Gov 2.0 Week in Review

Data.gov 2.0, Law.gov, cloud computing at Apps.gov, open data, Facebook Communities and government, and the future of the Internet and democracy.

This past week in government 2.0 news was full, as always, particularly for this correspondent as the Gov 2.0 Expo comes to Washington next week. Bernard Kouchner may have written that the "universal spirit of the Enlightenment should run through the new media" but this week, the zeitgeist of the government information revolution online was powered by open data. As always, if you have comments or suggestions, please send them to alex@oreilly.com or reply to @digiphile on Twitter.

Data.gov 2.0

The news that earned the most headlines was of the relaunch of Data.gov, which has seen substantial growth and improvements since the U.S. federal government published the first data set at the online repository a year ago. Federal CIO Vivek Kundra called data.gov: "pretty advanced for a 1-year-old" at the White House blog and talked at length on Federal News Radio about the anniversary of the website. The best coverage of the relaunch came from Wired's sneak peak at the redesigned Data.gov. Read NextGov for another good take on the update to the nation's data warehouse. And on the first anniversary of Data.gov, the Sunlight Foundation officially announced the launch of the National Data Catalog.

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My Contrarian Stance on Facebook and Privacy

In a recent Inc Magazine live chat, I found myself, somewhat surprisingly even to me, defending Facebook regarding their ongoing and evolving privacy policy. Here's what I said:

The essence of my argument is that there's enormous advantage for users in giving up some privacy online and that we need to be exploring the boundary conditions - asking ourselves when is it good for users, and when is it bad, to reveal their personal information. I'd rather have entrepreneurs making high-profile mistakes about those boundaries, and then correcting them, than silently avoiding controversy while quietly taking advantage of public ignorance of the subject, or avoiding a potentially contentious area of innovation because they are afraid of backlash. It's easy to say that this should always be the user's choice, but entrepreneurs from Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg are in the business of discovering things that users don't already know that they will want, and sometimes we only find the right balance by pushing too far, and then recovering.

The world is changing. We give up more and more of our privacy online in exchange for undoubted benefits. We give up our location in order to get turn by turn directions on our phone; we give up our payment history in return for discounts or reward points; we give up our images to security cameras equipped with increasingly sophisticated machine learning technology. As medical records go online, we'll increase both the potential and the risks of having private information used and misused.

We need to engage deeply with these changes, and we best do that in the open, with some high profile mis-steps to guide us. In an odd way, Facebook is doing us a favor by bringing these issues to the fore, especially if (as they have done in the past), they react by learning from their mistakes. It's important to remember that there was a privacy brouhaha when Facebook first introduced the Newsfeed back in 2006!

What we're really trying to figure out are the right tradeoffs. And there's no question that there will be tradeoffs. The question is whether, in the end, Facebook is creating more value than they capture. I'm finding Facebook increasingly useful. And I think a lot of other people are too. Does anyone else see the irony in the screenshot below, from ReadWriteWeb's article More Web Industry Leaders Quit Facebook, Call for an Open Alternative:

Almost an order of magnitude more people have used Facebook's "Like" feature to approve of the suggestion to quit Facebook than have commented on the blog post!

That being said, T.S. Eliot's judgment (from Murder in the Cathedral) that

The last temptation is the greatest treason:
To do the right deed for the wrong reason.

danah boyd goes to the heart of the matter when she writes:

The battle that is underway is not a battle over the future of privacy and publicity. It’s a battle over choice and informed consent. It’s unfolding because people are being duped, tricked, coerced, and confused into doing things where they don’t understand the consequences. Facebook keeps saying that it gives users choices, but that is completely unfair. It gives users the illusion of choice and hides the details away from them “for their own good.”

There was an excellent editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle this morning, outlining the "user bill of rights" that Facebook's privacy policy ought to be based on:

Users have the right to:

1. Honesty: Tell the truth. Don't make our information public against our will and call it "giving users more control." Call things what they are.

2. Accountability: Keep your word. Honor the deals you make and the expectations they create. If a network asks users to log in, users expect that it's private. Don't get us to populate your network based on one expectation of privacy, and then change the rules once we've connected with 600 friends.

3. Control: Let us decide what to do with our data. Get our permission before you make any changes that make our information less private. We should not have data cross-transmitted to other services without our knowledge. We should always be asked to opt in before a change, rather than being told we have the right to opt out after a change is unilaterally imposed.

4. Transparency: We deserve to know what information is being disclosed and to whom. When there has been a glitch or a leak that involves our information, make sure we know about it.

