Change we can believe in

Earlier this week, the Obama Administration celebrated 18 technology innovators as part of their “Champions of Change” initiative. White House Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra, honoured these citizens for building applications on government data in order to improve life for their fellow citizens. The applications vary widely in scope, from helping citizens to solve local issues through collective dialog, through to informing parents of child-friendly destinations and helping asthma patients track the use of their medication.

The White House's website is hosting profiles of many of these innovators including:

• Localocracy founder Conor White Sullivan, whose platform "helps citizens and elected officials identify and solve local issues by providing a platform that fosters healthy civic dialogue";
• Daniel X. O'Neil, whose works include collaborating with the new Federal CTO Harper Reed on Chicago's citypayments.org;
• Michael Riedijk, whose YouTown service provides an "all-in-one mobile app for local government".
• Waldo Jaquith, whose Richmond Sunlight website aggregates and opens up legislative information about the lawmaking body that governs the state of Virginia
• Leigh Budlong, whose ZonabilitySF App provides "San Francisco homebuyers, renters, remodelers and others answer zoning questions about various properties".
• David Van Sickle, founder of Reciprocal Labs which developed an asthma tracker.

Valerie Jarret, Senior Advisor to President Barack Obama, explained the Champions of Change initiative as 'highlighting Americans doing extraordinary things in their communities'.

For more, check Whitehouse.gov's series of blog posts from these champions:

• The Possibility and Promise of Open Data
• Harnessing Open Government Data to a Wellness Intiative
• Increasing Access to Data with Public-Private Partnerships
• How Open Government Technology Transforms the Way We Travel
• Taking Part in Democracy Through Open Source Software
• Making the Political Process More Open and Inclusive

Last month, the 2011 Government of the Future Summit gathered together European decision makers and senior government officials to explore the role of innovation in public services and the importance of state institutions in driving economic growth.

For more, see LisbonCouncil or GovernmentOfTheFuture.net along with their publications below

• Driving Public Entrepreneurship: Government as a Catalyst for Innovation and Growth in Europe
• Where Innovation Meets Transformation: Embracing the New Reality in the Public-Service Sector

Brandon Kessler, the founder of ChallengePost, speech at the George Washington University's  School of Business Social Graph seminar, offered interesting insights into how the Public Sector can utilise their crowdsourcing platform to hold public innovation contests.

ChallengePost recently won a major contract with the General Services Administration to develop Challenge.gov, a governmentwide online challenge platform. The site currently has about 75 contests posted by dozens of federal agencies.

Kessler outlined the benefits of online challenges as thinking outside the box, paying for performance, galvanizing the public and capturing a “huge” return on investment:

The aggregate value of the challenge almost always exceeds the prize money

He also noted how the most successful challenges are specific in nature, with common sense rules, the right incentives and “marketing, marketing, marketing,”. On incentives he noted the importance of peer-recognition and questioned the importance of purely financial incentives as a means of building sustainable communities around innovation initiatives:

Money is an inefficient compensation mechanism

For more on Kessler's presentation, check FCW's article on the topic.

Stephen Goldsmith, New York City's deputy mayor for operations and author of The Power of Social Innovation: How Civic Entrepreneurs Ignite Community Networks for Good, talks on WYNC's Brian Lehrer Show about the city's recent request for cost-cutting suggestions.

The interview discusses some interesting ideas and innovations from the public on how to save the city money, without impacting on service provision. He responds to callers suggestions on improving efficiencies within the city.

(via WYNC.org)

Last week, Mayor Gavin Newsom signed a first-of-its-kind open data law requiring San Francisco's City departments and agencies to post certain types of data sets to a publicly accessible portal at DataSF.org.

This cements progress made under an executive directive in 2009 and marks a significant expansion of San Francisco's Open Data policy.

Mayor Newsom said:

San Francisco once again demonstrates what it means to be on the cutting edge of government openness and transparency

By making data sets publicly available, we’re forging valuable public-private partnerships with app developers and making City services easier to access for our residents.

San Francisco’s open data policy builds on President Obama’s call for more open and transparent government. Newsom explained how this leadership, at the Executive level, is a guide for elected officials around the country:

President Obama’s leadership in pressing for easier access to government data should be a wake-up call to elected officials around the country. Open data is quickly becoming the gold standard of accountability and transparency that all citizens will come to demand..

I’m proud that here in San Francisco, we’re ahead of the curve on this important government 2.0 initiative.

Alex Howard interviewed Portland's mayor Sam Adams about the city's recent Civic Apps contest.

It's an interesting interview in which he explains the rational for the city's Open Data initiatives and the benefits it brings to residents of the city. Some quotes from the interview:

In Portland, like I think most cities, when people are armed with knowledge, they make wiser choices

For us, data has always been there, in some cases for decades. Putting it to use for the public and help people make money while they do it – we intend to be the open source capital of the nation – and this is one contribution we can make, with our data sets.

