Category Archives: open data

Weighing a more balanced view of Government 2.0

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There’s a lot to consider in Gartner analyst Andrea DiMaio’s newest post, toward a more “balanced view of government 2.0. Balanced views are good, as are research, evidence, case studies and solid reporting.

Unfortunately, I’m at the GOSCON Conference at the moment, so I can’t respond at length. I’m very glad he finds this blog informative. I’d also direct readers to the Gov 2.0 section at O’Reilly Radar for more content and other perspectives.

One thing I’d pose as a cautionary note to his last post is that the state of government 2.0 or open government can’t be measured simply by the answers of government CIOs, particularly at the federal level. It’s in the hands of more people than that, with respect to the “we government” meme that the Personal Democracy Forum has articulated.

That’s why, while Gartner’s view is both influential and something that many executives will clearly still spend money to gain, watching what’s happening at the state and local level is critical – and perhaps not reflected in its data gathering. I could well be wrong, naturally.

Resource-starved government entities at the state level are more likely to adopt free and open tools that require investments in time, much like the campaigns that are bootstrapping using social media and YouTube this election season instead of expensive TV buys. Just look at the choices that California has made for a precedent, where open government is connecting citizens to e-services with social media.

I’ve been asking a lot more questions about private sector value created from open government data. There are definitely examples that weren’t in that blog post that DiMaio referenced. That post should not be taken as comprehensive or exhaustive, merely easily referenced initiatives that I could offer to an audience that came fresh to the topic. Those include BrightScope (whose government 2.0 story TechCrunch covered last weekend), Passur Aeropspace, transit apps, or numerous healthcare apps that fold in CHDI data.

That said, the CIO panel at GOSCON just dropped several data points you might consider:

The data.ca.gov California apps contest yielded several startups, said CarolynLawson, including:

NYSenate.gov uses Drupal and a host of other technology choices that apparently have affected their bottom line. “We spent one million less last year, relative to the historical timeline,” said NY Senate CIO Andrew Hoppin.

If that open source framework is adopted elsewhere, similar cost savings to open government might be be available for you to cite.

In Coders We Trust: Laurel Ruma breaks down Gov 2.0 at Ignite NYC

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“We’re moving from the Social Web to the Civic Web. IT and geeks matter. What we can do with open data and the internet is very important. If government is a platform, we need people to create apps and others to open up data sets.”-Laurel Ruma, Gov 2.0 Evangelist, O’Reilly Media

If you want a great introduction to what Gov 2.0 is and why it matters, look no further than her 5 minute talk from Ignite NYC is embedded below.

Gov 2.0 Daily Dispatch: A Storify Experiment in Open Government Curation

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http://storify.com/digiphile/gov-20-daily-dispatch-october-18-2010.js

USA.gov launches new iPhone app on its 10th Anniversary

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This October marks the 10th anniversary of USA.gov, the nation’s search engine for government. And, as it turns out, now there’s an app for that. Nope, it’s not Apps.gov of even Apps.USA.gov. The General Services Administration quietly added a new USA.gov iPhone app to iTunes a few days ago. Why is it important? When American look for government information, they use search engines. While most of them go to Google and Bing, now they have another option when they fire up a smartphone.

The new app integrates access to a useful government dataset for citizens: a product recall database. The same access is available through a Product Recall app online, for Android or on mobile devices at Recalls.gov. That also means that citizens don’t have to have a smartphone to access public data, a issue for accessibility and the digital divide. For those inclined, the app also provides mobile search for local, state and federal websites, including predictive search.

The new USA.gov app is beautifully designed, lightweight and didn’t crash on me after ten minutes of searching and browsing. The integration of a “tap to call” feature with the iPhone on the home screen also preserves a handy “Gov 1.0” feature as well: 1 800 FED INFO.

As the app description in iTunes notes, the app makes public data like birth, marriage and death records freely available to all citizens (provided that they have an iOS device with an Internet connection). Search.USA.gov provides similar access on both mobile and desktop users, for folks who prefer a Web browser to an app. Information about schools, passport and visas, tax codes, government jobs and Social Security benefits is also available.

The addition of the USA.gov to iTunes ends a quiet but important lag in getting a free government app onto the world’s largest mobile application platform. When Apps.USA.gov launched, Apple apps were conspicuously absent. Months later, the legal difficulties between the feds and Cupertino appear to resolved.

As a result, parents can search the FDA database to see which toys have been recalled. While it’s true that analysts can (and no doubt will) point to the USA.gov app as the latest example of “shiny app syndrome,” making a better interface for open data is a win for everyone.

