CENTER ON DEMOCRACY, DEVELOPMENT & RULE OF LAW

BEYOND THE BUZZWORD:

ANALYZING THE GOVERNMENT 2.0 MOVEMENT OF TECHNOLOGISTS AROUND GOVERNMENT
DANIEL ONG, HONORS THESIS CANDIDATE ADVISOR: LARRY DIAMOND

Abstract
This paper identifies and analyzes the Government 2.0 movement of technologists around government across multiple countries, seeking to identify their broad concerns and influences. The Government 2.0 movement is a loosely defined collection of disparate initiatives that share the common characteristic of utilizing technology in government, and the application of principles learnt in the technology sphere in the design and functioning of government institutions. Broadly, the Government 2.0 movement can be characterized as six main themes. Opening Data refers to the technical, legal and bureaucratic efforts to open government data to the public and private sector. Government as a Platform refers to the efforts of a growing group of civic hackers and private sector companies that utilize government data and services as a platform to build applications that provide economic or informational value. Data-driven Transparency refers to efforts to open government data and develop applications for the purposes of transparency and accountability. Fostering a Civic Application Ecosystem refers to efforts on the part of government and civil society to cultivate a nascent civic hacker ecosystem, to build technology and applications for civic purposes. Architecting Government for Participation and Collaboration refers to the adoption of mechanisms and structures that enable citizens outside of government to participate and collaborate in the working of the government. We end with a discussion of the group of technologists both in and outside government and their increasing influence, and possible risks in the road ahead.

Contents
ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................................... 2 CONTENTS ............................................................................................................................. 3 1 INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................ 6 THE TECHNOLOGICAL ORIGINS OF GOVERNMENT 2.0 ....................................................................... 8 Web 2.0 and the Read/Write Web ................................................................................................................ 8 Platforms, Data and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)................................................................... 9 The Open Source Movement .......................................................................................................................... 10 Hacker and Startup Culture......................................................................................................................... 10 2 OPENING DATA ............................................................................................................ 12 THE CASE FOR OPEN DATA ....................................................................................................................... 13 OPEN GOVERNMENT LEGISLATION AND DATA WAREHOUSES ........................................................... 14 GOVERNMENT DATA STANDARDS AND TECHNICAL OPENNESS ..................................................... 16 Open, Machine-Readable Standards ............................................................................................................. 17 Bulk Data Access ........................................................................................................................................ 18 Linked Data and Persistent URIs ............................................................................................................... 18 Real-time Data ............................................................................................................................................. 19 Eating your own dog food .......................................................................................................................... 19 Data Liberation ........................................................................................................................................... 19 LEGAL OPENNESS: COST AND LICENSING ........................................................................................... 20 Data Licensing ............................................................................................................................................. 20 Data Cost .................................................................................................................................................... 21 DATA AUTHENTICITY AND VERIFICATION .............................................................................................. 22 SMART DISCLOSURE ..................................................................................................................................... 23 3 GOVERNMENT AS A PLATFORM .............................................................................. 26 UNLOCKING INFORMATIONAL VALUE FROM DATA ............................................................................... 29 UNLOCKING ECONOMIC VALUE FROM DATA ......................................................................................... 33 REPACKAGING GOVERNMENT SERVICES................................................................................................. 35
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DATA-DRIVEN TRANSPARENCY............................................................................... 37 FROM FREEDOM OF INFORMATION TO OPEN DATA ............................................................................. 38 REGULATION BY OPEN DATA .................................................................................................................... 41 FROM DATA TO INFORMATION: APPS FOR ACCOUNTABILITY .............................................................. 43 DATA JOURNALISM ....................................................................................................................................... 47 ISSUES RELATED TO DATA DRIVEN TRANSPARENCY ............................................................................. 49 Perils of raw data: lack of context, interpretation, and verification .................................................................. 49 Difficulties in differentiating data errors from actual corruption ...................................................................... 50 Data-driven Transparency as a De-legitimizing Force.................................................................................... 50 Bureaucratic opposition to Open Data, and the need for political will ............................................................. 52 Privacy vs. Transparency, and data scrubbing ............................................................................................ 53 The danger of falsified data ........................................................................................................................... 54 The absence of a monitorial citizen............................................................................................................. 55

FOSTERING A CIVIC APPLICATION ECOSYSTEM ................................................ 57 APPLICATION CONTESTS ............................................................................................................................. 58 BEYOND APP CONTESTS, TO A CIVIC APPLICATION ECOSYSTEM ........................................................ 60 CIVIC APPLICATIONS, BEYOND GOVERNMENT ....................................................................................... 63

6 ARCHITECTING GOVERNMENT FOR PARTICIPATION AND COLLABORATION ............................................................................................................... 66 THE PUTATIVE FLAWS OF CLOSED BUREAUCRACIES ............................................................................... 67 FACTORS LEADING TO GREATER PARTICIPATION AND COLLABORATION ......................................... 69 Patch Culture, and the participatory architectures of Web 2.0 ........................................................................ 69 The Age of Austerity .................................................................................................................................... 70 The Age of Networks ................................................................................................................................... 71 The Coasian Collapse, and the enabling effects of Technology ......................................................................... 71 The Long Tail of Public Policy ..................................................................................................................... 72 ARCHITECTING FOR PARTICIPATION AND COLLABORATION ............................................................... 73 ADHOCRACIES, AND GOVERNMENT AS AN IMPATIENT CONVENOR ............................................... 75 OPENING UP THE PROCESSES OF GOVERNMENT..................................................................................... 76 CHALLENGES AND CONTESTS .................................................................................................................... 78 CROWDSOURCING IDEAS ............................................................................................................................ 78
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CITIZENS AS SENSORS .................................................................................................................................. 80 CROWDSOURCING PUBLIC COMMENTS..................................................................................................... 81 ISSUES RELATING TO PARTICIPATORY AND COLLABORATIVE GOVERNMENT ................................... 82 Increased risks of manipulation ..................................................................................................................... 82 The increased load on government resources .................................................................................................... 83 7 THE FUTURE OF THE GOVERATI ............................................................................. 84 GOVERNMENT, RUN AS A STARTUP ........................................................................................................... 84 THE RISE OF THE GOVERNMENT CTO/CIO, AND MORAL HAZARDS ................................................. 85 MOVING OUT OF BETA: FISSURES AND DIVISIONS? ................................................................................. 87 THE LIMITS OF ANALOGY: GOVERNMENT != GOOGLE ......................................................................... 88

Introduction
Government-as-a-Platform. We-government. Open Data. Open Government.

Wiki-government. These are but a part of a larger set of terms that a growing group of technologists in government have used to conceptualize and characterize their work. From the savvy use of technology in Barack Obamas presidential campaign in 2008, to the creation of Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and Chief Information Officer (CIO) positions in levels of government ranging from the municipal to the White House, to the rise of the nascent civic hacker movement, the growing number of technologists in and around government have resulted in new innovations and initiatives. The Government 2.0 movement is a loosely defined collection of disparate initiatives that share the common characteristic of utilizing technology in government, but more critically, reflect the application of principles learnt in the technology and internet space in government. As technology publisher Tim OReilly, one of the key figures in the movement writes1,

Much like its predecessor, Web 2.0, Government 2.0 is a chameleon, a white rabbit term, that seems to be used by people to mean whatever they want it to mean. For some, it is the use of social media by government agencies. For others, it is government transparency, especially as aided by government-provided data APIs. Still others think of it as the adoption of cloud computing, wikis, crowdsourcing, mobile applications, mashups, developer contests, or all of the other epiphenomena of Web 2.0 as applied to the job of government.

O'Reilly, Tim. "Government as a Platform." Open Government: [collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice]. By Daniel Lathrop and Laurel Ruma. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2010. 11. Print.

Beyond a mere collection of technology-related initiatives in government, an alternate conception of the movement is in the characterization of the people who compose it. As government consultant David Eaves writes2,

Across North America and around the world, citizens and public servantsinfluenced by social media, Web 2.0, open source software, and other social and technological developmentssee growing pressure on governments to evolve. Seeking to respond to increasing citizen expectations around service delivery and effectiveness, these reformers envision governments that act as a platform: that share information (particularly raw data), are transparent in their operations and decision making, enable and leverage citizen-led projects, are effective conveners, and engage citizens requests, ideas, and feedback more intelligently.

This paper seeks to analyze the work of these technologists in government, enumerating the many initiatives across different countries. It also seeks to demystify that many buzzwords and conceptions that many government innovators have sought to cast their work in (e.g. wiki government, government-as-a-platform) to identify the actual elements of their work, and draw out the overarching thrusts and considerations across the movement. Special attention is also paid to the technological principles and influences that in many cases inspire these initiatives, and how it has influenced the objective, design, and implementation of such initiatives.

Broadly, the Government 2.0 movement can be characterized as six main thrusts. Opening Data (Ch. 2) covers the technical, legal and bureaucratic efforts to open government data to the public and private sector. Government as a Platform (Ch. 3) refers to the efforts of a growing group of civic hackers and private sector companies to build applications that utilize

Eaves, David. "After the Collapse: Open Government and the Future of Civil Service."Open Government: [collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice]. By Daniel Lathrop and Laurel Ruma. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2010. 139. Print.

government data and services to provide economic or informational value. Data-driven Transparency (Ch. 4) refers to efforts to open government data and develop applications for the purposes of transparency and accountability. Fostering a Civic Application Ecosystem (Ch. 5) refers to efforts on the part of government and civil society to cultivate a nascent civic hacker ecosystem, to build technology and applications for civic purposes. Architecting Government for Participation and Collaboration (Ch. 6) refers to the adoption of mechanisms and structures that enable citizens outside of government to participate and collaborate in the working of the government.

The technological origins of Government 2.0

It would be remiss to exclude from the discussion of Government 2.0 the major technological influences and trends that have shaped many of the initiatives in the movement. While it is difficult to capture in its entirety the broad mindsets of technologists and their perspectives, four major technological influences (Web 2.0, Platforms and APIs, Open Source and Hacker/Startup culture) give insight into the perspective that has informed many of the initiatives.

Web 2.0 and the Read/Write Web

Web 2.0 is associated with web applications that facilitate participatory information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web. Rather than being read-only, web applications allow for users to write information as creators of usergenerated content, and allows for users to interact and collaborate with one another in a virtual community. The inherent participatory architecture of Web 2.0 services democratizes the ability for any user to see his or her input in a web application, and participate in an online community, as
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opposed to the passive viewing of content. Web applications, in this sense, work as intelligent brokers that connect users to each other, and create a framework to facilitate contribution, participation, and collaboration on the web. Such architectures have made it possible to use the Internet to harness the collective intelligence of a wide spectrum of users, and allow for them to participate meaningfully in a mediated community3. This plays into other paradigms of Web 2.0, such as user-friendly design that allows users to intuitively and easily understand the participation mechanism and usage patterns of the web application.

Platforms, Data and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)

The technology sector has seen the rise of platforms, a term used to describe technology that allows developers to utilize an exposed Application Programming Interface to develop new products or services, and interface with other web services. Such paradigms have seen the rise of platforms such as Apples IOS and Googles Android platforms, that allow developers to extend the capabilities of smartphones by developing applications that utilize the phones functionality and stored data. On another level, the Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) exposed by Facebook and Twitter has enabled developers to incorporate certain functionalities into web applications, such as Facebooks commenting and authentication system. The growth of such platforms and APIs have led to the increased importance of interoperability (the ability for an application to interface with other services), as well as the importance of cultivating a developer ecosystem, and exposing the right types of functionality and data so they can extend the platforms

O'Reilly, Tim. "What Is Web 2.0 - O'Reilly Media." What Is Web 2.0 - O'Reilly Media. Web. <http://oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html?page=2>.

capability in a meaningful manner4. In certain platforms, they have also meant the access to the underlying data of the platform, such as Wikipedias exposing of an API that allows a developer to access all of Wikipedias data, or Facebooks API allowing an user-authenticated developer to access the users Facebook data.

The Open Source Movement

The Open Source movement is a philosophy (often in the context of software) that gives access to a products design, implementation details, and in the context of software the underlying code itself. This indirectly gives anyone the ability to edit and adapt software, improving it. The exposing of the underlying implementation details and source code also leads to the paradigm that with many eyes [checking the code], all bugs are shallow, as transparency allows for a greater number of people to examine and identify errors in the products design and implementation. The inherent openness is both a tool for error-minimizing, as well as a invitation to participate in the peerproduction of the product. Very often, Open Source software is results in a production model driven by interactive and collaborative communities, with many individuals working together to coproduce software.

Hacker and Startup Culture

The startup and hacker culture of technology start-ups, have also characterized the perspectives that technologists have brought to government. Hacker culture (not to be confused with the other definition of hackers that refer to security exploiters) broadly encompasses the principles of being able to take a product and improving it (a process commonly known as patching), or

O'Reilly, Tim. "What Is Web 2.0 - O'Reilly Media." What Is Web 2.0 - O'Reilly Media. Web.. <http://oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html?page=5>.

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building new products or hacks. Developers might hack together a software application as a hobby, very often for the sake of showing that it can be done, or for a creative purpose5. The selfmobilization and initiative of hacker culture is taken to a greater extent in startup culture, where small companies find and develop products.

The culmination of these technological influences, among many others, has a profound impact on the nature and design of the work of technologists in government, as illustrated in the subsequent chapters.

"Hack Value." Hack Value. Web. 4 Apr. 2012. <http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/H/hack-value.html>.

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Opening Data
Accessing government data has traditionally been a difficult task, for reasons both

technological and institutional. In the era before database technologies enabled data to be stored and transmitted at low cost, government data was to be conceptualized in terms of documents stored in physical facilities. Accessing this data often required some form of request (e.g. a Freedom of Information request) and subsequent navigation of the bureaucracy to retrieve the sought document. In certain cases, government data access comes at a cost, especially so in instances when government data has been contracted out to private concerns to publish or distribute6.

Yet, the advent of technology over the past few decades that allowed for the inexpensive storage, replication and transmission of data has changed several of the parameters that underpinned the old framework of government data access. The ability to replicate and transmit data at an almost insignificant cost has meant that mass databases of raw data, rather than single documents, can now be accessed and transmitted at little cost to both the government and the person accessing information. Moreover, through the internet, data can be transmitted in machinereadable formats that make it easy to access, reuse and redistribute.

Lathrop, Daniel, Laurel Ruma, and Carl Malamud. "By the People." Open Government: [collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice]. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2010. Print.

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The Case for Open Data

Open Data advocates argue that opening public sector information (and in some instances, private sector) data can serve as the raw inputs for greater transparency, and can create economic and informational benefits. Access to machine-readable government data could be used to drive transparency and accountability efforts, increase participation and allow for a greater diversity of analysis, as we explore in (Ch. 4). Moreover, the private sector and civic innovators can create applications that unlock the economic and informational value in government data (Ch. 3). The corollary effect is the creation of a civic application ecosystem that builds on government as a platform (Ch. 5). Fundamentally, the ability to access and reuse government data is crucial; with it, the private sector and public can use it for the purposes of transparency, economic or information value.

Yet the case for Open Data is often not framed in its putative benefits, but rather in the principles that purportedly make it necessary. The Right to Know paradigm ensconced in Freedom of Information and Access to Information legislation is extended to government data; rather than require citizens to go through a lengthy and often complicated procedure to request the release of government documents, Open Data would create a permanent public access strategy7. Open Data would reveal the raw source data that is the foundation for reports and statistics, allowing the public to come up with their own primary analysis, rather than rely on secondary reports and statistics provided by the government. An increasingly popular school of thought is of government data as a public good, where data that is collected on the taxpayers dime should be

Bass, Gary D., and Sean Moulton. "Bringing the Web 2.0 Movement to Government."Open Government: [collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice]. By Daniel Lathrop and Laurel Ruma. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2010. Print.

