Just last month, a team of researchers at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy argued that governments should make their vast datasets available through open interfaces, certain in the conviction that individuals, community groups and self-organizing interest groups would be able to develop flexible and far more useful applications than any bureaucracy.

“Rather than struggling, as it currently does, to design sites that meet each end-user need, we argue that the executive branch should focus on creating a simple, reliable and publicly accessible infrastructure that exposes the underlying data. Private actors, either nonprofit or commercial, are better suited to deliver government information to citizens and can constantly create and reshape the tools individuals use to find and leverage public data.”

This is not a new argument - people have been creating mashups from public data for several years now, as Tara Hunt and Factory Joe point out in the slideshow below.

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You know, intuitively, that this is a fantastic idea that can only have positive effects for the general public. As a bureaucrat, however, you also know that institutional roadblocks litter the road ahead:

• government-wide open source software standards? (until recently, the Canadian government had departments that mandated the use of WordPerfect)
• data collection programs that are required to be self-sustaining
• long term contracts for certain types of data (like weather data, shipping statistics)
• statistical agencies that jealously guard their data like a mystical elixir that is the source of all their power
• knee jerk concerns for the integrity of the data (and the agencies that originally collected it)

There’s a subtle irony: I suspect the some of the same people who now argue for open and transparent government were vocal proponents for responsible and efficient government in the 1990s. The intrinsic spirit is the same - opening up government and forcing it to recognize the real needs of the citizenry.

As we all now know, throughout the ’90s governments learned to measure activity, to track performance and to set up fee for service regimes as a result.

We’re now faced with a situation where business processes, network specifications, technological limits and institutional reticence are preventing true innovation in how governments serve their citizens.

I just have to wonder how long it will take public sector IT specialists to be fundamentally and professionally embarrassed that they are being handed their asses on a platter by weekend code warriors?

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 6th, 2008 at 4:43 pm and is filed under IT Issues, Community, Implementation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.