Cairns Blog

From Russia with Love

A few days ago I gave a presentation on “Solving Public Problems with Crowdsourcing” for 80 assembled governors of the Russian Federation outside of Moscow at an event on Contemporary Management Technologies.

The presentation was a sweep of the global landscape covering ways institutions are engaging with the public on (and off) line to brainstorm, collect data, undertake tasks, generate economic wealth, raise money and elicit opinions.  In other words, I was focusing on how government institutions can collaborate with citizens to solve problems through crowdsourcing.

It was a diverse group to address. It included the governor of Arkhangelsk, an Arctic Circle state, with no roads that can only be accessed by helicopter as well as the governor of Krasnoyarsk, a state so big that it takes 4 hours to fly across it. The federal president appoints these governors. But a new law (recently reversed in part by Putin) is slated to establish direct elections this autumn. Hence many of these leaders are thinking about their electoral chances in a time of increasing dissatisfaction with the Kremlin and, above all of the need to deliver better services to improve Russian quality of life with dwindling resources.

My goal was to be concrete and specific (thanks GovLab Research) about how to use technology to solve real problems in practice not in theory. My perspective was informed by my experiences in public service where I learned how hard it is to get stuff done on a hundred topics a day without access to good information or the time to get it. I wanted to convey at this propitious moment with the promise (threat?) of elections around the corner that engagement is a way, not to get beaten up by the press and public, but to collaborate to the end of solving real problems.

Crowdsourcing itself is a slippery term. A recent article counted 40 different definitions of “crowdsourcing” and there are lots of terms from open innovation to collective intelligence to crowd crafting to human computation, which get substituted interchangeably. My approach to defining crowdsourcing centered around the following variables:

Institution + Platform + Incentive + Citizens/Communities = Crowdsourcing

Using this model, I wanted to get the audience away from thinking that citizens can only complain and, instead, to remind them that people are smart and will give if asked. Crowdsourcing, is in essence, about strategies for working with citizens, companies and organizations — whether those with specific expertise, passion and know how or the general public (didn’t know how to say Joe Q Six Pack in Russian) — to collaborate with a government institution to solve a problem.

Important to point out is what crowdsourcing projects have in common (and this I learned clearly fromDaren Brabham‘s excellent short book on Crowdsourcing) is that crowdsourcing projects must be directed by an institution and depend upon the institution to organize the practice and set the rules. They aren’t bottom up exercises like Wikipedia nor are they top down activities like a corporate contest to pick a logo. To quote from one of my favorite slides that I often use: “it ain’t a thousand flowers blooming or command and control.”

Rather, Crowdsourcing exists in the middle between institution and citizens. This liminal space between government and civil society is such a fertile and little understood idea, especially in the public sector, where there can be resistance to saying “I don’t know” and “I need help” from anyone outside my professional cadre. To do crowdsourcing well, the institution has to play an active role in planning. This demands work but it also creates an incentive to public leaders who fear that engagement might lead to plebiscite or free for all where either they get beaten up or are drowned in information they can’t use.

For the future, GovLab and others need to create materials that outline the anatomy of specific crowdsourcing projects.  For institutional leaders flirting with the idea of greater openness and engagement, it will help to understand concretely both the steps to take and the steps taken by others before. For example, it may be heartening for the wary and would-be innovator to know that Veterans Affairs ran several important challenges to decrease the backlog in Veterans benefits claims with a 3K piece of software and part-time assistance of one employee. It’s crucial to understand that the open health government data movement got started with one tireless individual working to convene a few dozen people to use the data to demonstrate what’s possible. Today that Healthdatapalooza movement has growth exponentially and others outside of government have stepped up to help. But it doesn’t have to be hard to get started.

To inspire real change, vision must be married to tactics.. In short, the more concrete, the more granular and the more specific we can get by telling stories of how innovations got done and why they worked, the more likely we are to encourage leaders to understand that engagement is a must have tool of successful governance.

So please share examples of the “how to” of crowdsourcing – who did what, how much did it cost, what were the tools and, above all, what were the outcomes — that can be used to inspire any leader to become more collaborative and, as result, more effective. Comments here or links cc @thegovlab. Thanks!

Wiki Style Government

The Public Administration Select Committee of the UK Parliament issued a Report on Public Engagement in Policymaking calling for “wiki style” approaches to policymaking and creating greater engagement in the workings of government.

The Report, which is the result of a extensive consultation, including three live testimonies before the Committee (Full disclosure: I had the pleasure of being a witness) and extensive written submissions advocates a smarter government strategy of using online tools to elicit more information without ceding responsibility for decisionmaking. Rather, civil servants should steward the process of engagement in the public interest.

To govern is to choose. Open policy-making should take debate outside Whitehall and into the community as a whole, but ultimate responsibility and accountability for leadership must remain with Ministers and senior civil servants. Once again, we emphasise the importance of leadership in Government; of effective strategic thinking, which involves choosing between different arguments, reconciling conflicting opinions and arbitrating between different groups and interests; and of effective governance of departments and their agencies. A process of engagement, which can reach beyond the “Westminster village” and the “usual suspects”, will itself be an act of leadership, but there can be no abdication of that leadership.

 

“Groupy Once More”: J. Richard Hackman on Group Behavior and Performance

This week family and friends of the late Richard Hackman, who passed away in January, gather in Cambridge, Massachusetts to celebrate his life and work. He devoted his career as a social and organizational psychologist to studying what makes groups from spies to orchestras to sports teams (he was a huge fan of Harvard Women’s Basketball) work well both in terms of their ability to accomplish a goal and to enhance individual satisfaction.  For a bibliography, see his website and buy his books here. Thankfully, he still had opportunity to complete the definitive catalogue raisonee of group behavior research, a chapter on Group Behavior and Performance in the Handbook on Social Psychology (2010).

In his honor, I went back to re-read this masterful survey (co-authored with Nancy Katz) on the study of groups. It covers the major theories, research questions, thinkers and their writings. For anyone working on democratic engagement and participatory democracy and thinking about crafting mental models for how to engage groups in governance, the chapter advances our evidence-based understanding of:

1.     When should groups be used and when not? What kinds of tasks do they perform well?

2.     How does group performance compare to that of individual engagement?

3.     What differentiates groups that realize their full potential and the potential of their members from those that do not?

In the chapter, Hackman outlines the history of organizational psychology.  The exigency to leverage scientific expertise to combat Nazism in World War II gave rise to the formal study of what makes teams – in that case infantry squads – work. In 1945, Kurt Lewin founded the Research Center for Group Dynamics at MIT. This “action research” center was devoted to conducting controlled experiments in the laboratory and the field on group communication. Challenged by the experience of the Holocaust, Lewin was explicitly normative: “research that produces nothing but books will not suffice.”

What started as a project in psychology, however, has pervaded other disciplines, including political and policy sciences.  Social psychology’s interest in groups waned by the 1970s in response to the pervasive individualism of the 1960s. Interest in groups did not disappear, however, and today there are scholars in business schools and computer science departments who look at permanent and temporary (what Hackman called sand dune teams) groups online and off in a variety of organizations. (I studied in a law school where Richard’s work on purposive groups had a huge impact on my own interest in groups as the fundamental unit of democratic culture.)  It is not surprising that those concerned with re-imagining governance and who want to invigorate democratic engagement are looking to this literature on what makes groups work.

Studying dynamic, living, changing organisms like groups is, Hackman explains, a hard and imperfect science and fraught with ideological conflict. Hackman contends that there will never be a “definitive” study of groups given the different metrics for success, the different tasks groups perform and the diverse ways, including synchronous and asynchronous, that they work. Some researchers focus on whether the group accomplished its productive purpose while others measure to what extent the experience of working in a group contributes to individual well being.  Those who focus on process also study whether the way the group was organized made it function more or less well. (Citizen engagement researchers could do well to learn from this typology. We tend to focus either on the outcome, such as what app we built, without thinking about the benefits of getting engaged. Alternatively, others focus on the salutary benefits to individuals of participating in a deliberative process without inquiring as to the outcomes).

Hackman created another very useful typology for understanding the multiplicity of tasks that people acting in groups undertake. Groups do different things. Track teams perform “disjunctive tasks” where performance is measured by the best member. There are “conjunctive tasks” like a roped together group of climbers, who perform at the level of the least competent member. “Additive” tasks like a tug of war or many crowdsourcing projects are the sum of the parts. “Compensatory” tasks are those specific kinds of crowdsourcing projects that average the results of member contributions like a prediction market. “Complementary” tasks involve the assembly of smaller parts into a whole such as we find on Wikipedia. When we begin to take apart the different ways that groups function, (Hackman studied all of these), we begin to gain insight into how to design ways for groups to participate in different tasks of governance.

Over the years, Hackman and Katz discuss in the chapter, how we’ve evolved different approaches to studying the different aspects of group behavior. While action research emphasizes the normative goal of improving the work of the group, the psychodynamic approach studies the emotional state of groups as epitomized by Le Bon’s study of The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. The network approach analyzes the relationship between group members and tracks the changing patterns of network ties. The process approach is to look at how the group interacts, often using computational tools. Its major advance is to “capture nuance and meaning and to produce a rich and data-based understanding of how group members interact.  The decision-analytic approach focuses either on “qualitative, case-based methods” or “highly quantitative and largely laboratory-based” methods. It is this model that gave rise to Irving Janis’ work on groupthink that has had such a negative influence on policymakers willingness to embrace more citizen consultation.

Finally, the complex systems approach is a more recent trend emerging from the natural sciences to model mathematically the evolving patterns of group behavior over time. The chapter contains even more comprehensive yet concisely articulated analysis of the approaches to group analysis and recent studies of compositional diversity, the role of moderation, the effect of training, and the impact of the broader values of the system in which the group operates. As groups move more online, these different approaches are being revisited with an eye towards understanding how working at a distance changes (or doesn’t) these earlier insights.

