Author of machiavelli.net, proud father of three, interested in shaping network society. Welcome to my blog.Ed Felten’s Invisible Hand
…just in case you have not yet read it, but are interested in the relationship between transparency, technology, and public policy do read Government Data and the Invisible Hand by Ed Felten and friends (Yale Journal of Law & Technology, Vol. 11, p. 160, 2009).The full text is available at the Social Science Research Network.
If the next Presidential administration really wants to embrace the potential of Internet-enabled government transparency, it should follow a counter-intuitive but ultimately compelling strategy: reduce the federal role in presenting important government information to citizens. Today, government bodies consider their own websites to be a higher priority than technical infrastructures that open up their data for others to use. We argue that this understanding is a mistake. It would be preferable for government to understand providing reusable data, rather than providing websites, as the core of its online publishing responsibility.
Rather than struggling, as it currently does, to design sites that meet each end-user need, we argue that the executive branch should focus on creating a simple, reliable and publicly accessible infrastructure that exposes the underlying data. Private actors, either nonprofit or commercial, are better suited to deliver government information to citizens and can constantly create and reshape the tools individuals use to find and leverage public data. The best way to ensure that the government allows private parties to compete on equal terms in the provision of government data is to require that federal websites themselves use the same open systems for accessing the underlying data as they make available to the public at large.
