One of the many powers of the web is it offers easy mass communication. In a world filled with 140 character Twitter messages, though, some of the earlier web technologies, like web portals, email, instant messaging, and RSS, now feel like yesterday. Or even the day before.
Combine this with the arrival of a new president promoting openness and transparency, and the opportunity for innovation using this new mass communication feels like it is upon us in a big way. And one of the many areas where this innovation is occurring is in government itself.
It's called open government.
Open government goes something like this: government is made up of large, complicated, inefficient organizations. Rather than government organizations building more computer systems for communicating with the public, open up internal government systems to the web and let the public take care of the rest. Send a tweet Instead of filling out a form to report a pothole, or in NYC by calling 311. And rather than going to a web portal (like www.nyc.gov), government can be freed from these responsibilities by opening its computer systems so that the public can develop its own computer systems using mass communication tools and data provided by government. Fred Wilson, the NYC-based venture capitalist, in a recent post illustrates the possibilities by using his Blackberry to snap a photo of a pothole, uploading it to Yahoo's Fickr, and twittering its location to a public address accessible by everyone, including the city. Fred's scenario is hypothetical, at this point, but exciting.
The Sunlight Foundation, the pioneering not-for-profit focused on open government, recently held a contest where developers submitted applications they built using openly available government data. The result was some really useful applications that government agencies could never build. Take a look at Fillibusted and Legistalker to see two of the contest winners. Both systems could have real effect on the legislative process.
In NYC there is currently growing energy around an idea called Open 311. It pits yesterday's idea of "e-government" against today's "Open Government". The power of e-government was that it improved the public's ability to transact business with government thru the phone and the web. In NYC the e-gov focus was on creating a unified customer service center and eliminating the frustration and impossibility of searching thru city agencies to find what you needed. It was a big winner for the city, and for Mayor Bloomberg.
With Open 311 the idea is to chop off pieces of services offered by the city that the public can do better and cheaper using Twitter, Flickr and other mass communication tools. Plus, as Sunlight has shown, Open 311 would surely attract software developers with an itch for civic activity to work for free.
Now, governments like NYC taking in information may be harder than making information available. For example, a pothole is not just a pothole. The NYC DOT web site explains that there a number of different kinds of "street defects" in addition to potholes, like cave-ins, hummocks, and others, and that there are multiple agencies who may be responsible. A 311 operator has the advantage of a computerized "knowledgebase" (which the city spent a lot of effort developing) on his/her desktop to engage a caller with specific questions. The DOT's web site has structured forms that capture data in a way that is useful to them. A Fickr photo and a Twitter message, which doesn't have to follow the rigid structure of a form, may not enable DOT to find and fill the hole in the street. So, these kinds of details would need to get sorted out between the public and the city.
MikeBloomberg get ready. Open Government just might be able to provide you -- and the city -- with some new wins. (133 characters)