5. Freedom of movement: If we want to leave your network, let us. If we want to take our data with us, let us do that, too. This will encourage competition through innovation and service, instead of hostage-taking. If we want to delete our data, let us. It's our data.

6. Simple settings: If we want to change something, let us. Use intuitive, standard language. Put settings in logical places. Give us a "maximize privacy settings" button, a and a "delete my account" button.

7. Be treated as a community, not a data set: We join communities because we like them, not "like" them. Advertise to your community if you want. But don't sell our data out from under us.

We need to heed the advice of management gurus Tom Peters and Esther Dyson. Tom reminds us to "Fail. Forward. Fast." Esther's tag line is Always make new mistakes. With that in mind, I'm willing to cut Facebook some slack. For now.

App contests are unlocking government innovation

Apps for Democracy co-creator on how app contests get government going.

In August, Army CIO Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Sorenson will announce the winner of the Apps for the Army Challenge. He'll be speaking about the progress of the contest at the Gov 2.0 Expo in Washington, D.C. next week. Regardless of which application wins the contest, however, the development of software by coders in the Army is an important case study in disruptive IT innovation. Creating application contests, especially for government entities, is no walk in the park, given the complex rules and regulations that govern procurement.

The man who may know the most about the nuts and bolts behind that process is Peter Corbett, the founder and CEO of iStrategyLabs an interactive agency based in DC. In the Government 2.0 world, Corbett is well-known for co-creating Apps for Democracy with Vivek Kundra, now federal CIO, and for his work on Transparency Camp, Government 2.0 Camp and civic entrepreneurship. An edited interview with Corbett on app contests, open data and innovation follows. For the raw take, you can also listen in to the embedded podcast.

What are your current projects?

Peter Corbett: At the moment, it's Digital Capital Week, a specific innovation initiative we've got here in the District. It's 3,000 plus people, all geeks and creatives, who want to make the city and world a better place. It'l be here June 11-20.

We're also doing Apps for the Army. When application development challenges wrap up and all of the apps are shown, that's when it really gets exciting.

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Open space data can improve lives (and save birds)

Jeanne Holm wants to see an international ontology for space data.

The spectacle of thousands of migratory birds is among the natural world's wonders. And the images of the Earth generated by NASA's network of weather satellites are among humanity's most breathtaking creations. [Satellite Image of Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge via NASA]

What happens when bird migrations are tracked using that advanced imaging technology and then mapped onto flight paths? Open government data leads to fewer bird strikes. That's of major interest to anyone who operates, flies on, or is otherwise associated with European air travel, given that the cost of bird strikes due to damage and delays for civilian aviation is estimated to be €1-2 billion.

I learned about this application of open data from Jeanne Holm, the former chief knowledge architect at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (she's since left to be communications and collaborations lead for Data.gov). Holm told me about FlySafe, a European Union initiative that's primarily led through ESA, the space agency.

"Space data is meant to help us understand the world around us," said Holm. "We share because people are asking for it and making a difference with it."

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The solutions to our big problems are in the network

"Sustainable Network" author Sarah Sorensen on global connectivity and positive change.

Massive issues around the environment, social change, and worldwide economies feel intractable. Where do we even begin?

What is a sustainable network?

Sarah Sorensen: Every network can be a sustainable network because it has the ability to be a sustainable platform for change. Unlike any technology that has come before it, the network is able to permeate all parts of the globe and establish new links and relationships between people, governments and economies.

Every network is also self-sustaining. In the book I call this the "The Sustainable Network Law," which states that: the more broadband that is made available, the faster network innovation occurs, the greater the opportunity is for creating change, and the greater the need is for even more bandwidth.

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Four short links: 21 May 2010

