Author of machiavelli.net, proud father of three, interested in shaping network society. Welcome to my blog.XML-Dumping and the Data Liberation Front
I am in Chamonix right now, working on my book Shaping-Network-Society. There are lots of little tidbits of insights that I have posted to this blog over the last years and so yesterday night, I had the idea of downloading all entries and then picking and choosing what would be useful for the book.
There is a function in WordPress to download all blog-entries as .pdfs. Which I did, but when starting to copy-paste, I was confronted with lots of annoying formatting problems. So I decided to do an xml-dump, hoping it would be easier to parse through hundreds of pages in a word processor. This is what I got:
...<guid isPermaLink="false">http://importer9.wordpress.com /2006/08/04/governance-in-network-society/</guid> [CDATA[On Monday, I was in Mexico City, invited by Lourdes (the president of CIAPEM)
Now of course, I know that technically, there are many things I could do with the xml-file. But the questions that the Google Data Liberation Front asks of any online service are pertinent in today’s network society.
- Can I get my data out at all?
- How much is it going to cost to get my data out?
- How much of my time is it going to take to get my data out?
Think about if you ever would want to leave Facebook, Picassa, Twitter, Gmail, or Xing, but take your data with you. These questions are fundamental to our network societies and clearly express the political tension between networks as choice communities and the path dependency inherent in the participation in networks.
These issues are much more important to society in the 21st Century than the silly debate on if Journalism will survive the internet. Should we be worried that Google seems to be one of the few political theorists of network society? Will we refer to them as the distributed/crowd-sourced Thomas Hobbes of their time in 300 years? Or is this taken directly out of Monthy Python’s Life of Brian?
Distributed Leadership for Open Value Creation
Distributed leadership is an important puzzle piece for making open value creation work. The internet gives us the tools to create open value, but that does not mean we will all be great at using them. In the following MIT-lecture, Marshall Ganz outlines the distributed leadership approach they used in the Obama campaign. In a nutshell, he argues that (a) we need to develop a motivation narrative/story, then (b) focus on relationship building by constructing commitments to common purpose, (c) structure transparent and open organizational processes and roles, (d) strategize, and (e) act (=produce measurable outcomes).
“In the Obama campaign, there was no internet strategy, there was strategy that used internet tools.”
The Long Telegram of the 21st Century
There are not many instances when a governmental memo shaped the political philosophy of a generation. Clearly Kennan’s Long Telegram comes to mind:
The ‘Long Telegram’ was sent by George Kennan from the United States Embassy in Moscow to Washington, where it was received on February 22nd 1946. The telegram was prompted by US enquiries about Soviet behaviour, especially with regards to their refusal to join the newly created World Bank and International Monetary Fund. In his text, Kennan outlined Soviet belief and practice and proposed the policy of ‘containment‘, making the Telegram a key document in the history of the Cold War. The name ‘long’ derives from the telegram’s 8000 word length. (quote from About.com)
The social media community believes Obama’s Transparency/Participation/Collaboration memo will have a similar impact on our century. The framework implied in the memo has been taken up governments worldwide, real world policies have been implemented, and the “access-to-information-legislation” topic has moved from arcane to center field. It is surprising, however, that not much is known about the background/history of the memo. Who drafted it? Who developed the TPC framework? Who brought the topic onto the agenda? Who knows more? Who can point me to the relevant people?
Government 2.0 Barcamp Berlin
The countdown has started for the Government 2.0 Barcamp in Berlin (August 27/28). Join us, because the event can radically transform our thinking about public adminstration and government in the 21st Century. The German interior ministry and other policy makers will be there to discuss new forms of ideation, deliberation, and collaboration with us.
The interior ministry has tasked my team and me to document and reflect the discussions we will be having. We will be setting up a blogging platform (anyone interested in joining the team?) at the Center for Public Management and Governance and we will aggregate your #g20c tweets, interviews, ideas, etc. into a publication. Please twitter and comment at the site!
We plan to do two documents a documentation of the event and a more in-depth study of collaborative governance.
I am proud to announce that our team has just recently been joined by Bernie Krieger (Phd, Cambridge in Cyberanthropology), Holger Kindler (MPP, ESPP), Justus Lenz (MPP, ESPP), Violetta Pleshakova (MPP, ESPP) and Ksenia Meshkova, (MPP, ESPP). Other members are Sebastian Haselbeck (ESPP), Elisa Rebrin (ESPP), Sophie van Hüllen (University of Erfurt) and Sven Welters (University of Erfurt). You will greatly enjoy talking with them in Berlin!
The Logic of Open Value Creation
In 2009 we are confronted with new public policy and management approaches in mediated policy initiation and formulation (Obama’s Open Government Initiative), distributed intelligence gathering (the US intelligence communities Intellipedia), crowdsourcing of accountability (The Guardian’s British Parliament invoice scandal platform), or peer produced political campaigning (the Obama Campaign), and even social media enhanced revolutions (Iran).
