Don Tapscott (one of the authors of Wikinomics) was invited by the Davos management to organise an impromptu meeting of business and government leaders and some leading academics and thinkers on the topic of rethinking democracy. The topic he chose was government 2.0 – how the new Web 2.0 might lead to new models of citizen engagement.
During the discussion Nine themes emerged:
Self organisation
Youth
What should governments do?
The Body Politique
Open APIs for Government
Levels of Government.
Past technological paradigms
What does geo-spatiality mean to government?
If there really is a new paradigm in government emerging – a government 2.0 – how can such a change occur?
Don blogs about the discussion in Canada’s Globe and Mail Newspaper (last Saturday 26th January 2008)
The Wiki project is proceeding , I installed MediaWiki on an internal weberver today and found it straightforward to get configured and up and running. We are currently entering some test content before we ask for some input from our staff.
In addition to our public wiki ,we also intend to include an interactive mapping element to our public consultation process (see yesterday’s post).
To this end a GIS expert colleague of mine suggested we might use some of the information provided in this Google Blog as a kick-off point. We do already provide some online custom interactive mapping applications, however what we want here is a simple easy to use system to gather input from the public.
From the Google Blog:
In this crazy Web 2.0 world, it’s all about one thing: the user. It’s about what the user wants from your site, and what the user can contribute to your site. That’s particularly true about map sites - the world is a big complicated place full of users who are experts on the 10 mile radius around them. That’s part of the reason why maps.google.com added user-created maps, geocode editing, and local business reviews this year. Now, the question pulsing through your mind is probably: “How can I get in on some of this user-contributed action??” Good news, we have an answer!
Our latest article, “Creating a User-Contributed Map with PHP and Google Spreadsheets” describes what’s necessary to set up a shared Community Map application. The article takes you through the steps of registering a user, logging in a user, letting users add map places, and creating the map. The article uses Google Spreadsheets for a pseudo-database and the PHP client library to perform HTTP operations, giving you the advantage of a nice frontend for database editing/viewing (spreadsheets.google.com) and a database that’s not dependent on a particular hosting provider.
David outlines the possibilities more transparent government offers to the public and to business and gives some very good examples of several US agencies that have opened their data to the public using well documented APIs
He also outlines some possible concerns that government organisations may have in regard to opening up their datasets:
Concerns
There are a lot of concerns that can and should be addressed before a transparent government project is launched. Fortunately, there are sound solutions to most of them.
* Concern: Amateurs will just confuse issues
Response: As Jon Udell says, “Those who don’t cite data will be laughed at. Those who do cite data but interpret it incorrectly will be corrected. Those who do great work will develop reputations that are discoverable and measurable.”
* Concern: will violate privacy
Response: there is already a lot of personal information available on the web as well as data theft and inadvertent disclosure by government agencies. This issue must be addressed on a comprehensive basis, and shouldn’t be given as the justification for denying transparent government.
* Concern: releasing and combining bad data will compound problems
Response: No justification! Bad data must be cleaned up under any circumstances.
And offers some advice on how this process could perhaps begin…
Test transparent government behind firewall first
I realize this whole concept of releasing data to the general public is downright scary to many in government!
So here’s a great way to ease into transparent government: apply the same strategy behind the firewall first.
After all, your own employees may be struggling with incompatible data bases, may need to reach across agency “silos” to see if there might be synergies between programs, or they may need to see if plotting various data bases geographically might illustrate hotspots where intervention should be concentrated.
Just as with public transparent government projects: employees from outside a given agency may be able to provide new insights simply because of their differing life experiences and insights.
Also, as more young workers, who have never known life without the Web, join governmental workforces, they’ll naturally ask why tools they’ve used can’t be used in government. This can empower them and tap their expertise.
Experimenting with transparent government on the inside lets you:
* learn more about approach
* encourage inter-agency cooperation
* clean up data
* create your own data visualizations and information mashups before going public.
When launching a behind-the-firewall data visualization site, you need to have the same components as with a public site:
* clean up your data, and establish common formats for feeds: XML, RSS, and AJAX.
* create a single web site for the project, that will allow you to include the feeds, show how the process works, and then aggregate all of the mashups and visualizations that result
* encourage users to create and use tags, so that the projects can be clustered and searched.
From Charles Arthur also in the Guardian (2 November 2007)
The Irish government has dipped a toe into the free data market, making a group of datasets for boreholes around the country available online so that professional users - in particular those engaging in major construction or infrastructure planning - will be able to visualise subterranean structures.
The Irish data (which can be viewed using an interactive viewer) are not yet in the sort of form that could be used to build mashups, by connecting to an online web interface that could be queried by someone building, say, a Google, Yahoo! or Live Maps interface. At present, navigating to the borehole locations is a slow process that requires clicking on more and more detailed map views, or searching for known sites or towns.
But in principle it is widening the availability of data to anyone on the net, including Ireland’s citizens, which must be useful - and the possibility of a web API (applications programming interface) that would let people build their own mashups by querying the GSI’s servers in real time must exist.
Video of Tara Hunt Presenting her talk on Government 2.0 “Architecting for Collaboration” (May 26th 2007) to some New Zealand Government officials and staff at GOVIS and here also are the accompanying slides (hosted on slideshare.net). Its an excellent and inspiring presentation on Government as a platform, discussing 2.0 technologies and their role in enabling engaged citizens to collaborate with government organisations in decision making and progressing government in this new web 2.0 era, the main themes are openness, collaboration and community.
Here also is another excellent presentation from Tara called “Government Next” also available on slideshare.net. I highly recommend anyone who is working in IT in government or is interested in IT and government to watch these presentations. Tara has collected a lot of thought from various sources in addition to her own insights she is obviously influenced by Tapscott and Williams book ‘Wikinomics‘ and Chris Anderson’s book ‘The Long Tail’. She also covers Microformats, wikis and a number of other Web 2.0 technologies. Essentially encouraging government organisations to serve as a platform for the development of business and industry. She calls for governments to open APIs to their data and enable businesses to build new services on top of this data, to enable corporate mashups and perhaps to imagine and deliver new services that the government organisations might never have foreseen. Here are two examples of citizen created ‘mashups’ : Chicagocrime.org and the Irish Dartmaps, although in the case of Dartmaps at least, its creator had to ’scrape’ the data from a government website instead of connecting to a useful government created API.
Overall the case for government organisations opening their public datasets to their citizens and industries using open APIs seems a strong one, and after all, it is the public’s data in any case.
Finally here is the video ‘Day of the Long Tail ‘ which is referred to and presented during Tara’s architecting for collaboration presentation listed and linked above..