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subject to a mandated disclosure for the benefit of the public, or a an explanation as to why the information cannot be disclosed8.

Open Government Legislation and Data Warehouses

Open Government legislation often contains the legal underpinnings behind opening government data. The United States Open Government Directive (Dec 8th, 2009) stated that government agencies would take prompt steps to expand access to information by making it available online in open formats, with the presumption [being] in favor of openness, to the extent permitted by law and other restrictions9. New Zealands Declaration of Open and Transparent Government (8th August, 2011) commits the government to actively releasing high value public data10, while Australias declaration of Open Government Declaration committed its government to a culture of engagement, built on better access to and use of government held information, and sustained by the innovative use of technology11. The Open Government Partnership, a multilateral initiative, commits member countries to commit to increasing efforts to systematically collect and publish data on government spending and performance for essential public services and activities and proactively provide high-value information, including raw data,

Gorman, Sean. "Information as a Public Good." GSA Intergovernmental Solutions Newsletter (2009): 9-10. Print. 9 Executive Office of the President. Memorandum on the Open Government Directive.Whitehouse.gov. Web. 27 Apr. 2012. <http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/assets/memoranda_2010/m10-06.pdf>. "Declaration on Open and Transparent Government." Government ICT Directions and Priorities. Web. 04 May 2012. <http://ict.govt.nz/programme/opening-government-data-and-information/declaration-open-and-transparentgovernment>. "Declaration of Open Government." Declaration of Open Government. Web. 12 May 2012. <http://www.finance.gov.au/e-government/strategy-and-governance/gov2/declaration-of-open-government.html>.
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in a timely manner, in formats that the public can easily locate, understand and use, and in formats that facilitate reuse12.

In May 2009, Data.gov was launched in the United States as a data repository to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government13. Its launch, by the efforts of then-CIO Vivek Kundra marked opening up of raw high-value government data in structured, machine-readable formats, an effort helped by the Open Government Directive of Dec 8th that year, which required all federal agencies to release at least three high-value datasets through the repository. Data.gov allowed government data to be downloaded as raw data dumps, as well as accessed through web services14, in the form of RESTful15 and SOAP16APIs that returned data objects upon request, so that application developers could build applications based on queries for up-to-date data. By 2011, Data.gov had grown to hosting more than 400,000 datasets, and had 1.5 million downloads over 12 months from April 2011 to April 2012.

The concept of Data warehouses had also percolated to the state and city levels. As of 2012, more than 31 states have opened data warehouses of their own, with cities such as San

"Open Government Declaration." Open Government Partnership |. Web. 13 Apr. 2012. <http://www.opengovpartnership.org/open-government-declaration>. 13 "Data.gov." Data.gov. Web. 22 Apr. 2012. <http://www.data.gov/>.
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A web service is an application that provides functionality and data to remote applications over the internet.

Representation State Transfer is a software architecture that allows clients to initiate requests to servers, which process these requests and return appropriate responses.
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Simple Object Access Protocol, a XML-based protocol for exchanging messages between web services.

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Francisco17 and New York18 also opening up searchable databases, downloadable datasets and developer-friendly APIs. Similarly, government agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had opened up data warehouses of their own19. Internationally, 19 countries (as of 2012) have also opened Data warehouses, including the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand20, and Kenya21. Technology startups such as Socrata and Infochimps have formed around this ecosystem, providing a service that allows governments to create open data platforms of publicly accessible data, most notably with Data.gov switching over to use Socratas platform22.

Government Data Standards and Technical Openness

In spite of many good intentions, many Open Data efforts were hampered by technological implementations that rendered published government data in formats that were not easy to access. The lack of technical openness results in the inability to use the data the government has supposedly made open. In particular, technical openness increases as data is released in open, machine-readable formats, in bulk, using persistent URIs and standard semantics, as we describe below:

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"San Francisco Data." San Francisco Data. Web. 19 Apr. 2012. <https://data.sfgov.org/>.

"NYC Open Data." NYC Open Data. Web. 04 Apr. 2012. <https://nycopendata.socrata.com/>. "FCC Data." Home. Web. 6 May 2012. <http://www.fcc.gov/data>. 20 "Data.govt.nz." - New Zealand Government Data Online Data.govt.nz. Web. 04 Apr. 2012. <http://www.data.govt.nz/>.
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The Kenyan Open Data Initiative can be accessed at http://opendata.go.ke, and was launched in July 2011.

"Socrata Welcomes the Opportunity to Help Data.gov and Federal Agencies Deliver Universal Data Access." Socrata Welcomes the Opportunity to Help Data.gov and Federal Agencies Deliver Universal Data Access. Web. 17 Mar. 2012. <http://www.socrata.com/newsroom/press-releases/socrata-welcomes-theopportunity-to-help-data-gov-and-federal-agencies-deliver-universal-data-access/>.

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Open, Machine-Readable Standards

Machine-readable formats differ from human-readable formats in that they require data to be understood by computers in native data types. For instance, PDFs (Portable Document Formats) are readable to a human eye; yet to a computer they are no different from an image, as the format prevents computers from easily accessing the text that the document contains, and treats it like an image23. This greatly limits the ability for others to reuse that data. This is also applicable when data is not published in a readily-accessible structured format; for instance, publishing data on a web page rendered in HTML would require the use of screen scraping software to convert to usable form. For example, Josh Tauberers Govtrack.us used screen scraping software to retrieve legislative data of the U.S. Congress, allowing users to track the voting records and attendance of Congress members24.

The move towards providing data in machine-readable standards has also been accompanied by a concurrent effort to set open data standards for government data. The adoption of common data standards (e.g. XML, CSV, RDF25, XBRL) provides structure that allows others to successfully make automated use of data, and prevents the need for developers and data users to have to adapt to custom formats that are often badly documented. Furthermore, the use of common standards allows users to use off-the-shelf software to handle the data, or the development of software based on those standards, rather than have to develop custom software for each different type of data.

In laymans terms, PDFs are similar to digital images of paper reports, and are not easily machine-readable into databases. "GovTrack.us: Tracking the U.S. Congress: Law Tips Archive--Wirtz Labor Library."GovTrack.us: Tracking the U.S. Congress: Law Tips Archive--Wirtz Labor Library. Web. 04 Apr. 2012. <http://www.dol.gov/oasam/library/law/lawtips/govtrack.htm>.
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Resource Description Framework, an XML-based format that facilitates data merging.

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Bulk Data Access

Providing the ability to download data in bulk allows the public to access the complete database. Publishing data through the web or an API may be beneficial, but do not produce the same type of transformative value as providing the underlying data, and constrain the range of outcomes that can be asked about the data26. While APIs are useful for the purpose of efficient data delivery to other web services, bulk data still offers the most flexibility and completeness of data delivery formats, and should be the primary form of data release.

Linked Data and Persistent URIs

Significant discussion has also centered on the creation of unique identifiers for entities such as schools, companies and government agencies, so as to create linked data that connects related identifiers across datasets. These data standards and identifiers increase the interoperability of government datasets and documents, and enable the ability to combine datasets and enhance analysis27. Moreover, the persistent nature of government entities and data objects, especially in the field of legislation has led to initiatives such as Rick Jeliffes PRESTO system of creating persistent and permanent Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs), that identifies every document, view and metadata in the United Kingdoms legislative database. This enables a common shared system of language to refer to a particular version of a document, and access it through its URI28.

Robinson, David G., Harlan Yu, and Edward Felten. "Enabling Innovation for Civic Engagement." Open Government: [collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice]. By Daniel Lathrop and Laurel Ruma. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2010. 83-87. Print. "Legislation.gov.uk." VoxPopuli. Web. 02 May 2012. <http://blog.law.cornell.edu/voxpop/2010/08/15/legislationgovuk/>. Jelliffe, Rick. "PRESTO - A WWW Information Architecture for Legislation and Public Information Systems O'Reilly XML Blog." PRESTO - A WWW Information Architecture for Legislation and Public Information Systems - O'Reilly XML Blog. O'Reilly Media. Web. 01 Apr. 2012. <http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2008/02/presto_a_www_information_archi.html>.
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Real-time Data
Increasingly, public data is not only in the form of bulk data, but also in the form of data feeds that are updated in real time. This may be in the instance where data changes based on time (e.g. this weeks weather data), or when revisions or new updates may be added to existing data (e.g. legislative data). Governments may make data feeds available through services such as Really Simple Syndication (RSS), or APIs that notify the public whenever changes are made to data29.

Eating your own dog food

Perhaps the most effective way to ensure the technical usability of government data is for the government itself to use its own publicly available data for its own operations. It immediately highlights the technical shortcomings of the data feed within government, and results in a faster and more effective improvement cycle. For example, Legislation.gov.uk is built on top of the UKs public API for legislative data; developers were able to improve the APIs usability as they encountered difficulties using their own product while building the site.

Data Liberation
Even with the progress of government provision of machine-readable data, a significant amount of government data still remains unusable in its released form. An ecosystem of tools and community has continued to form around cleaning up government data into usable machine-readable formats. Initiatives like LinkedGov.org focuses on structuring and cleaning data from the U.K. government. Applications like ScraperWiki, a project developed in Portland and funded by the Knight Foundation, allows ordinary non-technical users to scrape data from websites or obscure data

Robinson, David G., Harlan Yu, and Edward Felten. "Enabling Innovation for Civic Engagement." Open Government: [collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice] . By Daniel Lathrop and Laurel Ruma. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2010. 84. Print.

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form, and output it in machine-readable formats that can be used for analysis or application building.

Legal Openness: Cost and Licensing

Open Data, even if technically open, is unable to be used by other parties if it is also not legally open. The ability to access, reuse and redistribute government data through applications or reports is crucial for the private sector and civic innovators to be able to use the data, and recent developments in data licensing and data cost have enabled them to increasingly do so.

Data Licensing
Many existing government data licenses often have strict limitations on the re-use of data, preventing the private sector and civic innovators from using that data to build applications. Even in many open data contexts, only access to public sector information is guaranteed, and copying, re-use and re-distribution prohibited or limited to commercial partners. The response to this has been the increasing numbers of governments creating licenses that foster an environment that allows for commercial and nonprofit reuse. In the U.K, the development of the Open Government License allows for public bodies to publish public sector information under a license that allows for the copying, publishing, adapting and commercial use of data. Governments in Australia, Austria, New Zealand, Italy and Basque (Spain) have made their data available under the Creative Commons license30,

Creative Commons licenses allow for the distribution of copyrighted work, and allow for variability in the conditions of the terms of distribution, attribution, and non-commercial utilization.

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Data Cost
In some cases governments license out data to private or non-profit concerns who charge fees for access to data, most notably in the example when San Franciscos transport data was found to be licensed out to a private company who insisted on charging for access31. In others, government institutions such as the US General Printing Office sell published databases, or in the case of the federal judiciary, charges for access to the PACER database of legal documents (in some cases, charging eight cents per page accessed). These costs are perhaps reflective of a past era when data collection and publishing was an endeavor that used considerable time and effort. In the United Kingdom (and many Commonwealth countries), the Crown Copyright defines that most government data belongs to the government, and information such as postcodes and Ordnance survey map data cannot be used freely for commercial purposes32. Even though the advent of modern data systems and technologies has reduced these costs significantly, there has been an understandable opposition from the data licensees and same portions of government, as open data would significantly affect that business model.

Yet, technology has provided means and ways for civic hackers to find ways around payment barriers, that either intelligently access or distribute the costs of accessing government data. The cost-based PACER legal documents database has been put under tremendous pressure to lower its 8-cents-a-page cost, after Harlan Yus RECAP program (a clever pun in itself) distributed the costs of accessing legal data among a larger crowd through a Firefox web browser plugin that

"Does A Private Company Own Your Muni Arrival Times?" : News: SFAppeal. Web. 10 May 2012. <http://sfappeal.com/news/2009/06/who-owns-sfmta-arrival-data.php>. "The Open Society." The Economist. The Economist Newspaper, 25 Feb. 2010. Web. 03 Apr. 2012. <http://www.economist.com/node/15557477>.
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contributes documents that the RECAP community has purchased from PACER into a public repository33. Carl Malamuds purchasing of the entire U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission database and distributing it online for free put pressure on the SEC to make that data available, something it did shortly after34. This pressure, along with the push for Open Data has already seen a trend of falling government data prices. A study by the European Commission for Information and Society found that 16 out of 21 datasets showed a clear trend towards lowering charges and facilitating reuse, with 9 providing their datasets for free for non-commercial reuse (the remaining 7 charged a reduced fee for non-commercial reuse)35.

Data Authenticity and Verification

One of the nascent issues that has pertained to government open data has been data authenticity and verification, especially important when data is used for the purposes of transparency and regulation. In those circumstances, the possible implications of analysis based on government data that has been altered by a third party may be significant. Recent proposals for a mechanism that allows governments to digitally authenticate datasets with a digital signature, and that allow users to checked that the signed data sets was not altered have been gaining traction.

Robinson, David G., Harlan Yu, and Edward Felten. "Enabling Innovation for Civic Engagement." Open Government: [collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice] . By Daniel Lathrop and Laurel Ruma. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2010. 84. Print. Malamud, Carl. "By the People." Open Government: [collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice] . By Daniel Lathrop and Laurel Ruma. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2010. 41-43. Print. De Vries, Marc, and Lionel Kapff et al. Pricing Of Public Sector Information Study. European Commission Information Society and Media Directorate-General. Web. 16 Mar. 2012. <http://epsiplatform.eu/sites/default/files/summary.pdf>.
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Such a mechanism would allow users to also check, up to a reasonable granularity, the authenticity of individual elements that were picked out from the data set36.

Smart Disclosure
Opening data has begun to move beyond government data, to citizens personal data as well as data about products and services held by governments and private companies. Smart disclosure refers to an increasing emphasis on the opening of high value data, distinct from traditional transparency and accountability data, for purposes other than decreasing corruption in government. This manifests in the ability of a private citizen to access his or her private data held by government and private companies, or access information held by such institutions about products and services37.

The first main category of Smart disclosure is when a government or private sector companies release data about products or services. For instances, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services release of hospital quality ratings through a web application has enabled consumers to make informed choices about hospitals38, while the U.S. Department of Education has released college data (e.g. graduation rates, student expenses) through their College Navigator web application and enabled prospective students to make informed choices about their college

Robinson, David G., Harlan Yu, and Edward Felten. "Enabling Innovation for Civic Engagement." Open Government: [collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice] . By Daniel Lathrop and Laurel Ruma. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2010. 84. Print Howard, Alex. "What Is Smart Disclosure? - O'Reilly Radar." O'Reilly Radar. 1 Apr. 2012. Web. 17 Apr. 2012. <http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/04/what-is-smart-disclosure.html>. "Hospital Compare." Medicare Quality of Care. Web. 15 May 2012. <http://www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov/hospital-search.aspx?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1>.
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decisions39. A start up called BrightScope makes available financial advisor data from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Financial Industry Regulatory Authority to enable consumers to make better decisions regarding financial advisors and 401(k) plans. Such releases of information of high value data can still be seen through the lens of traditional transparency and corruption detection; yet the prime imperative has been in its economic argument in enabling consumers and private companies make better-informed decisions about products and services in the market.

