Politics is retail, so they say. That’s politics at the municipal, state, provincial and federal levels, and it means paying attention to the details that occupy the everyday life of your citizens.

So why are private sector companies and web 2.0 firms doing such a better job at informing citizens about the nuts and bolts of their civic government and their neighbourhood lives?

Initiatives like EveryBlock, which accumulates government data, news sources, local blogs, flickr feeds and other sources to develop a ground-level view of your life, are not comprehensive but they are extraordinarily useful.

Most importantly, they take many data points and relate them to you and your location - instead of initiatives like DirectGov, which assume that everyone filters their information and their requests through an intricate knowledge of government hierarchy and bureaucracy.

Filmoculous has an interview with Adrian Holovaty, one of the developers behind EveryBlock, and he discusses the problems he’s had getting data from government agencies:

“… On a completely different note, it’s been a challenge to acquire data from governments. We (namely Dan, our People Person) have been working since July to request formal data feeds from various agencies, and we’ve run into many roadblocks there, from the political to the technical. We expected that, of course, but the expectation doesn’t make it any less of a challenge …”

“… I’d estimate we only have about 10% of the data we’d like in the long term, for Chicago, New York and San Francisco. As we expected, some government agencies haven’t been able to provide us their public data, and the reasons vary. A common reason is a lack of resources. In other cases, we’ve simply been stymied by bureaucracy. But we’re keeping at it …”

Part of the problem seems to be consistency of data collection, classification and distribution. Every city naturally has a separately developed civic infrastructure and information management system. Local politicians have also made different choices when it comes to making information publicly available. For example:

“… We publish building permits in San Francisco and New York, but not in Chicago. We publish filming locations in Chicago, but not in New York or San Francisco. We publish zoning agenda items in San Francisco, but not in the other two cities ..”

I don’t know if, as governments, we will ever find away around political considerations and historic quirks in how we collect, process and make available data. But we can start by thinking of responding to the individual need, rather than framing all our efforts by first identifying our institutional preferences and historic practices - and then deciding what we would like to provide.