Pattern Recognition and Spimewatch: Visions of Open Cities of the Future

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If you had five minutes to talk about the future, what would you say?

Last month, I had the privilege of presenting at two Ignite sessions, Ignite NYC at the Web 2.0 Expo and Ignite D.C. later in the week. If you’re not familiar, Ignites are 5 minute-long talks where presenters share subject they’re passionate about, using 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds. If you’re not used to that rhythm, it can be tricky.

The video of my talk at Ignite D.C. is embedded below:

The presentation and associated links is embedded below:

Visions of the Future: Spime Watch and Pattern Recognitionhttp://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=spime-watch-pattern-recognition-abh-101001132644-phpapp02&stripped_title=visions-of-the-future-spime-watch-and-pattern-recognition&userName=digiphile

Curious about the title for my talks? As fellow science fiction fans know, the title for these Ignite talks is an homage to two author: William Gibson, and Bruce Sterling. Gibson, sometimes called the “noir prophet” of cyberpunk, coined the term cyberspace and wrote “Pattern Recognition,” an enjoyable yarn about the future-present. Sterling, also an notable cyberpunk author, maintains the excellent Wired blog “Beyond the Beyond,” which has an entire category called “Spimewatch.”

US CTO pitches open government, innovation and health IT to Silicon Valley

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What is the federal chief technology officer up to out in Silicon Valley? From afar, however, it’s looks like federal CTO Aneesh Chopra is stirring up awareness about open government and entrepreneurship in the venture capital community in California. He’s also traveling with Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) CTO Todd Park to add his compatriot’s considerable enthusiasm for innovation in healthcare information technology (HIT). Chopra’s slides follow:

Aneesh Chopra DC to VC Oct 6, 2010http://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=dctovc100610-101007114153-phpapp02&stripped_title=aneesh-chopra-dc-to-vc100610&userName=DC2VC

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Following is a quick rundown of the websites and initiatives Chopra referenced in the presentation:

For a classic dispatch written by a great tech journalist, Wade Roush, make sure to read his interview with Aneesh Chopra on entrepreneurship, health IT, open government and “data as a policy lever.”

During the event, I picked up some tweets coming out of a “D.C.-to-Silicon Valley” event and curated them using the Storify tool. It proved to be a bit unstable – apps in beta are fun! – but you’ll find a “living version” of the story embedded in the post below.

http://storify.com/digiphile/dc-to-vc-healthcare-it-summit-pitches-gov-20-and-o.js

HHS CTO announces HealthData.gov, explains Blue Button and next steps for Health2Challenge

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Have you met Todd Park? He’s the first CTO of Health and Human Services Department of the United States. Earlier this week, he announced the upcoming launch of HealthData.gov, a new website that will publish open government health data. If you’re unfamiliar with Park, I interviewed him at this year’s Gov 2.0 Expo:

Park and I talked about his open government work at the Department of Health and Human Services, where he’s been trying to make community health information as useful as weather data. We also spoke about the Health 2.0 Developer Challenge, a series of code-a-thons and team competitions to build apps based upon community health data. “Games are a non-trivial information dissemination approach” that can drive actionable behavior, said Park at HealthCamp, referring to many of the entries that use game mechanics to socialize the data. The developer challenge culminated this week during the fourth annual Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco.

The nation now can see more about what the tech community has come up since this spring, when the question of whether there’s a healthcare app for that was answered the first time. “Social value and economic value can go hand in hand,” he said to a health IT summit in San Francisco. Below, Park talks about the Veterans Administration’s new “Blue Button,” which provides access to downloadable personal health data.

In the video, Park outlines the agency’s plan to offer military veterans and Medicare recipients the ability to download their own health records using a digital “blue button” on MyMedicare.gov and MyHealthyVet. Fried reported on veterans getting downloadable health info at CNET.com. Park, VA CTO Peter Levin and federal CTO Aneesh Chopra blogged about the Blue Button at WhiteHouse.gov:

Veterans who log onto My HealtheVet at http://www.myhealth.va.gov and click the Blue Button can save or print information from their own health records. Using a similar Blue Button, Medicare beneficiaries who are registered users of http://www.mymedicare.gov can log onto a secure site where they can save or print their Medicare claims and self-entered personal information. Data from of each site can be used to create portable medical histories that will facilitate dialog with Veterans’ and beneficiaries’ health care providers, caregivers, and other trusted individuals or entities.

