Government 2.0

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Open Data might have failed, but Open Government is still going strong.

2011/02/21 in Government 2.0 by peg | 1 comment

It would seem that the shine is starting to wear off the Open Government movement, with a recent report to the US congress challenging some of the assumptions which drove the dictate out of the U.S. Open Government Office[1], forcing U.S. departments to publish their data sets. The report found that simply pushing out data has negative outcomes as well as positive ones (which should be no surprise), and that often the cost of pushing out (and maintaining) a data set didn’t outweigh the benefits. Most importantly, it raised the question of whether or not publishing these data sets was a good use of the public’s money.

So, has the business case behind Open Government been found lacking in the harsh light of day? Or is this one of those cases where some faith is – similar as with the investment in the U.S. highway network – because the benefits of stepping into the unknown are not calculable with the crude mechanism of ROI. The truth seems to lie somewhere between the two.

I wouldn’t confuse the investment in the US road network post WWII (or AU’s current investment in a NBN) with Open Government. The former was an investment in an asset which the U.S. government of the time made largely on faith, an investment which is currently seen to be returning $14 billion to the U.S. economy annually. (Australia’s NBN might be heading on a similar journey[2].) The latter is actually a philosophical point of view about an approach to government.

The problem is that we confuse “Open Data” with “Open Government”. They’re related, but not the same. Open Government is a move to streamline service acquisition and delivery by exposing the bureaucracy of government and integrating it more tightly with other service providers, and has been progressing nicely for a decade or more now. Open Data is a desire to change the relationship between government and the population, reducing the government to a simple data conduit between the public (or corporations) providing services and the public consuming them.

Open Government has made government easier to deal with by making it easier to find and consume the services you need, and by fostering community. Everything from applying for the dole, getting a grant through to organising a council supported street party is orders of magnitude easier than it was a few decades ago, mainly due to increased transparency. This has been delivered via a range of means, from publishing information on line, through providing better explanations for the services offered and promoting multi-channel access and self service delivery. The latest wave of Open Government is seeing departments integrating external services with their own, putting even more data out in public in the process, as they move from a service-provider to a service-enabler. Ultimately though, if government (as separate from politics) is focused on keeping folk feed and feeling safe then it’s doing it’s job. It’s basic Maslow[3].

Open Data, though, is based on the view that government should do as little as possible, hand over the data, and let individuals in the public get on with doing what they want. It’s claimed that this will provide transparency (the public has all the data, after all) as well as fostering entrepreneurs to provide innovative solutions to the many problems that confront us today.

It’s quite possible to have transparency and Open Government without the need to publish all your data, and maintain these published versions, as claimed by the Open Data proponents. People need to understand how the wheels of government turn if they want to trust it, and the best way of doing this is usually through key figures and analysis which builds a story and names the important players. Drowning people in data has the opposite effect, hiding government operation behind a wall of impenetrable details. Wikileaks was a great study in this effect, as it was only when the traditional journalists became involved, with their traditional analysis and publication weaving together a narrative the broader public could consume, that the leaks started to have a real impact. (It’s also interesting that the combination of the anonymous drop boxes being created by conventional media, and Open Leaks[4]‘ anonymous mass distribution to conventional media, looks to be a more potent tool than the ideologically pure Wikileaks.)

Nor is treating government as an integration medium the only way to solve the world’s problems. While entrepreneurs and VCs might be the darlings of the moment, there’s many other organisations and governments which are also successfully chipping away at these problems. For every VC backed Bloom Box[5] who has mastered marketing hype, there’s a more boring organisation that might have already overtaken them[6]. The entrepreneur model will be part of the solution, but it’s not the silver bullet many claim it to be.

The problem is that Open Data is the result of a libertarian political mindset rather, rather than being a solution to a pressing need. Forcing government to publish all its data sets does not provide or guarantee transparency, nor does it have a direct impact on the services offered by the government. It can also consume significant government resources that might be better spent providing services that the community needs. Publish a data set of no obvious value, or build a homeless shelter? Invest in Semantic Web enabling another data set few use, or pay for disaster relief? These are the tradeoffs that people responsible for the day-to-day operation of government are forced to make. Claims by folk like Tim Berners-Lee that magic will happen once data is out there and ontology enabled have proven to be largely wrong.

