On the eve of the American Thanksgiving holiday, millions of people travel to spend time with friends and family. Before I share a meal with relatives, I contemplate the connection between the first thanksgiving and the emerging Open Government movement.
The “First Thanksgiving” celebration in the US was a feast shared by 53 starving pilgrims who survived a brutal winter in New England, and 90 Native Americans. The Native Americans knew how to manage their land and waters to provide sufficient fish, meat, vegetables and fruit.
The connection between the first American Thanksgiving and Open Government has to do with adapting to a new world by sharing information. Four hundred years ago, the Native Americans shared information on seeds, crops and planting conditions, helping the pilgrims survive. Today, sharing information via the Web is helping us to better understand climate conditions, our health care options and issues impacting our local community.
Last week I joined about 250 people at the first International Open Government Conference, hosted by the US Department of Commerce in Washington DC. Approximately half the conference delegates were from government, the balance from academia and the private sector. The speakers discussed Open Government projects underway in the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Brazil. Speakers shared success stories and areas for future development. The common theme: democratizing public sector data and driving innovation. Jonas Rabinovitch from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs highlighted several eGov strategies in developing nations. Mr. Rabinovitch noted that all but three UN member nations have a basic Web presence, many offer online forms and some provide the ability to perform transactions via the Web.
Given the conference was hosted in the US Department of Commerce, data.gov featured prominently. “The purpose of Data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government.” Seven countries have stood up Open Government sites in the last 18 months, including UK, US, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Finland. Government administrators are seeking to restore public trust and establish an environment of transparency, participation and collaboration with the public.
The US Administration launched its Open Government Initiative in April 2009. In the last two years, I’ve watched the US Executive Branch begin to move from a “need to know” to a “need to share” culture. This cultural transition and thus this Open Government Conference, was truly historic. The conference underscored to me that we all, regardless of our political views and affiliation, live in a highly interconnected global economy, underpinned by the World Wide Web.
Respected advisors on Open Government initiatives including Professor Jim Hendler of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, agreed that public participation and collaboration will be key to the success of Open Government initiatives. I believe that more conferences like this one and the Open Government Data Camp 2010 held in London last week, drawing delegates from a variety of disciplines, from several countries, will do a great deal to reinvigorate civic engagement and economic growth from the ground up.
Government employees are responding to mandates to publish content to Open Government websites. Data.gov was launched in April 2009 with 47 data sets. Vivek Kundra, U.S Chief Information Officer stated that data.gov has in excess of 300,000 data sets as of November 2010. A large portion of the data.gov data sets are geospatial information which is an opportunity for scientists and entrepreneurs to build tools for analysis and visualization of this valuable data. The UK Government as published over 4,600 data sets, including many from Great Britain’s national mapping agency, Ordnance Survey, providing the most accurate and up-to-date geographic data for the UK.
“The stakes are high for our interlinked global economy.” Dr. Robert Schaefer, Deputy Project Scientist from Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab gave a compelling presentation on the need for mechanisms to make sense of published data as Linked Open Data. Publishing the content as in RDF is not sufficient, rather, providing context on what the data implies is necessary. Better tools for analysts and scientists to extract meaning from Linked Open Data will allow critical information on climate change and space weather, for example, to be more readily understood by policy makers. Professor Schaefer stated the implications for climate change are serious, wide ranging & urgent. Current CO2 emissions are higher than the International Panel of Climate Change “worst case” scenario. Billions of people may experience serious consequences from climate change. Professor Schaefer reiterated the need to get started as soon as possible. “When the water from the sea rises, millions of people will have to move.” This international conference will hopefully stimulate cooperation between the public and private sectors. It is a critical step in making data accessible and providing decision support tools for space weather and climate change.
Mr. Kundra acknowledged we have much more to do to improve the quality of published data sets. He said, “when I’m able to perform analytics on the fly, grounded on quality data, we will have achieved success.” Delegates were encouraged by Mr. Kundra and other speakers to build out communities of interest, lead by individuals, rather than government agencies. The US Government is regularly launching challenges, see http://www.challenge.gov, with modest cash prizes targeting citizens to gain insights on how we, the people, not government, can solve problems ranging from education on childhood obesity to sustainable urban housing that respects the environment.
