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.
Disparities in access to the Internet have been persistent since the scratchy sounds of a modem were first heard in offices, basements and schools. In recent years, the digital divide has grown to encompass smartphones usage, differentiation of broadband Internet and open data’s role in empowering the empowered.
Dr. Nicholas Gruen, CEO of Lateral Economics and the former chair of the Government 2.0 Taskforce in Australia, warned the audience at the Smart Government 2010 conference in Melbourne of a new dimension to the digital divide: a “participation partition” that favors citizens who are more active engaging in online discourse.
“The world is leaning towards favouring those who participate,” said Gruen. “They have more fun and more influence. If you participate more in your local school and local democracy, you’re going to have more say and more power. I see these things as very healthy, but there isn’t an equality of outcomes for everyone.”
As Rob O’Brien reported in Government News, Australia’s Gov 2.0 Taskforce pushed government entities to participate more online themselves, including encouraging public sector officials and workers to use with social media tools.
“We’ve now got 20 government blogs, that’s a great start. What we don’t have is people participating on blogs,” Mr Gruen said. “I’m not suggesting they should be making controversial comments, but just be a member of a group of people talking about policy issues.”
Redefining Public/Private Partnerships
Dr. Gruen was a featured speaker at the Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington, where he explored public goods in the context of open government and digital citizenship. His talk is embedded below:
Today, California announced the winners of its Apps for California challenge. As the summer comes to an end, there will indeed be an open government app for that in California. As I reported earlier this year at Radar, the app contest was targeted at catalyzing innovative uses of a refreshed Data.CA.gov, which included over 400 major data sources, including XLS, CSV and XML formats, and over 100 million records. The winners will be honored and given prizes at an awards gala hosted by Government Technology’s Best of the Web Competition on September 17, 2010.
Who are the Winners?
So who won and why? According to the Apps for California rules, each entry was judged according to the following criteria:
Providing value to California’s residents and businesses;
Demonstrating Innovation;
Promoting Collaboration and Government Efficiency; and
Ensuring Accessibility and Usability.
WIthout further ado, here are the five winners:
California Cage Fight (info page) allows residents to compare their counties with other California counties and the state as a whole, including population growth, per capita income, unemployment, new houses and more.
California Environment Report: Cleanup Sites and Permitted Facilities (info page) provide residents with an interactive map that includes heatmaps, a mobile version with geolocation, data feeds, and detail pages for every cleanup site and permitted dacility from the CA Department of Toxic Substances Control Datasets.
California View (info page) is a simple mapping tool that displays the locations of California state parks, fishing holes and boating facilities.
ZonabilitySF (info page) provides mobile access to San Francisco zoning ordinance information. This app includes geolocation, interactive zoning maps, resources about code and a mechanism to ask a city planner questions.
DataCalifornia (info page) provides a browser for California education, health and current legislation. The mashup allows users to “submit ideas on how the government should spend taxpayer money. Notably, it also has a constant stream of updates from schools, first responders and local politics. The site features Facebook integration, and a “Fix” button that should be familiar to SeeClickFix users.
People’s Choice Award
“Explore California” (info page) and the California Cage Fight mashups won the People’s Choice Awards. Explore California is similar to Data California, providing users with an interactive map and visualizations population, income, unemployment, new housing units, and other trends over time. Visitors can “compare and contrast the patterns of growth and decline in various categories and the relationships between them.”
What’s do Apps for California mean for Gov 2.0?
At review time, the winners seems like it might have the most potential to enable better outcomes for citizens to engage with government, given the tool. The zoning app could potentially be quite useful to builders or homeowners. And if you’re also an angler, the easy lookup of potential hotspots could be of interest, though old salts might not want the increased competition. A complete list of Apps for California finalists is available at CA.gov.
The contest was conducted by the Center for Digital Government in collaboration with the state of California, the city of Los Angeles, the county of Los Angeles, the city and county of San Francisco, Google, Microsoft and ProgrammableWeb.com. That collaboration featured some of the nation’s biggest tech companies partnering with public institutions to create mashups that of open public data that would provide more value to citizens.
