Category Archives: open government

Todd Park and Tim O’Reilly on collaboration and healthcare [VIDEO]

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What if open health data were to be harnessed to spur better healthcare decisions and catalyze the extension or creation of new businesses? That potential future exists now, in the present.

Todd Park, chief technology officer of the Department of Heath and Human Services, has been working to unlock innovation through open health data for over a year now. On many levels, the effort is the best story in federal open data. In the video below, he talks with my publisher, Tim O’Reilly, about collaboration and innovation in the healthcare system.

PHARM FRESH: Todd Park and Tim O’Reilly Discuss How Collaboration Leads To Healthcare Innovation from Zemoga on Vimeo.

The next big event in this space on June 9 at the NIH. If you’re interested in what’s next for open health data, track this event closely.

[Hat tip: PharmFresh]

WhiteHouse.gov puts data to use in its new federal property map.

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As I reported at the O’Reilly Radar, The White House used interactive mapping and open data illustrate excess federal property around the United States. Check out the White House excess property map to see what that means in practice. I’ve embedded a similar map from MapBox below.

Selling excess federal property will be challenging. In contrast, open source mapping tools are making storytelling with data easier – and cheaper.

Open Government Camp: Sunlight’s tools for transparency

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So this one time, at Transparency Camp…

I’m still thinking through all of the things I learned at the Sunlight Foundation’s annual unconference last weekend. My top level takeaway was the large number of international campers solidified that transparency has gone global. At an operational level, I thought that the Sunlight Foundation used the combination of Internet and mobile technology to organize better than any of the previous unconferences I’ve attended. They raised the bar for interactivity with a new mobile app, integrated displays and livestreaming.

Putting the tools together to bring off a big camp is a lot harder than listing them, but by sharing the tools for transparency that the organizers used, Scott Stadum did the open government community a mitzvah. While that mobile app required development time and expertise, the vast majority of these tools are free on the Web.

Here’s a quick rundown of the tools that were used during Transparency Camp 2011:

Great stuff.

Stadum did forget one tool, even as he used it: the Sunlight Foundation’s blog.

From where I sit, a well designed and maintained blog continues to be extremely useful as the hub for organizing, particularly in a Web application ecosystem that supports the kind of diversity in platforms listed above. Sunlight does a great job with that, and in using it as a platform to track news that matter, like open government data.

Thanks again to the organizers, sponsors, hosts and, most of all, the attendees of Transparency Camp, who taught me a lot about open government over the course of two days.

US Senate hears testimony on the role of social media in crisis response

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If you watched today’s hearing in the United States Senate on the role of social media in emergency management, “you witnessed a turning point in Gov 2.0,” says Brian Humphrey of the Los Angeles Fire Department. It’s certainly an important moment for the global community that has used these channels to communicate, coordinate and response to both recognize and share. CPAN’s video of the event is embedded below:

 

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/videoLibrary/assets/swf/CSPANPlayer.swf?pid=299342-1 

The Social Media for Emergency Management (SM4EM) blog has a great summary of SMEM on Capitol Hill, including a link to Crisis Commons co-founder Heather Blanchard’s written testimony.

The excellent speakers provided key examples of use and statistics on the use of social media during crisis situations. Some of these incredible examples included:

  • Direct communication between an eyewitness & Director Fugate during an emergency
  • Pace of fundraising that the Red Cross has experienced through their text campaign
  • The use of iPhone applications to share information about shelters
  • Google’s Person Finder application supporting recent disasters which was active 90 minutes after Japan’s earthquake
  • Skype use between communication between disaster victims and their families at home
  • Use of Google Maps by soldiers for planning

Here’s a few other insights that stuck me, along with related coverage:

  • “it’s not the technology tool, it’s the data behind it, and the people able to coordinate info”-Heather Blanchard (@poplifegirl)http://j.mp/fHhN2R
  • “The best thing would be no “social media” people but that it’s an integral part of every position”- Wendy Harman (@wharman) http://oreil.ly/gsocRc
  • “geotagged social media and data can provide real-time, on the ground situational information”-Heather Blanchard, http://oreil.ly/9VRguV
  • “When we talk about information overload, what we’re really talking about is a lack of filters”-Heather Blanchard http://oreil.ly/gsocRc
  • FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate (@CraigatFEMA) said under oath that he tweets himself. http://bit.ly/muJd9O
  • Fugate also said that some of his peers now rate social media and mobile as important a revolution as radio

Read more:

Kicking off Transparency Camp 2011 with 3 words [#tcamp11]

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Today in Washington, Transparency Camp is back in session. As with every unconference, each attendee introduced him or herself with three words that describes what they do, what they care about or what they work on. The frequency of those words is shown in the Transparency Camp 2011 wordle below.