However, Open Data does align with a particular political point view. Open Data assumes that we, as a population, want such a small government model, an assumption which is completely unjustified. Some people trust, and want, the government to take responsibility for a lot of these services. Some want to meet the government somewhere in the middle. Open Data tries to force a world that works in shades of grey into a black-or-white choice that driven by a particular world view.

Deciding what and how much the government should be responsible for is a political decision, and it’s one that we revisit every time we visit the ballot box. Each time we vote we evolve, by a small amount, the role government plays in our lives[7]. (Occasionally we avoid the ballot box and revolt instead.) Should government own the roads? The answer appears to still be yes. Should government own power stations? Generally, no. Should they own the dams? We’re still deciding that one.

It’s in the context of the incremental and ongoing evolution of government’s role in our lives that we can best understand Open Data. Forcing Open Data onto government through mandate (as Obama did) was a political act driven by a desire to force one group’s preferred mode of operation on everyone else. You might want Open Data, but other people have differing priorities. Just because they disagree doesn’t make them wrong. The U.S. congressional report is the mechanism of government responding by documenting the benefits Open Data brought, the problems it caused, and the cost. The benefits (or not) will now be debated, and its future decided at the ballot box.

Open Government is alive and well, and is driving the evolution of government as we know it. Services are being improved, governments are increasingly their integrating services with those of the private sector, and more data will be released to support this. The assumption that all government data should remain secret unless proven otherwise has been flipped, and many public servants now assume that data should be made public unless there’s a good reason not to publish. Government is investing in moving specific information assets online, were it makes sense, and departments are opening up to social media and much closer involvement (and scrutiny) with the public sector. The mechanism of government is evolving, and this is a good thing.

Open Data, though, as an expression of a political point of view, looks like it’s in trouble.


References


1. The Obama Administration’s Open Government Initiative: Issues for Congress [PDF]↑
2. The NBN wants to be free @ PEG↑
3. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs @ Changing Minds↑
4. Open Leaks↑
5. Bloom Energy↑
6. New Solid Oxide Fuel Cell System Provides Cheap Grid Energy From CNG and Biogas @ IB Time UK↑
7. What is the role of Government in a Web 2.0 world? @ PEG↑

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Social media: bubble, definitely not; revolution, probably not; evolution, absolutely

2011/01/28 in Government 2.0 by peg | No comments

Is Social Media in general (and mobility in particular) a bubble or revolution? Is it a a powerful and disruptive force that will transform governments and social organisations? Or is it no? There seems to be a few[1] people[2] pondering this question

Mobile phones are interesting as they are addressable. Two-way radios made communication mobile a long time ago, but it wasn’t until mobile phones (and cheap mobile phones, specifically) that we could address someone on the move, or someone on the move could address a stationary person or service.

The second and third world showed us the potential of this technology over ten year ago, from the fishermen using their phones to market and sell their catch while still on the boat, through to the distributed banking based on pre-paid mobile phone cards. Image/video sharing is just the latest evolution in this.

The idea that this might be a revolution seems to be predicated on the technology’s ability to topple centrally planned and controlled organisations. Oddly enough, central planning is a bad enough idea to fall over on its own in many cases, and the only effect of mobile technology is to speed up a process which is already in motion. The Soviet Union might well be the poster child for this: collapsing under the weight of it’s own bureaucracy with no help from social media (or mobile phones, for that matter). Even modern democracies are not immune, and the US energy regulation policies leading up to deregulation in the late 70s is a great example of the failures of central planning[3]. The (pending) failure of some of today’s more centralised, and authoritarian regimes, would be more accurately ascribed to the inability of slow moving, centrally managed bureaucracies to adapt to a rapidly changing environment. Distributed planning always trumps central planning in a rapidly changing environment.

If we pause for a moment, we can see that governments do a few distinct things for us.

