Lessons from America

I’m considering getting a personalised plate. I like them, and I especially like the funny, hard-to-read ones that take me a moment to work out.

But in contrast, I love simple, obvious website names, so big prize to this one: www.data.gov (The US does have this great advantage of being able to shorten its website names).

The site is growing fast; it’s expected to have over 100,000 feeds by year end and is part of a Barack Obama-driven cultural change in federal government towards openness and transparency.

I include here the goal for data.gov from its website:

“A primary goal of Data.gov is to improve access to Federal data and expand creative use of those data beyond the walls of government by encouraging innovative ideas (eg: web applications).

“Data.gov strives to make government more transparent and is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. The openness derived from Data.gov will strengthen our Nation’s democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.”

The man in charge of delivering this is Vivek Kundra, appointed by Barack Obama to transform US government online in the newly created role of the US Government CIO.

To assist him, Wired Magazine (www.wired.com) has formed a wiki for all to input their ideas of where he should focus: http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Open_Up_Government_Data

An example of a wiki entry is:

“Action Item: Require data to be available in at least one public or open source format. An example of a ‘dataset’ that has generally been ‘locked up’ in PDF are the mission, vision, values, goals, and objectives statements documented in agency strategic plans, which are required by the Government Performance and Result Act (GPRA). The authoritative sources of such data should be XML documents conforming to a voluntary consensus standard like Strategy Markup Language (StratML).”

Telecommunications Review take note: what about a similar wiki on, say, the broadband initiative and what actions will be needed to make that dream real? Or even a similar common data repository from the NZ Government? What would people want from such a site, what data can be unlocked and value created for NZ?

But there is more from Kundra.

He is committed to reducing the US Govt total IT spend from $US76 billion per annum (yeah I was stunned by the size of that number too), by 50, 60 even 80% by driving its systems onto open source and cloud computing.

It’s something he did in his last job as CTO for the District of British Columbia, when he signed a contract to move 38,000 state employees from Microsoft Office to Google Apps. This 34-year-old is about action and not just talk.

Examples Kundra gives of his thinking include recently stopping the sign-off of a $US600,000 budget so a government department could launch a blog; they have since used a free blog service instead.

Another is his suggestion that often the costs of responding to a tender are more than the cost of developing the solution tendered for! (I’ve seen that one.)

So he is proposing that individuals and organisations come forward with their solutions ready built, based on government data, and just launch them – deliver the value!

His moves to change and streamline government purchasing, spend and investment in IT are dramatic and – best of all – co-coordinated.

NZ has had several initiatives to harmonise government IT and networking based from numerous areas, but none I have seen that are as inclusive or open as this initiative seems.

This approach by the Obama administration makes enormous sense to me.

No, I’m not talking about setting up an elephantine bureaucracy that attempts to pull all departments IT into one, but to have a Government CIO who is dedicated to evolving our democracy online, foster public participation and collaboration, reduce costs through intelligent sourcing and enable new businesses to be developed that leverage government data.

Critically such a role could also address the stove pipe mentality whereby a government department builds its identity and services as a vertical-based walled garden.

Any other readers who feel this is a transformational initiative that could deliver massive benefits to NZ society, drop me a line at robspray@tig.org.nz.