The second category of Smart disclosure is when governments or private sector companies release a private citizens personal data to the citizen. In the U.S. the Department of Veteran Affairs enables veterans to download their military health records through a Blue Button initiative, allowing them to share it with their doctors or families40. The Green button initiative in the U.S. sees utilities companies enabling households to securely access their energy usage data with a click of a button, empowering them to make better energy consumption decisions as well as enabling innovation around that data source. The ability for consumers to access their private data is made easier if privacy law legislation gives citizens the right to access their personal data, for instance in the United Kingdom where the midata initiative (launched in 2011) sees the government and 26 partner organizations commit to give consumers increasing access to their personal data in a portable, electronic format. Even in the absence of legislation, the growing trend for private companies (particular data-rich technology companies) to adopt data liberation policies that allow consumers to access their data has seen the launch of products such as Googles

"College Navigator - National Center for Education Statistics." College Navigator - National Center for Education Statistics. Web. 01 May 2012. <http://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/>.
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"What Is the Blue Button Initiative?" Blue Button Home. Web. 02 Apr. 2012. <http://www.va.gov/bluebutton/>.

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Takeout that allows their users to download all their data across Google products41, as well as Facebooks feature that allows users to download all their social network data42.

One of the more powerful versions envisioned by proponents of Smart Disclosure is when the two categories of Smart Disclosure are used in tandem. Data on products and services is combined with personal data to produce choice engines that use algorithms to recommend consumers to make better decisions based on their personal context, particularly in the making of important decisions (e.g. the purchase of insurance, financial or healthcare products). For example, Billshrink, a startup combines different types of data (including government) relating to cell phone plans with a consumers personal calling history to recommend the optimal cell phone plan43. Hello Wallets ability to recommend better financial decisions in choosing saving and investment plans is based on smart disclosure data from governments and banks44. While these initiatives are still in their infancy, the nascent growth of Smart Disclosure based choice engines has generated a fair amount of interest as increasing amounts of high value data, particularly in the financial and energy sector are made available.

"The Data Liberation Front." The Data Liberation Front. Google.com. Web. 04 June 2012. <http://www.dataliberation.org/>. "Download Your Information - Facebook Help Center." Download Your Information - Facebook Help Center | Facebook. Facebook, Inc. Web. 04 June 2012. <https://www.facebook.com/help/?page=116481065103985>. "About Billshrink." Cell Phone Plans, Credit Cards & CD Rates, Compare & Save Money on BillShrink. Billshrink, Inc. Web. 25 May 2012. <https://www.billshrink.com/>. "Hellowallet." HelloWallet. Hellowallet, Inc. Web. 01 Apr. 2012. <https://www.hellowallet.com/blog/ourpresentation-at-the-financial-literacy-and-education-commission/>.
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Government as a Platform
In recent years, the technology sector has seen the rise of platforms such as Apples

Application Store and Facebooks Apps program, that create frameworks that allow for the participation of an ecosystem of developers. These developers build applications based on the platform, providing functionality and services that incorporate and extend those offered by the platform, and allow the platform to be used in new and innovative ways. Apples, in particular, provides a Software Development Kit (SDK) that allows developers to create applications that take advantage of the functionality provided in their devices, and finished applications can be made available to the users via an App Store. Almost 500,000 applications have been developed for Apples iPhone and iPod devices, allowing an iPhone to be used in many different ways, ranging from a voice recorder to a music instrument. The paradigm of a platform with its accompanying developer ecosystem has taken hold in the technology sector, with Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Evernote (among many) developing their products as platforms for developers to build upon.

This has led a number of technologists to explore the idea of Government as a Platform or we-government45. Technologists such as Tim OReilly (the founder of OReilly media, one of the worlds largest publishers of technical books) outline a vision of how governments, like operating systems, provide a platform of re-usable open data and services, that opens up the opportunity for private citizens and innovative private companies to build new, unexpected

"Making Sense of Gov 2.0, Open Government and We Government at Ogilvy." Gov 2.0: The Power of Platforms. Web. 28 Apr. 2012. <http://gov20.govfresh.com/making-sense-of-gov-2-0-open-government-and-wegovernment-at-ogilvy/>.

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applications- a manifestation of what Law Professor Jonathan Zittrain refers to as generativity, the ability of open-ended platforms to create new possibilities not envisioned by their [original] creators46. Such a system, ostensibly, would allow self-mobilizing citizens to collaboratively create solutions, and co-produce government services and products47, moving away from a vendingmachine government48 to one that takes advantage of a civic surplus of citizens passion, expertise and patriotism [to] fix their own communities49. In certain circumstances, such efforts would culminate in a certain form of Schumpeterian creative destruction, where products created by citizens or the private sector may fulfill certain citizen needs better than government programs50. Governments, in this sense, are enablers that create the platform for citizens to participate in, by providing the raw inputs (be it in data or services) to allow them to create services and products that are ostensibly more user-centric, and may have not been otherwise envisioned by the platform creators themselves.

Yet implicit in the government-as-a-platform vision is a putative need on the part of governments to cede absolute control, and allowing for a certain amount of uncertainty to be left to the generativity of the developer ecosystem. Jonathan Zittrain refers to the delicate balance

O'Reilly, Tim. "Gov 2.0: The Promise Of Innovation." Forbes. Forbes Magazine. Web. 10 Apr. 2012. <http://www.forbes.com/2009/08/10/government-internet-software-technology-breakthroughs-oreilly.html>. "Strata New York 2011: Rachel Sterne, "How Open Government Is Transforming New York City"" YouTube. YouTube, 23 Sept. 2011. Web. 23 Mar. 2012. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGyCLMwIld0>. Kettl, Donald F. The next Government of the United States: Why Our Institutions Fail Us and How to Fix Them. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2009. Print. Howard, Alex. "Citizensourcing Smarter Government in New York City - O'Reilly Radar." Citizensourcing Smarter Government in New York City - O'Reilly Radar. Web. 04 June 2012. <http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/03/nyc-smart-government.html>. O'Reilly, Tim. "Government as a Platform." Open Government: [collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice] . By Daniel Lathrop and Laurel Ruma. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2010. 11-24. Print.
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between the innovation and generativity of the developer system, and the need for platform creators to enforce some set of rules that control the kind of products or services that run on the platform, while at the same time ensuring that these rules do not stifle the developer ecosystem. Tim OReilly goes one step further, alluding to the oft-observed pattern where platform creators begin to compete with their developer ecosystems, often crowding out the platform and leaving less space for the developer ecosystem to create products and services. In his view, governments should act like a platform provider rather than a complete solution provider, and should provide the core functionality that others can build on, and then let the private sector compete to flesh out the offerings51. Several technologists and academics have even gone to the extent of recommending that government bodies focus on providing reusable data rather than creating websites, as private actors are better suited to deliver government information to citizens and can constantly create and reshape tools52. Critical to the success of government-as-a-platform, evidently, was the willingness of the government to not control nor compete with its developer ecosystem.

Another critical factor that government-as-a-platform advocates allude to is the need for open standards and open data as important ingredients for encouraging innovation and growth. Open standards refer the public availability of technical standards- examples in the context of government-as-a-platform include functional calls and specifications for data access to government databases, as well as good documentation that allow developers to understand the functionalities

O'Reilly, Tim. "NHIN Direct: Open Healthcare Records and Government as a Platform - O'Reilly Radar." NHIN Direct: Open Healthcare Records and Government as a Platform - O'Reilly Radar. Web. 04 Apr. 2012. <http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/03/nhin-direct-open-healthcare-an.html>. Robinson, David, and Harlan Yu et al. "Government Data and the Invisible Hand." Yale Journal for Law & Technology 11 (2009): 160. Print.
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and methods of usage. Open data refers to data that is released with clear re-use rules, and clear licensing rules. The overall effect is to create low barriers for developers to innovate based on government data and functionalities, and a stable environment to build products and services upon. The overall validity of these views were strengthened by the findings of a study done by the European Commission of Information Society and Media that found that a key barrier to the development of civic applications by developers was when there were complicated pricing structures, and unexpected changes in re-use conditions53.

Government-as-a-platform is a relatively nascent movement, and the debate over the validity of its vision (and its possible implications), as well as the specifics of how it should be designed is still in its relative infancy. Yet there has been incredible traction growing around the vision of civic innovators and innovative private companies building upon government data and services to build products that cater to citizen needs. The resultant products, applications and in certain instances companies have served to illustrate the possible value of this vision, and the next few sections identify the broad categories in which such applications and products have contributed value.

Unlocking Informational Value from data

The opening of government data has allowed for developers to create applications that unlock the informational value of the data. These applications span a range of different objectives,

"Measuring the Re-use of Public Sector Information Report." Public Sector Information. Web. 18 May 2012. <http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/policy/psi/actions_eu/policy_actions/mepsir/index_en.htm>.

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from finding out more about neighborhoods, to optimizing business decisions. In particular, using government data for the informational purposes of transparency and civil society is an objective that is critical and complex enough to require treatment in a chapter of its own (Chapter 4: Data Driven Transparency). Yet it would be remiss to assume that government datas usefulness is limited solely to transparency, as the recent rise of many government data driven applications have illustrated its inherent informational value, especially in the case of mashups- applications that use and combine data from two or more sources to create new services and products.

A particularly strong example of this trend has been the creation of applications that sieve through government data to retrieve information that is useful to the user in a particular context. For example, the opening up of New York Citys public restaurant inspection dataset enabled Max Stoller, a student at New York University to build Dont Eat At (www.donteat.at), which combines Foursquares location check-in54 functionality with the citys hygiene data55. Users who check in at a restaurant that is at risk of being closed for health code violations automatically receive a text message warning them, and enables users to access the informational value that would otherwise be stored in an inaccessible government database. In the UK, the Lincoln Social Computing Research Centre created a service called FearSquare, that combines Foursquares check-in functionality with street-level crime data from the UK police, to alert users to crimes in the areas

Foursquares mobile application utilizes Global Positioning System (GPS) data from users mobile phones to allow users to indicate that they are in a particular location by checking-in at a location "App Tells You What Restaurants NOT to Eat at." The Next Web. Web. 11 May 2012. <http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/01/27/app-tells-you-where-not-to-eat/>.
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that they frequent56. UHpartments, a mobile application, combines caller complaints regarding vermin, leaks and heating problems from the Department of Housing Preservation and Development in New York City, along with the users location to give relevant information while house hunting57. Three aspiring entrepreneurs created MyCityWay, an application that cleans up and bundles data feeds for more than 30 US cities, including restaurant reports, train schedules, swimming pool hours and traffic information, to provide users with an data augmented understanding of their cities. These applications bring relevant data to the users hands, and combines them with other data or technology to help users make better decisions.

Another genre of application has sought to augment citizens and groups understanding of their immediate surroundings and communities, through government data. Stamen Design, a design and technology studio in San Francisco, created an interactive map that layered historical crime figures on top of map data, allowing users to visualize crime data, spot trends, and identify areas that required more police presence. Neighborhood Knowledge LA, a collaboration between UCLA and neighborhood groups, aggregated seven indicators of neighborhood decline (including code violations and tax arrears) and plotted these on maps to identify through visualizations high risk areas in which neighborhood groups then focused efforts on. Similarly, bicycle accident data in the UK was visualized on a map to identify dangerous intersections and bicycle-unfriendly

"FearSquare Alerts UK Foursquare Users to Crime near the Venues That They Visit Often." The Next Web. Web. 27 Apr. 2012. <http://thenextweb.com/uk/2012/05/06/fearsquare-alerts-uk-foursquare-users-to-crime-nearthe-venues-that-they-visit-often/>.
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"Uhpartments." Uhpartments. Web. 04 June 2012. <http://www.uhpartments.com/>.

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streets, allowing bikers to plan safer routes58. In New Zealand, an application called Firemash was developed as a real time service that analyzed notices and historical data from the Rural Fire Service to determine a users danger in event of a fire, and send a tweet or text message that would give the user the crucial early warning needed to stay safe59. The open source application OpenBlock aggregates local civic data (e.g. crime reports, 311 service requests, building permits) onto local maps so that neighborhoods understand their local communities better60. Whether for the purposes of policy analysis or safety, open government data allowed for the development of applications that unlocked informational value from otherwise inaccessible government data.

The provision of government data has allowed for the development of applications that unlock its informational value, at essentially zero cost. Many applications are developed by civil society, hobbyists, or during application contests- applications that otherwise would have required a budget from the government to develop. The generativity of civic innovators and private citizens made possible by government data release enables the development of informational applications that governments would otherwise neither have the resources nor political will to bring to reality.

Moore, Matthew. "Sir Tim Berners-Lee Demands More 'raw Data' from Government." The Telegraph, 15 Sept. 2009. Web. <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/6191392/Sir-Tim-Berners-Lee-demands-more-rawdata-from-Government.html>.
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"Mashupaustralia.org." Firemash. Web. 04 June 2012. <http://mashupaustralia.org/mashups/firemash/>. "OpenBlock." OpenBlock. Web. 24 May 2012. <http://openblockproject.org/>.

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Unlocking Economic Value from data

Access to public data being a driver for the creation of economic value is not entirely new. Access to government-held weather data in the U.S., for instances, had its roots in the time just after the American Civil War. A small group of professors and an Army signals officer lobbied congress to allow others to access data collected by the Armys weather observation unit, in the interest of creating an early warning system for storms. The subsequent demand from railroad, transportation and shipping operators led to the creation of the National Weather Service, and the eventual creation of a multi-billion dollar industry (the Weather Channel, most notably, was recently sold to an NBC-led consortium for $3.5bn)61. Similarly, Reagans 1983 directive guaranteeing the Global Positioning System (GPS) signals would be available at no charge to the world62 has seen the steady growth of the commercial ecosystem around GPS, and the creation of an estimated US$28.9bn industry63.

Similarly, the opening of government data has seen the nascent growth of government-data driven applications whose informational value has been able to be commercialized. This has perhaps been easiest seen in the opening of transit data, beginning with the development of the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) as a collaboration between Google and the city of

Johnson, Clay. "The Information Diet." The Information Diet. Web. 22 Apr. 2012. <http://www.informationdiet.com/blog/read/how-did-weather-data-get-opened>. "United States Updates Global Positioning System Technology." United States Updates Global Positioning System Technology. 03 Feb. 2006. Web. 04 Apr. 2012. <http://www.america.gov/st/washfileenglish/2006/February/20060203125928lcnirellep0.5061609.html>. "Global Positioning Systems (GPS) Market Worldwide Is Projected to Reach US$28.9 Billion by 2015, According to New Report by Global Industry Analysts, Inc."Global Positioning Systems (GPS) Market Worldwide Is Projected to Reach US$28.9 Billion by 2015, According to New Report by Global Industry Analysts, Inc. Web. 04 Apr. 2012. <http://www.prweb.com/releases/global_positioning_system/GPS/prweb4670914.htm>.
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Portland. The provision of data in a specified standard, as well as the efforts of other cities to open their data have seen new innovation in the city transit sector. Bostons MBTA transit system opened up transit data, which resulted in the development of 48 different consumer-facing applications by private developers and civic innovators. Technology startups such as Railbandit64, Roadify65 and Embark66 have built business models around packaging open transit data in userfriendly applications.

Yet transit data represents only a single type of government data. Recent focus has highlighted the power of Smart Disclosure initiatives- where the government and private sector companies release high value data about products and services, as well as a citizens personal data in the system- to be a key ingredient in the creation of choice engines that enable consumers to make better decisions67. For example, the U.S. Labor Departments opening up of data pertaining to the government-mandated reporting of 401(k) plan performance has enabled startups such as Brightscope to develop an analytic engine that drives better decision making in finding a financial advisor or retirement plan (Brightscope earned more than $2mn of revenue in 2010, 2 years after its founding)68. The Health Data Initiative encourages innovators to build on

Railbandit is a mobile application for train, light rail and subway in the United States and Canada that enables users to plan commutes and trips. Roadify was the winner of the NYC BigApps contest, and is a growing startup of 6 people. It intends to expand its service beyond New York City to 7 cities by the end of 2012. "YC-Funded Embark Is Now Plotting Two Million Transit Trips A Month."TechCrunch. Web. 04 Apr. 2012. <http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/25/yc-funded-embark-is-now-plotting-two-million-transit-trips-a-month/>. Howard, Alex. "What Is Smart Disclosure? - O'Reilly Radar." What Is Smart Disclosure? - O'Reilly Radar. Web. 04 Mar. 2012. <http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/04/what-is-smart-disclosure.html>. Howard, Alex. "The Story of BrightScope: Data Drives the Innovation Economy - O'Reilly Radar." The Story of BrightScope: Data Drives the Innovation Economy - O'Reilly Radar. Web. 04 Mar. 2012. <http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/11/the-story-of-brightscope-data.html>.
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government (and in some cases, private sector) data to develop health-related applications, and showcases applications that fall in that category. Notably, Bing (Microsofts search engine) added patient ratings below search results for hospitals69, and applications such as iTriage empower consumers to make better healthcare decisions (iTriage was acquired by insurance giant Aetna in 2011).