Some of the prize winning apps that make use of the City's data include:

• Cross-platform Group Messaging and Location Beaconing for Disaster Relief  - a resource for citizens, medical teams and governments before, during and after disasters.
• PDX Trees - Find trees with Heritage Tree status
• Portland Bike to Transit Map - web map that helps you figure out how to ride your bike to transit
• CivicApps Data Previewer - A web application to preview any of the public geo data on CivicApps from your web browser.
• Pdxtrian - Helps riders of Portland's excellent mass transit system, TriMet. 
• MyTriMet.com   - designed to answer one simple question. Where's my bus?
• PDX Bus - isplays arrival times for public transport in Portland, Oregon
• pdxhash - is a scheme for geotagging locations in the Portland area with a short string made up of numbers and letters
• PDXAPI.com - website providing a JSON api to nicely formatted, developer friendly versions of the datasets provided at CivicApps.org.
• Clackamas County Fire/EMS twitter feed - Sends the most recent fire/EMS call in Clackamas County to a Twitter account.

For more, check Alex's blog-post at Govfresh.com and CivicApps.org

At the Activate 2010 conference, organized by the Guardian, Nigel Shadbolt of data.gov.uk gave a talk on the latent power of government data and the drive to open it up . A video of that talk is now available on-line and contains interesting examples of the power of open data.

Great panel on Democracy and Voice: Technology For Citizen Empowerment and Human Rights from the Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting earlier this month.

The session looked at the impact of digital information on social causes, government reforms, civil society, and the broader economy.

The discussion focused on how people all over the world are demanding the freedom that unfettered social media can provide. Recent news events - from the use of Twitter in Iran to Google's withdrawal from China - have demonstrated that many people now see access to information technology as a basic human right. As such, the global information commons raises serious questions, however, about politics, governance, access, privacy, intellectual property, and cultural change.

Commitment Presenter:

Nicholas Kristof, Columnist, The New York Times

Participants:

• Arianna Huffington, Co-Founder and Editor In Chief, The Huffington Post
• Mohamed Ibrahim, Chairman, Mo Ibrahim Foundation
• Ashton Kutcher, Co-Chair, Demi and Ashton Foundation Omid Memarian, Journalist, IPS News Agency
• Pierre Omidyar, Founding Partner, Omidyar Network
• Maria Otero, Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs, U.S. Department of State

An interesting new report – ‘Better for Less: How to make Government IT deliver savings’ - has just been released by The Network for the Post-Bureaucratic Age (a research group supported by activists and volunteers in the public and private sectors).

The report seeks to investigate the quagmire of government IT.  Better for Less

 Concentration of Power  

UK Government IT has failed to meet political and public aspirations and has followed a policy of demand aggregation, an approach that has concentrated the IT marketplace in the hands of a small group of overly influential “System Integrator” companies who themselves find the profligate waste and lack of capability deeply troubling.

Effective checks and controls over IT contracts have been dismantled with a move instead to selectively placed, very large, high value and long-term contracts going to ‘the big 9’. Transparency is routinely refused, often for ‘Commercial Confidentiality’ reasons.

More fundamentally, by turning away from the IT mainstream (based on open platforms, open competition and rapid innovation) and instead pursuing a closed, centralised IT model, government has effectively backed the wrong model - it has chosen Betamax over VHS.

Trapped in an evolutionary cul-de-sac and with little competitive leverage, it has paid ever larger amounts to persuade suppliers to prop up its suite of disconnected, unsustainable platforms.

Potential solutions

The report suggests 5 principles that should form the basis of all IT in government:

1) Openness

• Open Data – government data must be transparent

• Open Source works – its concepts should be applied to processes as much as to IT 

• Open Standards will drive interoperability, save money and prevent vendor lock-in

• Open Markets – competition creates efficient market-based solutions 

2) Localism – the centre may set the standards, but local deployment is best

3) Ownership and Privacy

• It’s our data, government can have access but not control over personal data 

• Government should be accountable for data protection and proper use

4) Outcomes matter more than targets

5) Government must be in control of its programmes, not led by them. 

The report goes on to suggest 4 workstreams to embed these principles. These workstreams include

1: Audit – Get and understand the numbers

2: Identity – the pre-requisite for online delivery

3: Capability – build in the skills we will need for the long term

4 - Delivering change through open markets

For more analysis on the report check:

• A facelift for the pig
• Opening Up Government IT: Better for Less

Conrad Quilty-Harper recent article for Telegraph.co.uk explores how data is changing how we live. In it he provides 10 real-world examples in the fields of Shopping, Relationships, Business deliveries, Maps, Education, Politics, Society, War and Advertising.

While the article is focused primarily on the benefits of data mining for companies, it also gives examples that show fundamental shifts in our society. Some snippets below in relation to government's use of data:

Politics

Spending data for the government is being released on a much greater scale, with the release of COINS spending data to be supplemented by itemised spending above £500 from local government. Several bodies have appeared that aim to provide a clear picture of how the Government spends money, including Where Does My Money Go?, OpenlyLocal and Armchair Auditor...

The London Datastore and Data.gov.uk are campaigning for and highlighting open data releases from the Government, and the Government itself is planning a raft of data releases. With more data becoming available about how our Government operates, it'll inevitably be pressured to change.

Linked data and the future

The majority of the information that we use in our daily lives is "dumb", or unconnected. The next step is "linked data", or data that talks to each other. In the UK, Tim Berners-Lee and the team behind Data.gov.uk are aiming to create a linked database of Government information. By providing all data the Government produces in a linked format, individuals will be able to pull in different sets of data to produce new and innovative ways of understanding how our Government and the world works.