Overall, the state saw over a dozen applications developed over the summer that might have taken it much longer to build internally, and at substantially great cost. Beyond stimulating that activity, however, the success or failure of the contest will likely be judged not upon the prices awarded or the number of apps built but rather whether these applications make the lives of citizens easier or provide more frictionless access to information. That’s a judgement that will only be rendered with time.
“If you read only one blog in the Gov 2.0 space, you should read eaves.ca” – Tim O’Reilly.
My interview with David Eaves on open government and open data at today’s Gov 2.0 Summit is a reminder why my publisher would offer that ringing endorsement. We talked about the risks and rewards of open data, the state of Gov 2.0 in Canada and the progress of “We government” up across the border. Eaves also revealed that Canadians love Facebook, though perhaps not as much as hockey.
How will regulations and laws that address the new challenges of online privacy evolve? What are the tradeoffs between societal benefit and individual rights? How should the opportunities inherent in data mining be balanced with harm-based standards? What are the responsibilities of governments, businesses and citizens to protect privacy?
Yesterday at the Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington, my interview with Jules Polonetsky covered all of those topics and more. Polonestsky is the Co-chair and Director of the Future of Privacy Forum, a think tank seeking to improve the state of online privacy by advancing responsible data practices. His writing and research can be found at Futureofprivacy.org.
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?
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:
Earlier today, my newest Radar post explained what to expect as FCC.gov is poised for an overdue overhaul featured FCC managing director Steven VanRoekel on participation and building platforms. For the full perspective on what’s next in “FCC 2.0,” check out Radar. Our video interview is embedded below.
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.
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.
It’s the first day of September, and with it the beginning of the fall conference season. After looking toward the months head, my colleague Laurel Ruma and I thought that it would be worth sharing the camps, panels, conferences and forums that were on our “radar.” We won’t be able to attend all of them, unfortunately, but the community should be aware of what’s happening. I hope to see many of you at the Gov 2.0 Summit next week.
Could contests help us realize the vision of participatory democracy outlined by Thomas Jefferson, where citizens collaborate with government to solve the nation’s most difficult problems? The White House hopes so. As the Federal Times reported this morning, agencies are trying to crowdsource their way out of problems.
“Government does not have a monopoly on the best ideas,” as Vivek Kundra, the nation’s first federal chief information officer, has emphasized repeatedly. To deliver on the promise of innovation for “government as a platform,” as Tim O’Reilly has framed the concept of “government 2.0,” the White House will have to find ways to empower citizens to contribute to the formation and delivery of effective and efficient policy and services.
The idea of a contest to inspire technological innovation, however, is not a novel concept reliant on Web services, born from the fertile mind of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. One of the most famous scientific achievements in nautical history was spurred by a grand challenge issued in the 18th Century. The issue of safe, long distance sea travel in the Age of Sail was of such great importance that the British government offered a cash award of £20,000 pounds to anyone who could invent a way of precisely determining a ship’s longitude. The Longitude Prize, enacted by the British Parliament in 1714, would be worth some £30 million pounds today, but even by that measure the value of the marine chronometer invented by British clockmaker John Harrison might be a deal.
What has inspired the use of the contests? “There are a number of sources,” said Thomas Kalil, deputy director for policy at OSTP. “The organization that gets the most credit for the renaissance in the use of prizes is the X Prize Foundation. The Ansari X Prize and its success was one of the things that got me excited about the potential of these challenges.” Kalil joined Tim O’Reilly and Lesa Mitchell from the Kauffman Foundation next week at the Gov 2.0 Summit to talk about turbocharging American innovation. Their conversation is embedded below:
The Applications of App Contests
“We created Apps for Democracy with Vivek Kundra and Office of the Chief Technology Officer back in 2008,” said Peter Corbett, CEO of Washington, D.C.-based iStrategy Labs. “[Kundra] said ‘Peter, we have all this open data–it’s probably the most comprehensive municipal open data catalog in the world–but it’s not really useful to anybody because it’s just raw data.”