Repackaging Government Services

Beyond opening government data, governments can also open certain government functionalities and interfaces through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) or more comprehensive Software Development Kits (SDKs) that allow for the development of applications that repackage government functions, and create new and possibly more user-friendly interfaces to government. For example, beginning in 2003 the Free File service offered through the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS) allows a consortium of private tax-preparation companies to build applications that help people prepare and e-file their taxes70. Open311 is an effort to create a standard interface for cities to allow users to send in 311 reports (non-emergency governmental service requests, such as taxi complaints, street condition reports and the like). Several cities, including Boston, New York City and Vancouver, have adopted Open311 standards that expose an interface that allows applications to integrate into their existing work order systems. Traditionally, the way to file a 311 service request has been to dial 3-1-1 (thus the name) and

Howard, Alex. "Making Community Health Information as Useful as Weather Data - O'Reilly Radar." Making Community Health Information as Useful as Weather Data - O'Reilly Radar. Web. 04 Mar. 2012. <http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/06/unlocking-innovation-through-d.html>. "Everyone Can Use Free File." 2011 FreeFile. Internal Revenue Service. Web. 04 Apr. 2012. <http://www.freefile.irs.gov/>.
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speak to the operator; the creation of the Open311 standard has allowed for the building of applications such as SeeClickFix, a user-friendly web-based and mobile application that enables citizens to submit 311 service requests through mobile phones and computers. Many other applications have been developed around this standard to create user-friendly interfaces for citizens to submit reports to governments, and other popular applications such as Ushahidi adapted to integrate into Open311 systems71.

The opening of interfaces to government functionality is a nascent one, as security and service delivery concerns have often posed a risk high enough to prevent such initiatives from becoming reality. Yet the examples of the IRS Free File system and Open311 have demonstrated the ability for developers to create applications that repackage government functions in a manner that enhances civic value, and may be precursors to future opening of useful government functions that application developers can take advantage of to create civic value.

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Data-driven Transparency
Transparency, the notion that citizens have the right to access the documents and

proceedings of government for the purposes of public oversight, is the genesis of the open data movement and its related growth. Traditionally, governments have some form of Access to Information (ATI) or Freedom of Information (FOI) legislation that guarantees access to data held by the state. Yet the advent of technology and the rise of the open data movement has enabled the publishing and transmission of larger amounts of data at minimal or no cost, where in the past data transmission was limited by the physical limitations of print on paper. This has enabled the release of greater amounts of government data at more regular intervals- and in some instances, real time data. Moreover, the opening of data access through data warehouses under licenses that allow for re-use, and in machine-readable formats that allow for use and analysis with the help of technology have significantly lowered the barriers to using data for the purposes of accountability and government oversight.

These factors have led some to attest to a paradigm shift from transparency built around requests for documents, to one built around an open-by-default model that gives access to the underlying data used by government processes. Some have welcomed this notion, but others have pointed to the possible corollary de-legitimization and privacy issues that may accompany the opening of data. Regardless, the early returns for the opening of data has given led to the creation of many applications and projects that use analyze, visualize or parse data for the purposes of transparency, as well as the nascent growth of data journalism.

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From Freedom of Information to Open Data

Modern Freedom of Information and Access to Information legislations require governments to react to information requests and provide requested documents, and through this process guarantee access to information held by the state for purposes of public oversight. Such legislation is critical to transparency policy in government, and over 90 countries have some form of Access to Information or Freedom of Information legislation to varying extents72. This paradigm of transparency is underpinned by a legislative framework, and has been argued to be a form of reactive transparency73, and associated with a request process that is may often be tedious and inconvenient. Some have argued that this paradigm is an artifact from earlier eras, where Freedom of Information legislation was based on the desire of citizens and civil society to gain access to printed government documents that needed to be either retrieved or produced by the bureaucracy74. Transparency, in this context, is built on the basis of requests, and underpinned by legislative or good-practice imperatives; it adopts an underlying assumption of inequality, and a mindset of opposing interests that requires a watchdog75.

The push for increased government transparency has been aided in recent years by the spread of the ideas of the Open Source movement, particularly among technologists76. The Open

"Access to Information Laws: Overview and Statutory Goals." Right2Info.org. Open Society Justice Initiative. Web. 17 Apr. 2012. <http://right2info.org/access-to-information-laws>. Millar, Laurence. "Information as a Public Good." GSA Intergovernmental Solutions Newsletter (2009): 16-17. Print.
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Heusser, Filipe. "From Freedom of Information to Open Data." Berkman Center, Boston. 12 Feb. 2012. Lecture.

Millar, Laurence. "Information as a Public Good." GSA Intergovernmental Solutions Newsletter (2009): 16-17. Print. Tapscott, Don. "Foreword." Open Government: [collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice] . By Daniel Lathrop and Laurel Ruma. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2010. Print.
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Source philosophy advocates the free access and redistribution of an end products design, code and implementation details, and in the context of software refers to the ability for others to access the underlying source code of a program. This enables a greater number of people to participate in the production, improvement and co-creation of products, and have allowed for the tremendous growth of software products like the Android and Ubuntu operating systems, as well as nonsoftware products like Wikipedia77. More importantly, the attraction of the Open Source philosophy is that with the underlying code of a product being open for anyone to access, possible bugs or mistakes would be quickly detected and fixed. Eric Raymond, a software engineer, summarized this idea in what he termed Linus Law, stating that with many eyes, all bugs are shallow- an idea not entirely different from Justice Louis Brandeis words, in the context of transparency and democracy, that sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants78. The ideas of open source have been easily translated to transparency initiatives: just as Open Source software allows users to identify bugs and patch software to create better products when given access to the underlying code, access to government data and public sector information allows citizens and civil society to identify bugs, and keep governments accountable.

The influence of the Open Source movement, along with the cognizance of the enabling effect of technology has prompted transparency advocates to revisit many of the principles embodied in Freedom of Information legislation in a manner with a decidedly technological slant.

Android and MongoDB are commercial open source, while Ubuntu is theoretically part of the Free Software Movement Raymond, Eric S. The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary. Beijing: O'Reilly, 2001. Print.
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In the US, Obamas Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government, issued on the first day of his term as President, stated executive departments and agencies should harness new technologies to put information about their operations and decisions online, and readily available to the public79. This was closely followed by the issuing of the Memorandum on the Freedom of Information Act, that stated that [the Act] should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails, and that all agencies should adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure 80. The establishment of an open by default principle for government data was not limited to the United States, as similar approaches to government data have been adopted in several other countries ranging from the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada, to Kenya81.

Open by default paradigms for the release of public sector information are partnered with the enabling effects of technology to lower barriers to accessing government data. For data or information that is already publicly available, the always-on nature of technology also enables information access with fewer gatekeepers and tedious formalities: a single API request82 within a well-designed system or a bulk data download can do what previously required the filing of requests and the navigation of a large bureaucracy. The paradigm shift of a government proactively and systematically initiating disclosure of data through an always-on system, rather than reactively

Obama, Barack. "Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government." The White House. Web. 17 April 2012. <http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/TransparencyandOpenGovernment>. Obama, Barack. "Memorandum on the Freedom of Information Act." The White House, 19 Mar. 2009. Web. 17 Apr. 2012.
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Most notably, Australia, Kenya, UK, Canada, have adopted open by default data laws.

Application Programming Interface (API), a specification intended to be used as an interface by software components to communicate with each other (Wikipedia).

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responding to requests for information, allows for a permanent public access strategy83. The appeal of open data is that it lowers the barriers to accessing that information, and makes it easier for civil society, application builders and citizens to access that data for the purposes of transparency, business or curiosity. It also makes neutral primary datasets the object of access as compared to documents of synthesized data, that ostensibly allow for a greater diversity of analyses. The machine-readable nature of open data allows for developers and programmers to build customized applications that reveal meaning from data, allowing it to be analyzed for transparency purposes.

Regulation by Open Data

In 2009, the Obama administration launched Recovery.gov to track spending and federal procurement that was part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The Act required the creation of a website to foster greater accountability and transparency in the use of funds made available in this Act, and went live on February 17th 200984. The site provided users the ability to track how recovery funds were spent, and provided the ability to track and visualize money disbursements. In particular, the site allowed users a map view to geographically visualize recipients of federal funds in ones neighborhood, as well as the amount received. The site also provided a developer center that exposed an API that allowed developers to request recovery data through REST API calls, and also allowed for users to download data in bulk.

Bass, Gary D., and Sean Moulton. "Bringing the Web 2.0 Movement to Government."Open Government: [collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice]. By Daniel Lathrop and Laurel Ruma. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2010. Print. "Recovery.gov - Track the Money." About. Web. 04 Apr. 2012. <http://www.recovery.gov/About/Pages/About.aspx>.
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The culmination of these features was the infrastructure that allowed for what Obama termed as the enlisting of many eyes for regulation, as users and interested citizens would be able to see where money was going to in their own communities, and report irregularities. Earl Devaney, the chairman of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board attested that the transparency inherent in the program through Recovery.gov acted as a deterrent to scam artists, and kept fraud levels significant below expected levels85. Even though the site was plagued with early issues regarding data accuracy and lack of clarity in project descriptions86, it represented a step forward in establishing a system for government transparency through open data. Accounting and reporting mistakes (such as when a supposed 440 congressional districts that did not exist were given $6.4bn in funds) revealed flaws within the reporting system that led to changes for recipient reporting systems. It also revealed that the administrations calculation for number of jobs created was very inaccurate, and a significant exaggeration of the number of jobs saved or created.

Recovery.gov is just one of the examples of governments using sites and open data to further transparency and encourage regulation by information release. Other examples from the United States include USASpending.gov87, a searchable website containing information about each and every Federal spending award, and various state spending websites like Texas Where the Money Goes88. This has percolated to local governments, with examples such as Cook County in

Howard, Alex. "Tracking the Tech That Will Make Government Better - O'Reilly Radar." Tracking the Tech That Will Make Government Better - O'Reilly Radar. Web. 04 Apr. 2012. <http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/08/exploring-technological-innova.html>. "Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group." Project Updates on Recovery.gov Lack Clarity. Web. 04 Apr. 2012. <http://reporting.sunlightfoundation.com/2010/project-updates-recoverygov-lack-clarity/>.
87 88 86

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"USASpending.gov." USASpending.gov. Web. 04 Mar. 2012. <http://usaspending.gov/>.

"Where the Money Goes." Texas Transparency -. Web. 04 Feb. 2012. <http://www.texastransparency.org/moneygoes/>.

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Illinois launching lookatcook.com to visualize county spending patterns89. In Canada, data made available about charities revealed a $3.2bn tax sheltering fraud90. In the United Kingdom, Kenyas Open Data initiative has an explicit aim to improve government accountability and transparency, and enable the detection of corruption. One of the clauses in the Declaration of the Open Government Partnership is to increase access to new technologies for openness and accountability, as well as to increase the availability of information about governmental activities91. Open data, while politically difficult, has been gaining traction as a tool for regulation and transparency, indeed, with many eyes, all [problems] are shallow.

From Data to Information: Apps for Accountability

The opening of data through many Federal or government initiatives is complemented by the efforts of civil society, private companies and interested individuals who comprise a transparency movement that both presses for greater openness in government and develops tools to enable citizens to take advantage of that openness92. The percolation of open data has been the impetus for the creation of civic applications that are focused on transparency and uncovering irregularities, and critically, the translate data into useful information. The unlocking of useful information from raw data is often achieved through the use of data visualization, mashups (where

"Where's the Money Going?" Look at Cook: Brought to You by Cook County Commissioner John Fritchey. Web. 04 Apr. 2012. <http://lookatcook.com/>. David Eaves "Eaves.ca." Case Study: How Open Data Saved Canada $3.2 Billion. Web. 04 Apr. 2012. <http://eaves.ca/2010/04/14/case-study-open-data-and-the-public-purse/>. "Open Government Declaration." Open Government Partnership |. Open Government Partnership. Web. 04 Apr. 2012. <http://www.opengovpartnership.org/open-government-declaration>. Drapeau, Mark. "Two-way Street: Government with the People." Open Government: [collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice]. By Daniel Lathrop and Laurel Ruma. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2010. Print.
92 91 90

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data sources or combined), or simply through the cleaning up of data from machine-readable formats into formats that are human recognizable. Examples of applications built upon open data are numerous, even in the relative infancy of the field. A group of civic hackers in Chicago created Chicagolobbyists.org, a site that built on Chicagos Open Data on lobbyist activity and visualized it in a way that made it easy to understand the influence of an individual lobbyist on the political process93. Palantir Technologies, a data integration and analysis platform, built a web application called Analyzethe.us to explore Open Data released through data.gov. It allows users to utilize Palantirs own data analytics platform to develop an intuitive picture of the complex flow of resources, money and influence that affects how [the US] government functions, and among other things allowed the user to visualize relationship networks, and geographically map out resources.

Yet the transparency movement, while aided by the growth of open data, is nevertheless not dependent on it in any way. In many cases where critical data has not been opened up, members of the transparency movement have taken it upon themselves to find means of extracting, or in some cases, collecting relevant data and publishing it for the rest of the community to re-use. Govtrack.us screen-scrapes information off THOMAS, the Library of Congress database of legislative information, and integrates and cross-references other relevant information (including biographical information, geographic information) to allow users to better understand the workings of Congress94. Beyond merely providing a web application to understand the data it has collected, it also makes the data available through bulk downloads and APIs for

Baker, Paul, Derek Eder, Chad Pry, and Nick Rouguex. "About This Project." Chicago Lobbyists. Web. 04 May 2012. <http://www.chicagolobbyists.org/about>.
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"Developer Documentation." Govtrack.us. Web. 04 Mar. 2012. <http://Govtrack.us/developers>.

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other transparency projects to use. Govtrack.us data is utilized in many sites, ranging from Barack Obamas personal site, to other transparency projects such as OpenCongress.org and MAPLight.org95. Sunlight Labs takes data inside and outside of government and transforms it into services developers can use, exposing APIs for data on Congress, campaign contributions, lobbying records among other data sources96. OMBWatch, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization that tracks the White House office of Management and Budget, cleaned up data from the Federal Procurement Data System, the Federal Award Data System as well as other government data that was licensed from private contractors in order to put the first publicly available database of all government spending online. Interestingly, its creation led to the passage of the Coburn-Obama Bill that mandated the Office of Management and Budget created a similar database- instead of re-creating what OMBWatch had created, the software behind FedSpending.org was licensed to build USASpending.gov, the official publicly available database97.

Beyond merely making data available, transparency applications make data relevant to ordinary citizens and make otherwise abstruse data easier to understand and act upon. OpenCongress.org allows users to sign up for tracking alerts on a bill, vote, or lawmaker, and link up with other people who are interested in monitoring similar issues. Notably, in 2008 more than 45,000 people posted comments on a piece of legislation regarding the extension of

Tauberer, Josh. "Case Study: Govtrack.us." Open Government: [collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice]. By Daniel Lathrop and Laurel Ruma. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2010. Print.
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"Sunlight Labs Services." Services.sunlightlabs.com. Web. 04 Mar. 2012. <http://services.sunlightlabs.com/>.