Beth Simone Noveck, United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government, leads President Obama’s Open Government Initiative. Based at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, she is an expert on technology and institutional innovation. Ms. Noveck stated that “the Open Government Initiative is not transparency for transparency’s sake. It is through participation and collaboration with academia and the public sector that there is value.” Creating partnerships to use Open Government Data for important and unforeseen uses is empowering individuals with the ability to make better decisions and affect our quality of life.
We are in the very early stages of making Open Government available as Linked Data. Today, we are in the very early phases, however, there are many good reasons to support Open Government initiatives including accountability in spending, improved health care provision, and addressing climate change and space weather which affects the world’s population. The international data exchange standards are in now in place. While experts will continue to refine the technical underpinnings and best practices will evolve, the citizen lead movement, assisted by government, is truly underway.
Bright young geeks are increasingly involved in American civic life through non-profit organizations like Code for America. Passionate entrepreneurs like Dan Melton show that being being super bright and engaged at a grassroots level in government is both hip and necessary. Code for America recruited twenty “fellows” from 362 applicants to get involved in city projects in 2011. One example discussed was the Boston Project whose idea is to bring info on students together & create interesting applications leveraging federal census content, student data, transit info, city and state data.
Each month new mobile applications and social networking solutions are made available. These are not expensive, government top down initiatives, rather, they are coming from the ground up by military personnel, students, local government officials, publishers, scientists and citizens who value transparent government. An interesting mobile app for Android, iPhone and the iPad was unveiled for the New York Senate. It is a real-time constituent mobile dashboard to the legislative process allowing citizens to connect with Senators, find and comment on bills, review votes and transcripts.
Academics are doing innovative research. Grad students and post-docs are rapidly prototyping what the new world of open data will look like. An increasingly number of software companies, including my employer Talis, are producing light weight platforms and cloud computing solutions. Thousands of smart people have been creating the foundation of the Linked Data “ecosystem” in the form of International Data Standards and best practices over the last fifteen years, largely through the important work of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
The availability of improved development tools is seen as a requirement for widespread proliferation of Semantically enabled applications, however, people are leveraging international standards such as RDF for Linked Data, content sharing models, well-documented licensing models, and existing best practices. Fully 25% of the applications shipped on a new Apple iPhone use government produced content.
I believe there are significant opportunities for commercial software firms to produce services and products to visualize data sets, find related data sets and most importantly, provide mechanisms as easy to use as the early Web to publish machine and human readable data as Linked Data. There is burgeoning information economy rapidly forming around provision of public and private data mixed together in novel ways. I believe that in 2011, truly useful tools for Web developers to create compelling Linked Data applications will be available for use with Open Government data.
We should all acknowledge that data will never be 100% perfect. Real data is dirty, face it. Yes, concerns will linger about misinterpretation and inappropriate mashups until people gain experience in making informed decisions based the data presented. Be patient and don’t expect it to be perfect on day one or even year one. Allow best practices to emerge from the ground up, by communities of interest. Issues of data quality, provenance, context and important elements such as units of measure will all be addressed as Linked Data becomes more mainstream. Harvard Business School published a blue print for use of open government data. The W3C provides lots of useful guidance on eGovernment and Linked Data activities.
Just as the early American pilgrims experienced miscalculations in weather and agriculture, they eventually they figured out how to plant seeds correctly and increase their potential for a bountiful harvest. Through information sharing and discussion by informed citizens, the US evolved a free and democratic form of government that is admired by millions of people around the world.
I’m optimistic that the citizens of the world will leverage Open Government initiatives for positive outcomes. The more our governments support openness and transparency through Open Government initiatives, the more we, the people, can solve issues that matter at the community-level or on a global level. The stakes are high and we should be grateful and cooperate to harness the power of Open Government data and the Web. We are defining our history, as well as our future, today.
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Beth Noveck,
Code for America,
data.gov,
eGov,
International Open Government Conference,
IOGDC,
Jim Hendler,
Jonas Rabinovitch,
linked data,
Robert Schaefer,
Talis,
Tim Berners-Lee,
Vivek Kundra