One of the important insights in this chapter to thinking about the role of groups in democratic life is the way groups work together to create a shared mental model.  “When group members share the same mental model, coordination is enhanced and the likelihood of miscues is lessened.” Today we lack these shared mental models for how networked publics outside of government can work together with professionals inside government to solve problems.

We understand what it means to vote in an election or sign a petition. But we are only just beginning to comprehend how the kinds of tasks that groups can perform together (see above) can be applied to addressing public problems. Instead of guessing jellybeans in a jar, we are learning that groups that aggregate predictions can help us understand complex policy issues. Instead of additive social tasks, we are now beginning to realize that people can also crowdsource the collection of data to fight disease and improve people’s quality of life. Thanks to Hackman’s research and the rise of technologies for distributed communication, we now have an opportunity for more people to engage in the life of our democracy and make our democratic culture stronger and more robust.

Creating an organizational culture that emphasizes shared, public interest over individual self-interest is the essence of democracy. But designing the processes for more and more distributed purposive groups to do public work and take on the tasks of governance requires drawing on Hackman’s research.

Without insights from the social sciences we cannot know how to compose teams, how to organize their work together, how to define their tasks and how to create incentives for group based collaboration that achieves a goal and enhances satisfaction. We surely don’t know how to do this online without drawing on what he’s taught us about team effectiveness offline. “It is reasonably well established, for example, that performance is facilitated when teams are small and compositionally stable with clear, but permeable, boundaries and interdependence for some consequential, shared purpose.”

While in the chapter Hackman and Katz describe the field as a whole, it is stunning to note how much of the literature and how many important insights he contributed to the field. As we stand on the threshold of the opportunity to redesign our democratic institutions to incorporate the work of outside groups in governance, his analysis, passion and humor will be profoundly missed. While technically a psychologist, Hackman should go down in history as one of the great and important political thinkers of our time. 

IRS: Turn Over A New Leaf, Open Up Data

From the Forbes blog

Co-authored by Stefaan Verhulst

The core task for Danny Werfel, the new acting commissioner of the IRS, is to repair the agency’s tarnished reputation and achieve greater efficacy and fairness in IRS investigations. Mr. Werfel can show true leadership by restructuring how the IRS handles its tax-exempt enforcement processes.

One of Mr. Werfel’s first actions on the job should be the immediate implementation of the groundbreaking Presidential Executive Order and Open Data policy, released last week, that requires data captured and generated by the government be made available in open, machine-readable formats. Doing so will make the IRS a beacon to other agencies in how to use open data to screen any wrongdoing and strengthen law enforcement.

By sharing readily available IRS data on tax-exempt organizations, encouraging Congress to pass a budget proposal that mandates release of all tax-exempt returns in a machine-readable format, and increasing the transparency of its own processes, the agency can begin to turn the page on this scandal and help rebuild trust and partnership between government and its citizens.

Every year in the United States approximately 1.5 million registered tax-exempt organizations file a version of the “Form 990” with the IRS and state tax authorities. The 990 collects details on the financial, governance and organizational structure of America’s universities, hospitals, foundations, and charities to the end of ensuring that they are deserving of tax exempt status. We are missing an opportunity to analyze this data so that decisions about whom to investigate can be based on evidence rather than conjecture, on patterns rather than prejudice.

Currently, hundreds of thousands of the largest tax-exempt organizations are required to file their returns electronically. The IRS should release this data in bulk as a free database immediately.  If the IRS were to make these 990 data available in a form that could be easily downloadable and processed by computer programs for visualization and statistical analysis, researchers could quickly do more extensive, in-depth empirical research to better understand the sector and spot fraud, waste and abuse more systematically. Knowing who runs a nonprofit can help detect fraud. Attorneys General have occasionally found the same person collecting full time salaries from several different nonprofits.

While the IRS is using robo-audits, catching large evasions still happens mainly by happenstance. With open data, they could be detected, first, through computer analysis. By using technology to expand the regulator’s toolkit, it becomes possible to target limited enforcement resources to where problems really are.  The Securities and Exchange Commission has, for instance, developed an improved capacity to detect and prevent insider trading more effectively by making public information computable and easier to mine. In addition, open data creates the means for government and citizens to collaborate on spotting problems. As the adage goes, with many eyes, all bugs are shallow.

Similarly, Form 990 requires charities to disclose loans to or from current and former officers. Making these and other transactions that correlate with instances of fraud like these would save government resources at the state and federal levels.

With a 990 database, it would also be easier to run queries to understand which executives receive the highest compensation. By combining 990 and other data,  such as lobbying data, it might become possible to spot impermissible political activities.

President Obama’s 2014 budget calls for requiring all tax exempts to file electronically, but also requires that the IRS makes these already public returns available in a timely, machine-readable format. These data would create a corpus of open, computable information that could be used to understand where nonprofits are providing services and where there are gaps. Enabling more people and organizations to analyze, visualize, and mash up the data, creating a large public community that is interested in the nonprofit sector and can collaborate to find ways to improve it.

In sum, the data that the IRS collect about nonprofit organizations present a great opportunity to learn about the sector and make it more effective.

Making IRS data open won’t solve every problem; the recent scandal has proven that the IRS must be more transparent about both the information it collects, but also how it manages that information. A commitment on day one to share the data it collects in a machine readable manner would show true leadership by Mr. Werfel and help solidify the Obama administration’s legacy as an open government

 

My Review: Citizenville: How to Take the Town Square Digital and Reinvent Government

Reposted from the San Francisco Chronicle, March 1, 2013

Citizenville: How to Take the Town Square Digital and Reinvent Government By Gavin Newsom with Lisa Dickey (The Penguin Press; 249 pages; $25.95)

Beth Simone Noveck

When I started work in the White House in 2009, I had been brought in to help implement the Obama administration's commitment to making government more transparent, participatory and collaborative. At the time, the federal government, like governments worldwide, was anything but open. The White House didn't have a blog, Twitter accounts or a social media site. To make matters worse, we were running Windows 2000.

As a colleague described the situation: "We have a nearly obsolete infrastructure, so a lot of things have to be done 'by hand.' Don't think Google server farm. Think gerbil on a wheel."

Things have gotten better since those early days, but they're not yet good enough. Approval rates for government are at an all-time low. We need more open, innovative government to connect with citizens and win their trust. But it can be hard to know how to talk about government innovation in a way that is exciting and inspiring. Through lively stories and engaging quotes from famous digerati and less-famous policy entrepreneurs, Gavin Newsom's new book, "Citizenville: How to Take the Town Square Digital and Reinvent Government," does just that.

Read more

Riding on Exponentials: Big Data, Predictive Analytics, Urban Informatics : Interview with Dr. Steven Koonin

It is not a bigger government we need, but a smarter government that sets priorities. President Barack Obama, State of the Union Address, February 12, 2013

In this interview with Steve Koonin, Director of NYU's Center for Urban Science and Progress and former Undersecretary of Energy for Science, we talk about the big thing happening in technology enabling smarter government, namely big data, the oil of the 21st century. In this lively half hour discussion, we talk about the technological developments driving the rise of big data, how big data changes the ways we govern, the impact of big data on innovation and entrepreneurship, the challenges and limits of using big data effectively, and how to train the next generation of data-savvy decisionmaker who can solve problems.We also brainstorm about what it would take to create a "politfact for urban data" and how to engage citizens in designing smart cities from the bottom up as well as about the need to get both private and public sector using data in conversation together.

The "wiring of the world," says Koonin is transforming society. Today we have cheap low cost sensors in phones and that we can install throughout our environement. And we have the technology to  transmit and store the data they provide us. We can analyze the massive amounts of data that can be collected about the physical world and about us.

We need data in governance. "When you get to the highest level policy tables," Koonin explains, the jobs are so broad that you can't get into the details. They are also highly political. Hence discussions are, if not fact free, than fact lite." With data in hand, we can make government more efficient, make decisions on the basis of better information, including robust models, and give citizens a stick with which to hold government more accountable. "If I knew that my bus service was only half as efficient as the folks across town," says Koonin, "that might change the way I petition the government." Data also empowers citizens to change their own behavior and decide to walk or carpool.

But data can also be misleading. "If you're smart, big data can make you seem smart," Koonin adds, "but if you're dumb big data only makes you dumber." It is key to understand how to ask the questions of the vast quantities of heterogeneous data increasingly availble to us.  And it is key to develop a knowledge of how to use data lest we confuse correlation with causation. Koonin talks thoughtfully about how to evolve our approaches to using big data to mitigate the risk of hubris and govern more thoughtfully.

 

Representative Democracy for Facebook

In a new essay from pioneering cyberlaw scholars David R. Johnson, David Post, and Marc Rotenberg entitled Governing Online Spaces, they argue that Facebook would benefit from user participation albeit not from the system the company once proposed. Earlier Facebook promised to forego policy changes that received comments from thirty percent or more of its users. Thirty percent of a billion people????

Clearly, that was an unworkable idea for governing. However, bringing democracy to Facebook is long overdue. Because of its size Facebook is both "platform and polity," they contend. Users cannot simply vote with their feet and pick another product when Facebook is essentially the only game in town. It is more state than a store. User engagement (aka Voice) will help avoid defection (aka Exit) and promote stickiness (aka Loyalty). Doing well by doing good.

Instead of one-profile-one-vote, they want Facebeook to implement a system of "virtual representation, whereby every user would be given the ability to grant a proxy to anyone who has volunteered to act on his/her behalf in policy discussions with Facebook management." In other words, they want representative not direct democracy for the world's largest social network.

Sounds like Congress, right? What's different here is that there's no need ahead of time to decide on a "right" number of fixed representatives (a fairly arbitrary and silly process). With proxy voting, users can designate a different representative for different issues from negotiations over the privacy policy to the design of the Timeline. Presumably, proxy voting would enable certain users, who were particularly eager to dig in on the internecine details of the terms of service, could stand for election. Facebook would supply the tools for one user to select another to vote on her behalf.