Evilbook, Design Story, Openness Rating, Web 2.0 Sharecropping

1. Infrastructures (xkcd) -- absolutely spot-on.
2. The Michel Thomas App: Behind the Scenes (BERG) -- not interesting to me because it's iPhone, but for the insight into the design process. The main goal here was for me to do just enough to describe the idea, so that Nick could take it and iterate it in code. He’d then show me what he’d built; I’d do drawings or further animations on top of it, and so on and so on. It’s a fantastic way of working. Before long, you start finishing each others’ sentences. Both of us were able to forget about distinguishing between design and code, and just get on with thinking through making together. It’s brilliant when that happens.
3. Open Government and the World Wide Web -- Tim Berners-Lee offered his "Five-Star" plan for open data. He said public information should be awarded a star rating based on the following criteria: one star for making the information public; a second is awarded if the information is machine-readable; a third star if the data is offered in a non-proprietary format; a fourth is given if it is in Linked Data format; a fifth if it has actually been linked. Not only a good rating system, but a clear example of the significantly better communication by semantic web advocates. Three years ago we'd have had a wiki specifying a ratings ontology with a union of evaluation universes reconciled through distributed trust metrics and URI-linked identity delivered through a web-services accessible RDF store, a prototype of one component of which was running on a devotee's desktop machine at a university in Bristol, written in an old version of Python. (via scilib on Twitter)
4. Data Access, Data Ownership, and Sharecropping -- With Flickr you can get out, via the API, every single piece of information you put into the system. Every photo, in every size, plus the completely untouched original. (which we store for you indefinitely, whether or not you pay us) Every tag, every comment, every note, every people tag, every fave. Also your stats, view counts, and referers. Not the most recent N, not a subset of the data. All of it. It’s your data, and you’ve granted us a limited license to use it. Additionally we provide a moderately competently built API that allows you to access your data at rates roughly 500x faster then the rate that will get you banned from Twitter. Asking people to accept anything else is sharecropping. It’s a bad deal. (via Marc Hedlund)

Make-offs: DIY indie innovations

How low-cost, open-source tools are energizing DIY.

DIY, or Do-It-Yourself, is not something that everyone thinks they can do but more people are doing it than you might think.

The DIY movement in science and technology is demonstrating that it can do inexpensively what large companies and even Big Science have spent millions doing. I call them "make-offs," low-budget knock-offs of scientific and industrial technology built with off-the-shelf components. It is a version of what China has been doing to America, benefiting from the R&D that goes into refining the specifications, developing prototypes and building a finished product. Only now, with new digital fabrication techniques and open source hardware and software, individuals and small companies are in a position to compete globally with a distinctly DIY approach to innovation. It's a new independent source of creative work, similar to what indie films are to Hollywood films developed in-house. It's open, collaborative and done on the cheap. And almost anyone can play, as you can see this weekend at the 5th Annual Maker Faire Bay Area.

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Four short links: 20 May 2010

New Take on Ubicomp, Language Insight, Sexy Viz, and iPad Usability

1. People are Walking Architecture -- presentation by Matt Jones of BERG, taking a new lens to this AR/ubicomp/whatever-it-is-today world. "[Mobile phones are] a whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities ...."
2. Lexicalist -- insight into geographic and age distribution of language use, based on Twitter data. (via Language Log)
3. Advanced Visualization Techniques -- nice overview of some non-standard visualization techniques. Short shameful confession: I love polar dendrograms with a passion. These techniques are to visualizers as algorithms and data structures to programmers: each is used in specific circumstances and compromises some things to gain in others. (via Flowing Data)
4. iPad Usability Report (Nielsen-Norman Group) -- 93-page report based on user studies. The iPad etched-screen aesthetic does look good. No visual distractions or nerdy buttons. The penalty for this beauty is the re-emergence of a usability problem we haven't seen since the mid-1990s: Users don't know where they can click. For the last 15 years of Web usability research, the main problems have been that users don't know where to go or which option to choose — not that they don't even know which options exist. With iPad UIs, we're back to this square one. (via Andrew Savikas)

What I like about the health care technology track at the Open Source convention

The list of sessions at the Open Source convention's health care track was published this week. We found it wonderfully gratifying to get so many excellent submissions in the brief three weeks that the Request for Proposals was up. Although the credentials of the presenters cover a lot of impressive accomplishments, my own evaluation focused on how the topics fit into four overarching areas we're following at O'Reilly:

• Patient-centered records, education, and activity
• Mobile devices to collect and distribute health care information
• Administrative efficiencies, which could range from automating a manual step in a process to revising an entire workflow to eliminate wasteful activities
• The collection, processing, and display of statistics to improve health care

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Applying social software to digital diplomacy at the U.S. State Department

How do you move from a culture of "need to know" to a culture of "need to share?" Richard Boly thinks about the answer to that question every day. Boly, a speaker at next week's Gov 2.0 Expo, is the director of the Office of eDiplomacy at the State Department. His office is an applied technology think tank within the agency that's focused on improving the agency's communication and knowledge sharing.

Boly is responsible for overseeing Virtual Presence Posts (VPPs), enterprise search, classified web publishing, and social networking, including the development of "StateBook." He recently spoke with me about all of these initiatives, as well as the cultural challenges of integrating social software into a large, distributed enterprise.