What Corbett suggested to Kundra was to encourage citizen technologists to build Web applications and mobile services on top of that data. “Build on top of that catalog for fame — and a little bit of fortune.” Within two months, they had 47 Web, mobile and iPhone applications developed. Since then, that method and concept has spread throughout the world, said Corbett. The Department of Defense recently announced the winners of the Apps for Army contest, which could shape the future of defense acquisition.
Apps contests are not just a phenomenon in the United States, either: in Canada, an Apps for Climate Change contest just wrapped up. And in Africa, Apps for Africa is focused on leveraging the talent of local developers in Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania.
“There are ‘Apps for Democracy’ contests in Finland, in Australia and ones on the city level like Portland, New York and London,” said Corbett, highlighting the spread of the paradigm globally. Later this year, an Apps for Development contest will leverage an even bigger open data store soon too, explained Corbett, based upon the World Bank’s open data catalog.
A recent McKinsey article on the promise of innovation held by prize contests offered further instruction, noting that “most successful prize competitions place an equal emphasis on other elements, such as the broader change strategy, the competition itself, and post-award activities designed to enhance the impact of the prize.”
Kalil agreed with that assessment, observing that a strategy that specifies victory conditions is useful. “That’s why a clear goal, like ‘build a spaceship that can go up 200km, and then repeat that within two weeks,’ is helpful,” he said.
Will hardwiring prizes that leverage public sector investments provide a good return on the commitment of time, prize money and other resources?
“We’re finding that to be the case with the NASA Centennial Challenges Program,” said Kalil. “If NASA had had to pay for all of the capabilities created by the Lunar Lander Challenge, they would have had to put in far more money.”
Corbett said that for D.C., the city estimated the value of the first Apps for Democracy program was in excess of $2.3 million dollars, when compared to the traditional costs associated with procurement and development.
Other early results are also promising. “The government is still in early days with respect to its use of prizes,” said Kalil. “The agencies most involved have been NASA and its prizes. DARPA, particularly the DARPA Grand Challenge, have played an important role in advanced unmanned ground vehicles and robotics. The DARPA Network Challenge showed the power of social networks to gather information in a distributed way.”
Riley Crane, a MIT post-doctoral fellow, shares insights on crowdsourcing from his team’s success in the DARPA Network Challenge below. The interview came after his testimony at a recent Senate hearing on technological innovation and government.
The success or failure of these challenges and contests may ultimately rest upon the ability of the White House to draw the attention of innovators to the questions posed. Should we expect a live American Idol panel to judge the potential of ideas?
Kalil laughed: “That will depend on the competition.”
There are already dozens of challenges online at the new Challenge.gov today. Below, Bev Godwin from the General Services Administration talks about the new site:
Crowdsourcing innovation through social media
Contests aren’t the only platform that government entities are looking to in order to spur collaborative innovation. Another platform for communication will come from Expert Labs, a non-profit independent lab that is affiliated with the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The open source ThinkUp App being developed by award-winning author Gina Trapani will be used by the White House as a crowdsourcing platform for collecting feedback on grand challenges that are submitted on Twitter.
“This first attempt is about whether we can get people to push the button,” said Anil Dash, director of Expert Labs. “The next attempt will be about seeing if we can get them to contribute to something larger, like a collaborative document.”
Dash said that to be successful, people developing these tools need know what they want to achieve at the outset. “You have to have a purpose-built tool,” he said. “You have to tap into as large of a network as possible, and you need to clearly define the outcome you want.”
Will it be possible to draw attention to huge, difficult problems using social media and the Internet? “Look at the number of people that have watched Bill Gates’ TED talk on zero carbon,” said Dash. “You don’t need to get everyone in the world to agree. It’s a matter of activating the people who want to contribute. It’s about getting the doers to do.”
In the video below, you can learn more about Think Up App from Dash and Trapani’s talk at the recent Supernova Hub conference.
E Pluribus Unum 