Transparency Camp 2011 Wordle

Transparency Camp 2011 Wordle

You can follow the conversation on Twitter on the #tcamp11 hashtag:

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Some sessions will be livestreamed at TransparencyCamp.com. Sessions will be updated on a new mobile website at m.tcamp.us. Check back for a report from Transparency Camp 2011 tomorrow.

Can open government be embedded?

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This morning, the White House posted President Obama’s long form birth certificate to the public. Now that the White House has released the president’s long form birth certificate to the media (and directly over Twitter to everyone) I hope that the country can move on to the much greater issues that confront the country and humanity as a whole.

Honestly, it was much cooler to watch Mr. Obama speak live using the White House iPhone application than to see the President of the United States take time to debunk the issue that has been settled for years. His remarks are embedded below:

It’s also worth noting the evolution of the White House’s new media strategy, where a government document was not only released directly to the American people as a PDF over social networks but was uploaded to Slideshare where it can be embedded on other webpages to be spread even further, as I have done below.

The White House is not alone in using SlideShare to create embeddable documents. The Congressional Budget Office, Department of Energy, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. National Library of Medicine are sharing information there as well. The military has created channels there too, including the Department of Defense and the U.S. Navy.

To be clear, releasing documents online in of itself is not nor will ever be a full measure of government transparency. Open government is a mindset, not just a matter of adopting new tools. For open government to endure in an era of budget austerity, it will need to be baked in to how government operates, with a clear connection to how it helps deliver on the mission of agencies and officials.

That said, creating online channels with embeddable content is taking more than a few steps forward from paper memos dropped into file cabinets or proclamation read over the radio.

Here’s to moving forward to work on the stuff that matters.

President Obama's Long Form Birth Certificate

View more documents from White House

Senator Carper fears e-gov budget cuts are “penny wise, pound foolish”

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As Daniel Schuman wrote on the Sunlight Foundation’s blog today, Delaware Senator Tom Carper wrote yesterday to federal CIO Vivek Kundra about the effects of a 75% cut to e-government funding at the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), including questions about how the Obama administration intends to go forward. For those that have not been tracking the issue closely, Congress and the President collectively cut OMB’s Electronic Government Fund from $34m in FY2010 to $8m in FY2011.

Schuman and the Sunlight Foundation originally discovered proposed deep cuts to e-government funding during the budget crisis weeks ago and have been reporting on every new wrinkle in the story.

In the last few weeks there’s been a whirlwind of news and speculation about what will happen to the federal government’s online transparency efforts. From the first rumble of budget trouble to a frantic search for information on when the sites would go dark, and an extended legislative give-and-take over funding levels, the storm has cleared enough to know what’s left standing.

The way forward for these online open government platforms, as Schuman notes, isn’t immediately clear. Now, Senator Carper (D-DE) has become more directly involved:

I remain concerned with how the new lower funding level for the E-Gov Fund might not only impede the progress made thus far to make government open and transparent, but also harm efforts to cut wasteful and duplicative spending in the federal government.

The future of these programs have already earned bipartisan support, with Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA) making a personal pledge to use his reprogramming authority as Chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to keep many sites alive. “We’ll find a way to keep OpenGov sites open, but need to make data actually accessible/usable,” tweeted Issa this week, linking to a story on NextGov on softening the budget blow to transparency websites.

Improved accountability, efficiency and civic utility from open government data, in other words, are issues that both sides of the aisle appear to support, although it remains unclear why, if that is so, the original budget was cut by 94%.

Senator Carper’s letter is embedded below.

Letter From Senator Carper to Vivek Kundra about the E-Gov Fund(function() { var scribd = document.createElement(“script”); scribd.type = “text/javascript”; scribd.async = true; scribd.src = “http://www.scribd.com/javascripts/embed_code/inject.js”; var s = document.getElementsByTagName(“script”)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(scribd, s); })();

Plain writing is “indispensable” for open government

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Obama confers with advisors before the Cairo speech

President Barack Obama confers about the Cairo speech with Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications Denis McDonough, right, and speechwriter Ben Rhodes on Air Force One en route to Cairo, Egypt, June 4, 2009. (Official White House photo by Pete Souza)

Open government is not expressly defined as embracing technology, although it can and is be empowered by smart use of it. Last year, Cass Sunstein made plain language an essential part of open government.