Given the online reach of people like Jared Cohen, Katie Stanton and Alec J. Ross, the U.S. State Department has already accumulated social media credibility. When coupled with the State Department's YouTube channel, official "Dipnote" blog , Facebook page, Flickr account, Second Life hub and RSS feeds, someone assessing "Government 2.0" success at the oldest executive agency in the United States might miss the importance of how social software is changing the way things work behind the firewall. Consider these numbers:

• Diplopedia, the State Department's enterprise wiki, has more than 11,000 articles, which are viewed by employees more than 35,000 times every week.
• Communities @ State includes 64 online communities, with 20 more on the way. State Department workers have posted more than 32,000 entries and comments to these blogs.
• The Secretary's Sounding Board, an idea generation platform, has suggestions for improving the Department from nearly 1,000 workers, including more than 6,000 comments.

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Four short links: 19 May 2010

Hiring Strategy, Data Catalogue Software, Web Frameworks, and Perl Lives

1. Google Hiring by the Lake Wobegon Strategy -- having just run some interviews myself, I recognise the wisdom in what they say. Another hiring strategy we use is no hiring manager. Whenever you give project managers responsibility for hiring for their own projects they'll take the best candidate in the pool, even if that candidate is sub-standard for the company, because every manager wants some help for their project rather than no help. That's why we do all hiring at the company level, not the project level. First we decide which candidates are above the hiring threshold, and then we decide what projects they can best contribute to. (via Hacker News)
2. CKAN 1.0 Released -- an open source registry system for datasets. It powers data.gov.uk and more than a half-dozen other national catalogues around the world.
3. jed's fab -- an all-Javascript web framework built on node.js, whose DSL looks suspiciously LISPish. (via Simon Willison)
4. Perl 5.12.1 Released -- lovely to see regular stable releases coming from the Perl line, and active development of the next versions with new features. 5.12 featured new work to help developers with APIs and versions, future proofing (literally: 2038 is no longer a bad year), DTrace support, and lots more.

Educational technology needs to grow like a weed

Want to scale education reform? Plant a tech seed and help it flourish.

Why do so many well-conceived education reform designs fail in implementation? For the same reason that old-school top-down software development fails in today's rapidly evolving Internet-based marketplaces.

In both cases there is an implicit false assumption that the designers can accurately predict what users will need in perpetuity and develop a static one-size-fits-all product. In response to that fallacy, both software development and education reform have developed agile models of adapting to unpredictable environments. Independently, these have failed to scale to their potential in the real-world trenches of the U.S. educational system. Interdependently, could they achieve the results that have so far eluded each?

Traditional education reform, like traditional engineering development, invests heavily in up-front design. In engineering, this makes sense when dealing with deliverables that are hard to change, like silicon, or when mistakes are not an option, as with space flight or medical technology. However, when the deliverable is malleable, as with consumer software, once the market starts to change the implementer is trapped between the choice of piling modification upon modification until the initial design is completely obscured, or plowing ahead unswervingly only to deliver a product that is obsolete on delivery. The software developer is destined to be outperformed by more nimble developers who can adapt effectively to changing market needs, new information, and an evolving industry.

Similarly, education reform interventions are rigidly constrained. To prove a treatment's effectiveness, research needs to demonstrate that one particular variable in a messy human dynamic environment is responsible for a change in student outcomes. This means that an educator and his/her students must behave precisely as designed in order for the research to be valid. Tremendous resources are spent in these kinds of trials to ensure "fidelity of implementation." In this situation, the educator is trapped between the choice of corrupting trial data by changing the implementation to meet the changing needs of students and the environment, or plowing ahead only to limit the good he/she can do for students to the lowest, common, measurable denominator.

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Recent Posts

• Four short links: 18 May 2010 | by Nat Torkington on May 18, 2010
• Mobile operating systems and browsers are headed in opposite directions | by Jason Grigsby on May 17, 2010
• Four short links: 17 May 2010 | by Nat Torkington on May 17, 2010
• Disintermediation: The disruption to come for Education 2.0 | by Rob Tucker on May 14, 2010
• Gov 2.0 Week in Review | by Alex Howard on May 14, 2010
• Using technology to support global education | by Lucy Gray on May 14, 2010
• Four short links: 14 May 2010 | by Nat Torkington on May 14, 2010
• White House moves Recovery.gov to Amazon's cloud | by Alex Howard on May 13, 2010
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• Announcing The Emerging Languages Camp at OSCON | by Brady Forrest on May 12, 2010