According to them, proxy voting is a much better system for Facebook because it creates incentives for informed participation. "Adopting an innovative mechanism for virtual representation would place Facebook at the forefront of public spirited innovation in Internet governance."

The devil is in the details, of course, of course of how the app would work. Given that each person only knows 150 people well, would proxy voting only minimally cut down on the number of voters and render the system unmanageable? Would there need to be campaigns and how would those be governed to avoid manipulation or just plain old unpleasantness? And regardless of the voting structure would the company abide by user decisions? Would it even allow a vote on things that genuinely matter?

Wouldn't it be great to find out? Precisely because of its size and the relative limits on opportunities for participation, Facebook offers a testing ground with many similarities to our existing political culture and institutions. This is an extraordinary opportunity to road test different models of governance including a variety of different styles of proxy voting.

If Facebook were willing, what would you have them try?

Related articles

Facebook, Governance, and Virtual Representation

Liberating 990 Data

For more, see Noveck and Goroff, Information for Impact: Liberating Nonprofit Sector Data. Link (PDF)

Every year in the United States approximately 1.5 million registered tax-exempt organizations file a version of the “Form 990” with the IRS and state tax authorities. While the questions vary between the version for private foundations or small nonprofits, the 990 collects details on the financial, governance and organizational structure of America’s universities, hospitals, foundations, and charities to the end of ensuring that they are deserving of tax exempt status. These organizations, which together pay $670 billion in wages and benefits annually, create America’s education, culture, art, religion, science, and provide many of the social services upon which our communities depend.

 

With a national movement in the U.S. to shrink the role of government, non-profits may be expected to expand their programs as they step in to fill essential needs. The role of nonprofits may now become even greater – and deserving of greater scrutiny. 

The data that the IRS collects about nonprofit organizations present a great opportunity to learn about the sector and make it more effective. Yet this data could be made far more useful than it is today. It’s time to “liberate” 990 data and make it easier to gain insight into the workings of America’s nonprofits.

The IRS does make nonprofits’ Form 990 returns available, but only on DVDs for a high fee. A single year’s worth of 990s costs over $2,500, arguably to recoup the costs of pressing and mailing all these dics. But there is no reason to charge for the Form 990 data at all. Just as most people have gotten accustomed to sharing large files via a service like Drop Box, it would be simple for the IRS to publish the returns online for anyone to download in bulk for free. This week two groups committed to government transparency, Public Resource and the Internet Archive, used their own resources to post 12 years of returns online, demonstrating that it can be done.

As President Obama declared on his first day in office, “Information maintained by the Federal government is a national asset,” and IRS data on nonprofits is important and valuable information that should be available to everyone.

The DVDs are only part of the problem. Even if you can afford to buy the DVDs with Form 990 data, as some organizations and news media do, the data on them is contained in image files, which are created by scanning the printed Form 990s rather than putting their data into a searchable database. Image files are useful only for reading about one nonprofit organization at a time. The sector deserves comprehensive and computable data that can be openly aggregated, searched, checked, and analyzed. 

In the long run, as a condition of being a nonprofit, organizations should be required to file the Form 990 electronically, rather than on paper, and the IRS should publish those returns in formats that lend themselves to doing aggregate analytics, creating visualizations and building analytic tools.

 

The IRS can start releasing in a timely fashion the data it holds that is filed electronically in computable form without waiting until all returns are electronically filed. There’s some debate about how much authority the IRS has to make changes like this on its own, and whether they would require Congressional action. Others argue that under the Freedom of Information Act, they must release the data. But we don’t need to wait for either a legal battle or for the IRS or Congress: The groups that now independently analyze IRS data can and should take the lead.

 

Today, the Foundation Center, GuideStar, the Urban Institute, Johns Hopkins’ Center for Civil Society Studies, and Indiana University’s Center on Philanthropy spend millions each year on converting the IRS images of the Form 990 into clean data that a computer can ingest and use to perform analysis and develop visualizations.  They’ve had to do this conversion because there has been no comprehensive set of open data about the nonprofit sector available to them or the many others who would take advantage of it. But rather than replicating each other’s efforts and then charging for access to the results, these groups could follow a more collaborative, open model. (Some of these groups are beginning to explore a collaboration.)

At least for the short term, incumbent organizations whose goal it is to provide data about the nonprofit sector and who raise philanthropic dollars to do so can stand in the place of government and make a data resource on nonprofits available. These organizations and those who fund them should take their cue from Public Resource and Internet Archive by pooling their resources and collaborating to develop a single, open and comprehensive 990 database that is available and free to all.

 

It will reduce the costs of data management for these incumbents and make the task of converting IRS data more efficient. And it need not threaten their revenue models: What they lose on the sale of bulk data, they can more than make up for by providing new tools and analytic services.

 

More important, free, open, analyzable data on nonprofits will enable more innovators, researchers, and entrepreneurs to use the data to benefit the sector. There are now many examples of public benefits that have come from “opening up” government data. When the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services published its database of hospital infection rates online in a computable format, Microsoft and Google were able to mash it up with mapping data to create an application that shows infection rates for local hospitals across the country. This tool readily allows anyone — from the investigative journalist to the parent of a sick child — to see which hospitals are safest.  The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration freely and publicly provides weather and forecast data online, and that data provides the backbone for such services as the Weather Channel. The GPS data we use to get from work to home were made available for civilian use by President Ronald Reagan, who saw the impact these data could provide as a public good. Cities have unlocked the data on when public transit runs and to where, making bus and subways easier to catch than ever before.

A comprehensive source of high-quality data on nonprofits, structured to allow comparisons and analyses across different organizations in the sector, would greatly enhance and accelerate research about the sector and make it possible to:

 

1. Do more extensive, in-depth empirical research on the sector as a whole, including sector-wide issues such as the impact of the economic downturn on nonprofits, the geographic distribution of nonprofit services, and the efficiency of the nonprofit sector in delivering services;
2. Combine the 990 data with other datasets, such as those on government spending, to better understand the relationship between public and private dollars in providing social services;
3. Query the data to address issues relating to specific nonprofits, such as gaining greater insight into 501(c)(4) organizations that engage in lobbying or finding trends and outliers in executive compensation;
4. Recognize fraud early, anticipate abuses, and target enforcement more efficiently and effectively; and
5. Enable more people and organizations to analyze, visualize, and mash up the data, creating a large public community that is interested in the nonprofit sector and can collaborate to find ways to improve it.

Above all opening up 990 data would attract many new and innovative people who would bring energy, enthusiasm and creativity to developing tools to help the neediest among us access better services, nonprofit providers to become more effective and efficient, and everyone to understand the role of the nonprofit sector in our economy better. Instead of only the work that Guidestar’s and Indiana’s employees have the time to do, many more people could begin to create apps, develop visualizations and do research than have been able to today.

With open Form 990 data, we can expect to see again what we are now seeing in many sectors: When experts of all kinds have access to open data, it becomes a catalyst for creative problem solving and community innovation.

Speed Dating for Social Change

Today we had our first class of sixty unbelievably energized grad students and one brave undergrad in Gov 3.0 @ NYU.

We got them out of their seats to meet one another and "speed date for social change" to the end of forming blogging communities. Cosmo and Laura asked everyone to make one name tag with three topics about which they are passionate and another with three skills they have. Then they took over the hallway and lobby outside the classroom to find complementary partners with whom to start blogs and "learn out loud" during the course of the semester. #Education and #Climate were popular destinations as was #IT and #Collaboration. Over the course of the next few days, students will self-organize into groups.

While this ice breaker was largely designed to find blogmates so that the responsibility of launching a blog on "innovation and X" won't be so onerous and students can learn from one another, it was also an exercise in learning about what's involved in building a network of collaborators. It's hard enough face to face in the classroom and that much harder? or easier? to do with strangers online.

Afterwards we talked about Newtown. I was frankly surprised that their response to my question about what's transpired since Newtown was to talk positively about social media stimulating a national conversation on gun control. No one expressed the outrage I feel about the anemic legislative response. Where, instead, are the collective intelligence platforms to develop good ideas for solving the problem of guns and school safety? Or the collaboration initiatives to crowdsource volunteer labor to protect schools for example? We are so conditioned to today's institutions that we are content to sit back and wait for the compromise-ridden, politicized process to play itself outself.

Let's see what we can teach ourselves this term about ways to tap social media networks and turn their energy into reliable ways of working together.

We're going to have a lot of fun exploring the opportunities and limits for collective intelligence and collaboration in this course.

We will run a twitter backchannel in an out of class under #gov30.

Unforunately, the chairs in our classroom are nailed to the floor in a lecture format, which didn't lend itself to collaboration. We are in search of a Pop Up Learning Space.

Related articles

Flipping the Classroom

Government 3.0

The future of our society will depend on how we respond to the crisis of governance.

Governance -- the way we provide public goods, services, and solve problems collectively -- is broken. Confidence in government is at an all time low. Traditional institutions are widely perceived to be untrustworthy or ineffective.  Around the world, we are witnessing public expression of pervasive disappointment with government and rising hostility toward mainstream institutions. Especially visible was the Occupy Movement, which launched in New York City during fall 2011 and rapidly spread across the globe and took aim at traditional, centralized hierarchies ranging from governments and corporations to non-profit and media institutions.

Troublingly, this erosion of trust in government comes at a time when a large portion of the world’s population continues to face significant challenges in daily life. One billion people live on less than $150 dollars each year, and lack access to clean water, basic education, or even minimal health care. Environmental catastrophes exacerbate their plight. Meanwhile, rising temperatures threaten the planet itself.

At the same time, tremendous leaps in science and technology offer new opportunities to address such challenges. Social networking and increased access to data enable citizens to connect and engage with one another to develop solutions to individual and collective problems. In order to recognize, implement and scale innovative solutions to public problems, however, we need open institutions capable of translating innovation into social progress. In this Cambrian age of big data and social media, we must use technology to transform governance.

