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Government CXO

Beth Noveck, former US Deputy CTO in interview: part three

By Laurence Millar | 23 March 2011

There are three components that need to be in place for success of Open Government Data – the supply of data by government, the software tools, and the demand from outside users. What do you think is needed outside government to make open government successful?

The size of the US makes it easier to build a community than it is in smaller countries like New Zealand. As the availability of data grows, we will need more people who can use the data, and I am delighted that every day the number of people who want access to the data seems to grow. I recently co-hosted a Transportation Camp - we had to close registration at 300, a mix of geeks and wonks – technical people and policy policy – there to exchange strategies for social change.

So what is needed? You need more information literate people - students, journalists, activists - who have the skills and capacity to make things from data. They can come from different places and professions, from the dot-com sector as much as from the .org sector.

Secondly, we need an understanding of the connections between economic opportunities and open government data. First and foremost, we do open data because it is the right thing to do in a democratic government system - you get better informed policy-making, and more accountable government. There is the added benefit of generating economic value and the creation of new professional opportunities for people by using government datasets. As we see more entrepreneurial activity, the payback will become clearer, and that will attract more people to do things using government data.

It is a very reciprocal process; the more people do with government data, the more impetus that gives to government officials to do the hard work to make the data available. It is not easy, even with the best political will in the world. You have to have servers, to have metadata, to get through the internal hurdles - putting data online is not as automatic as it may seem. More productive capacity outside government builds the impetus and priority to do more.

The journalism industry needs to be more numerate and have better visualisation skills, using government data to support the traditional watchdog function of the Fourth Estate. We need universities to train more students in quantitative and technical skills, empowering them to use those on government data, and encouraging and helping to articulate projects and opportunities. We also need government to make suggestions – “here is a good idea of what you could do with this data” - although people may do ten different things you didn’t expect, it is important to plant some seeds of productive ideas.

And then we need more venture capital and financing for people who are building businesses using government data.

Starting from the ideas of building social capital and reducing the democratic deficit, you say that it is important to identify the economic value. Open Government Data needs to be sustainable in the medium term, and new business opportunities bring jobs, bring tax revenue and start to feed themselves, giving a return on government investment.

There is also the need for grants and foundation funding to enable the development of tools and applications, which are starting to replace the research activities of the old world. We need organisations that see how to achieve the same goals that were previously achieved by writing research reports. Some foundations are inclined to fund technology, but others are not yet ready.

Two more ideas. The first is a point that Tom Steinberg makes. Out of the profusion of very nice apps, we can expect a community to emerge (for example the crisis commons) that will join the apps together, take the initiatives, curate them and turn them into a movement. In transportation, you don’t need 100 different iPhone apps to tell you when the bus is coming. If you start with a dozen apps, they can come together in a single platform. This is an exciting combination of small-scale and large-scale innovation.

The other idea is to understand what non-technical people can do. It’s great that there are opportunities for software developers to do mash ups. But there is other important work – tracking data, figuring out how to improve the system, or coming up with ideas of tools that could be built. I think we will see a second stage of growth - in the same way that a lot of this collaborative activity started off in the open source community and has found its way into other social practices. Similarly for open government data - it started with the geeks, from them to the artists, from them to the public …. and the policymakers will be last (laughs). There will be a natural evolution which engages other people and enhances their education.

In New Zealand, it’s been interesting seeing the way volunteers behave when they join the Christchurch Recovery Map community – a site that built on the crisiscommons experience to respond to the major earthquake in February. The volunteers start off with a degree of nervousness because the conversation was mainly ‘geek speak’, but very quickly they start to make suggestions for improvements and new ideas. Your idea of extending the circle beyond the usual suspects is important to embed open data into the wider community.

This is the future of media. We’re never going to have a world where everybody is statistically illiterate. You will always need interpreters who stand between data and the public - they translate wholesale data into retail, they create the picture and the narrative. Having more people who are capable of doing that is an exciting opportunity.

Government in the past has been both the wholesaler of data and the only retailer. But the more retailers you have, the more you can provide different options to the public for consumption.

I agree, but exactly the opposite argument gets made all the time: People will distort the data; create different versions of the facts; and therefore we, the government, need to be in the business of providing The Truth - as if the government itself doesn’t engage in selective publication already. Government doesn’t have a monopoly on all the right answers and interpretations and needs to recognise the value of different analyses.