  • They provide us with what is seen as essential services.
  • They create a platform to enforce social norms (policies and laws).
  • They engage with the rest of the world on our behalf.

The reality is that many of the essential services that government provides are provided by the government because it’s too difficult or expensive for citizens (and to some extent, corporations) to access the information they need to run these services themselves. Mobile phones (and social media) are just the latest in a series of technologies that have changed these costs, enabling companies and citizens to take responsibility for providing services which, previously, were the sole domain of government. From energy, water and telecoms, through FixMyStreet and the evolving use of social media in New Orleans, Haiti and then Queensland during their respective natural disasters, we can see that this is a long running and continuing trend. Government is migrating from a role of providing all services, to one where government helps facilitate our access to the services we need. Expect this to continue, and keep building those apps.

As a platform for agreeing and enforcing social norms, then it’s hard to see anything replacing government in the short to mid term. (As always, the long term is completely up for grabs.) These social norms are geographical – based on the people you interact with directly on a day-to-day basis – and not virtual. Social media provides a mechanism for government to broaden the conversation. Some governments are embracing this, others, not so much. However, while people like to be consulted, they care a lot more about results. (Think Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs[4].) Singapore has a fairly restrictive and controlling government, which has (on the whole) a very happy population. China is playing a careful game of balancing consultation, control and outcomes, and seems to doing this successfully.

Finally we come to the most interesting question: government as a means for us to engage with the rest of the world. In this area, government’s role has shrunk in scope but grown in importance. Globalisation and the Internet (as a communication tool) has transformed societies, making it cheaper to call friends across the globe than it is to call them around the corner. We all have friends in other countries, cross-border relationships are common, and many of us see ourselves as global citizens. At the same time, the solutions to many of today’s most pressing issues, such as global warming, have important aspects which can only be addressed by our representatives on the global stage.

So we come back to the question at hand: is social media a bubble, a revolution, or an evolution of what has come before.

It’s hard to see it as a bubble: the changes driven by social media are obviously providing real value so we can expect them to persist and expand. I was particularly impressed by how the Queensland government had internalised a lot of the good ideas from the use of social media[5] in the Victorian fires, Haiti et al.

We can probably discount revolution too, as social media is (at most) a better communication tool and not a new theory of government. (What would Karl Marx think?) However, by dramatically changing the cost of communication it is having a material impact of the role government in our lives[6]. Government, and the society it represents is evolving in response.

The challenge is to keep political preference separate from societal need. While you might yearn for the type of society that Ayn Rand only ever dreamed about, other people find your utopia more akin to one of Dante’s seven circles of hell. Many of the visions for Gov 2.0 are political visions – individuals’ ideas for how they would organise an ideal society – rather than views of how technology can best be used to support society as a whole.

China is the elephant in this room. If social media is a disruptive, revolutionary force, then we can expect China’s government to topple. What appears more likely is that China will integrate social media into its toolbox while it focuses on keeping its population happy, evolving in the process. As long as they deliver the lower half of Maslow’s Hierarchy, they’ll be fairly safe. After all, the expulsion of governments and organisations – the revolution that social media is involved in – is due to these organisations’ inability to provide for the needs of their population, rather than any revolutionary compulsion inherent in the technology itself.


References


1. The video above is less than a minute long. Please … @ bryan.vc↑
2. Is The Mobile Phone Our Social Net? @ AVC↑
3. The Role of Petroleum Price and Allocation Regulations in Managing Energy Shortages @ Annual Review of Energy↑
4. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs @ Abraham-Maslow↑
5. Emergency services embrace Social Media @ Social Media Daily↑
6. The changing role of government @ PEG↑

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Taxonomies 1, Semantic Web (and Linked Data) 0

2010/07/08 in Business-Technology, Government 2.0 by peg | 4 comments

I’m not a big fan of Semantic Web[1]. For something that has been around for just over ten years — and which has been aggressively promoted by the likes of Tim Berners-Lee[2] — very little real has come of it.