Achieving Transparency and Accountability in Federal Spending, House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Cong. (2011) (testimony of Craig Jennings). Print.

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unemployment benefits, sharing information about the process98. OpenSecrets.org tracks the influence of money on U.S. politics, and brings together different data sources to identify, illustrate, and help users analyze the influence of political contributions. California Common Sense, a Stanford based project, cleans up data derived from various sources and uses visualization tools to make data and research easy to understand in order to educate the public about government finances in California99. The Open Knowledge Foundations Where does my money go uses timelines, maps and visualizations to explore public finances in the United Kingdom. Sunlight Foundations Inbox Influence application allows users to see the political contributions or people and organizations that are mentioned in emails received, and their Checking Influence applications shows how companies [users] do business every day are wielding political influence by analyzing a users bank or credit card statement. Such applications contextualize and make transparency data relevant to ordinary citizens, making it easier to understand and act upon.

Certain applications also focus on crowdsourcing data related to government accountability and corruption. Swati Ramanathan and her husband started a website called I Paid a Bribe that collects anonymous reports of bribes paid and bribes requested in India, and collected more than 400,000 reports of corruption at various levels of government, publicly listing instances of corruption including the requestor of the bribe100. Many similar sites have been launched in

Miller, Ellen. "Disrupting Washington's Golden Rule." Open Government: [collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice] . By Daniel Lathrop and Laurel Ruma. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2010. Print. "CACS - About Us." CACS - About Us. California Common Sense. Web. 04 Mar. 2012. <http://www.cacs.org/site/about>.
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"I Paid a Bribe." I Paid a Bribe. Web. 04 Apr. 2012. <http://www.ipaidabribe.com/>.

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Pakistan101, Bhutan102, Nigeria103, and Kenya104. The OpenCongress Wiki (formerly Congresspedia) is an editable guide to congress, containing user-contributed information about congress members, their influences, and voting patterns105.

Data Journalism
As todays technology allows for the generation, storage and transmission of unprecedented amounts of data, the traditional role of the press in government accountability and transparency has expanded to cover the needs of analyzing and filtering large data sets to uncover stories, or help the public make sense of data106. Notably, traditional news organizations such as the Guardian107 in the United Kingdom and the New York Times108 have data teams who aim to find stories in large datasets, and create interactive visualizations and graphics which help their readers understand the issues related to the stories. For example, the New York Times Toxic Waters project sought to identify the worsening pollution in American waters and regulators responses using open government data from the Environmental Protection Agency and received

"Corporate, Political, Government Corruption News in Pakistan." Corruption Analysis, Accountability, Fight Corruption with I Paid a Bribe. Web. 04 Apr. 2012. <http://www.ipaidbribe.pk/>. "Online Corruption Reporting." www.acc.org.bt. Web. 04 Feb. 2012. <http://www.anticorruption.org.bt/?q=node/102>.
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"BribeNigeria.com." BribeNigeria.com. Web. 04 May 2012. <http://www.bribenigeria.com/>. "I PAID A BRIBE." I PAID A BRIBE KENYA. Web. 04 Mar. 2012. <http://ipaidabribe.or.ke/>.

"Meta:About - OpenCongress Wiki." About - OpenCongress Wiki. OpenCongress. Web. 04 May 2012. <http://www.opencongress.org/wiki/Meta:About>. Howard, Alex. "Data Journalism, Data Tools, and the Newsroom Stack - O'Reilly Radar." Data Journalism, Data Tools, and the Newsroom Stack - O'Reilly Radar. O'Reilly Media. Web. 04 Apr. 2012. <http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/07/data-journalism-tools-newsroom-stack.html>.
107 108 106

"Data Journalism and Data Visualization." The Guardian, UK. Web.

The New York Times - Innovation Portfolio. The New York Times. Web. 04 May 2012. <http://www.nytinnovation.com/>.

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a Pulitzer Prize109, while its interactive visualization of Obamas 2013 budget proposal allowed readers to quickly identify where significant cuts or increases were being made to budgets110. It has also seen the rise of organizations such as ProPublica, an independent, non-profit newsroom whose investigative journalism is often released in the form of interactive news applications that organize or visualize extensive amounts of data to reveal journalistic insight111.

A growing ecosystem of organizations such as the Knight Foundation (that supports media innovation in journalism), the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting (NICAR)112, the MIT Center for Civic Media, conferences such and an increasing number of open source collection of journalism-related data tools such as ScraperWiki113 and Overview114 form an ecosystem to support data-driven journalism in the public sphere and beyond. Data-driven transparency is not only the domain of civil society and interested individuals, as investigative journalists and traditional press organizations increasingly turn their focus onto the large amounts of government and civic data.

"Does Transparency Mean More Democracy?" Urban Portal. Web. 17 Apr. 2012. <http://www.urbanportal.org/issues/entry/does_transparency_mean_more_democracy>. Four Ways to Slice Obama's 2013 Budget Proposal. The New York Times. Web. 04 Apr. 2012. <http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/02/13/us/politics/2013-budget-proposal-graphic.html>.
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"Tools & Data." ProPublica. Web. 04 Mar. 2012. <http://www.propublica.org/tools/>.

"Welcome to the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting." Naitonal Institute for Computer-assisted Reporting. Web. 11 Apr. 2012. <http://www.ire.org/nicar/>. ScraperWiki allows users to scrape data off web pages into machine-readable formats, and can be accessed at https://scraperwiki.com. "The Overview Project." The Overview Project. Associated Press. Web. 11 May 2012. <http://overview.ap.org/>.
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Issues related to Data Driven Transparency

Perils of raw data: lack of context, interpretation, and verification
The push for open raw government data may result in increased chances for misinterpretation, as it is often difficult to attach context to raw data, as compared to when data is explained and synthesized in a government report. An oft-raised example is that of the publishing of public officials salaries, without the associated metadata of what the scope of their responsibilities are and what the comparable equivalent role in the private sector would be, leading to sometimes unfair conclusions. There is also the possibility of misinterpretation of trends when associated contextual metadata is lost or ignored, for example when geographic crime data seems to indicate that a certain neighborhood is high crime because of its racial composition, when in fact it was due to a one-off demonstration that resulted in arrests115. The peril of raw data is that it shifts to onus of contextualizing and interpreting data to the consumer or application creator, whose intentions may lead to a misinterpretation of data and incorrect conclusions being drawn. Depending on the nature of data, it is entirely possible that an application creator could design the application to twist data to fit a particular narrative to support an agenda.

Furthermore, government data in its current form lacks a verification mechanism (e.g. a checksum which end users can verify against). Moreover, government data often is cleaned and redistributed by third parties (civil society or private vendors), and it is difficult to detect if data has been modified. It is again entirely possible for an ill-intentioned individual or group to make marginal

Schrier, Bill. "Toads on the Road to Open Government." Open Government: [collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice] . By Daniel Lathrop and Laurel Ruma. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2010. 313-317. Print.

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modifications to data such that it is difficult to detect and redistribute it, as the lack of a verification system makes it difficult to identify errors.

Difficulties in differentiating data errors from actual corruption

Data errors (for example, mistakes made when populating the database) often create abberations that can be interpreted as instances of corruption, and their detection often results in negative press and an impression of corruption, rather than the simple identification of a data error. For example, in Recovery.govs early days, watchdog groups and the media found 440 phantom districts that had supposedly received $6.4bn in recovery funds to much fanfare and accusations of corruption. The root of the problem, however, was in the data reporting and entry process, and there had been insufficient checks and vetting procedures for the data entered by recipients. Nevertheless, the damage had been done, and furthered the case of the opponents of the Recovery Act. The difficulties in differentiating data errors from corruption make open data a politically risky move, especially if datasets are large and unable to be verified to the smallest detail116.

Data-driven Transparency as a De-legitimizing Force

Opening government data for the purposes of transparency, even though done in progressive interests, may draw excessive attention to the mistakes and errors of government, and through that process delegitimize government by portraying it as incompetent and corrupt. Transparency focuses on accountability, creating a gotcha game and a check-and-balance mechanism that discourages and curbs corruption and wrongdoing. Yet transparency that focuses exclusively on

Follow-Up: Recovery.gov Purges Phantom Congressional District Data. Web. 04 Apr. 2012. <http://westvirginia.watchdog.org/944/follow-up-recovery-gov-purges-phantom-congressional-district-data/>.

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accountability is blind to the accomplishments of government, instead focusing only on its mistakes, and in so doing shapes citizens social and political judgment of government in a negative light117. Open data, when combined with a sensationalist media apparatus and a critical political culture, may very counter-intuitively lead to lessened belief and confidence in the government, even as the government makes efforts to make itself more transparent through open data policies. The example of Recovery.gov illustrated this risk, as many newspaper reports sensationalized errors in the data to portray the stimulus bill as being corrupt. Alec MacGillis, a writer for the Washington Post, questioned the choice to make the data publicly available and that the decision might have been a strategic mistake, stating that the administration [had] left itself open to neardaily assaults on the credibility of job numbers finding flaws in the data is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel, and reporters have been all too happy to fire away118.

Moreover, the increase in data lowers the barriers of entry into policy debate, leading to a vibrant culture of debate over policy decisions. Yet, the release of underlying government and public sector raw data reduces the information asymmetry between civil society and government and the decline of the culture of deference of everyday citizens to government and objective professionals to make decisions on their behalf. While the increased number of perspectives strengthens a democracy, opening up government data increases the scrutiny and second-guessing of administrative decisions that go against the principles of the traditionally insulated Weberian

Archun Fung and David Weil. "Open Government and Open Society." Open Government: [collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice] . By Daniel Lathrop and Laurel Ruma. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2010. 106-107. Print. MacGillis, Alec. The Washington Post, 18 Nov. 2009. Web. 04 May 2012. <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/17/AR2009111703837.html>.
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bureaucracy, drawing government administrators into the political sphere119. While this may not be an unfamiliar in established democracies, this factor might contribute to the significant opposition of government officials in less democratic regimes.

Yet the basic premise of transparency is that de-legitimization due to errors or corruption exposes errors that otherwise would have gone undetected, while de-legitimization due to alternate opinions reflects greater discourse within society. Data from recent studies seem to suggest that the fear of open data causing mass de-legitimization may not be well founded: The Pew Internet and Life Project found that when citizens believed their government was sharing more information, they were likely to feel more satisfied with civic life and the overall performance of their local government120. A recent study studying the United Kingdoms Transparency Program found that open data, while having a strong possibility of a negative effect on unwarranted trust (e.g. based on a hunch), had a long term effect of created warranted trust based on the openness of the system121.

Bureaucratic opposition to Open Data, and the need for political will
Data-driven transparency creates a gotcha system of transparency for bureaucrats and creates significant opposition to open data. The benefits of open data are societal; yet the rewards a

Miller, Ellen. "Disrupting Washingtons Golden Rule." Open Government: [collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice] . By Daniel Lathrop and Laurel Ruma. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2010. 199-204. Print. "Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project." Perception of Open Government Is Tied to Higher Levels of Community Satisfaction. Web. 04 May 2012. <http://www.pewinternet.org/PressReleases/2011/Community-Information-Systems.aspx>. O'Hara, Kieron (2012) Transparency, open data and trust in government: shaping the infosphere. In, ACM Web Science 2012, Evanston, US, 22 - 24 Jun 2012. 10pp.
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bureaucrat receives for opening public access are far outweighed by the potential risk, negative publicity, and possible disciplinary action received if public access reveals government errors or is misused. Moreover, considerable time and energy has to go into answering public queries about data, or mitigating publicity crises when errors are discovered. This makes open data a tough sell for bureaucrats; it also emphasizes the need for political will to both catalyze and sustain open data. In the U.S., Open Data was driven by President Obamas Memorandum of Transparency and Open Government, that explicitly directed the government departments to develop an Open Government plan with in 120 days122, while the Open Government directive instructed agencies to publish online at least three high-value data sets and register those data sets via Data.gov. These underlined the political will required to open government data123.

Privacy vs. Transparency, and data scrubbing

Data-driven transparency releases data in its most primitive form- and can expose details that go against the impulses of privacy. This can result in an incentive for governments to release scrubbed data- data that often is missing important details (for privacy reasons or otherwise) so much that it is difficult to do any quality analysis. It can also result in governments maintaining a side system of data whose sole purpose is to be made public, away from the actual data systems used within government. For example, USASpending.gov does not provide access to actual spending records like invoices and purchase orders; rather it exposes a side system of data the contains minimal information about actual purchases, focusing only aggregate numbers. The

Obama, Barack. "Transparency and Open Government." The White House. Web. 04 May 2012. <http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/TransparencyandOpenGovernment>. Orszag, Peter R. "Open Government Directive." The White House. Web. 04 May 2012. <http://www.whitehouse.gov/open/documents/open-government-directive>.
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scrubbing of recipient data for farm-subsidies, for instance, erodes the ability for analysis to find fraud or corruption. The stripping of personally identifiable information, in particular, makes it difficult to establishing audit trails, and nullifies the ability to use the data for the purposes of government accountability124. In jurisdictions with Freedom of Information legislations, the ability to retrieve the actual documents under a Freedom of Information request may be even harder under such a system, as government agencies can point to the scrubbed records having already been made public.

The danger of falsified data

Though data-driven transparency dramatically increases the difficulty of falsifying data, it would be nave to assume that an ill-intentioned government would not undertake the task to push forward a particular agenda. The availability of data is not a guarantee of its accuracy or truth, and the onus of verification lies on the part of civil society and individuals. The need to collect independent data does not evaporate with the implementation of open data, rather, it makes it all the more important to establish robust data verifications and neutral fact checking. Efforts to crowd source data to verify against official data have started in several domains; an initiative called Safecast, for example, begun in Japan to crowdsource the collection of radiation measurements in different locations to verify official government numbers125.

Howard, Alex. In the Age of Big Data, Data Journalism Has Profound Importance for Society - O'Reilly Radar. Web. 04 May 2012. <http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/03/rise-of-the-data-journalists.html>.
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"Safecast." Safecast. Web. 04 May 2012. <http://blog.safecast.org/>.

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The absence of a monitorial citizen

While open data policies have generated accountability in modern democracies like the United States and the United Kingdom, the tremendous amount of data generated often generates little attention from the general public apart from a small minority of people consisting of civil society and policy-niks. Political sociologist Michael Schudson writes of the lack of monitorial citizens, who are too busy to play active roles in government126. For the general public, the data deluge is like drinking from a fire hose: apart from the small minority, few citizens are keen on finding out the latest government press releases or data changes; they just want government to work. The average citizen is less interested in transparency than in assurance, and if the small minority of civil society and policy-niks are absent, a database put online achieves nothing if it is not analyzed. With nobody interested in analyzing data, or building applications for accountability, transparency means nothing. Even if applications are built, they are of little use if few people are interested.

The development of civil society is a different topic altogether, although this papers subsequent chapter on fostering a civic application ecosystem (Chapter 5) identifies ways in which governments have created an ecosystem of developers and users of their data. There is also a growing knowledge among transparency application builders and civil society on how to build applications that convert government information into applications that people are interested in using: the Sunlight Foundations applications, for instance, utilize interesting and non-conventional forms to push transparency into peoples personal agendas (for example, through their email

Schudson, Michael. "Good Citizens and Bad History: Today's Political Ideals in Historical Perspective." University of California, San Diego, 13 Nov. 1999. Web. <http://frank.mtsu.edu/~seig/pdf/pdf_schudson.pdf>.