Government 3.0: Rethinking Governance and Re-Imagining Democracy for the 21st Century at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at NYU is a semester-long exploration of how to use technology to improve governance. Through conversations with leading technology and policy innovators, in-depth reading and, above all, personal reflection we will teach ourselves more about advances in technology, how those innovations can be applied to making decisions and solving problems and design new experiments that might help advance institutional innovation.

via gov30.typepad.com

Flipping the Classroom

This course is an experiment. We are "flipping the classroom." Instead of passive learning in  class, we'll record lectures by leading thinkers and doers working on government innovation to watch at home supplemented by relevant readings. This frees up  time in class for active learning. We will work on projects and problems, including blog postings to apply what we are learning to the topics we each care most about.

via gov30.typepad.com

Future of Government Talks at TED: Cameron, Noveck, Pahlka, Shirky

http://www.ted.com/talks/beth_noveck_demand_a_more_open_source_government.html http://www.ted.com/talks/jennifer_pahlka_coding_a_better_government.html http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_the_internet_will_one_day_transform_government.html http://www.ted.com/talks/david_cameron.html

Wiki Gov Now Out on Kindle

Kindle edition.

 

 

 

TED Blog on The Open Government Revolution or The Day After the Arab Spring

Helen Walters wrote up my talk at TEDGlobal under the catchy heading Demand a More Open Source Government. That was the title of one of my first speeches when I worked in the White House. But using the O-word in public then was shocking.

Open Data: The Democratic Imperative

Reposted from Crooked Timber as part of an Open Data Symposium with

Henry Farrell (blogger at Crooked Timber)
Steven Berlin Johnson (author of Emergence, Where Good Ideas Come From, and the forthcoming Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age)
Tom Lee (director of Sunlight Labs at the Sunlight Foundation)
Clay Shirky (author of Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus_)
Tom Slee (author of No-One Makes You Shop at Walmart)
Victoria Stodden (assistant professor of statistics at Columbia, Big Data public intellectual)
Aaron Swartz (in no need of introduction to CT readers
Matthew Yglesias (author of Slate’s Moneybox column).

Open Data are the basis for government innovation. This isn’t because open data make government more transparent or accountable. Like Tom Slee, I have serious doubts about whether it does either of those things. In any event, shining a light on the misdeeds of ineffective institutions isn’t as imperative as redesigning how they work.  Instead, open data can provide the raw material to convene informed conversations inside and outside institutions about what’s broken and the empirical foundation for developing solutions together.

The ability of third parties to participate is what makes open data truly transformative. The organization that collects and maintains information is not always in the exclusive position to use it well.  For example, US regulators have compiled hospital infection rates for a long time.  Accessible only to government professionals, they had limited resources to make adequate use of the information.  When HHS made the data publicly available by publishing the data online in a computable format, then Microsoft and Google were able to mash up that information with mapping data to create search engines that allow anyone – from the investigative journalist to the parent of the sick child—to decide which hospital to choose (or whether it is safer to stay home). When data are open—namely legally and technically accessible and capable of being machine processed – those with technical know how can create sophisticated and useful tools, visualizations, models and analysis as well as spot mistakes or mix and mash across datasets to yield insights. As Matt Parker, put it: “By making data open, you enable others to bring fresh perspectives, insights, and additional resources to your data, and that’s when it can become really valuable.”

Complex Democracy

Solving complex challenges requires many people with diverse skills and talents working together. In modern society, we weave our collective expertise together, enabling us to make complex products such as cars and computers that we cannot make alone. The more complex and diverse the products, the more successful – measured both in terms of wealth and well-being – the society over time.

Educating our young or curing cancer are the cars and computers of governance. They are complex social problems that require us to bring our diverse talents to bear. But our centralized institutions of government do not adequately leverage our collective knowledge to improve governance and solve problems. We can’t foster complexity if we limit public participation to voting in annual elections or commenting on already written rules. There’s no excuse for failing to take advantage of people’s talents, abilities and desire to play a role in governing ourselves and our own communities.

Hackathons as a Model for Engagement

Open data create obvious new ways for geeky citizens to play a role in governance. All over the world, local transportation authorities are making schedules available for free and then inviting tech savvy citizens – civic coders—to create iPhone apps that tell commuters when their bus or train is coming. There’s obvious value to the public as well as to institutions from having better data to inform planning, policymaking and the expenditure of resources. But what’s exciting about mashathons, hackathons, data dives and datapaloozas (a Todd Park favorite term) is that these are intelligible models for taking action.

Wikipedia works because we know what tasks are required of us to write an encyclopedia entry. Only the high priesthood of government professionals knows how to write a law, craft a policy, draft procurement RFPs, or appropriate funds. Hackathons aren’t the only model for participatory governance but they are one way for us to get involved that showcases how it might be possible to move away from centralized to distributed action.

Making government more participatory wouldn’t have worked as well if we had only focused on releasing data-as-in-FOIA about the workings of government—politicians’ tax returns, who-met-with-whom, and even spending data. By defining High Value Data to include information: “to increase agency accountability and responsiveness; improve public knowledge of the agency and its operations; further the core mission of the agency; create economic opportunity; or respond to need and demand as identified through public consultation,” the hope was to speak to more people’s interests, talents and abilities.  We took a lot of flak at the time from those with passion for specific kinds of data. I have written previously that the “open” in open gov was never meant to suggest data-as-in-FOIA but, rather, meant open as in open innovation and therefore always had to go beyond “civil liberties data” to include all the information that government collects as well as information that citizens might crowdsource and provide to make government smarter.

The Hard Work of Opening Data

Moving toward open innovation as a default way of working in government is not easy. It takes a religious fervor (hence the sense of movement) for those who want to open up data.

It requires doing the hard and costly work of persuading data owners to shift from paper to digital and machine-readable formats and then to release that data despite political and technical challenges. But to foster engagement also requires curating the guest list for the hackathons to get subject matter experts, stakeholders, data geeks, activists, designers, computer scientists, data junkies and entrepreneurs together.

The host of a good dinner party doesn’t just leave the guests to fend for themselves. He introduces people, points out what they might have in common and seeds the conversation. Transit camps have been so successful because the conversation starts itself. Everyone wants to know when their bus is coming. But give people a data set about freight routes for transshipping goods or Form 990 tax returns and some explanation might be required.

Creating a participatory innovation ecosystem is about a lot more than just publishing data sets. It requires doing the hosting, convening, persuading, and demonstrating involved in inviting diverse people to participate. The institutional players have to be prepared to collaborate with the innovators; those outside government have to know how to collaborate; civil society activists have to ensure that innovators know the problems that need solving; and research is needed to figure out what works.

Using Data to Re-Regulate

The curatorial function is about coming up with strategies for using data to develop innovative solutions to protect consumers and serve the public interest. If we merely throw data over the transom, entrepreneurs, especially large ones, are likely to be the only entities with the wherewithal to do anything with the raw information.

But when we focus on data as a means to the end of bringing people with diverse skills together to solve problems then open data can improve upon the blunt instrument of regulation enforced by litigation.

With open data (also called Smart Disclosure), the US government is experimenting with using light touch regulation combined with technical innovation (and a firm belief in behavioral economics) to create consumer decision tools. For example, the Department of Transportation enacted a rule to require airlines to make all their fees and charges transparent. Because the data is open, innovators can create new visualizations to help consumers understand the costs and make informed decisions. No Child Left Behind requires states to gather and report school performance data, which is now being used by GreatSchools.org (in cooperation with the Department of Education) to help parents choose between public schools. The tool is in use 40-50% percent of all K-12 households. The White House Open Educational Data Initiative is spurring university Presidents to provide data voluntarily to help students and parents compare college costs and college aid “so they can make more informed decisions about where to enroll.”

But until we stop talking about data and start talking about complex and collaborative governance, we will fail to appreciate how open data can both protect consumers, lessen the burdens on entrepreneurs and catalyze more effective institutions.

Crowdsourcing Governance

 

[Video intro ends at 52 seconds; Intro by Dr. Gref ends at 2'18; Speech ends at 11'15; then Q&A]

These remarks have been edited from a 9-minute speech made in Moscow on November 12, 2011 at the 170th anniversary of Sperbank, Russia's largest and oldest financial institution. Speakers at this panel were introduced by Dr. Hermann Gref (CEO and Chairman of the Board, Sperbank, and former Russian Minister of Economic Development and Trade) and included Vladimir Putin, Prof. Jeff Howe (Northeastern), Prof. Tom Malone (MIT) and Dr. Paul Saffo (Managing Director of Foresight, Discern Analytics), Patrick Howard (Vice-President and Global Cloud Leader, IBM Global Business Services) and Klaus Kleinfeld (CEO and Chairman of the Board, Alcoa).

For Prime Minister Putin's presentation, click here.

Crowdsourcing Governance

We’ve heard today that as individuals we are smarter collaborating together than working alone. That is as true for institutions as it is for individuals. We are also smarter working across the boundaries of institutions with groups and individuals outside the walls of a single organization.

Collaboration makes businesses more successful. After all, Sberbank made $30 billion rubles ($1 billion U.S. dollars) as a result of its recent crowdsourcing experiments. But how do we, practically speaking, use technology and these collaborative processes to marry the chaotic success of Wikipedia to the hierarchical institutions of governance and government at the national and local level?

Challenges

To do so, we have three challenges we must first overcome: 

1. Serious Problems: The problems governments face are serious and complex. We live in a world with 7 billion people and soon we’ll live in a world with 10 billion people, 40% of whom will not have access to healthcare, clean water, or basic education. The breakup of the Eurozone is not the same as the Eurovision song contest. Are these kind of contests too frivolous to address the problems we face?