Taxonomies, on the other hand, are going gangbusters, with solutions like GovDirect[3] showing that there is a real need for this sort of data-relationship driven approach[4]. Given this need, if the flexibility provided by Semantic Web (and more recently, Linked Data[5]) was really needed, then we would have expected someone to have invested in building significant solutions which use the technology.

While the technology behind Semantic Web and Linked Data is interesting, it seems that most people don’t think it’s worth the effort.

All this makes me think: the future of data management and standardisation is ad hoc, with communities or vendors scratching specific itches, rather than formal, top-down, theory driven approaches such as Semantic Web and Linked Data, or even other formal standardisation efforts of old.

The technologies behind the likes of Semantic Web and Linked Data have a long heritage. You can trace them back to at least the seventies when ontology and logic driven approaches to data management faced off against relational methodologies. Relational methods won that round — just ask Oracle or the nearest DBA.

That said, there has been a small number of interesting solutions built in the intervening years. I was involved in a few in one of my past lives[6], and I’ve heard of more than a few built by colleagues and friends. The majority of these solutions used ontology management as a way to streamline service configuration, and therefor ease the pain of business change. Rather than being forced to rebuild a bunch of services, you could change some definitions, and off you go.

What we haven’t seen is a well placed Semantic Web SPARQL[7] query which makes all the difference. I’m still waiting for that travel website where I can ask for a holiday, somewhere warm, within my budget, and without too many tourists who use beach towels to reserve lounge chairs at six in the morning; and get a sensible result.

The flexibility which we could justify in the service delivery solutions just doesn’t appear to be justifiable in the data-driven solution. A colleague showed my a Semantic Web solution that consumed a million or so pounds worth of tax payer money to build a semantic-driven database for a small art collection. All this sophisticated technology would allow the user to ask all sorts of sophisticated questions, if they could navigate the (necessarily) complicated user interface, or if they could construct an even more daunting SPARQL query. A more pragmatic approach would have built a conventional web application — one which would easily satisfy 95% of users — for a fraction of the cost.

When you come down to it, the sort of power and flexibility provided by Semantic Web and Linked Data could only be used by a tiny fraction of the user population. For most people, something which gets them most of the way (with a little bit of trial and error) is good enough. Fire and forget. While the snazzy solution with the sophisticated technology might demo well (making it good TED[8] fodder), it’s not going to improve the day-to-day travail for most of the population.

Then we get solutions like GovDirect. As the website puts it:

GovDirect® facilitates reporting to government agencies such as the Australian Tax Office via a single, secure online channel enabling you to reduce the complexity and cost of meeting your reporting obligations to government.

which make it, essentially, a Semantic Web solution. Except its not, as GovDirect is built on XBRL[9] with a cobbled together taxonomy.

Taxonomy driven solutions, such as GovDirect might not offer the power and sophistication of a Semantic Web driven solution, but they do get the job done. These taxonomies are also more likely to be ad hoc — codifying a vendor’s solution, or accreted whilst on the job — than the result of some formal, top down ontology[10] development methodology (such as those buried in the Semantic Web and Linked Data).

Take Salesforce.com[11] as an example. If we were to develop a taxonomy to exchange CRM data, then the most likely source will be other venders reverse engineering[12] whatever Salesforce.com is doing. The driver, after all, is to enable clients to get their data out of Salesforce.com. Or the source might be whatever a government working group publishes, given a government’s dominant role in its geography. By extension we can also see the end of the formal standardisation efforts of old, as they devolve into the sort of information frameworks represented by XBRL, which accrete attributes as needed.

The general trend we’re seeing is a move away from top-down, tightly defined and structured definitions of data interchange formats, as they’re replaced by bottom-up, looser definitions.


References


1. SemanticWeb.org↑
2. Tim Berners-Lee on Twitter↑
3. GovDirect↑
4. Peter Williams on the The Power of Taxonomies @ the Australian Government’s Standard Business Reporting Initiative↑
5. LinkedData.org↑
6. AAII↑
7. SPARQL @ w3.org↑
8. TED↑
9. eXtensible Business Reporting Language↑
10. Ontology defined in Wikipedia↑
11. SalesForce.com↑
12. Reverse engineering defined in Wikipedia↑

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What is the role of government in a Web 2.0 world?