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plugin that shows the political contributions of the people the user is corresponding with)127. Applications such as Govtrack.us are architected for people who are interested only in one or two issues, enabling a user to subscribe for updates to a small subset of legislation, and the system notifies them if there are changes or updates. There is an increasing push toward findable government, where search engines index government data to be found during traditional searches128. The knowledge of how to capture peoples interest in accountability through applications will only grow further as civil society and application builders discover new models and products through building and experimenting.

"Influence Explorer." Inbox Influence. Sunlight Foundation. Web. 04 May 2012. <https://inbox.influenceexplorer.com/>. Reich, Brian. "Towards a Findable Government." WeMedia.com. Web. 04 May 2012. <http://wemedia.com/2008/12/11/towards-a-findable-government/>.
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Fostering a Civic Application Ecosystem

The vision of Government as a Platform outlined a conception of government as a

platform making available re-usable open data and services, providing the raw ingredients for private citizens and civic innovators to convert into informational and economic value to society through applications and startups. Ideally the very provision of open data and services would result in individuals and civic innovators coming forward to build upon them- yet the assumption of such a build it and they will come129 mindset is nave at best. The recent rise of applications building upon government data and services was not a result derived from the mere opening of access; rather, there were very clear and deliberate actions on the part of governments and interested individuals to engage and cultivate a developer ecosystem. Application contests, developer meet ups and other initiatives (by both government and civil society) contributed to the growth of developers who were interested in civic and government issues- a group colloquially known as civic hackers. Their increased attention to the problems of civic and government have resulted in the creation of numerous applications, as have been covered in the previous chapter.

The rise of civic hackers has led to a nascent civic application ecosystem that moves beyond merely building applications based on platforms provided by the government, to building applications with civic goals in mind. The term civic applications increasingly broadens to include applications that are built for communities to organize or perform critical civic functions independent of government. Moreover, the increased familiarity and interest of developers with

"If We Build It, They Will Come." Web. 13 May 2012. <http://fearlesscompetitor.com/2010/05/24/if-we-buildit-they-will-come/>.

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the central problems of government have also led to the creation of new products and services by start up companies (or in some instances, open source initiatives) that address those needs. These have all contributed to the development of a growing civic application ecosystem of applications, developers, companies and open source communities.

Application Contests
In 2007, Vivek Kundra was appointed to the cabinet post of Chief Technology Officer for the District of Columbia in the United States, and opened up the D.C. data catalog containing more than 300 datasets held by D.C.s public agencies. Partnering with Peter Corbett, the CEO of iStrategyLabs, an interactive agency, he launched the Apps for Democracy contest for developers to create innovative applications with the data, with prizes totaling $50,000. The contest resulted in more than 47 applications being developed within 30 days, with the winners being an application that used historic and image data to provide walking tours around the city, and an application that used crime, amenity and demographic data to help users better understand their neighborhoods. Many other applications were developed, ranging from applications that helped users find the best bars and a safe path to stumble home, to visualizations of school test scores and poverty rates. The D.C. CTOs office estimated that the cost of having the D.C. government develop these applications would come at a cost exceeding $2mn, and 1-2 years of effort between contracting, procurement and development130.

Gorman, Sean. "Information as a Public Good." GSA Intergovernmental Solutions Newsletter (2009): 9-10. Print.

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Quickly on its heels, other districts and organizations adopted application contests to drive the use of their Open Data. New York Citys BigApps contest was first launched in 2009, initially offering $50,000 in prizes and the free use of the technologies of several technology startups in New York city, including bit.ly and Meetup.com131. MyCityWay, the winner of the 2010 edition of the contest, subsequently spun out into a startup and received $5 million in venture capital funding, and a partnership with BMW132. Application contests also launched in the United Kingdom, with the Rewired State (a hack day organizer) partnering with the Government Digital Service and several other government agencies to organize a National Hack the Government Day, complete with prizes for winning entries. Finland launched its own version of Apps for Democracy that received 23 submissions133, and European Commission launched its own INCA awards for innovative applications. Organizations such as the U.S. Army held their first internal application contest in 2010, offering rewards totaling $30,000, and resulted in 53 individuals or teams developing applications that supported army operations or services134. Many other application contests were held thereafter, ranging from theme-based application contests, to organization-sponsored application contests.

Even though the initial results and spread of application contests seemed to suggest its success, several questions about its viability and effectiveness began to be called into question.

"New York City Is Challenging Software Developers to Create Apps That Use City Data to Make NYC Better. $50k in Cash and Prizes!" NYC BigApps 3.0. New York City Government. Web. 27 Apr. 2012. <http://2011.nycbigapps.com/>.
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"MyCityWay - Home." My City Way. Web. 15 May 2012. <http://www.mycityway.com/>.

"Apps for Democracy Finland - Kansalaisosallistujan | MindTrek." Web. 10 Apr. 2012. <http://www.mindtrek.org/2009/democracy_finland>. Corbett, Peter. "Apps for the Army." IStrategyLabs. Web. 01 May 2012. <http://www.istrategylabs.com/2010/02/apps-for-the-army-a-first-of-its-kind-app-dev-contest-for-mil/>.
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Bryan Sivak, who took over the role from Vivek Kundra as D.C.s CTO, decided to not renew the Apps for Democracy project on the basis that many of the applications produced were shortterm cool projects, rather than practical tools that could be sustained in the long term. The original intent of application contests were to attract and engage developers to use the data that the government had opened up; while it had been successful in attracting a group of developers to use government data, it had arguably been less effective in sustaining developer interest beyond the contest, to creating the type of developer ecosystem envisioned by government-as-a-platform advocates. While opinions like Sivaks have been less prominent (New York City has continued to run its BigApps application contest successfully ever since), it did highlight that application contests were far from the magic bullet- and far more work was required to build a developer ecosystem that moved beyond mere apps, to a civic application ecosystem.

Beyond App Contests, to a Civic Application Ecosystem

Successful software platforms attract a dedicated and active ecosystem, where communities of developers and users center on building applications on top of the platform, adding new layers of functionality. This goes beyond a one-off building of an application, to a long-term engagement of developers that sees platform owners adapt their products and incorporate developer feedback in the design and implementation of these platforms. The shift from a short-term hobby to a longterm engagement is critical, and in the context of government, requires a shift from merely organizing and holding application contests to cultivating a developer ecosystem. Peter Corbett, the organizer of the original Apps for Democracy contest, alluded to the need to move beyond running contests to engage developers, to building a community of developers through real-life

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meet ups and providing long term incentives to keep them engaged135. Bryan Sivak, the then-CTO of Washington D.C, alluded to the need to engage [private sector developers] in creating applications that tackle the problems at the governments core rather than on the fringes136. This would come through the form of developer ecosystems and civic startups, a term for startups with a focus on civic improvement.

Recent efforts have focused on building upon the momentum generated by application contests, and building the community of developers and interested civic innovators through reallife meet ups. CityCamps aim to bring together local government officials, civic organizations, social entrpereneurs, technologists, and creative in order to create local communities of practice who are dedicated to design technology applications that make cities and other local communities more open and user friendly. The first CityCamp was held in Chicago in 2010, and have spread to almost 22 other cities since, including cities in Russia, Guatemala, Canada and the United Kingdom137. More informal means of maintaining community such as mailing lists and wikis have also served to further the purpose of building community around the ecosystem. The result of these efforts have been to coalesce the civic innovation ecosystem, build relationships between developers and governments, as well as familiarize developers with the workings and cogent needs of governments and the communities they serve.

Corbett, Peter. "Beyond Apps Contests - Building Sustainable Civic Innovation Projects." Government 2.0 Expo. Web. 16 Feb. 2012. <http://www.scribd.com/doc/32025918/Beyond-Apps-Contests-Building-SustainableCivic-Innovation-Projects>. Nagesh, Gautham. "New D.C. CTO Scraps "Apps for Democracy"" The Hill, 6 July 2010. Web. 28 Apr. 2012. <http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/101779-new-dc-cto-scraps-apps-for-democracy>. "CityCamp: Gov 2.0 Goes Local." Cities. GovFresh. Web. 18 Apr. 2012. <http://citycamp.govfresh.com/cities/>.
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Recent initiatives have also started up that further encourage the coalescing of the civic innovation ecosystem. Code for America was founded in 2009 by Jennifer Pahlka, and seeks to build a network of civic leaders and organizations to help governments work better for everyone with people and power of the web. The organization runs an 11-month fellowship program for technology professionals where they receive training and introductions to city governments, and develop and launch an application for their partner city by the end of the fellowship138. The fellowship recently expanded from 3 cities in 2011 to 8 cities in 2012, and will likely increase that number in 2013. In February 2012, Code for America also recently started a Brigade program that supports local brigades of citizens interested in civic technology in deploying, maintaining, and sustaining civic technology and open data infrastructure for their cities139. Within a month of the programs launch, 43 brigades had been formed in various areas ranging from Alaska to Philadelphia140. Code for Americas efforts can be seen as creating the infrastructure to build and strengthen the nascent community of developers around government data, and providing the incentives for longer-term engagement beyond application contests.

Another initiative that is aiding the growth of the nascent civic innovation ecosystem is the Civic Commons, which grew out of a Code for America project that was done with OpenPlans141. Designed in 2011 to be infrastructure for the open government movement, and lists among its

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"Code for America Fellows." Code for America. Web. 18 Apr. 2012. <http://codeforamerica.org/fellows/>.

"About the Brigade." The Code for America Brigade. Web. 27 May 2012. <http://brigade.codeforamerica.org/about>. "Current Brigades." The Code for America Brigade. Web. 27 May 2012. <http://brigade.codeforamerica.org/brigades>. OpenPlans is a non-profit technology organization helping to open up government and improve transportation systems, and has played a role in several open government initiatives such as the Civic Commons, OpenGeo, and OpenTripPlanner. More information can be found at <http://openplans.org>.
141 140

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primary goal to make it easy for jurisdictions at all levels to deploy low-cost reusable software using open standards, open protocols, and open source code wherever possible. Its Marketplace showcases applications built for both civil society and government; a single entry on an application showcases where the application is being used, and the city governments experiences using them. For developers, the Marketplace is a chance to showcase their work and gain users and collaborators. Its Wiki is a community-edited guide to the civic innovation ecosystem, sharing information, guides and resources on how to deploy applications. By establishing a clear application store where governments can discover and deploy civic technologies, and where developers can gain users, the Civic Commons helps coalesce the civic innovation ecosystem around it, and encourages the growth and adoption of many of the civic applications that it catalogues142.

Civic Applications, beyond government

Civic hackers, however, have not been limited to building applications based on government data. The term civic applications increasingly broadens to include applications that are built independent of government involvement that aid citizens to organize and perform civic functions- from clearing snow from streets to strengthening community in a neighborhood, and from maintaining a local neighborhood wiki to campaigning through online social networks.

There are a growing number of civic applications that harness technology to overcome the problems of collective action, by using technology to implement a framework to enabling selfmobilizing citizens to perform traditional government functions and public services for the larger

142

"About Civic Commons." Civic Commons. Web. 08 May 2012. <http://civiccommons.org/about>.

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community. For example, Adopt-a-Hydrant, a open source civic application that was developed under Code for Americas fellowship, allows citizens to use a web application to self-organize and individually adopt (and name) a fire hydrant during the winters, pledging to shovel the hydrant out of the snow to maintain fire-preparedness143. First deployed in Boston, the system was replicated in many other cities- and in the case of Hawaii, repurposed to allow citizens to adopt a tsunami siren144. Such applications push forward a do-it-yourself agenda, where collective action problems are tackled through the use of technology to reduce the transactional costs of organization and information dissemination. Independent initiatives to solve collective action problems are not new, as neighborhood watches and other volunteer initiatives come to mind, and such applications are perhaps the revisiting of many of these principles with the assistance of technology.

There has also been renewed interest in civic applications that strengthen the sense of civic community. OpenBlock, an open source project, aggregates civic news stories, local news on top of local maps for citizens to understand what goes on in their communities, while applications such as Localocracy145 and Everyblock run private location-based networks for neighborhoods. An open source project called LocalWiki attempts to make it easy for people to share knowledge about their local communities, and establish a collaborative resource that can become the

143 144

"Adopt-a-Hydrant." Adopt-a-Hydrant. Code for America. Web. 28 Apr. 2012. <http://adoptahydrant.org/>.

Pahlka, Jennifer. "Jennifer Pahlka: Crowdsourcing Can Revolutionize Government." Green Business. Web. 13 May 2012. <http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2012/03/15/jennifer-pahlka-crowdsourcing-revolutionizegovernment>.
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About Localocracy. Localocracy, Inc. Web. 27 Apr. 2012. <http://www.localocracy.com/>.

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communitys information hub146. These developments have also come in the political sphere, with social campaign sites such as Popvox and Votizen allow citizens to use their social networks to campaign online147, and startups such as Turbovote allow citizens to be notified of upcoming votes, and to vote from home148.

As the civic developer ecosystem grows, the number and variety of civic applications will increase as innovators identify opportunities in their communities where technology could make a difference. One of the notable projects from Code for Americas inaugural year was MuralApp, a mobile application that enabled citizens to discover murals and art around their locale149; another project, Discover BPS, used crowdsourced user reviews of schools, along with interactive maps and structured data to help parents choose the right school for their children150. These applications reflect the ability of civic hackers and innovators to build products to address civic needs (or desires); being on the ground and understanding the unique needs of a community, they are best placed to develop appropriate applications and technologies that address a particular civic need.

"LocalWiki - The Open-content, Open-source Effort to Share the World's Local Knowledge." Web. 23 Apr. 2012. <http://localwiki.org/>. "Your Voice. Verified. Quantified. Amplified." POPVOX. Web. 18 May 2012. <http://www.popvox.com/>, "Discover and Activate the Voters You Know." Votizen. Web. 18 May 2012. <http://www.votizen.com/>.
148 149 147

146

"Turbovote." Turbovote, Inc. Web. 16 May 2012. <https://turbovote.org/>.

"MuralApp." MuralApp. Code for America. Web. 18 May 2012. <http://codeforamerica.org/?cfa_project=mural-app>. "Discover Boston Public Schools." Code for America. Web. 19 May 2012. <http://codeforamerica.org/?cfa_project=school-selection>.
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6 Architecting Government for Participation and Collaboration

Obamas Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government, released on the day just after his inauguration, outlined not only the need for government to be transparent, but also participatory and collaborative. The desire to not only open data for transparency, but to architect government to offer Americans increased opportunities to participate in policymaking [and] provide the benefits of their collective expertise and information, as well as push government agencies to cooperate with civil society, businesses and interested individuals outlined a vision of an open architecture of government151. Such a vision was far removed from traditional Weberian ideals of an insulated bureaucracy, and marked a move to open government- open not only in terms of transparency, but also in access. In a sense, while the inspirations and motivations for Open Government were diverse, significant influence on the ideas and principles of participation and collaboration was drawn from the examples of Web 2.0, the practices of the Open Source community, and mass, technology-enabled collaborations like Wikipedia152.

Yet the case for increased participation and collaboration in government is an interesting one that moves beyond the boundaries of mere technology to influencing the mechanisms and structures of government itself. The putative flaws of closed bureaucracies and recent budgetary

Obama, Barack. "Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government." The White House. Web. 17 April 2012. <http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/TransparencyandOpenGovernment>. Eaves, David. "After the Collapse: Open Government and the Future of Civil Service."Open Government: [collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice]. By Daniel Lathrop and Laurel Ruma. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2010. Print.
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constraints pair with enabling effects of technology, to create a need to adapt government mechanisms that enable governments to respond and incorporate citizen participation and collaboration. The results are new (or in some cases, re-visited) innovations and mechanism that allowing citizens, businesses and civil society to participate in government in different ways.