This new option will help Veterans and Medicare beneficiaries save their information on individual computers and portable storage devices or print that information in hard copy. Having ready access to personal health information from Medicare claims can help beneficiaries understand their medical history and partner more effectively with providers. With the advent of the Blue Button feature, Medicare beneficiaries will be able to view their claims and self-entered information—and be able to export that data onto their own computer. The information is downloaded as an “ASCII text file,” the easiest and simplest electronic text format. This file is also easy to read by the individual; it looks like an organized report.

More than 60,000 people have already downloaded their PHRs. As those technically savvy writers emphasize, however, this will create thousands of opportunities to have that sensitive data leak. They stressed the importance of using encryption and password protection to protect the records. For those watching the development of health IT, the future that the 3 CTOs hint about near the end of the post will be of particular interest:

Soon, Blue Button users may be able to augment the downloaded information that is housed on their computers—or that they transferred to a commercial personal health record or other health application—through automated connections to, and downloads from, major pharmacies including Walgreens and CVS; lab systems such as Quest and LabCorp; and an increasing number of inpatient and outpatient electronic medical records systems.

Keep an eye out for how that develops.

Below, Park kicks off the Healthcamp SF Bay event.

http://www.ustream.tv/flash/video/10033111?v3=1

Here are his slides from the event:

Todd Park – Open Health Data Oct 6, 2010http://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=openhealthdata10062010-101007115012-phpapp02&stripped_title=todd-park-open-health-data&userName=DC2VC

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Below, he summarizes his Healthcamp session.

Making sense of Gov 2.0, Open Government and We Government at Ogilvy

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What is Gov 2.0?

How does making government smarter relate to open government, e-government or “We government?”

As Sifry put it in the Huffington Post this week ,

At Personal Democracy Forum, we prefer the term “We-government,” the co-creating of new forms of collaboration and service that use technology, public data and the social web to address vital issues and solve public problems, that enables us to do more with less. It’s neither Right nor Left, not small government or big government, but effective do-it-ourselves-government.

What are the early success stories and challenges for an open government in beta? This morning in Washington, I dodged rain drops on my way to a Gov 2.0 panel moderated by Ogilvy Digital’s Rohit Bhargava to talk about that very topic, joining Personal Democracy Forum co-founder Micah Sifry; Mark Murray, deputy political director for NBC News; Ari Melber, correspondent and blogger for the Nation magazine and Politico; and Gwynne Kostin, Director at the Center for New Media and Citizen Engagement at the GSA.

The panel was livestreamed at Livestream.com and integrated with the Ogilvy’s 360 Digital Influence Facebook page for an online audience. Fast forward to about 30 minutes into the archive for the beginning of the event.

http://cdn.livestream.com/grid/LSPlayer.swf?channel=ogilvy360didc&clip=pla_450cc7e2-ce2f-487e-82d0-f8db28753ff1&autoPlay=false

“We’re just beginning to see the government using the Web in a more porous, participatory way,” said Sifry, who saw no reason that government workers couldn’t get technology in the same way other citizens else can. “Really, government workers have mastered the telephone,” he said. “The can probably use Web 2.0 tools.”

Gov 2.0 Case Studies

While Sifry was critical of the White House’s embrace of Gov 2.0 and open government, he observed that at the agency level he’s seeing “a flowering of initiative.” That’s backed up by what I’ve seen on the ground and have reported on in numerous studies. For instance:

“There is a civic surplus waiting to be tapped of people who want the country to succeed,” said Sifry. And, in fact, I reported on Harnessing the Civic Surplus for Open Government,” when Noveck spoke in Manor, Texas about all of these initiatives.

I’m shortchanging the comments of Melber, Kostin and Murray due to time, unfortunately, but the #Ogilvy360di tweetstream and archived livestream offer additional perspective. Both of the reporters provided ample insight into the hyper-charged world of national correspondents in Washington, where news and issues move almost as quickly as the polls. More of Kostin’s thoughts may also be fond at her blog, OnDotGov.

http://cdn.livestream.com/grid/LSPlayer.swf?channel=ogilvy360didc&clip=pla_4d3b3b86-4458-40b4-92af-ed14a203397a&autoPlay=false

Selected reflections from the online audience:

@msspinach: “The hot question: what exactly is #gov20? Gwynne Kostin: ‘We’re still throwing spaghetti on the wall and seeing what sticks.'”

@voleynik: “#Gov20 = government using the web to create better services for citizens. Creating smarter more effective government.”

@SaBean21: “Our bill of rights is being used in a digital form. Open platform is a tiny & fragile thing we have right now.

@dlblack: “@digiphile: the gov20 / #opengov conversation can’t just be about Washington, it has to be about data people can use”

@msspinach: “#gov20 means whoever is in power gives up some cntrl. If u want group prticipation, ppl need to feel they’re being listened to.”