2010/02/11 in Business-Technology, Government 2.0 by peg | No comments

What will be the role of government in a post Web 2.0 world? I doubt it’s what a lot of us predict, given society’s poor track record in predicting it’s own future.

One thing I am reasonably sure of though, is that this future won’t represent the open source nirvana that some pundits hope for. When I’ve ruminated in the past about the changing role of government, I’ve pointed out that attempting to create the future by dictate is definitely not the right approach. As I said then:

You don’t create peace by starting a war, and nor do you create open and collaborative government through top down directives. We can do better.

There was an excellent article by Nat Torkington, Rethinking open data, posted over at O’Reilly radar which shows this in action. As it points out, the U.S. Open Government Directive has prompted datasets of questionable value to be added to data.gov; while many of the applications are developed as they are easy to build, rather than providing any tangible benefit. Many of the large infrastructure projects commissioned in the name of open data suffered the same fate as large, unjustified infrastructure projects in private enterprise (i.e. they’re hard for the layman to understand, they have scant impact on solving the problems society seems plagued with, and they’re overly complex to deliver and use due to technological and political puritism).

A more productive approach is focus on solving problems that we, the populace, actually care about. In Australia this might involve responding to the bush fire season. California has a similar problem. The recent disaster in Haiti was another significant call to action. It was great to see the success that was Web 2.0 in Haiti (New Scientist had an excellent article).

As Nat Torkington says:

the best way to convince them to open data is to show an open data project that’s useful to real people.

Which makes me think: government is a tool for us to work together, not the enemy to subdue. Why don’t we move government on from service provider of last resort, which is the role it seems to play today.

Haiti showed us that some degree of centralisation is required to make these efforts work efficiently. A logical role for government going forward would be something like a market maker: connecting people who need services with the organisations providing them, and working to ensure that the market remains liquid. Government becomes the trusted party that ensures that there are enough service providers to meet demand, possibly even bundling service to provide solutions to life’s more complex problems.

We’ve had the public debate on whether or not government should own assets (bridges, power utilities etc.), and the answer was generally not. Government provision of services is well down a similar road. This frees up dedicated and hard working public servants (case workers, forestry staff, policy wonks …) to focus on the harder problem of determining what services should be provided.

Which brings me back to my original point. Why are we trying to drive government, and society in general, toward a particular imagined future of our choosing (one involving Open Government Directives, and complicated and expensive RDF infrastructure projects). We can use events like the bush fires and Haiti to form a new working relationship. Let’s pick hard but tractable problems and work together to find solutions. As Nat (again) points out, there’s a lot of data in government that public servants are eager to share, if we just give them a reason. And if our efforts deliver tangible benefits, then everyone will want to come along for the ride.

Updated: The reports are in: data.gov has quality issues. I’ve updated the text updated with the following references.

Updated: More news on data.gov’s limitations highlighting the problems with a “push” model to open government.

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The changing role of Government

2009/12/11 in Business-Technology, Government 2.0 by peg | No comments

Is Government 2.0 (whichever definition you choose) the ultimate aim of government? Government for the people and by the people. Or are we missing the point? We’re not a collection of individuals but a society where the whole is greater than the parts. Should government’s ultimate aim to be the trusted arbiter, bringing together society so that we can govern together? Rather than be disinterested and governed on, as seems to be the current fashion. In an age when everything is fragmented and we’re all responsible for our own destiny, government is in a unique position to be the body that binds together the life events that bring our society together.

Government 2.0 started with lofty goals: make government more collaborative. As with all definitions though, it seems that the custodians of definitions are swapping goals for means. Pundits are pushing for technology driven definitions, as Government 2.0 would not be possible without technology (but then, neither would my morning up of coffee).

Unfortunately Government 2.0 seems to be in danger of becoming “government as a platform”: GaaP or even GaaS (as it were). Entrepreneurs are calling on the government to open up government data, allowing start-ups to remix data to create new services. FixMyStreet might be interesting, and might even tick many of the right technology boxes, but it’s only a small fragment of what is possible.

