and in other cases available but not in usable formats. This is a classical example of a data integration problem that occurs in many other domains.

The report calls for creating an ecosystem, EcoINFORMA, around data. The crucial piece of this ecosystem is to make the relevant data publicly available in a timely manner and, most importantly, in a machine readable form. Publishing data embedded in a PDF file is a classical example of what does not count as being machine readable. For example, if you are publishing a tabular data set, then a computer program should be able to directly access the meta-data (e.g., column names, date collected) and the data rows without having to heuristically extract it from surrounding text.

Once the data is published, it can be discovered by search engines. Data from multiple sources can be combined to provide additional insight, and the data can be visualized and analyzed by sophisticated tools. The main point is that innovation should be pursued by many parties (academics, commercial, government), each applying their own expertise and passions.

There is a subtle point about how much meta-data should be provided before publishing the data. Unfortunately, requiring too much meta-data (e.g., standard schemas) often stymies publication. When meta-data exists, that’s great, but when it’s not there or is not complete, we should still publish the data in a timely manner. If the data is valuable and discoverable, there will be someone in the ecosystem who will enhance the data in an appropriate fashion.

We look forward to seeing this ecosystem evolve and excited that Google Fusion Tables, our own cloud-based service for visualizing, sharing and integrating structured data, can contribute to its development.

Posted by Dominic Campbell, Founder of FutureGov

[From time to time we invite guests to blog about initiatives of interest, and are very pleased to haveDominic Campbell, founder of FutureGov join us here. – Ed.]

Note: This is an edited version of a post that first appeared on Simpl's blog

On Friday and Saturday 17-18 June, a diverse bunch of energetic people came together in London for Interactivism Accessibility Hack Weekend (the first of its kind).

Some of those present - the student developers, Google developers and social innovators - were regular attendees at hack weekends, but it was those who had never even heard of a hack weekend - the members of the Gransnet website - that turned Interactivism into a hack weekend to remember.

Kicking things off, Andrew Eland (Google) and Dominic Campbell (FutureGov / Simpl) outlined the challenge that lay ahead of the teams, working together and using their creative, design and coding skills to turn their ideas into working prototypes by the end of the two days.

Before the hacking commences, two inspirational speakers to stepped up to the mic. Mike Bradley shared his experience of all things accessible through his current job as Senior Lecturer in Product Design and Engineering at Middlesex University and previous job as Accessibility Engineer at Ford. In short, listen to what people need and do that. Simple right?

Then came the star of the show, Peter Oakley, otherwise known by his renowned YouTube name: "Geriatric 1927". Peter spoke about his inspiration for joining YouTube, his love of all things web related, encouraged others to just give it a go as "you can't break it" and then demoed his YouTube skills.






And then it was time to get down to business. The people behind the ideas pitched to the room to get people motivated and moving into teams to start to get those ideas developed. Most of the teams gelled really quickly and stereotypes were quickly dispelled. Gransnet members later commented how impressed they were that the student developers really took time to listen to their ideas and everyone remarked on what good fun and great value the Gransnetters were.

Despite some healthy competitiveness, designers, developers and Gransnet members were bartered between teams, helping with sought after skills like logo design, understanding a complicated piece of coding or posing for a photograph or two to jazz up their final presentations.

So those final projects presented to the judging panel:

1. Our Town: a location based site with user generated content about local volunteering opportunities and ideas for projects

2. Go for Local: a portal for people to locate the services that are around them, including the user reviews of the services, such as a pharmacy (a combination of Older People's Local Portal, www.useyourcommunity.com and Carebay)

3. Gene Pool: an easy to use and fun genealogy game (a bit like Foursquare Family History)

4. Timetag: using the web to show patients if their hospital appointment is going to be delayed because of an overrunning clinic



5. TV Mate: an easy to use remote control made from a computer tablet that can be personalised with photographs and sounds

6. EZPZ: a simplified web browser that removes all the clutter and makes internet browsing clear and straightforward for the inexperienced user

7. Echoing: helping people in care homes connect and add value to the outside world by recording memories specific to local places that can be accessed by people visiting those locations

8. Spotted: an app for sharing likes and dislikes related to accessibility through photographs and individual profiles, for example a photograph of something that impedes good accessibility (a combination of Accessify Places and On the Go)

9. Milly and Jake: an interactive story that can be read by grandparents and grandchildren regardless of their location, for example by using Skype.

10. Face to Face: simplified video calling, using a telephone number as identification instead of a username (a combination of Face to Face and Stupidly Easy Video Chat for Elders)

11. I Was Here: A way of collecting and sharing memories about times, places and historical events (this team was formed from Memories and Retrospective Life Streaming for Elders)

After tough deliberation, the expert panel of judges awarded EZPZ as the Interactivism - Accessibility Hack Weekend winners. The students from this team received a sought after Google Interactivism Award. Our Gransnetters were also invited to form their own judging panel and voted for Spotted as their favourite idea.

All the photographs from the weekend are available on the Interactivism Flickr group.

And special thank you goes to Gransnet members and everyone who came along and worked so hard - we hope you all enjoyed it as much as we did.