2. Declining Legitimacy: Globally, trust in government institutions is declining. We only need to witness the Arab Spring or the Occupy Wall Street movement. In the United States, by some measures trust in government is at an all time low of 9%. Government has to act with legitimacy. It has to engender trust. It has to have stability in its decision making. Is trying to connect the pulsing, vibrant network to the institution too experimental, too radical for government?

3. Too Costly: Finally, are these techniques too novel for government? It might be nice to have, but is crowdsourcing a must-have that is worth the investment of time and money?

Solutions

I would argue that collaboration is more important for government than for business in these very tough economic times, because it enables government to deliver better services for less money and more democratically.

First, crowdsourcing is a serious solution to serious problems.

1. Saving Money: Twenty nations, and countless states and local governments, have created and launched national data portals to put out spending data. With information about how government spends money, citizens can crowdsource the development of solutions to spot fraud and waste, such as sophisticated models, visualizations, and predictions. But what they can also do, as in happened in the state of Rajasthan, India, is crowdsource the reading of that data in the town square and the writing of that data on one hundred thousand walls of villages, so people can then identify paychecks that have been written to someone who has died or bridges that were never built when the government claimed that they were.

2. Spotting problems: There are local platforms like See Click Fix, in use now in seventy governments across six continents, that allow for distributed problem spotting. Identifying red lights that are out at intersections or potholes in the street allows government to target the delivery of services more effectively and more cheaply.

3. Innovating Solutions: But crowdsourcing also allows for innovating solutions and not just the spotting of problems. The Department of Defense has used crowdsourcing to design a new combat vehicle. And they got it done not in years, not in months, but with 159 competitive, serious submissions obtained in a matter of weeks. How did this work? The Obama administration’s Open Government Initiative created a single platform called Challenge.gov that makes it simple and easy for every ministry to post a challenge and ask people not simply to suggest ideas but to develop solutions. Our Office initially helped ministries to frame the question, to pick the judges, and to identify their goals. Initially we provided some support centrally to educate the lawyers and the ministries to say “you too can do this,” or “it’s okay to do this.” But very quickly we put ourselves out of business because the ministries began to talk to each other. Now there is an effective community of practice with at least sixty agencies who communicate about the challenges they’ve created, the successes they’ve had, and they have learned from their experience putting these challenges on the web through this single, free platform.

Second, designed right, these are not experimental projects.

Previously, I had some experience creating a platform called Peer to Patent, in which we connected volunteer scientists and technologists to the national patent offices. The program, began in the US, then expanded to the UK, Japan, and Australia. This is is a structured, targeted process that uses rating and ranking - thumbs up and thumbs down - to deliver to the government official not ten thousand suggestions, not one hundred suggestions, but ten pieces of information that will help to inform his or her ultimate decision about the application that deserves a patent. I describe this at length in my book, Wiki Government.

This week, the British Prime Minister announced a new initiative to crowdsource the identification of regulations that are impeding and hindering entrepreneurship of new businesses. But he’s not just asking for those thousand ideas, he’s offering a process to ask the crowd to then help implement those suggestions and gather the data that’s necessary, so that crowdsourcing doesn’t create more work for government officials. It helps them in making their decisions.

Third, innovative solutions such as crowdsourcing are a must have, not just a nice to have. The tools to crowdsource are free or nearly free and the solutions are generated quickly. It makes government cheaper, smarter, and more effective.

In the Department of Veteran Affairs in the United States, the agency asked the nineteen thousand employees for a solution to the problem of how to bring down the wait time for veterans coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq to receive services that are owed to them. The time was reduced from more than a year to now only to a few weeks. It took only one person in the ministry, part time, to run a project that generated involvement from seven thousand employees in the first month alone.

There’s a town in California that just launched an iPhone app that manages a network of trained volunteers who respond when someone has a heart attack but before the ambulance can arrive. This saves lives at no extra cost.

The Latvian Parliament is working with Latvia’s banks to authenticate citizens identities in order to crowdsource the development of new legislation. The legislation is shaped by citizens, who are advised by a network of voluntary experts before the legislation is implemented.

And we’ve heard from the Prime Minister that here members of the public in Russia are helping to rewrite new laws, like a law on fisheries, and working together to supplement official government efforts by providing aid and assistance during the devastating fires that rampaged Moscow last year.

Closing

So let me close by saying that we have the means to engage more people in the life of their democracy.

This is not about the technology. That’s free.

It’s about asking questions. It’s about a willingness to ask and to create engaging and accessible opportunities for people to participate. But it’s not the same ad voting. It’s not about creating a single mass process that’s one size fits all. What’s required is crowdsourcing wisely, not crowdsourcing widely: developing many different, small ways for people to lend their expertise, their experience, and their enthusiasm for the public good whether it’s about patents or fish, veterans or potholes.

Churchill said, “democracy is the worst form of government except all others.” But we can do better. And thanks to the techniques that we’ve heard about today, we have the experience to make institutions of our democracy more effective and more participatory. Not just in principle, but in practice. Thomas Jefferson said we can “mak[e] every citizen an acting member of the government in the offices nearest and most interesting to him.” This in turn, Jefferson went on to say, “attaches him by the strongest feelings to the independence of the country and it’s Republican Constitution.”

Thank you and happy birthday.

Club de Madrid: Digital Technologies for 21st Century Democracy

Last week the Club de Madrid, the non-profit organization composed of 80 democratic former Presidents and Prime Ministers from 56 different countries, held its annual meeting in New York. The theme was Digital Technologies for 21st Century Democracy.  Irving Wladawsky-Berger posted his reflections on the meeting and, in particular, on the question of how governments manage the cacophony of open innovation here. I posted the remarks that I shared with the Club Members here.

The Club provides peer to peer strategic advising by former world leaders to current world leaders, exploiting the global profile of its members to raise awareness of major issues that can strengthen our democracies. Just as music, publishing, and other commercial industries are transforming, so, too, must the institutions of our democracy evolve with the changing technological reality. The conference aimed to explore how network technologies might fundamentally change what we mean by democracy for the 21^st century.

As Prime Minister Wim Kok of the Netherlands expressed at the outset of the conference:

We will hear about such recent innovations having a profound impacton participatory democracy as large-scale computational tools. The explosion of “big data” might enable us to deepen our understanding of the world around us, potentially avert crisis and make better decisions. We will learn about collective intelligence technologies – also sometimes called social media -- that allow us to work together in new ways, heralding an era in which citizens and the state work together to solve problems collaboratively.

Whether in longstanding or fledgling democracies, digital governance is only in its infancy.  Many government institutions are only just getting online.  Even those that had long used technology are just discovering how openness, enabled by technology, might help them work more effectively and more democratically.

There are many conferences about politics and yet more about technology. By convening expert technologists and experienced politicians as well as business leaders, social scientists and journalists, we hope to develop a nuanced picture of how to realize the long-term vision of a more innovative and participatory democratic culture despite the short-term realities of electoral democracy.

For me, this conference will have been a success if it accomplishes three things. First, the discussion, whether in formal sessions or in the hallway, over the next two days should give each of us an understanding of how technology is impacting democracy globally.

Second, I hope that through our conversation, we each come away with clearer vision of the kind democracy we want to achieve and the impediments to such innovation.

Finally, we should each strive to identify three concrete ideas, principles or projects each of us can champion, whether individually or collectively.

Used well, digital like bio-technologies have the potential to improve human flourishing and quality of life for people and the planet.  They can also transform our institutions for the better.

 

 

 

 

Evolving Democracy for the 21st Century

Network technology has irrevocably changed campaigning and elections. It has the potential to transform governance and the workings of our democracy for the better.  These improvements, however, have been slow in coming.  Innovations in governance have been thwarted by politics as usual and resistance to devolution of power away from hierarchical bureaucracy to networks of diverse, public participants.  In Tripoli, Tottenham or Wall Street people have been protesting failed policies and a lack of opportunity to participate in elections once every two or four years. Whether in failed states or old democracies, most simply want a state that works.  But they have lost faith in government and other centralized institutions of power.   For example, just eleven percent of Americans polled express optimism about the future of the United States government.[1]  Churchill was fond of saying that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others, but by democracy he surely meant something better than this.[2]

Democratic elections alone do not remedy the crisis of confidence in government.  Moreover, there is no viable justification for a democratic system in which public participation is limited to voting.  We live in a world in which ordinary people write Wikipedia, the most comprehensive and highest quality global encyclopedia; spend their evenings moving a telescope via the Internet and making discoveries half a world away; get online to help organize a protest in cyberspace and in the physical world, such as the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia or the demonstrations of the ‘indignados’ throughout Spain; or pore over purloined State Department cables.

The same technologies enabling us to work together at a distance are creating the expectation to do better at governing ourselves.  But to achieve the twin goals of more participatory and effective governance, we must innovate in how we govern.  Thanks to technology, if we have the will to do so, we also now have the opportunity. 

Continue Reading Evolving Democracy (Download Evolving Democracy). Approx 10 pages.

---

[1] New Poll Finds Deep Distrust of Government, New York Times, October 25, 2011 (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/26/us/politics/poll-finds-anxiety-on-the-economy-fuels-volatility-in-the-2012-race.html).

[2] Sir Winston Churchill, Speech Before the House of Commons, Hansard, November 11, 1947 (http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1947/nov/11/parliament-bill#column_206).

Open Video Conference 2011 at New York Law School: Opening Remarks on 9/11

Remarks at Open Video Conference 2011, as delivered. 

Good morning. My name is Beth Noveck. I am a professor of law here, the founder of your host the Institute for Information Law and Policy and I once had a job in Washington.

New York Law School is 8 blocks from Ground Zero. After 9/11 the school was closed for two weeks. There was no power, no telephone, and no Internet connection. Some of these things took months to restore. And the acrid smell burned one’s lungs weeks after the attacks.  