@merici:”Ok, social media exists. We get it. Moving fwd, what are ex of gov using web to be smarter, more efficient?”

@dlblack: “not all #gov20 projects need to be about mass participation, they need to be about exchanging knowledge w/right audience”

Canadian Apps for Climate Change Winners Announced

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Earlier this spring, the United States released community health information to provision healthcare apps and drive better policy.

[Photo by Senior Airman Joshua Strang, U.S. Air Force, via Wikipedia]

Now, scientists and policy makers will explore the potential for climate data services to inform citizens and government, enabling both to make better decisions for communities and businesses alike.

Can open government lead to greater awareness or action around the existential issue climate change? Posting open data online in of itself is not enough, although there’s no question that publishing scientific data where it can be publicly accessed, validated or stored is a huge step forward with respect to transparency.

Socializing open health data was necessary to build a better government platform at the National Institute of Medicine, where open data and innovation led to an innovative means to identity pills.

Is collaborative innovation in open government possible in Canada? On the one hand, Canadian open data consultant David Eaves bluntly pointed out some of the challenges extant because of culture: Collaborate? ‘Governments don’t do that’.

Collaborative innovation, however, may be another matter, as many governments, large and small, are experimenting with websites crowdsourcing citizen ideas.

Enter the Apps for Climate Action Contest, which challenged Canadian software developers to raise awareness and inspire action by using open data in Web and mobile applications. The open data itself came from the government of British Columbia, which created a catalogue of climate and greenhouse gas emission data at Data.gov.bc.ca.

So who won?

Best Web App – VELO

The app allows organizations to compare against peers internally and externally, enabling businesses to monitor and compare benchmarks for carbon emissions continually rather than annually.

Best Mobile App – MathTappers: Carbon Choices

“The MathTappers: Carbon Choices App is designed to help students examine the effects of their personal choices on climate change. As students track their choices their impact is assessed in terms of annualized kg of CO2 equivalents generated.”

Best of B.C. – Waterly

This app is designed to help people to use less water on their lawns.

People’s Choice – VanTrash

“VanTrash scrapes pickup schedules from City of Vancouver websites and combines it with GIS data from data.vancouver.ca. In turn, VanTrash exposes this scraped data in a clean RESTful API for other citizens to build and innovate on.” The idea here is that the app will help residents to remember to take their recycling, organic waste and other garbage out.

Will any of these apps make a difference in a global context? The jury is out on that count. Notably, several of the winners empower citizens with more lightweight access to information about local services or awareness of commodities usage. Canada may be one of the world leader’s in sheer volume of clean water but that doesn’t mean minimization of transport or use doesn’t make sense. I could certainly use a trash and recycling reminder here in Washington; maybe Octo Labs will work with a good developer if the data is available.

A gallery of all the climate change apps is online.

Climate Services and Open Data in the US

In the United States, using data as a climate change agent is part of the big idea behind Climate.gov, where public climate data from NOAA and NASA could spur better decisions and a more informed society.

Amidst varied hopes for open data and open government, enabling better data-driven decisions in both the private and public sector rank high. One of the existential challenges for humanity will be addressing climate change, particularly in countries where scientific resources are scant or even non-existent.

In February, the Obama administration proposed a climate service that would provide projections on climate change in much the same way that the National Ocean and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) provides weather information. Earlier this summer, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) published new research, “Earth Observation for Climate Change,” and hosted a forum on leveraging climate data services to manage climate change. The video from the forum is embedded below:

http://blip.tv/play/hYpBgfCMMwI

For more perspective on the role of Climate.gov and climate services, read the full post on Radar.

Exploring Gov 2.0, open data and open government in Canada

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What’s going on with Gov 2.0 in Canada? I had the opportunity to interview David Eaves on Gov 2.0, open government and open data in Canada last week – and I took it. He shared even more perspective on the state of open government in Canada with my colleague Mac Slocum at Radar back in March. And if you’re not following his posts on government collaboration ( or the lack thereof), well, start. His talk about Gov 2.0 in Canada at the recent Gov 2.0 Summit is embedded below:

Eaves posted a wealth of links on Gov 2.0 in Canada at his blog after the talk.

For those interested in further perspective from north of the 49th parallel, flip through the presentation by Jury Konga, principal of the eGovFutures Group embedded below:

Gov 2.0 and Open Data Sustainabilityhttp://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=misa-bcgov2-opendatasustainsept1610final-100916191603-phpapp02&stripped_title=gov-20-and-open-data-sustainability

View more presentations from Jury Konga.