Well, to get back to the previous point, I was recently at a meeting in the City of Chicago with people who work on the open data portal there. I'll give you an example. The department of housing has data.... I mean, there's housing data in seven different departments. Often the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing. One of the biggest consumers of Chicago data is actually other departments within the City of Chicago, which is important.
Washington, D.C. was the first city to release substantial data from almost every department, in 2006. That was the first major effort. They studied the actual users of the data. Between 60% and 70% of the people who came to the website and downloaded the data were actually members of city departments. A lot of city departments were afraid to release data initially, but then they ended up finding out it was so much more efficient to be able to get data that they didn't know was related to what they wanted to do from other departments. That's definitely one of the most immediate benefits.
People within government who are kind of reluctant to release data and make their data available, once they see that it has a lot of benefits for them also, it reduces the resistance tremendously. So within government, it has a very immediate value.
In terms of efficiency, I'll give you one example. We were working with the housing department. They have section 8 housing vouchers where basically low-income people can get money to rent apartments, and landlords or people who build apartments can get deferred taxes for eight to ten years in return for renting to low-income people.
It was a paper-based system, so when someone would leave section 8 housing, it might take six months for a landlord to rent the apartment. That's not a very good incentive, if you know you're frequently going to have vacancies and it takes a long time to rent the apartment. As a result, you would have people looking for section 8 housing. It would take a long time for them to find it. At the same time, you would have landlords who would have vacant section 8 housing and couldn't find people to occupy that housing, largely because the different departments dealing with housing data and section 8 housing didn't talk to each other much. It was paper-based.
Now that they have it all machine readable, they can reduce that time to two weeks or a month. It really improves the situation for both the landlord and the person or family who wants housing.