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Category Archives: open source
Slideshow: Fedtalks 2010
The slideshow above is a selection of pictures from today’s Fedtalks in Washington. (Look for more high quality photography soon from the event organizers). If you can’t see the Flash slideshow, you can view my full Fedtalks 2010 set on Flickr.
Pattern Recognition and Spimewatch: Visions of Open Cities of the Future
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
View more presentations from Alexander Howard.
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.”
Making sense of Gov 2.0, Open Government and We Government at Ogilvy
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.
“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:
- Barghava mentioned Pillbox at NIH, where socializing open government healthcare data built a better platform
- Health and Human Services, where CTO Todd Park is making community health info as useful as weather data:
- Crowdsourcing national challenges at Challenge.gov
- “There’s a movement to make sure that cities all put their data out in the same way,” said Sifry, as evidenced by the Open 311 initiative
- Sifry also referenced the targeted crowdsourcing example of Peer-to-Patent, an open government innovation pioneered by White House deputy CTO Beth Noveck
- The reboot of FCC.gov and rollout of APIs and developer engagement holds some promise.
- The launch of the Civic Commons code-sharing initiative could be a big deal to state and city governments.
- The progress of bringing open government to courts bears close watching.
- If you’re tracking the technology that will make government better, it’s clear that network visualization and the mining of open data sets will have major utility for fraud detection and reduction.
- Abroad, the growth of government 2.0 in Australia and development of open government in Britain are key case studies to watch, particularly Data.gov.uk.
“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.
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”
Exploring Gov 2.0, open data and open government in Canada
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:
What does Gov 2.0 have to do with cloud computing?
Last week, Gartner analyst Andrea DiMaio rendered his opinion of what Gov 2.0 has to do with cloud computing. In his post, he writes that “ironically, the terms “cloud” and “open” do not even fit very well with each other,” with respect to auditability and compliance issues.
I’m not convinced. Specifically, consider open source cloud computing at NASA Nebula and the OpenStack collaboration with Rackspace and other industry players, or Eucalyptus.For more, read my former colleague Carl Brooks at SearchCloudComputing for extensive reporting in those areas. Or watch NASA CTO for IT Chris Kemp below:
Aside from the work that CloudAudit.org is doing to address cloud computing, after reading DiMaio’s post, I was a bit curious about how familiar he is with certain aspects of what the U.S. federal government is doing in this area. After all, Nebula is one of the pillars of NASA’s open government plan.
Beyond that relationship, the assertion that responsibility for cloud computing deployment investment resides in the Office for Citizen Engagement might come as a surprise to the CIO of GSA. McClure certainly is more than conversant with the technology and its implications — but I have a feeling Casey Coleman holds the purse strings and accountability for implementation. Watch the GSA’s RFP for email in the cloud for the outcome there.
To Adriel Hampton’s point on DiMaio’s post about cloud and Gov 2.0 having “nothing to do with one another,” I’d posit that that’s overly reductive. He’s right that cloud in of itself doesn’t equal Gov 2.0. It’s a tool that enables it.
Moving Recovery.gov to Amazon’s cloud, for instance, is estimated to save the federal government some $750,000 over time and gives people the means to be “citizen inspector generals.” (Whether they use them is another matter.) Like other tools borne of the Web 2.0 revolution, cloud has the potential enable more agile, lean government that enables better outcomes for citizens, particularly with respect to cost savings, assuming those compliance concerns can be met.
The latter point is why Google Apps receiving FISMA certification was significant, and why Microsoft has been steadily working towards it for its Azure platform. As many observers know, Salesforce.com has long since signed many federal customers, including the U.S. Census.
DiMaio’s cynicism regarding last week’s Summit is interesting, although it’s not something I can spend a great deal of time in addressing. Would you tell the Gov 2.0 community to stop coming together at camps, forums, hearings, seminars, expos, summits, conferences or local government convocations because an analyst told you to? That’s not a position I’m coming around to any time soon, not least as I look forward to heading to Manor, Texas next week.
In the end, cloud computing will be one more tool that enables government to deliver e-services to citizens in a way that was simply not possible before. If you measure Gov 2.0 by how technology is used to arrive at better outcomes, the cloud is part of the conversation.
