To recap, the concept of open sourcing government is essentially about allowing third parties (citizens, companies, non-profits, etc.,) direct access via APIs to government data, so:

that individuals, communities and businesses are able to interact with government web applications in ways that are useful to them.
5 principles for Govt 2.0

The UK Cabinet Office released a report in June last year that looked at what this would mean for their public management system. The economic impact alone, as the report makes clear, had the potential to make a significant contribution:

2006 figures from the Office of Fair Trading that estimate that improved availability of information to re-users could double the direct market value of public sector information to £1.1 billion per year.
The value of government information

The Princeton paper authors, however, seem to be going some way further, calling for the US federal government to reduce the role it plays in presenting online information to citizens. The authors argue that the key role for federal agencies should be opening up their data, rather than building websites that provide a platform (and by inference, not a particularly good one) and a filter for people to access the information.

Their premise is an attractive one. That government

should focus on creating a simple, reliable and publicly accessible infrastructure that “exposes” the underlying data. [... The Government should] require that federal websites themselves use the same open systems for accessing the underlying data as they make available to the public at large.
Government Data and the Invisible Hand, p1.

Effectively, this means that government agencies could focus their attention (and taxpayer dollars) on the quality and accessibility of the information, and not on the presentation level. It’s a compelling proposition, particularly when you consider the current state of the namespace (in any jurisdiction, really).

The authors argue that the market, in the form of these third parties developing applications that reuse the government data, will drive economies of innovation and accessibility that are beyond anything that government itself could hope to provide. They list some of these advanced features:

• advanced search
• RSS feeds
• links to information sources
• mashups with other data sources
• discussion forums and wikis
• data visualization
• automated content and topic analysis
• collaborative filtering and crowdsourcing analysis

It is worth pointing out that some of these advanced features are already part of the namespace here; albeit with mixed success. Advanced search, RSS feeds, and wikis are all essential elements of the .govt.nz space.

There are a couple of concerns that I have. The authors acknowledge that in some case there will be no private actor willing to step forward and create a compelling website based on the data. The notion that government makes all information accessible, irrespective of it’s apparent value, is a fundamental one. Abrogating that responsibility to third parties seems fraught with potential to disadvantage some sections of the community. Mike W leaves a comprehensive comment to this effect on Ed Felten’s blog (one of the authors of the paper).

As an aside, ensuring that people can access a government data set via a visualization (like EveryBlock, for example) using a screenreader can be done, but it is hard work…

More of a concern, however, is the notion that we can either continue to try to build usable websites or simply outsource innovation in the namespace. I don’t see, as the authors apparently do, that the two are mutually exclusive. Indeed, there is an argument that government should retain and build more capability for innovation, rather than adopt practices that would encourage this sort of activity to atrophy.

Those concerns aside, however, what the authors of the paper are proposing is both an effective and efficient approach to transformed government. We should be seriously considering the same here in New Zealand.

Photo: kool_skatcat

Despite the evidence and regular predictions about the central role that mobile devices will play in the future of the web, public sector agencies (most of them anyway) have yet to recognize this and build or adapt their existing sites to accomodate these users.

One obvious reason is that public sector agencies’ investment cycles are a lot longer than twelve months and that we will start to see mobile-friendly sites developed increasingly over then next 36 months. That may be the case, but it points at what I believe is the fundamental problem with the .govt.nz domain space: that the management of government websites is mostly considered to be a technical function.

These are not, however, technical issues. The technology has been developed, is already widely used and understood. It is a question of business managers understanding how they can use these tools to better achieve their outcomes.

One possibility

Let me give you an example. We know that the telephone is New Zealander’s preferred means of interacting with government. We also know that it is the channel that causes the most grief for customers (and hence materially impacts upon the agency’s customer satisfaction ratings).

Yet how many government websites offer real-time interaction via the web, using instant messaging, for example? None that I am aware of (happy to be contradicted, point to examples in the comments).