People here, many of whom commuted through the PATH train station at the World Trade Center or others who were getting their coffee on the way to class or who were caught in the fleeing multitudes running northward or who participated in the volunteer clean-up efforts that followed, were eyewitnesses to the history we commemorate today.  We remember the thousands who died and were injured on 9/11 and their families; in the two wars that followed it as a consequence and among the civilians of other nations who perished as casualties of the war on terror.

What makes this tragedy so uniquely moving, in my view, is that senseless death and destruction were complemented by heroic action.

As little as we can fathom the evil of which the attackers were capable, so too we are at a loss to find in ourselves the superhuman courage and generosity of spirit demonstrated by so many – whether First Responders, soldiers and veterans, passengers on flight 93 in Shanksville or thousands of civilian volunteers -- on that day and in the weeks and months that followed who saw the news on television and came here without hesitation.

We, too, are gathered here today in that spirit of collaboration and civic action.

Every single person here believes in the need to do something (besides shop) – perhaps many of us inspired directly by the experience of 9/11 -- and the power of the visual to change the world for the better. Video transforms (to crib from WITNESS, the organization that gives people cameras to document human rights abuses) “personal stories into powerful tools for justice.” Even New Yorkers who experienced the tragedy first hand did so with one eye out the window and the other on CNN. If you go to the web or YouTube or to the National 9/11 website, you will see examples of all the video that ordinary people shot and shared that now form our collective memory of 9/11.

The Open Video Conference Organizers can take no credit for the coincidence of dates but they should.

It is extraordinarily apropos that we share the 10^th anniversary of 9/11 together here 8 blocks from ground zero.  Whether it is bystanders photographing and filming the events of 9/11 ten years ago or protesters in Syria documenting human rights abuses on YouTube this week or activists posting videos of hearings and committee meetings to ensure democratic accountability to or people making their own music videos, cooking shows or comedy, we are here to safeguard a world where everyone has the tools, the know-how and the freedom to make and to distribute, to hear and to watch video. By bearing witness to the personal and the political, the tragic and the comic about the world in which we live, we stand to make it better. We are taking action here today to build a media future in which we are more empowered, enlightened, and connected than ever before.

This morning, you will hear (and see) from two institutions that are taking action to do just that.

Gigi Sohn, Founder of Public Knowledge, a public interest organization based in Washington, DC, working to protect the openness of our communication infrastructure and unbiased pluralism in our media ecology.

And you will here from Brewster Kahle of the Internet Achive, who preserving the entire web, and particularly 3000 hours of video from 9/11, in a remarkable project called the 9/11 Archive.

At some point this weekend, you will no doubt wander south to see the phoenix rising from the ashes of ground zero.  But today we thank you for marking this occasion together, not only for grieving and reflection, but as an opportunity to rise from the ashes of history by taking action in support of Open Video, participatory culture and the values of free speech that so many died to defend.

Gigi Sohn is the president and co-founder of Public Knowledge, a nonprofit organization that works to defend citizens’ rights in emerging digital frontiers. She serves as the chief strategist, fundraiser, and public face of Public Knowledge, and has made numerous media appearances and published articles highlighting emerging issues in the public’s access to content.

Gigi has long been recognized as a pioneer in identifying key issues facing digital media. Prior to co-founding Public Knowledge, she served as Executive Director of the Media Access Project, and as a Project Specialist in the Ford Foundation’s Media, Arts and Culture unit, where she developed the Foundation’s first-ever media policy and technology portfolio. In October 1997, President Clinton appointed Gigi to serve as a member of his Advisory Committee on the Public Interest Obligations of Digital Television Broadcasters. The Electronic Frontier Foundation gave Gigi one of its Internet “Pioneer Awards” in 2006. At this year’s OVC, Gigi will be speaking about timely questions of internet accessibility, including the threats that capped and metered internet access pose to the open web. We’re thrilled to have her expertise and insight as we examine these issues at the conference.

 

Improving Government Data Collection

by Jim Hendler and Beth Noveck

Both Congress and the White House have taken initial steps toward creating greater transparency in reporting federal spending.  While preliminary, these efforts could have a far-reaching impact on how governments collect and publish data from the entities they regulate. 

Done right, new rules can create greater transparency and accountability while reducing the paperwork burden on regulated entities. At present, however, both sides' proposals fall short. They fail to recognize that spending is only one type of data collected from players from whom data is repeatedly and inefficiently gathered.

We offer some suggestions for improvement that could lead to reduced compliance and investment costs, improved corporate accountability, greater consumer protection, and will also create new research and reporting test beds to foster data-driven journalism and scholarship about the life of organizations.

The DATA Bill

In mid-June, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) introduced the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2011 (DATA)^[1], calling for quarterly reporting of all federal spending, including grants, contracts and subcontracts by both the recipients and the awarding agencies to an independent successor to the board previously established to oversee the implementation of the Recovery Act. DATA would effectively strip the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) of much of its oversight over federal spending reviews. However, DATA also calls for OMB to set standards about which data elements are to be used in reporting and to follow international, open and non-proprietary models such as XBRL. All reported data is to be published online and, to the greatest extent possible,  the process automated to maximize transparency. 

Executive Order on Accountability

On the same day, the President issued an executive order on Delivering an Efficient, Effective, Accountable Government^[2], calling for agencies to reduce fraud, waste, and abuse and centralizing control over these accountability efforts with the Chief Performance Officer in OMB.  The EO, too, calls for the creation of a new Transparency and Accountability Board, in this case, however, comprising agency personnel from the executive branch.

Suggested Improvements

Without opining here on the jurisdictional debate between branches of government over the control, composition and authority of the new board, there are provisions that could be improved both in the draft legislation and in any subsequent guidance to serve the bi-partisan goals of greater transparency regarding how data is collected and published.

First, the DATA bill provides that items reported include name and address of recipient but no requirement that corporate persons identify the beneficial owner nor any parent-subsidiary corporate relationships. This week the Securities and Exchange Commission proposed draft "know your counter party" rules^[3] for complex financial transactions known as swaps as part of its new package of rules implementing the Dodd-Frank legislation. In the same way, it is entirely doable to add simple provisions to the DATA bill that would mandate disclosure of the ownership and structure of recipients at whatever level of specificity will best enable the public to know who is really receiving the money and how they relate to other recipients.

Second, entities could be mandated to use consistent legal entity identifiers by, for example, picking their corporate entity from a selection list.  This will be useful for building a more consistent, open and standard library of legal entity identifiers within the federal government.  By moving toward a standard list of names in the federal spending domain, we will help agencies to amass a library of common corporate names across different regulatory regimes. Currently, one federal agency might refer to a company as ABC Inc. while another uses ABC Corp. We can help solve this problem by mandating open, universal identifiers here rather than exacerbate it by creating yet another IT system with yet another set of disparate naming conventions.

Third, while mandating a single way of naming a legal entity is important, it's not sufficient to address the fact that every agency also collects different information, ie. names of facilities or securities controlled by that entity. We shouldn't be designing and building a system for reporting spending in a vacuum and focusing only on those limited data elements. Instead, DATA and bills like it should mandate a process that leads toward a single, universal, entity identifier for naming firms with the requirement that additional data fields be open and interoperable.  We want the spending data to be able to "talk" to other data collected about corporate compliance and innovation so we can “mash up” data across agency responsibilities - for example, linking patent activity with the data about federal contracting.  The DATA bill describes only a limited universe of approved standards and the EO is silent on the topic. Instead, any new requirements should mandate the use of non-proprietary, interoperable data elements not subject to any license fees or restrictions on reuse. 

Fourth, data release through the federal data.gov, or via the many data sharing sites being developed by states, cities and tribal governments throughout the US, drives innovation and the development of innovative new startups.  This side benefit to our economy should be augmented in data transparency legislation by allowing thatnew data standards promulgated for use in reporting federal spending should be subject to public consultation, letting developers and others help make sure the systems are open.  The data should also be available in a machine-readable format, to encourage this sharing, with transparency legislation mandating the development of APIs for information sharing.  The DATA bill does recognize the need to allow data to be linked, but it is an ambiguous, throwaway reference to Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) in 3612(d)(3)(H). Strengthening this requirement would significantly lower the effort to reporters, economic researchers, and systems developers to reuse this data in our increasingly information-driven economy.

Fifth, there is no authority in either the EO or the DATA bill to create pilot projects and iterate. We don’t understand the problem of inconsistent spending reporting well enough to design -- whether by the legislative or executive branch -- "the" system. Instead, we ought to be allowing small-scale pilots (potentially funded by prize-backed challenges) seeing what works, and trying again.  Further, if the data is made available in machine-readable ways, new systems to make the data more transparent and useful can and will arise outside the government through crowsourced design and use.  This will reduce the development costs while simultaneously allowing more designs to be explored.  In the government, making large-scale “legacy” data systems interoperable is a hard problem that we are trying to retrofit without great expense. This requires more humility and the qualifications to try new policies, technologies, rules and standards. This isn't reflected in the legislation or in the composition and role of the Boards proposed. (We note that the UK’s Data Transparency Board includes a combination of government representatives and outside experts from corporations and academia, and would encourage the US government to consider a similar approach.)

ORGpedia

Outside the government, we have been advocating the creation of an Open Organizational Data Project (http://dotank.nyls.edu/orgpedia), which is committed to assisting with the development of open, interoperable, non-proprietary standards for reporting data collected by government about firms and other corporate entities. With the support of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, we are at the beginning stages of thinking through the legal, policy and technology framework for a data exchange that can facilitate efficient comparison of organizational data across regulatory schemes as well as allowing public reuse and annotation of that data.   Currently, we are convening workshops with relevant stakeholders and developing a functional prototype of such a system.  As part of this project, we will also continue to curate feedback on legislative and regulatory approaches to achieving greater transparency, efficiency and accountability.