[*Note Gartner’s reply in the comments regarding the resolution of the magic quadrant suit. -Ed.]
New Data.WorldBank.org fuels storytelling with the power of open data
Earlier today, the new data.worldbank.org launched. As I reported for Radar this afternoon, added widgets, maps and an API make World Bank data sing.
The Bank is increasing the number of indicators available on the site from 339 to more than 1,200, and it has substantially improved its API. Four different languages are supported on the site, along with an improved data browser, feedback buttons, instant search, and embeddable widgets.
“The new site shows the art of the possibility,” said Eric Gundersen of Development Seed, the D.C.-based Drupal shop behind the World Bank’s data catalog. “This is really actionable information. So many more NGOs [non-governmental organizations] can now make data-informed decisions if they have access.”
Below, I’ve embedded a video on the power of geo-coding aid.
From the blog:
A team of researchers from Development Gateway and AidData have worked with the World Bank to add detailed subnational geographical information to all of the Bank’s active projects in the Africa and Latin America region. This isn’t just pins in a map showing the country where the money is spent: they have looked through the project documentation to find out as far as possible the geographic coordinates of the actual locations where aid the activities take place.
This video by AidData explains brilliantly what geocoding means, and why its important.
As I also reported at Radar, the World Bank wil be running an Apps for Development contest, launching on Oct. 7. In addition to the contest, the World Bank will host an open forum on Oct. 7 that will feature experts from the open data movement via live webcasts and a 24-hour chatroom.
How Socializing Data Built A Better Government Platform
Can social media, open government and an API lead to a better pill identification system? What about a collaborative effort between Big Pharma and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that could result in pictures of medications on labels for the first time?
As David Hale’s interview in my most recent article at Mashable showed, the power of social media, open data and innovation led to a better healthcare platform at the National Library of Medicine:
Every year, poison control centers get more than one million calls for pill identification. Each one of those calls costs nearly $50. Social software is helping biomedical researchers collaborate on better ways of identifying drugs. “Pillbox is a digital platform for communities to solve challenges related to pharmaceutical identification and reference,” says David Hale, the program manager. The National Library of Medicine’s mission is to gather, curate and distribute the world’s biomedical information, said Hale.
Pillbox is an open government initiative from the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Food and Drug Administration that could transform how pharmaceuticals are labeled in the future. The interactive web application currently allows visitors to rapidly identify unknown solid medications, like tablets or capsules, based upon their shape, color and other markings. Pillbox remains a research and development project, so users should not be making clinical decisions just yet. Right now there are over 1,000 images of prescription drugs in the system, with many more to come in the next few months.
In the video below, Hale demonstrates the platform:
Hale will share more about new updates to Pillbox and how the healthcare community and developers partnering to restructure federal drug label data at the Gov 2.0 Summit next week in Washington on September 8th.
His last presentation, “Open Gov Ninja 101,” is embedded below:
Gov 2.0: Applying open data to open government
http://www.viddler.com/simple/dbed5110/
Earlier this summer, the Knight Foundation convened a panel of experts on open source and open government at the 2010 Future of News and Civic Media Conference at MIT to consider whether open data can be used to fuel positive social change. If you missed the event or video when it was first posted, it’s well worth your time.
From the Knight Blog:
Ellen Miller, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, Laurel Ruma, editor at O’Reilly Media, and Nick Grossman, director of Civic Works at OpenPlans, each gave a brief speech and answered topical questions. Although each speaker expressed different ideas about how to foster civic engagement and social change, their strategies all revolved around a similar theme: transparency. The speakers agreed that social change can be fostered by increasing the amount of quality data available and correspondence between residents and their governments.
Miller will be presenting an Open Government Scorecard at the Gov 2.0 Summit next week. It’s a good bet that John Wonderlich’s post on the White House leading practice winners might serve as a preview of her comments.
Considering open source healthcare IT standards at Transparency Camp
http://www.ustream.tv/flash/video/5759369?v3=1
A discussion of healthcare IT standards, with moderation from Brian Behlendorf. More information at healthIT.hhs.gov
E Pluribus Unum 