The putative flaws of closed bureaucracies

Max Weber, in Economy and Society, studied the types of public administration and government, and coined the concept of a Weberian Bureaucracy to refer to the classic, hierarchically organized civil service that required bureaucratic officials to have expert knowledge and training, and developed competencies in the areas of administration. It also advocated that the bureaucracy should be autonomous and insulated from society: citizens, while being able to express opinions, lack the ability and training to make informed decisions on complex policy matters. Bureaucrats would also be insulated from the pressure of electoral politics, and as supposedly apolitical professionals, would possess the impartiality, expertise and time to make public decisions153. While the ensuing decades saw the advocating of lessened insulation of the bureaucracy (Peter Evans Embedded Autonomy of East Asian developmental states close ties with industry being one of them), the fundamental belief that the basic processes of government should be insulated away from the public, and handled by expert bureaucrats stayed in vogue154. As David Eaves writes in the Future of the Civil Service, to a large extent, present-day government

153 154

Weber, Max. Economy and Society; an Outline of Interpretive Sociology. New York: Bedminster, 1968. Print.

Evans, Peter B. Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1995. Print.

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culture reflects a strong delineation between insiders and outsiders, deference to authority and specialization, and centralized decision-making155.

Yet there is an increasing cognizance that expertise is diffused across society, and that in many cases, the bureaucrat is unable to gain access to the right information or expertise necessary to make optimal decisions. Bureaucracies, while still being able to bring in consultants and experts, do not have a monopoly on expertise of even access to expertise; expertise that lies outside the government, on the other hand, are limited in their ability to surface their expert feedback or input due to the relative opacity of the government. Moreover, government professionals or consultants are not guaranteed to be completely impartial: expert witnesses or consultants, chosen by the government itself, may in some instances be susceptible to the personal political influences, or the influence of lobbyists. This has led among some technologists, like Beth Noveck (the ex-deputy CTO of the White House) to conceptualize a closed bureaucracy being a single point of failure, where a failing within government is unable to be averted or reversed by those outside of government156. She points to the patent system as a prime example of this: bureaucrats, often with insufficient technical knowledge of a particular subject area, decide and arbitrate on the awarding of patents in areas of expertise they may not have deep knowledge in. For many technologists, the culture and principles of the open source movement are relevant here: closed source software, akin to closed bureaucracies, provide a single point of failure if undetected, whereas open source softwares bugs are easily detected through the participation and collaboration of code reviewers

Eaves, David. "After the Collapse: Open Government and the Future of Civil Service."Open Government: [collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice]. By Daniel Lathrop and Laurel Ruma. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2010. 139. Print. Noveck, Beth Simone. Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger, and Citizens More Powerful. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2009. Print.
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who are able to access the code. The approach of open innovation, where outsiders are welcome to participate and collaborate, putatively lessens the risk of a single point of failure, and allows for the tapping of expertise outside of the system.

Factors leading to greater Participation and Collaboration

A few factors, both due to developments in technology as well as socio-economic changes, have put pressure on governments to architect for greater participation and collaboration. Changing cultures, along with the increased expectations of citizens are met with technological developments that allow for the creation of frameworks that allow for continuous, large-scale participation and collaboration. The growing pressures on governments to do more with less have the corollary effect of incentivizing governments to re-assess citizen production or creation of public goods and services; likewise, the recognition that success in tackling societys hardest problems relies on collaborating with partners outside of government has also led governments to move towards collaboration and co-production.

Patch Culture, and the participatory architectures of Web 2.0

While there are many drivers of the desire for greater participation in government, the spread of the ethos of patch culture and Web 2.0 participatory architectures has led to an increased interest in government allowing for greater participation. One of the traits of Open Source culture is the ability for any user change and contribute to the source code of software, in particular to

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patch software with a correction to a bug or an improvement to the code157. While there are relatively few people involved in the Open Source software movement, the ethos of patch culture has found its way into other fields: Wikipedia, for instance, a project that grew out of the philosophical roots of the Open Source movement, allows users to patch encyclopedia articles with edits or additions. Patch culture has increasingly led to the increased adoption of its component principles of participation and co-creation into other areas, particularly in the design of Web 2.0 websites (e.g. Youtube, Facebook) that allow for significant user participation and contribution through participatory architectures such as comment systems or likes158. For those used to the ability to participate, the notion that government does not allow for their contributions is foreign, particularly if they see a clear means by which their contribution can be of value to government and society.

The Age of Austerity

In recent years, persistent budget deficits and steep cuts in government revenue and slow economic growth have given rise to an Age of Austerity, where governments are expected to function on decreased budgets159. The pressure of tight budgets pushes for governments to reassess their provision of services, seeking to offload non-core tasks to citizens and the private sector, as well as seek cost-saving innovations in the delivery and form of government services. Moreover, the concurrent retirement of a large number of baby boomers sees more than 60,000

Tapscott, Don. "Foreword." Open Government: [collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice] . By Daniel Lathrop and Laurel Ruma. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2010. Print. Schacht, Sarah. "Democracy, Under Everything." Open Government: [collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice] . By Daniel Lathrop and Laurel Ruma. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2010. 170. Print.
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Samuelson, Robert J. 2010. The Age of Austerity. The Washington Post (October 11, 2010).

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government employees exit annually between 2011 and 2015160, creating an exodus of knowledge, skill and expertise. The confluence of these two factors puts pressure on government services to operate with fewer people, and a smaller budget (though the lowered labor costs offsets the smaller budget, to a degree), while having to deal with the increased expectations of a citizenry that is increasingly accustomed to the added conveniences of the information age.

The Age of Networks

The increased cognizance that many of societys wicked problems (e.g. climate change) require governments to open up and adopt a more collaborative approach, results in governments taking public action in the form of collaborative governance (or government by networks), a departure from top-down commands through an organizations hierarchy161. At the same time, informationbased societies drive knowledge transfer through networks rather than hierarchies, and the increasing need to tap on information, as well as motivate action outside of government results in the added need for a collaborative approach162.

The Coasian Collapse, and the enabling effects of Technology

Traditional Coasian organizational theory postulates that hierarchical organizations exist to mitigate transactional costs of individuals constantly self-organizing (negotiating, coordinating, and

Tapscott, Don. "Foreword." Open Government: [collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice] . By Daniel Lathrop and Laurel Ruma. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2010. Print. Weber, E. P and Khademian, A. M. 2008. Wicked problems, knowledge challenges, and collaborative capacity builders in network settings. Public Administration Review, 68, 2 (2008), 334-349.
162 161

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Nye, Joseph. Picking a President, Democracy Journal, Fall 2008: 1928.

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enforcing) to achieve a particular aim163. Yet, in the emerging Information Age, the Internet and other info-communication technologies allow for ubiquitous information, instantaneous communication, and lessening if not eliminating barriers to collaboration. These lower the transaction costs of self-organization, and while academic research is ambiguous to the long-term market structure effects of lowered transaction costs, academics such as Clay Shirky argue that this allows for self-organizing groups to perform certain functions that were otherwise the preserve of large hierarchical organizations164. A simple email group, for example, lowers the transactional costs of communicating information to a large number of people, and allows for the coordination of a large group that previously would have required a lot more effort to individually call and inform. The Coasian collapse makes it possible for large-scale collaboration and participation to happen over a long period of time, and as Web 2.0 initiatives like Wikipedia and Quora165 demonstrate, allow groups to come together to co-create products and solve problems.

The Long Tail of Public Policy

Chris Anderson, in his 2006 book The Long Tail, described the new digital economics of retail, where online retailers were able to stock and sell more niche products due to the lack of need to display items on expensive shelf space; the long tail of niche products enabled online retailers to

163 164

Medema, Steven G. Ronald H. Coase. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1994. Print.

Eaves, David. "After the Collapse: Open Government and the Future of Civil Service."Open Government: [collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice]. By Daniel Lathrop and Laurel Ruma. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2010. 140. Print. Quora is an online Question and Answer community where users can post questions and respond to questions that other community users have posted. It can be accessed at http://www.quora.com.
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capture markets that otherwise had not existed, and contributed to their growth166. Similarly, the lowered transactional costs of information transmission allow a greater number of people to keep up with their own personal niche interest areas of government, and participate in them. This is particularly so if they possess particular expertise in an area; while they might not have the interest or resources to pay attention to the larger developments in government, the long tail of public policy should allow for them to participate and share their knowledge. As David Eaves writes, governments should not restrict [government participation] to a community made of only the most hardcore [policy] geeks, but rather should allow for the partial participation or people interested in only one or two issues, but who form part of the long tail of expertise and capacity for delivering public policy167.

Architecting for Participation and Collaboration

In a letter to Joseph Cabel, Thomas Jefferson wrote that every man [should] feel like he is a participator in the government of affairs, not merely at election one day in a year, but every day168. The concept of participation and collaboration in government at the political level is not new, having been present in the earliest days of the design of government. Yet the revisiting of such concepts with the power of technology, and in the context of the civil service or bureaucracy have prompted new innovations and cost savings in government service delivery. The move for

Anderson, Chris. The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. New York: Hyperion, 2006. Print. Armstrong, Charles. "Emergent Democracy." Open Government: [collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice] . By Daniel Lathrop and Laurel Ruma. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2010. 139. Print. Thomas Jefferson, "Thomas Jefferson Letter to Joseph C. Cabell," in Ford, Paul Leicester, ed. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson. 12 vols. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1905. 154-5. February 6, 1820.
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government bureaucracies to architect for greater participation and collaboration outside of government allows for the harnessing of expertise and effort outside its walls, and for citizens, private organizations and civil society to solve the tasks of government. The willingness to open up formerly closed processes of government to broader input and innovation reflects an impulse for openness, as well as a willingness to empower and incorporate the input of private individuals and organizations within the processes of government169.

The 2009 Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government stated the aim for how to increase and improve opportunities for public participation in government, not only at the policymaking level, but also at the level of government processes. The result was government agencies developing plans that were released in 2010 to pursue their open government mandate with regard to public participation, be it through online participation, face-to-face participation, or formal public participation. Implicit in the memorandum was a certain depth of involvement that moved beyond mere informing, engaging and consulting (e.g. through social media), to empowering and engaging the public to a deeper level of involvement through structures developed for public participation and collaboration170.

Tapscott, Don. "Foreword." Open Government: [collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice] . By Daniel Lathrop and Laurel Ruma. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2010. Print. Lukensmeyer, Carolyn J., Joe Goldman, and David Stern. Assessing Public Participation in an Open Government Era: A Review of Federal Agency Plans. Publication. IBM Center for the Business of Government. Print.
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Adhocracies, and Government as an Impatient Convenor

Adhocracies, a term first popularized by Alvin Toffler in a 1970 book, broadly refers to a type of organization that operates in opposite fashion to a bureaucracy. It refers to an organization that cuts across normal bureaucratic lines to capture opportunities, solve problems, and get results, and often refers to the management of online organizations171. In the context of governments, increased collaboration means the willingness to reach across and outside of government to access the collective brainpower of organizations, stakeholders, and individuals. Moving beyond traditional notions of public-private partnerships, the concept of government by network sees the governments role as an impatient convener within a larger network of organizations and individuals to address national priorities on an equal footing, rather than from a position of centrality172. These are not new developments: governments have always collaborated with external organizations, the new pushes for participation and collaborations have seen an increased attention being paid to government agencies that have embarked on such initiatives, which will hopefully in turn lead to increased numbers of adhocracies.

Some of the notable networked initiatives in recent years have included the DIRECT launcher project, which saw a few frustrated NASA engineers, unhappy with the planned redesign of the Ares I and Ares V rockets, cooperating with engineers outside of government to design an alternative173. The Pillbox initiative, an open data project developed by the National Library of

171 172 173

Travica, Bob. New Organizational Designs: Information Aspects. Stamford, Conn: Ablex Pub., 1999. Print. Donahue, J. 2004. On collaborative governance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard (2004).

Eaves, David. "After the Collapse: Open Government and the Future of Civil Service."Open Government: [collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice]. By Daniel Lathrop and Laurel Ruma. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2010. 139. Print.

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Medicine and the Food and Drug administration, was built outside [of government], with the community and worked extensively with developers and the larger medical community at conferences such as Healthcamp174. BRIDGE, an unclassified U.S. Intelligence Community virtual environment that debuted in 2009 allowed government analysts to network with subject matter experts outside of government, collaborating with government outsiders on national security challenges175. The Direct Project, a project led by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, convenes federal agencies, healthcare providers, doctors, pharmacies and patients to develop a secure, scalable standards for sending encrypted health information, and utilizes a public wiki to share discussions and information about the project176. Citycamps are small-scale conferences that bring together local government officials, experts, developers, and interested citizens to share perspectives and insights about cities, and facilitate the abilities of local governments to provide open data and services for the community177.

Opening up the processes of government

The opening of previously closed processes of government to citizen input and participation allows citizens to participate in the core processes of government. The putative flaws of closed bureaucracies are in the inability for governments to tap on the expertise that lies outside of government in the actual administrative processes, an issue particularly relevant in fields that

Hale, David. "Pillbox: Pharmaceutical Imaging, Identification, and Reference." Pharmacopeia's Annual Scientific Meeting. 22 Sept. 2009. Lecture. Drapeau, Mark. "Two-way Street: Government with the People." Open Government: [collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice]. By Daniel Lathrop and Laurel Ruma. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2010. Print.
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"The Direct Project." The Direct Project. Web. 18 May 2012. <http://directproject.org/>. "CityCamp: Gov 2.0 Goes Local." GovFresh. Web. 14 May 2012. <http://citycamp.govfresh.com/about/>.

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require depth of technical knowledge. The ability for qualified individuals and organizations to contribute and collaborate in the processes of government is especially attractive in the age of austerity, and allows governments to crowdsource public expertise and effort.

One of the most successful initiatives that demonstrate this approach is that of Peer to Patent, an initiative between the New York Law School and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Previously, patent applications and reviews were a relatively closed approach where only staff from the Patent Office could review, comment on, and decide on applications, putting an unnecessarily large burden on patent office staff who had to make decisions on patents in domains that they often had limited expertise in. A member of the patent office staff was simultaneously expected to have tremendous breadth of knowledge to deal with a wide variety of patent applications, while still being able to have the depth of knowledge to make a decision on a single patent application- a difficult task, especially when dealing with technical patents. Peer to Patent migrated the process of patent approval to an open, online version that allowed for members of the public that held expertise to provide input on current patent applications, providing an important source of information for patent examiners. Though the final determination of patentability still lay in the hands of the professional staff at the patent office, input regarding the technical uniqueness of a patent application was crowdsourced from the public, not only allowing individuals and organizations with domain expertise to provide useful input in the process, but arguably also allowing the patent office to make more informed patent decisions178.

Noveck, Beth Simone. Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger, and Citizens More Powerful. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2009. Print.

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Challenges and Contests

In March 2010, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget issues a memorandum on the use of challenges and contests to make public key government priorities, and invite the public to come up with solutions to them, and in so doing leverage the problem-solving capabilities and expertise of the public. While its attraction to many in government was as an alternative to the traditional procurement process, and a good way to generate ideas and only pay for results, the use of challenges and contests allowed a greater segment of the public to participate in solving the problems of government179.

The subsequent launch of Challenge.gov saw the creation of a central site for all of the governments challenges and contests that ranged from the Veteran Associations $75,000 prize for the development of a system to certify military-learnt skill sets for civilian employers to help the employability of veterans180, to hard technical problems like NASAs $1.5mn prize to develop energy storage systems for use in the moon rover181.

