Archive for the ‘Government 2.0’ Category
On Tuesday, Vivek Kundra, U.S. chief information officer, announced the launch of Apps.gov on The White House blog. Kundra credited Obama’s government innovation initiative as the reason for the new site.
CNN International has called Apps.gov the “App Store” for the government and the moniker doesn’t seem to be that far off. In the blog Kundra describes the site as “an online storefront for federal agencies to quickly browse and purchase cloud-based IT services.”
Most of you might be asking, as I did, what cloud-based means. Well, fortunately Kundra, and in my case the computer geniuses in my office, explained that cloud is the next step in IT.
Who is the Most Interesting Tech Startup of 2009?
Now, unless you’ve read Anil Dash’s Blog, you probably didn’t guess the Federal Government. The government is a large, established monopoly that’s been around longer than Twitter, the Internet and even telephones. You think Microsoft’s anti-competitive? Try not paying your taxes.
Yet this is exactly the answer the article argues. Since January the government has revamped WhiteHouse.gov and launched Data.gov, USASpending.gov and Recovery.gov.
They’ve done all this in a matter of months where, as Dash points out, “something like the USA Spending dashboard would have taken half a year or more to deploy in any large-sized corporation. How did they do it? Well, the team in the CIO’s office was working nights and weekends, borrowing time and resources, when they were able to, in order to get something useful, shipping as quickly as possible.”
That sounds an awful lot like a a startup to me.
A real tech startup (Google)
Of course, there’s plenty of room for rebuttal. Paying $18,000,000 to overhaul Recovery.gov isn’t something a startup would do. Nor would startups award no-bid contracts or involve contractors in drawn-out processes to be eligible to bid on contracts.
It’s cool to see the government be “innovative” for once when it comes to technology, but we can’t, and shouldn’t expect them to be a startup. The government needs to be accountable to us, the citizens, far more than a startup in some garage.
If I had just woke from a 5-year coma and read that the real estate market had collapsed, and that the government had spent over $200 billion dollars to bailout nearly every major American bank, how many of you could explain what happened?
Many of us couldn’t, and that’s an unsettling statement considering that we just lived through it. But it’s not your fault. The media has turned into more of a spectacle than the informative service it was designed to be. The biggest spectacle of them all is Fox News, I’m looking at you Shepard Smith. With all of their exploding sound effects and fancy graphics, it feels like you’re watching a poor mans Independence Day. Except there are no aliens, and the movie never ends. CNN, CNBC and even newspapers aren’t doing any better.
Enter Jonathan Jarvis and The New Mediators. The business sounds like a rock band, and Jarvis is already a rock star when it comes to conveying complicated issues in a simplistic fashion. He does this by using graphic representations for events and combines them with fluid animations and tops it off with transparent, unbiased commentary.
Federal CIO Vivek Kundra
As part of the Obama Administration’s crusade to bring more transparency to the federal government, the Office of Science and Technology Policy created a webpage to discuss the outdated cookie policy of federal websites.
Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra and Michael Fitzpatrick of the Office of Management and Budget, laid out their case for an update of the nine year old policy.
The cookie policy, as it stands, puts limits on the use of “certain web-tracking technologies, primarily persistent cookies, due to privacy concerns.” A cookie is a small piece of text placed on a user’s computer by a web browser. The cookie stores information about the user that can later be accessed by the site you visited to transmit preferences or a myriad of other information about your last visit.
Fed CTO Aneesh Chopra
Federal Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra spoke at the Open Government and Innovations Conference in Washington, DC yesterday, about the government’s need to play catch up with the private sector’s technological capabilities.
Chopra used competitions like Apps for Democracy and Apps for America as examples of the government’s commitment to the open-government initiative of President Barack Obama.
The Apps for America competition is still open for submission through today. So far only four applications have been submitted. The competition requires applications to use data from Data.gov. Top Dangerous Mines highlights the most dangerous mines in the US based on earthquake data and then there’s the F.B.I. Fugitive Concentration matching game. It’s just like the match game you played with a deck of cards as a kid but this deck has photos pulled from the FBI’s Fugitive RSS Feeds.
Chopra pointed out the importance of accountability for the administration to an open government. “I am equally committed to holding myself accountable, and in turn asking you to hold me accountable, for us to deliver on promises, so that we show progress,” Chopra said.
Since the ascension of the first hunter-gatherer to chief of the hunter-gatherers, man has worried about the power of his rulers. He has worried about transparency. He wondered whether all the meat was being shared and whether the chief was wearing too many of the hide–I’m sorry I don’t know what I’m talking about. It was supposed to be deep. I was going to go on to compare the evolution of the chief to the modern president and neo-colonialism but then I realized that I had no idea what I was talking about. The point I making is that the same concerns hold true today. I want to make sure that we as a people aren’t being taken advantage of by those in power. I want to live in a place where all information is made public and the American people and other citizens of the world have easy access to this information.
As a technology and interactive businessman, I’ve seen the push by nations like communist China to require the internet be censored and their people left in the dark. This year was the twenty year anniversary of Tiananmen Square, an important event in the history of the struggle between communist Chinese leaders and the people who want nothing more than the freedoms we take for granted. It’s frightening and although we don’t have the same censorship when it comes to the internet, we do face challenges in our search for information.
Open Data Democracy is something touched on previously on this blog but this is slowly becoming the BOALT manifesto, as we look toward the future of this nation and our world. I recognize as a for-profit businessman the power and reach of information but also as a person active in the political community of DC I recognize the lack of technological advancement of the government when it comes to the dissemination of information. Although we’re far away from being able to access our own FBI files online, we shouldn’t be that far away from accessing infant mortality rates of northwest Ohio.
The task that stands before the government is more daunting. We live in a nation of 300 million people spread out over an area of thousands of miles. The public and government data of an area that size is beyond the scope of anything previously compiled. The hurdles are even more daunting. We have 50 states with almost as many different ways of compiling their state data.
If you visit Data.gov and click on STATE/LOCAL you’ll see that only 2 states, California and Utah, and the District of Columbia have created state websites that you as a citizen can go to find government compiled information about your area. Although this is a start the problem that exists now is that the California, Utah and DC information is in different formats. There isn’t a uniform standard for government agencies to work from. Imagine if the mail system didn’t have guidelines for how you address an envelope. The mail would take forever to be delivered. There needs to be an information standard that all government agencies have to follow, from the smallest town in rural Montana to the Oval Office. Nothing would make it easier than a national, if not international standard. Eventually, I hope, the world will be more willing to share information on a global scale, and so an international standard is not so far-fetched. There are a few things that I suggest doing to get us closer to a national standard:
1. Support contests like AppsForDemocracy.com. Open Data Democracy is a bit dry and boring but contests like Apps for Democracy raise awareness for the issue by showcasing the amazing applications that can be created and how the average citizen can benefit. For example AreYouSafeDC.com is an application for your iPhone that takes crime data from Data.gov and other sites to tell you how safe an area of DC is.
2. Create and release free tools that make the transition to a national standard easy for small municipalities without the tech know-how of large cities to implement.
3. Change has to be inexpensive as well. Smaller communities can’t afford large overhauls of existing systems.
4. Lay out guidelines and standards in easy to follow and easy to access ways. For example, on Data.gov a page should be included with explicit and easy to follow instructions for communities to lay out their data for faster implementation.
Looking at the government’s first steps towards Open Data Democracy, I’m confident that a global standard can be achieved someday and we can all live in world where ideas and information is exchanged freely and fairly. An information utopia.