Last week, Sunstein, who serves as the administrator of the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, finalized his guidance for the use of plain language in government communication a core part of open government.

For those who have tried to make sense of complex rulemaking, regulations, official announcements or directives, the change will be welcome. For the average citizen trying to comply with them, it’s essential.

“Plain writing is indispensable” to achieving the goals of establishing “a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration,” wrote Sunstein on the White House blog. “…far too often, agencies use confusing, technical, and acronym-filled language. Such language can cost consumers and small business owners precious time in their efforts to play by the rules.”

By July 13, 2011, federal agencies must:

  • designate a senior official oversee plain language
  • create and maintain a “plain writing section” of the agency website that is
    accessible from the agency homepage
  • train employees to use plain language

“Whenever officials provide information about Federal benefits and services, produce documents that are necessary for filing taxes, or offer notices or instructions to the public, they must now write clearly and concisely,” wrote Sunstein.

Will it matter? In measuring the progress of the Open Government Directive, implementation matters. It will be no different here, as changing the culture of government to plain language will never be a matter of installing “a better app for that.”

It was clear back in September that in the United States, open government remains in beta. A year after federal government agencies published their open government plans, the projects are starting to roll out, like the rebooted FCC.gov or NASA’s Open Source Summit. Compiling an Open Government Week in Review this month served as a useful reminder of how much is happening in this space.

As agencies update their progress on open government, however, the focus has often been upon new digital initiatives. Now they have a mission that has very little to do with technology and everything to do with better communicating the activities of government to citizens: adopt the Elements of Gov 2.0 Style.

Below is the full, finalized guidance. More information is available at PlainLanguage.gov.
Final Guidance on Implementing the Plain Writing Act of 2010(function() { var scribd = document.createElement(“script”); scribd.type = “text/javascript”; scribd.async = true; scribd.src = “http://www.scribd.com/javascripts/embed_code/inject.js”; var s = document.getElementsByTagName(“script”)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(scribd, s); })();

Tools for the Citizen Scientist: measuring NASA’s open government progress [INFOGRAPHiC]

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<img alt="http://www.nasa.gov/open/infographic.html" src="http://www.nasa.gov/533977main_opengov_tools_for_the_citizen.png " title="NASA Open Government Infographic" width="600" height ="1333"

NASA‘s celebration of the one year anniversary of its implementation of the Obama administration’s Open Government Directive included a beautiful new infographic, above.

To zoom in, you can download and explore a hi-resolution image of the infographic.

The sweeping, visually accessible representation of the galaxy of open government activity at NASA shows the progress that the air and space agency has taken to towards accomplishing the more than 150 milestones it committed to reaching in the NASA open government plan.

Overall, this infographic estimated the progress of NASA towards completing all of elements at 64%. The most recent step, NASA’s Open Source Summit, highlighted the progress, potential and problems with open source a NASA.

Overall, NASA currently rates the completion of the open source component of its open government plan at only 20%: there’s a long journey ahead in that area, as in others. Writes NASA: “We have made great progress in some areas; others have taken longer than we anticipated and extra time is required to fully realize the goals.”

Some missions will, by nature, take longer than others.

What is open government data? What is it good for? [FILM]

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Open government data broadly refers to public sector records that have been made available to citizens. For a canonical resource on what makes such releases truly “open,” consult the 8 principles of open government data. Today, the Open Knowledge Foundation has released a terrific new short film entitled “#opendata” that offers expert perspectives on what open government data is and how it can be useful to society.

#opendata from Open Knowledge Foundation on Vimeo.

For more information, visit OpenGovernmentData.org. The film has already been translated into Czech, Spanish, Hungarian and Chinese. If you’d like to volunteer to translate it into another language, the makers of the film are actively seeking help.

In the broader context, The Economist‘s support for open government data remains salient today: “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.”

In the United States, the open data story in healthcare is particularly compelling, from new mobile apps that spur better health decisions to data spurring changes in care at the Veterans Administration.

As Clive Thompson reported at Wired this month, public sector data can help fuel jobs, “shoving more public data into the commons could kick-start billions in economic activity.” In the transportation sector, for instance, transit data is open government fuel for economic growth.

Thompson focused on the story of Brightscope, where government data drives the innovation economy. “That’s because all that information becomes incredibly valuable in the hands of clever entrepreneurs,” wrote Thompson. “Pick any area of public life and you can imagine dozens of startups fueled by public data. I bet millions of parents would shell out a few bucks for an app that cleverly parsed school ratings, teacher news, test results, and the like.”