Making government data visible - and is Change coming to Ottawa?

I went to the event about open government, it was good.  (It was a "meetup" I guess, in the popular terminology, or a new term I learned, 5à7).

Jennifer Bell of VisibleGovernment.ca did a presentation that I liked a lot, about mobilising government data by opening it up for public engagement through APIs.

Her presentation should show up at

http://www.slideshare.net/jenniferbell

In the meantime the presentations currently there give an idea of the concepts and objectives.

UPDATE 2009-02-12: Her presentation Benefits of Open Government Data is now available, and I also found an article by her that covers some of the same ground

Bell, J. 2009 Feb 1. Government Transparency via Open Data and Open Source. Open Source Business Resource [Online] 0:0. Available: http://www.osbr.ca/ojs/index.php/osbr/article/view/829/802

ENDUPDATE

Given my experience trying to sell the idea of APIs and open data to a community that mostly understands plain web pages, this is a challenging concept to promote, but I think there are some good US and UK examples that we can point to (about which more later).

Having learned from the experience of twitter-spamming people by live-tweeting an event, I made a FriendFeed room for my live notes instead.  I don't know how well it turned out - because of screensize limitations on my 7" netbook, it was much easier if I kept creating new top-level items, rather than just making a long section of comments - I'm not sure if this mix is right - maybe they all should have been toplevel items, or all comments.  Anyway the room is at

http://friendfeed.com/rooms/open-government-canada

in the spirit of the event, it's currently completely open.  You're welcome to add any relevant items, they don't have to be specific to this event.

Change Coming to Ottawa - Part 0

Jennifer also mentioned the possibility of a ChangeCamp Ottawa (for background, see my previous posting about ChangeCamp Toronto).  It looks like a good way to connect is through the ChangeCamp Twitter account,

http://twitter.com/changecamp

and the rather long hashtag #changecampottawa

Change Coming to Ottawa - Part 1

New web technologies face many adoption challenges for Canadian Federal Government - official languages rules, Common Look and Feel rules, slow tech adoption and a risk-averse culture.  That being said, there is a lot of excitement about the potential of these tools both internally, in an Enterprise 2.0 sense, and externally, in a Government 2.0 sense.  As I said in my Web 2.0 presentation at CISTI, in some ways I find it hard to get particularly excited when this is stretched to include blogs and wikis, which are actually both pre-Web 2.0 technologies (as you can see from the timeline I posted on FriendFeed) that are now quite mature.

That being said, the "Standard Set" of modern web tools (Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook) is getting deployed (perhaps somewhat quietly) on Canadian Government websites, the example I have been using is the Prime Minister's Official site, under Family Centre - Social Networks.

Part of what prompts this section of my posting is that there was a recent "Social Media for Government" event in Ottawa (unfortunately rather expensive).  Via the Twitter tag #ali I see that the Canadian Afghanistan mission is also using the social media tools: Flickr, YouTube, Facebook (and RSS feeds)

http://www.afghanistan.gc.ca/canada-afghanistan/multimedia/index.aspx?lang=en

Change Coming to Ottawa - Part 2

In addition to the internal drivers of change, the entire government information environment is changing worldwide.  Whether it's phenomenal reports like the Power of Information Taskforce in the UK, or President Obama releasing principles of openness on WhiteHouse.gov in his Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government

• Government should be transparent
• Government should be participatory
• Government should be collaborative

or declaring in his Memorandum on the Freedom of Information Act that

The presumption of disclosure also means that agencies should take affirmative steps to make information public. They should not wait for specific requests from the public. All agencies should use modern technology to inform citizens about what is known and done by their Government. Disclosure should be timely.

Of course, words alone won't achieve these goals, and people like Don Tapscott have been talking about transparency for years (see e.g. "turn your organization inside-out" and Tapscott keynoting about transparency at SLA 2005).  What is changing is that more people with IT expertise and a passion for engaging the public are gaining prominence.  One great example is Vivek Kundra, who is rumoured (but AFAIK not yet currently announced) to be the Obama administration's choice for Office of Management and Budget administrator for e-government and information technology (an obscure title but one that is as powerful if not more than the government CTO).  Even if Kundra just stays working for the DC city government, he's already done some great things:

47 Applications in 30 Days for $50K

Like many cities, Washington, D.C., collects a vast amount of data and metrics about its people and operations including both realtime (or near realtime) data as well as relatively static information such as neighborhood demographics. Much of that information is now available to the public through more than 200 data feeds accessed through the Office of the Chief Technology Officer's Web site.

Kundra's idea was to use a competition to encourage developers to use those feeds to create applications for the public good.

You can see the competition site at

http://www.appsfordemocracy.org/

I think these kinds of open government initiatives are pathfinders that show us ways in which governments at all levels - federal, provincial, municipal - can open up and engage citizens.

Comments

[Mark Kuznicki]

It's great to see the ChangeCamp meme spreading, thanks to the fine folks attending the ALI summit and, of course, Twitter!

There is now a ChangeCamp Ottawa page on the ChangeCamp.ca wiki. I'm looking forward to seeing how our Ottawa friends take the ball and run with it.