To Prevent Another Flint, Make All Open Data Machine Readable – AllMagNews

"We cannot and should not rely on the government to always keep us safe. This is not an indictment. Governments are fallible, just as any other large organization is fallible. But 100 years ago, there was no way to easily access, analyze and monitor government activities. Today, there is no excuse not to do so.

In the case of Flint, if state and federal environmental authorities had placed in a timely fashion the raw water testing results into an open data platform like Socrata, Junar or CKAN, then any citizen could have run a quick analysis on the results and, with a modicum of education, judged for themselves whether something was amiss.

Developers, too, could have accessed this data via an API and piped it into any number of data analytics platforms to spot aberrant samples, anomalies and other red flags.

Equally important, such systems could detect changes in testing procedures that might indicate manipulation. In the case of Flint, a number of positive test results for lead were not reported. Had these additional samples been included in the reports, then the samples would have crossed critical thresholds that would have forced the government to engage in deeper investigation and possibly even shut down the supply."