Think about the advantages. You still have people in the ‘holding pattern,’ waiting to interact with a human being, but staff can see the nature of the query/complaint and make a judgement about moving it up or down in the queue.

You can also track contact drop outs against the logged query/complaint and garner much more data about the effectiveness of the interactions, because it can all be stored and – more importantly, given the volume of data we are talking about, searched.

Now to really add public value, you could have the customer service representative tag the data as it is entered during the exchange, for example applying microformats to describe attributes like location and time, which would effectively create a rich dataset for the agency — and for any enterprising third parties, much like Adrian Holovaty’s EveryBlock.

The solution

The first couple of aspects of the scenario above are pedestrian in both conception and execution. The notion of introducing semantics to the process has the potential to transform the agency’s interaction with its publics.

As I suggested above, the lack of coordinated and strategic development of the namespace is because what are essentially communications issues are decided by technologists.

A small part of the solution is wresting back control of the way our agencies interact with their publics; the greater challenge is to understand the technology sufficiently to effectively engage with management and the technologists in these discussions. Otherwise we will be doomed to keep arriving just in time for the ribbon cutting…

Photo: Waponi

The review proposes a simple vision:

that citizens, consumers and government can create, reuse and distribute information in ways that add maximum value.
p.20

The authors then go on to propose a three point strategy to enable government to make the most of the opportunities afforded by unlocking its information. They suggest government:

• welcomes and engages with users and operators of user-generated sites in pursuit of common social and economic objectives;
• supplies potential re-users with the public sector information they, when they need it, in a way that maximizes the long-term benefits for all citizens; and
• protects the public interest by preparing citizens for a world of plentiful (and sometimes unreliable) information, and helps excluded groups take advantage.

In the post on the principles of Govt 2.0, I discussed the importance of this practice, ‘open sourcing government.’ But before we (here in New Zealand, or any other jurisdictions for that matter) are in a position to transform the .govt.nz namespace into one that actively encourages this sort of value transfer, we need to look at how we are making the information available in the first place.

Data web

The use and re-use of government information is predicated on the ability to find the right information at the right time, and for it to be made available in a way that enables people and/or machines to access and, where necessary, manipulate it. The review has an interesting counter example of this:

‘I got in touch with the Stern report team, because I wanted to republish it in a format that people could easily read and discuss on the internet. I couldn’t make the person at the other end of the phone line understand why I didn’t want the report in 600 page PDF format. So I said I wanted to be able to read it on my phone. He told me to get a better phone.’
p. 19

The irony of this review only being available as a PDF aside, this anecdote illustrates a classic public sector myopia around the publishing process: “We’ve put it on the web, we’re done.” When what is really called for is a vision of the publishing process as a value chain that begins when agency information is being marked up for publication.

However, this requires a revolution in the thinking that we bring to the management of government information. Everything that we publish becomes viewed as a potential resource for the public and private sectors to consume, syndicate, mashup and reinvent for social and economic benefit.

A local example is Statistics New Zealand, who have just launched a programme to make their data available to businesses.

The Cabinet Office review cites 2006 figures from the Office of Fair Trading that estimate that improved availability of information to re-users could double the direct market value of public sector information to £1.1 billion per year (another pdf).

Unlocking some of this value is the challenge before us. Microformats and semantic markup in general are a good first step, and another compelling reason why public sector communicators should be familiar with HTML. It is our job to describe and champion this value chain within our agencies.

Conclusion

Mor Naaman, in his post The Emerging-Semantics Web (”The Semantic Web is Dead”), points out that most people will be unwilling to mark their pages up semantically therefore what we will see emerge is a ‘bottom-up’ semantic web built from lightweight solutions like microformats and Flickr machine tags. This is probably the case, and a good reminder that web standards are not an end in themselves.

It should also remind us that as public servants we have an additional responsibility to ensure that the information that we publish – in addition to being accessible by all – can be re-used by people and businesses to generate social and economic value.

Photo: dltq