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^[1] http://oversight.house.gov/images/stories/Legislation/Leg_Counsel_final_06_10_2011_ISSA_040_xml.pdf

^[2] http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/06/13/executive-order-delivering-efficient-effective-and-accountable-governmen

^[3] http://sec.gov/rules/proposed/2011/34-64766.pdf

Wiki Hen Hao

Defining Open Government

credit: John Klossner, Federal Computer Week. Originally printed here.

The following post is a new and improved version of What's in a Name: Good Gov and Open Gov recently posted on HuffPo:

Recently the White House launched a new website about Good Government at www.whitehouse.gov/goodgovernment.

The name change appears to be responding to the demands of major watchdog groups, who want "accountability data," including information about government spending and the workings of political officials, such as salaries, travel and meeting schedules of cabinet secretaries.

The problem with aligning the White House's goals to a traditional reform agenda is not only having to endure Jon Stewart's scathing yet humorous attacks on any failures to deliver (no government can ever be transparent enough), but that the White House Open Government Initiative that I directed and the Open Government Directive instructing agencies to adopt open government were never exclusively about making transparent information about the workings of government. 

Open government is an innovative strategy for changing how government works. By using network technology to connect the public to government and to one another informed by open data, an open government asks for help with solving problems. The end result is more effective institutions and more robust democracy.

Putting a cabinet secretary's schedule, for example, up online does little to produce greater accountability or better government. At least there's no empirical evidence to suggest that it does. By contrast, when HHS makes hundreds of datasets about health and wellness available online and invites .orgs and .coms to transform that data into tools that help individuals, institutions and communities make smarter decisions that improve the quality and reduce the cost of healthcare, government is partnering with the public to solve problems more collaboratively.  The public isn't simply accepting the solution that government comes up with but creating new services and solutions. I've written earlier about how this kind of co-creation makes government institutions work better, creates jobs and economic growth, and engages people in governance.

Agencies across the executive branch have been working to adopt the practices of open innovation -- namely creating more collaborative strategies for working with the public, informed by open data about everything from bridge safety to air quality, to achieve their core mission better.

The aim of open government is to take advantage of the know-how and entrepreneurial spirit of those outside government institutions to work together with those inside government to solve problems. For example, whereas we must know about radiation levels from Japan and oil contamination in the Gulf and cost overuns in the public sector, most important is that government invite "all hands on deck" to develop innovative solutions to crises such as these--solutions that government doesn't always readily devise on its own.

So if open gov is a confusing name why did we name it the White House Open Government Initiative?

Two years ago I published a book called Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger, and Citizens More Powerful. In it, I advocate the principle of collaborative democracy that emphasizes the ability of ordinary people using network technology to do extraordinary things by working together for the public good. Collaborative democracy is an answer to those who think that the public is only capable of voting once every four years and who ignore citizen coders who redesign the Federal Register and create useful apps for better healthcare; citizen activists who build a powerful first responder network; citizen scientists who solve scientific challenges; and citizen archivists who improve government recordkeeping.

When I had the opportunity to work with colleagues on turning collaborative governance into a national agenda for the Obama Campaign, Obama-Biden Transition and then in the White House, I didn't want to name our White House project in a way that could be construed as promoting my book. Collaboration: out. Wiki Gov: out.

Gov 2.0 is a popular term but puts the emphasis on  technology when our goal was to focus on changing how government institutions work for the better.  Our work was not limited to doing the cool stuff of Silicon Valley in the staid world of Washington. Technology is only one means to the end of changing how we work—of finding practical ways to take advantage of the intelligence, skills and expertise of others. And, besides, it was a brand already in widespread commercial use. For purposes of use in the White House, anything 2.0: out.

Open gov was actually a shorthand for open innovation or the idea that working in a transparent, participatory, and collaborative fashion helps improve performance, inform decisionmaking, encourage entrepreneurship, and solve problems more effectively. By working together as team with government in productive fashion, the public can then also help to foster accountability.

In retrospect, "open government" was a bad choice. It has generated too much confusion. Many people, even in the White House, still assume that open government means transparency about government.  But through it's repeated use to describe the transformational work underway in governments around the world, especially in the federal agencies in the US, we can rescue the term and clarify its original meaning.

The unveiling of the Good Government website brings into stark relief two (not the only two, by any means) different approaches to making government more effective:  Good Government reformers who focus on a certain kind of transparency and the Open Government innovators who focus on collaboration informed by data.

The reformer wants more information about how government functions. For example, he demands to see the travel schedule of the Cabinet Secretary. When he doesn't get it, he sues. When he does, he works with the media to make sense of it and point out fraud, waste and abuse.

The innovator recognizes that the public schedule provides little insight into how power is wielded. Instead, he wants the Cabinet Secretary to use network technology to invite the public to identify creative solutions to the problems he's going to discuss on those trips. Therefore the innovator also needs a broader kind of data about health, education, or the economy so that she can engage in informed collaboration. She doesn't have to sue for the data because the agency knows that with the information in hand, the innovator is going to build productive tools, apps and visualizations to transform that data into useful knowledge.

Unless we think that government has all the answers (and not many Americans think it does), we need to create more participatory institutions.

There's a happy ending to this story. At the same time as the White House launched the Good Government brand, it also hired a phenomenal United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Public Sector Innovation, Chris Vein (former CIO of San Francisco).

By dividing the world into Good Government and Public Sector Innovation, the White House may be well-poised to work with both the reformers and the innovators to pursue accountable and participatory government.

Just as what we used to call e-commerce is now just commerce, if eventually government works with citizens to address challenges, it won't matter if we talk about government open gov, good gov, e-gov, or wegov. We will simply enjoy functioning, legitimate -- Government.

 

ORGPedia: The Open Organizational Data Project

Updated April 19

Clarification: The following are notes of the March 30th workshop at the Sloan Foundation and reflect the views expressed by participants in the workshop not my opinions.

For more on ORGPedia, see the new ORGPedia project page at http://dotank.nyls.edu/orgpedia/.

On March 30^th twenty economists, technologists, and government officials (Download Participant List) convened in person and by telephone at the Sloan Foundation in New York to discuss creating an open numbering scheme and platform to facilitate the comparison of data about organizations across levels of government and agencies in order to:

• Promote greater accountability and compliance;
• Enhance economic growth and innovation; and
• Enable research on the evolution of companies and organizations.

This ORGPedia project is convening a wide range of experts to inform the design and scope of:

• An open legal identifier system to enable datasets about companies to be compared. Currently, different agencies use different numbering schemes. An open ID will enable taxonomies to “talk” to one another.
• An online platform to mash up and visualize authenticated government datasets already collected about firms and organizations pursuant to statute or regulation.
• An Application Programming Interface (API) and supporting software libraries to make it easy for third parties to incorporate ORGPedia into their own systems.
• A community to encourage public participation in reviewing, annotating and contributing to collected government data whether by companies and organizations or by third parties.

ORGPedia is an experiment in designing an information system that effectively combines authenticated government data with user-contributed information – a hybrid wiki – to enhance public understanding about organizations and firms. 

During the March 30^th discussion, participants provided their thoughts on the opportunities, challenges, and strategies for implementation, including ideas for how to prototype and pilot a first phase of the system, from the perspective of government and research communities.

This is the first in a series of five planned workshops. The Sunlight Foundation will host a second meeting on April 8th to focus on issues of corporate accountability and compliance. There will be subsequent meetings focused on the needs of those businesses who consume business intelligence; the technology design; and the international opportunities and implications.

For a longer description of ORGPedia see this backgrounder (HTML, Download PDF).

The following are notes summarizing the discussion among participants at the March 30th Meeting:

Opportunities

There are 18 million registered legal entities in the United States. Having the ability to compare and track data about them would make it possible to:

• Compare datasets about legal entities across regulatory regimes and states
• Track changes in control and ownership

In order to make information more transparent to the public; facilitate information sharing across agencies and states; and streamline regulatory compliance by pre-populating information requests with information about entities.

Imagine if, as with the Encyclopedia of Life, which creates a page for every organism on earth, we had a system with a page for every legal entity on earth.  Imagine if we had an “ISBN number” for every entity. It would enable all kinds of new services and research. This has become possible in the last few years as a result of advances in web technology and policies for opening up access to public data. The challenge is that firms evolve faster than fish and firms can morph into new firms with different names and owners through changes in control.

At root, we must address the fundamental microeconomic problem of identifying the boundaries of the firm. What if Adam Smith’s pin factory had a financing arm? Or an exclusive steel supplier? We now have the technology to represent these relationships and make the transparent.

Benefits to Government:

Having stable, unique identifier system by means of a single number or a data dictionary to translate across numbering schemes (or both – a single entity identifier plus a way to translate other common fields across schemes) would enable comparison of corporate activity across levels of government, states and across agencies.  Right now we don’t know if a company doing business in one state is the same or related to a company doing business in another state. So when malfeasance is committed in one place, we are missing an opportunity to be on the look out before it happens in another state. It would be incredibly valuable to have a way to generate early warning signals.

Having a unique identifier or the ability to pull data from a common and authenticated collection of data about an entity would reduce the transaction costs to entities wishing to comply with requirements across multiple states.

The federal government alone spends $3.5 trillion. Public should be able to slice and dice. In order to make the information about how government spends accessible to people, we need to be able to trace this money even when companies change ownership and name. For example, when Boeing acquires McDonnell Douglas, a search today does not connect these two entities to provide an accurate picture.

Even though we track to the subcontractor level, we have none of the history to connect affiliates and see relationships.

This makes having a unique identifier a priority. If we had the ability to trace changes such as mergers, we could better understand the connection, if any, between government grants/contracts and campaign contributions; we could spot fraud and remove offending companies from the rolls across agencies.

Some discussion about needing a level of private information, especially about the individuals involved, even as we maintain public information at the entity level.

Benefits For Researchers:

Think about scholars working with firm as unit of analysis – engaging in same redundant transaction costs – cries out for public data set.

There are huge transaction costs associated with doing work about firms. Data sets tends to be proprietary, limited in scope and the info is at best outdated and, at worst, just terrible.  