Crowdsourcing Ideas
The accessibility of Internet platforms also allow for governments to crowdsource ideas publicly from citizens, allowing citizens to contribute ideas or policy proposals. The unique public accessibility of an Internet platform allows citizens to contribute ideas without needing existing

Howard, Alex. "ReadWriteWeb." ReadWriteWeb. Web. 3 May 2012. <http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/crowdsourcing_national_challenges_with_the_new_challengegov.php>.

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"Badges for Vets." Challenge.gov. Web. 9 May 2012. <http://challenge.gov/VAi2/262-badges-for-vets>.

"Night Rover Challenge." Challenge.gov. Web. 11 May 2012. <http://challenge.gov/NASA/50-night-roverchallenge>.

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relationships with public officials, or political entities. More so, the development of platforms such as Ideascale and Uservoice allow for citizens to see all submitted ideas, and vote and comment on the ideas they support, effectively creating a filter system that highlights the better ideas, and refine policy proposals through discussion. They also allow agencies to interact with citizens and participate in the discussion, creating a community around the ideation process182. Different from challenges and contests in that ideas and policy proposals are not in response to a prompt, crowdsourcing ideas allow citizen input and engagement beyond the parameters set by the government. The first and perhaps most notable example of the use of free-form idea crowdsourcing include the Obama teams crowdsourcing of ideas from the public for his transition team (44,000 ideas, and 125,000 participants)183, as well as for the administrations open government initiative in 2009, (gathering more than 4,000 ideas, 350,000 votes and 15,000 active participants)184. These initiatives quickly grew to other areas as well, with the State Department, NASA, and California governments being among the number of government agencies opening up public feedback and channels for ideas.

The early results from the use of crowdsourcing are mixed at best. The top-voted idea from Obamas crowdsourcing effort was an effort to End Marijuana Prohibition and a petition for Obama to produce his birth certificate; the politicization of such platforms leads to the

"IdeaScale Powers 23 Crowdsourcing Sites For The U.S. Government." TechCrunch. Web. 13 May 2012. <http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/07/ideascale-powers-24-crowdsourcing-sites-for-the-u-s-government/>. Sifry, Micah. "You Can Be the Eyes and the Ears: Barack Obama and the Wisdom of Crowds." Open Government: [collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice] . By Daniel Lathrop and Laurel Ruma. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2010. Ch. 9, p. 116. Print.
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"OpenGov - Open Government Brainstorm." IdeaScale. Web. 5 May 2012. <http://opengov.ideascale.com/>.

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marginalization of ideas that might genuinely be useful185. Often, idea crowdsourcing in practice results in the use of crowdsourcing platforms as a public feedback forum at risk of astroturfing or hijacking, rather than a genuine effort to contribute good ideas, though efforts to cultivate and curate smaller communities have proved useful in several experiments. There is also the problem of the sheer deluge of ideas- in the instance of the Obama transition teams crowdsourcing effort, staffers went through all 44,000 ideas, eventually releasing a 32-page report that summarized the ideas of promise186. The eventual impact of many of these ideas was still uncertain- while the crowdsourcing of ideas had been beneficial for public relations, its actual policy impact and value remains difficult to ascertain.

Citizens as Sensors
Governments have traditionally relied on citizens to gather information, be it through incident reports or annual census returns. Citizens participate by relaying critical information back to government to aid in government operations and processes, or provide information for policymaking. Perhaps the most notable example of this is in the design of the 911 system, that enables citizens to relay important and critical information to government with accuracy and timeliness, enabling emergency responders to operate. The expansion of infocommunication technologies have allowed for the expansion of this concept to other verticals beyond emergency incident reporting. Services such as SeeClickFix, FixMyStreet and Open311 allow users to submit

Owyang, Jeremiah. "Obama Crowdsources Daily Ideas with Citizens Briefing Book."Obama Crowdsources Daily Ideas with Citizens Briefing Book. Web Strategist. Web. 25 May 2012. <http://www.webstrategist.com/blog/2009/01/17/obama-crowdsources-ideas-with-citizens-briefing-book/>. Sifry, Micah. "You Can Be the Eyes and the Ears: Barack Obama and the Wisdom of Crowds." Open Government: [collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice] . By Daniel Lathrop and Laurel Ruma. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2010. Print
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non-emergency incidents such as potholes, graffiti or fix-it requests to local governments from their mobile phones or computers. In the aftermath of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill in 2011, an initiative called oil reporter crowdsourced oil spill reports from the public up and down the coast of the United States187, while a similar effort in Japan after the Fukushima nuclear disaster saw the development of the Safecast project, that crowdsourced radiation measurements from the public188.

Crowdsourcing Public Comments

The ability of the internet and communication technologies has allowed for the publishing and crowdsourcing of public comments on documents. While public commenting has been explored in several e-democracy efforts at the legislative level, recent initiatives have sought to incorporate such mechanisms in the workings of government agencies. Allowing for public input at the policy level allows for greater feedback about the smaller details of policy and policy implementation, and allows for the solicitation of expertise from citizens outside of government. Peer-to-Patent (as mentioned earlier) is an example of the incorporation of a public commenting system in the patent application system that allows expertise outside of government to raise and highlight issues and problems. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) publishes drafts of rulemaking for public comment, providing an online interface at their website for users to complain, comment or discuss about drafts of policy proposals189. Similar mechanisms have been adopted at many other government agencies, as part of the Open Government initiative. OpenTownHall, an online public comment platform for government has been adopted by over

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Deepwater Oil Reporter Crowdsourcing Platform. Web. 3 May 2012. <http://oilreporter.org/>. "Safecast." Safecast. Web. 18 May 2012. <http://blog.safecast.org/>. "Federal Communications Commission." Web. 04 May 2012. <http://www.fcc.gov/>.

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40 government agencies in the United States to power more than 700 online public forums, ranging from the state level to the municipal190.

Issues relating to Participatory and Collaborative Government

Increased risks of manipulation
While the opening of government to increased participation and collaboration allows for greater citizen engagement and harnessing of expertise outside of government, the same mechanisms also allow for increased risk of external manipulation of government. Barack Obamas effort to crowdsource ideas for his new administration, for instance, resulted in the politicization of the system with the top idea being for Obama to produce his birth certificate, a result of the efforts of the birther political movement191. Outsider participation in adhocracies brings up the relevant concerns of government data privacy and privileged information, as well as the risk that participants might have agendas to manipulate the direction of certain policy decisions. It is not difficult to imagine commercial interests using the Peer-to-Patent system to attempt manipulation in the patent process, or use public commenting systems on policy proposals to attempt to influence policies. The use of anonymous commenting systems, in particular, might make them especially susceptible to efforts at astroturfing (manipulation designed to give the appearance of

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"About Us." Open Town Hall. Web. 8 May 2012. <http://www.opentownhall.com/about_us>.

"Release Obama's Long Form Birth Certificate and Passport Records." OpenGov - Open Government Brainstorm. Web. 16 May 2012. <http://opengov.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Release-Long-Form-Birth-CertificatePassport-Records/5429-4049>.

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a grassroots movement)192. Such risks make the design of such participatory systems especially important, in the mitigation of the risks of external manipulation, while still allowing for external participation.

The increased load on government resources

Opening government to participation brings with it the corollary need for government resources to manage citizen input and participation. The increased expectation on the part of citizens for governments to respond to their input and participation requires governments to set aside manpower and resources to handle the input to avoid the risks of seeming unresponsive. The sheer scale of feedback might overwhelm systems and prevent the actual utilization of good public feedback. In a notable instance, the Federal Communications Commissions use of the open public commenting system resulted in 30,000 comments and an explosion of online debate over contentious issues such as net neutrality and piracy acts, with managing director Steve VanRoekel remarking that while the volume of comments had become a problem, as he only had a limited number of people to oversee the effort193.

Monbiot, George. "The Need to Protect the Internet from 'astroturfing' Grows Ever More Urgent." The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 29 June 0023. Web. 04 May 2012. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2011/feb/23/need-to-protect-internet-from-astroturfing>. Howard, Alex. "FCC.gov Poised for an Overdue Overhaul - O'Reilly Radar." FCC.gov Poised for an Overdue Overhaul - O'Reilly Radar. O'Reilly Media. Web. 1 May 2012. <http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/09/rebootingfccgov-with-open-gov.html>.
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7 The Goverati, and the Future

The Government 2.0 movement ultimately boils down to the growing number and influence of technologists around government, that Mark Drapeau, the Director of Innovative Engagement at Microsoft terms the Goverati. In the absence of the clear demarcation of what Government 2.0 is and is not, Government 2.0 is less about the manifestations of a putative movement, than a collection of initiatives by a group of government insiders and outsiders with a passion for applying technology and technological principles to government. The growth of this community through online networks such as GovLoop194, blogs such as TechPresident195 and OReilly Gov2.0 Radar196, as well as through organizations and initiatives such as the Open Government Partnership and Code for America have seen the spread of the ideas of the Goverati nationally and internationally. This increased influence, while beneficial in many of the aspects covered in this paper, also brings with it risks and hazards will likely become increasingly pertinent in the future.

Government, run as a Startup

It is unsurprising to find that with the increased number of technologists in government, aspects of startup culture have found their way into government. In the United States, the

Govloop is a social network for governments, aimed at federal, state and local government employees, and was founded by Stephen Ressler, an information specialist with the United States Department of Homeland Security. http://www.govloop.com. Techpresident, a blog started by Andrew Rasiej and Micah L. Sifry, monitors the use of technology at the political as well as the governmental level. http://www.techpresident.com. OReilly Gov2.0 Radar covers news and happenings in the Government 2.0 movement. http://radar.oreilly.com/gov2
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Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (set up in 2011) was touted as the federal agency [that is] also a startup197. In the United Kingdom, the Government Digital Service (GDS) was set up to ensure the government offers world-class digital products to meet the peoples needs, with director Mike Bracken promising to instill an organization culture of [behaving] like a large-scale start up, in stark contrast to the traditionally analogue Whitehall198. In many instances, this manifested in the bringing in of design and web talent that otherwise would have headed to Google or major web companies, as well as the adoption of Agile and iterative methods of product development that have characterized startups, as opposed to the traditional waterfall methods of government procurement199.

The rise of the Government CTO/CIO, and moral hazards

The appointment of Vivek Kundra and Aneesh Chopra as Chief Information Officer and Chief Technology Officer of the White House in 2009, saw the elevation of two members of President Obamas transition team to the White House. Since then, various levels of government ranging from the state to the municipal have seen the creation of posts specifically for technologists. In New York City, for instance, Rachel Sternes appointment as Chief Digital Officer saw her taking charge of New Yorks public engagement and Open Government efforts, while Jay Nath and Bryan Sivak served as Chief Innovation Officers of San Francisco and

"Booting up Startup.gov: Mint.com Meets Healthcare.gov at the New CFPB." Gov 2.0: The Power of Platforms. Web. 3 May 2012. <http://gov20.govfresh.com/booting-up-startup-gov-mint-com-meets-healthcaregov-at-the-new-cfpb/>. "About the Government Digital Service." Government Digital Service. Web. 18 May 2012. <http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/about/>. Agile software development is a group of software development methods based on iterative and incremental development, and utilize constant testing and short release cycles to continuously adapt their products.
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Maryland respectively, the former with the express goal of working with the technology community and the public to reinvent government in the digital age200.

Yet the potential for moral hazard is not easily ignored. Many former government IT leaders have gone into private enterprise after their government stints, often after establishing policies in government that create the demand for their products. While most of this has been done in fair faith in the interest of pursuing better technology, the possible moral hazard is likely to be the subject of increasing attention in future years. Vivek Kundra joined Salesforce, a cloud computing company shortly after leaving his post as the governments Chief Information Officer, during which stint he had overseen the adoption of cloud computing in government. This development was seen as a possible moral hazard by some, including government technologist Brand Niemann, who accused Kundra in an online article of missing the mark for not staying for an adequately long period to oversee the implementation of many of his initiatives, instead choosing to leave for Salesforce to [try] to market cloud computing back to government201. While Brands concerns proved to be unfounded (Kundra was assigned to run Salesforces emerging markets team, and was uninvolved with domestic IT purchases), similar concerns were raised for Vivek Kundras predecessor, Mark Forman, who had also started a cloud computing company, as well as for John Suffolk, the former Chief Information Officer of the United Kingdom, who joined Chinese firm Huawei as the global head of Cybersecurity202. As increasing

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"Jay Nath." Jay Nath. Web. 10 May 2012. <http://www.jaynath.com/>.

Niemann, Brand. "Vivek Kundra Missing The Mark Again? | Commentary." AOL Gov. Web. 22 May 2012. <http://gov.aol.com/2012/01/17/vivek-kundra-misses-the-mark-again/>. "Former US Government CIO Vivek Kundra Joins Salesforce." V3.co.uk. Web. 15 May 2012. <http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2137854/government-cio-vivek-kundra-joins-salesforce>.
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numbers of technologists move between government and the technology sector, the potential for moral hazard will become a risk that needs to be addressed and mitigated.

Moving out of beta: fissures and divisions?

As the Government 2.0 movement goes through its early stages, the increased divide between technologists as to the aims of their work may in the future lead to divides between the movement. Aneesh Chopra, the former Chief Technology Officer of the federal government, stated in an exit interview with The Atlantic magazine that he foresaw the open government movement splitting between the folks who want data to create products and the folks who want to hold [government] accountable203. Similarly, in a paper titled The New Ambiguity of Open Government, Harlan Yu and David Robinson draw the distinction between the hard political edge of Open Government, and the more politically neutral open government data of public sector disclosures that may have nothing to do with public accountability. They propose a separation of the politics of open government from the technologies of open data, seeking to separate the two separate issues altogether204. While the possible implications are yet to play out, the tension between a more technological vision and a decidedly-politicized one might result in differences in opinion in the design of government systems, and in interactions with governments.

Lipowicz, Alice. "Chopra Gives Exit Interview on Open Government, SOPA, Smart Grid -- Federal Computer Week." Chopra Gives Exit Interview on Open Government, SOPA, Smart Grid -- Federal Computer Week. 10 May 2011. Web. 04 May 2012. <http://fcw.com/articles/2012/02/06/chopra-sees-split-in-open-governmentcommunity.aspx>. Yu, Harlan, and David Robinson. "The New Ambiguity of 'Open Government'" UCLA Law Review Discourse. Web. 04 June 2012. <http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2012489>.
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The limits of analogy: Government != Google

The underlying tent of many technologists in government (and the Government 2.0 movement) has been in the translation of many of the best practices and ideas from the technology sector into the design of government mechanisms. As technology initiatives take off, there is the increasing danger of hubris and the belief that technologies and technological principles are always the appropriate course of action and can be applied uniformly to government. Yet this analogy might not be true in all cases. Andrea Di Maio, an analyst at Gartner Research, identifies several key characteristics that make governments different from many technology companies: its operation in a highly regulated environment, its differing motivations, its role in instances of market failure, and the need to reach out to a sizeable population that may include those with limited digital access, who are very different from the average internet user205. The Government, after all, is not Google, and with it technologists run the risks of translating technology and technological principles even in contexts where it is not pragmatic to do so. This is especially so when technology initiatives are presented with a certain messianic or evangelical zeal, that alienates traditional government practitioners. Recent articles such as Di Maios calling for the [retaking] of Open Government out of the hands of technologists can be construed in this light, and may be an issue of increased importance in the future work of technologists around government206.

"Andrea DiMaio." Why Government Is Not A Platform. Web. 04 May 2012. <http://blogs.gartner.com/andrea_dimaio/2009/09/08/why-government-is-not-a-platform/>. "Andrea DiMaio." Let s Take Open Government Out of The Hands of Technologists. Web. 04 May 2012. <http://blogs.gartner.com/andrea_dimaio/2012/05/18/lets-take-open-government-off-the-hands-of-technologists/>.
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