GovHack

This approach has resulted in some interesting and worthwhile experiments like GovHack, but it seems to position much of government as a boat anchor to be yanked up with top-down directives rather than as valued members of society who are trying to do what they think is the right thing. You don’t create peace by starting a war, and nor do you create open and collaborative government through top down directives. We can do better.

The history of government has been a progression from government by and for the big man, through to today’s push for government for and by the people. Kings and Queens practiced stand-over tactics, going bust every four to seven years from running too many wars that they could not afford, and then leaning on the population to refill their coffers. The various socialist revolutions pushed the big man (or woman) out and replaced them with a bureaucracy intended to provide the population with the services they need. Each of us contributing in line with ability, and taking in line with need. The challenge (and possibly the unsolvable problem) was finding a way to do this in an economically sustainable fashion.

The start of the modern era saw government as border security and global conglomerate. The government was responsible for negotiating your relationship with the rest of the world, and service provision was out-sourced (selling power stations and rail lines). Passports went from a convenient way of identifying yourself when overseas, to become the tool of choice for governments to control border movements.

Government 2.0 is just the most recent iteration in this ongoing evolution of government. The initial promise: government for the little man, enabled by Web 2.0.

As with Enterprise 2.0, what we’re getting from the application of Web 2.0 to an organisation is not what we expected. For example, Enterprise 2.0 was seen as a way to empower knowledge workers but instead, seems to be resulting in a generation of hollowed out companies where the C-level and task workers at the coal face remain, but knowledge workers have been eliminated. Government 2.0 seems to have devolved into “government as a platform” for similar reasons, driven by a general distrust of government (or, at least, the current government which the other people elected) and a desire to have more influence on how government operates.

Government, The State, has come to be defined as the enemy of the little man. The giant organisation which we are largely powerless against (even though we elected them). Government 2.0 is seen as the can opener which can be used to cut the lid off government. Open up government data for consumption and remixing by entrepreneurs. Provide APIs to make this easy. Let us solve your citizen’s problems.

We’re already seeing problems with trust in on-line commerce due to this sort of fine-grained approach. The rise of online credit card purchases has pull the credit card fraud rate up with it resulting in a raft of counter-measures, from fraud detection through to providing consumers with access to their credit reports. Credit reports which, in the U.S., some providers are using as the basis for questionable tactics which scam and extort money from the public.

Has the pendulum swung too far? Or is it The Quiet American all over again?

Gone are the days where we can claim that “The State” is something that doesn’t involve the citizens. Someone to blame when things go wrong. We need to accept that now, more than ever, we always elect the government we deserve.

Technology has created a level of transparency and accountablility—exhemplified by Obama’s campaign—that are breeding a new generation of public servants. Rather than government for, by or of the people, we getting government with the people.

This is driving a the next generation of government: government as the arbitrator of life events. Helping citizens collaborate together. Making us take responsibility for our own futures. Supporting us when facing challenges.

Business-technology, a term coined by Forrester, is a trend for companies to exploit the synergies between business and technology and create new solutions to old problems. Technology is also enabling a new approach to government. Rather than deliver IT Government alignment to support an old model of government, the current generation of technologies make available a new model which harks back to the platonic ideals.

We’ve come along way from the medieval days when government was (generally) something to be ignored:

  • Government for the man (the kings and queens)
  • Government by the man (we’ll tell you what you need) (each according to their need, each …)
  • Government as a conglomerate (everything you need)
  • Government as a corporation (everything you can afford)

The big idea behind Government 2.0 is, at its nub, government together. Erasing the barriers between citizens, between citizens and the government, helping us to take responsibility for our future, and work together to make our world a better place.

Government 2.0 should not be a platform for entrepreneurs to exploit, but a shared framework to help us live together. Transparent development of policy. Provision (though not necessirly ownership) of shared infrastructure. Support when you need it (helping you find the services you need). Involvement in line with the Greek/Roman ideal (though more inclusive, without exclusions such as women or slaves).

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