Accounting, business strategy, information technology management, finance, political science scholars are all engaging in the same socially wasteful redundant activity of trying to clean and match this data. If we could free up some of the time spent on cleaning data, we would free up researcher capacity.

For example, NYTimes did Pulitzer Prize piece on worker death at a manufacturing firm. It was tremendously labor intensive and next to impossible, to investigate the environmental compliance record of the same entity, though preliminary analysis showed they were turning in the same topic release statements to regulators each year rather than developing new figures.

If we wanted to “mash up” OSHA compliance data with EPA compliance data, we can’t do it today. Researchers have the interest but the incompleteness makes it so hard.

Over 50% of the business outputs in the United States are coming from intangibles. But there is no way to match up firms with IP output because we can’t connect patent registrations to the registrations to the entities that hold IP.  At a time when innovation is becoming more important as a driver of the economy, this work is more important not less.

The field of business history is dying off because of difficulty of doing empirical research.

Technology:

Technologically, this problem is not unlike the naming issues we face today in trying to create websites (or banking codes) to identify entities, ie. sloan.org and we’re now trying to make sense of the secondary pages like the About page, address page etc. which search engines know how to do.

We have the ability to map when a firm is taken over, complex interdependencies, who owns what.

Visualizations will help make this data more usable. We can show where data came from, whether it is authenticated government data, or contributed by the public.

The technology platforms for building this kind of site exists. There are no show stoppers. Some work will be needed at the applied research level to transition technology from research to practice but there are existing models.

The Encyclopedia of Life (eol.org), funded by Sloan, provides some important organizational lessons learned about running a system of this type and complexity with a mix of authoritative and open information.

Challenges

Adding a signal field to existing identifier systems (ie. a universal identifier) might not be hard. Adding several fields to track changes in control, however, could be costly. However, there are Web technologies that can mitigate most of this cost if properly deployed.

What is the right role of the government? Should the government own such a system or should it be a stand-alone non-profit? What is the right governance structure to ensure legitimacy?

Pilot and Partners

Three areas of focus for potential pilot/prototype came up:

• Mashing up Environment and Labor enforcement databases
• Mashing up SEC’s XBRL data about public companies with state registrations to track and display changes in ownership
• Mashing up patent office applications with state corporate registrations to see who is patenting what

The National Organization of Secretaries of State would be a natural partner for implementing the necessary changes.

Also check out B-Lab at http://www.bcorporation.net/, a younger, more entrepreneurial set of companies committed to social benefit who might be willing to test contributing more of their data to be used in a pilot.

Check out: Bottega and Powell, Creating a Linchpin for Financial Data: Toward a Universal Legal Entity Identifier (http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/2011/201107/index.html)

Check out: UK Companies House, which does impose an LEI but would benefit from the win/win of gains to companies and transparency of getting companies to share their data through such a platform. There will be a June/July paper on corporate reporting.

Check out the book: The Demography of Corporations

Why Cutting E-Gov Funding Threatens American Jobs

The House of Representatives is proposing cutbacks to the E-Gov fund to reduce it down to $2 million. 

Without the funding, the USA will not be able to maintain the national spending data portal (USASpending.gov) and the national data transparency portal (Data.gov).

These are the tools that make openness real in practice. Without them, transparency becomes merely a toothless slogan.

There is a reason why fourteen other countries whose governments are left- and  right-wing are copying data.gov. Beyond the democratic benefits of facilitating public scrutiny and improving lives, open data of the kind enabled by USASpending and Data.gov save money, create jobs and promote effective and efficient government. As the Economist writes: “Public access to government figures is certain to release economic value and encourage entrepreneurship. That has already happened with weather data and with America’s GPS satellite-navigation system that was opened for full commercial use a decade ago. And many firms make a good living out of searching for or repackaging patent filings.”

For those interested in the topic, there's a longer discussion here in the Open Data, Open Society report. But here are a few, short reasons.

Saving Money

By making available the raw information about how government spends money, it is affording the opportunity to Congress, among others, to analyze the data and spot patterns of fraud, waste and abuse.  Here's one example published today. Because of the availability of data on these sites, the US attracts free evaluation by academics and others.  This kind of (free) feedback loop aids with analyzing what works and saving the taxpayer money. But we can't streamline government without access to the data.

Creating Jobs

Moreover, hidden within the troves of public data being made available through data.gov (and in the pipeline on their way to data.gov) is information that could translate into private sector job growth and the next GPS or genomics industry.

Here are a number of examples:

BrightScope has made a profitable business of using government data about 401(k) plans. They’ve raised $2 million in venture capital and hired 30 people and is likely to double headcount to at least 60 by the end of the year. They did $2M in sales in 2010 and are currently on a $10M+ run rate for 2011.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency in the United States has a ~$5 billion dollar annual budget. Through the open release of data, NOAA is catalyzing at least 100 times that value in the private sector market of weather and climate services when including market and non-market valuations. As just one example of a market that uses NOAA data, the total value of weather derivative trading has been estimated at $15.0 billion in 2007-2008.

The ~$1 billion it spends on the National Weather Service enabled weather.com, which has since been sold for $3.5 billion.  

The Health datasets (health.data.gov) on Data.Gov are unleashing the wider software development community to build robust tools that stimulate entrepreneurship and help Americans lead healthier lives.

The availability of ten year's of Federal Register data sets on Data.gov enabled three young programmers to design the new FederalRegister.gov, the daily gazette of government, and, at the same time, do business with the Federal government for the first time.

Promoting Innovation and Efficiency

By making government data available through these E-Gov programs, public officials can then reach outside of government for creative answers to tough problems, which, in turns help with identifying strategies that are more effective and save money. 

HHS CTO, Todd Park, gives several examples here of how the 1170 health data sets now available on data.gov are creating the "rocket fuel" for public sector innovation. In this era when government is trying to curtail spending, E-Gov technology creates opportunities to identify creative solutions for delivering services in new ways. The value from “doing more with less” is the potentially biggest payoff of the kinds of tools supported by the E-Gov fund. Also if Congress ever wants to cut the number of regulations then it has to support the availability of data to inform the identification of more efficient strategies.

If we care about saving money, creating jobs and doing more with less, we should ensure that this budget remains intact.

 

The "Open Interview" Experiment: Conversation with Laurence Millar, Former New Zealand CIO

I'm trying something new. As a condition for granting any interviews, I'm now quid pro quo asking to interview the interviewer. I find that reporters and writers often have more breadth of knowledge about a field than anyone else. And I want to learn something!

Recently, I talked with Laurence Millar, who was New Zealand government CIO until May 2009 and is the editor-at-large for FutureGov magazine. Here's the first of my comments to him. What follows is what he said to me about open gov in New Zealand:

The current government in New Zealand took some time to cotton on to open government. I think that, in general, the left wing's political values are more naturally attuned the values of open government.  As you point out, the UK has continued the work started under the previous government, so maybe it is more to do with the timing of the Open Government movement.

We have established a group of ICT Ministers, led by Bill English, who is Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance. I think he likes Open Government because he sees it as a way he can enlist the public as agents of change to improve government performance.  In NZ, we have a politically neutral public service, so incoming governments always look for levers that they can use to move forward with their policies -- to move the bureaucracy. In New Zealand open gov been driven by enthusiastic individuals in the public service (who come from the open government values of them individually). It is bottom up rather than being top down by the manifesto.

Ministers have endorsed the Directions and Priorities for government ICT, which include a statement of support for Open and Transparent Government, with three workstreams

1. Improve public access to government data and information.
2. Support the public, communities and business to contribute to policy development and performance improvement.
3. Create market opportunities and services through the re-use of government data and information for set of  (unfortunately in ICT, rather than wider government transformation) 

It is not quite as snappy as your mantra – transparency, collaboration and participation.

There is a group of agency Chief Executives, led by Land Information New Zealand, who provide leadership in the area of Open and Transparent Government, and there are champions in each department to push open government.  The initial momentum has definitely come from the bureaucrats, bottom up, rather than being part of the manifesto of the politically elected leaders..

Tell me about the most interesting and innovative projects like the Mix-and-Mash Competition?

We discovered that if you find something for people to rally around that creates moments - for instance, the mix-and-mash, similar to your Apps for America. The winner was a mashup of walking tracks, using data provided by the Department of Conservation. There was quite a lot of anxiety about putting data that was not accurate, but what they found was that people were willing to update the map based on their experience on the ground. So we saw the virtuous cycle of crowdsourcing data quality improvement.

We've also had a powerful reminder of the power of crowdsourcing after the Christchurch earthquake. Eq.org.nz was a community-based website fed from e-mails and SMS twitter and Facebook notifications like "this ATM is working," "this supermarket has food," "you can get fresh water here," "pharmacies are available." The information is then pushed back out by Twitter, RSS, smartphone apps, and printed maps are distributed at community briefings. They even send out information via teletext. The site used the CrisisCommons foundation work, and enlisted about 120 volunteers from around the world to do quality assurance on the information, operating 24 x 7.

We don't have as many people here. We don't have the depth and cross-section of .gov, .org, .edu who can work with government data to improve the quality of life but we are building and growing this community.

Official sources can only process so much information, and they rightly focus on life and death, rescue and infrastructure issues. There is lot more involved in returning to normal daily life, and so the site extends the information published by official sources. I have been saying that the site provides information that is not important enough to be official information, but is still important to people recovering from civic emergency. It is first time I've seen cognitive surplus in action (or as you call it, civic surplus). 

We also have fixmystreet.org.nz and FYI.org.nz, which deals with official information act requests.

Beth: So what happened with the police wiki? 

Not much happened to build on the experience; we did have some other successes in e-participation at the time, but nothing like using a wiki to revise legislation.  I guess it was our Bob Beamon moment – it was so far ahead of the thinking at the time, no-one has yet caught up.