Not everything government does can be addressed by these new mechanisms, but with technologically mediated open value creation we have been handed a powerful tool to make the world a better place. O’Reilly asks the pertinent questions in Forbes:
How does government itself become an open platform that allows people inside and outside government to innovate? How do you design a system in which all of the outcomes aren’t specified beforehand, but instead evolve through interactions between the technology provider and its user community?
The idea of government as a platform necessitates an open value creation process.
Open Value Creation consists of Open Policy Making and an Open Value Chain.
The distinction is slightly arbitrary but useful. It allows us to differentiate between coming up with a value generating process (policy) and repeatedly creating the value (value chain).
- Open policy making aims to open all aspects of the policy process (initiation, formulation, implementation, evaluation) to outside inputs and scrutiny. It assumes that this allows better informed policy making that is more legitimate and less costly.
- The open value chain opens the implementation process (inputs, process, outputs, impact, outcome) to outside contributions under the assumption that a co-produced public value is less costly and more effective.
Open value creation can be achieved if it is applied in all phases of the policy cycle and the value chain. At the Erfurt School of Public Policy we refer to the IDCA framework (ideation, deliberation // collaboration, accountability) for this purpose:
1. Ideation (policy)
Ideation is the process of collectively coming up with ideas and developing them. What is need is a platform that allows participants to post ideas, to comment, and to weed out the bad apples.
2. Deliberation (policy)
We understand deliberation best, because it has its analog in the offline world and there is sufficient text about it. The idea is to create a space in which the better argument and not the structurally advantaged position wins. What is needed is a platform to present ideas, discuss them both syn- and diachronically, and to weigh them in concordance with the underlying governance principle (think Digg-style, Reddit-style, or IMDB-style).
3. Collaboration (value chain)
We have most difficulties with collaboration, because it is new. Collaboration allows access to the work-flow by self-selected outsiders. The idea is to make the work flow modular, granular, and redundant, so that very different contributions can be integrated without endangering the quality of the output. A collaboration platform must be governed by a combination of self-enforcing code, simple but strong core principles, and an inclusive culture (think Canonical’s Launchpad or Wikipedia).
4. Accountability (value chain)
Accountability is often not well understood. We see it as a danger and not a strategic asset. By accounting to our stakeholders we decrease our error rates by adding free expertise and increase legitimacy, and public pride and ownership.
Core Technologies of Open Value Creation
Open value creation is possible because of new technologies that allow us to structure idea generation and information aggregation in digital form.
The core technologies of open value creation are the wiki (principle-based, user-generated platforms, with flexible moderation capacity), the forum (question driven user-generated knowledge platform), blogging (core message with feedback/discourse loop), and work flow management and visualization tools (Government resource planning, government process mapping tools, think SAP, Oracle, SugarCRM, etc.). Together they allow us to structure policy and administrative public value creation processes, by enhancing ideation (idea-generation), deliberation (commenting and discussion), collaboration (generating public values), and accountability (parsing data to hold government accountable).
How to implement such projects?
By combining these modular core technologies into custom-tailored open policy and value creation platforms organizations can address the challenges they are facing and capture the hearts and minds of local, national, and international stakeholders.
- Agree on set of principles for all policy and adminstrative processes according to the framework.
- Provide a set of (open source) tools to all parts of government responsible for implementation.
- Put together an inter-functional consulting group that helps cross-functional implementation.
At the moment we are working on several such projects with municipal (participatory budgeting, crowdsourcing security), state level (knowledge management, cross-border collaboration), and federal level stakeholders (legal ramifications of new forms of collaboration, strategy development) worldwide. So if you have an interesting project, please comment about your experience or send us an email!
The Hyper-Reflective Web: Revisiting My last 20 Tweets
As we are realizing that network society is contingent on technology, but not on specific technologies (such as email, friendster, myspace, facebook, twitter), we are learning to work and play across and beyond specific social media. For me, the integration of my blog with twitter and facebook has led to a conversation that takes place in hyperspace online and offline in lectures, at conferences, and on trails in the Alps. So as an exercise in such intertextual hyper-reflexivity, let me mirror my last 20 tweets (often links to my blog) on my blog and then twitter about it:
- @zephoria is calling for epistemological open-mindedness when analyzing social networks: http://tinyurl.com/nel2k5 #networksociety2 minutes ago from TwitterFox
- @chr1sa Will professional journalists become extinct? The Spiegel interviews Chris Anderson with naive indignity: http://tinyurl.com/macgqfabout 21 hours ago from TwitterFox
- @arenda @rmmdc @tocat @kohenari thank u for ur tweets on socialtheory/socialmedia: http://bit.ly/muSyo need more constitutive theorizing!10:21 AM Jul 25th from web
- Do social media need political philosophy and social theory? http://tinyurl.com/kmvyk7 #opengov #gov20 #radicaltransparency #socialmedia11:15 PM Jul 24th from TwitterFox
- @ U Beck’s #Future-of-Modernity Symposium: fine-grained analysis of contemporary society, completely ignoring the social media elephant.9:47 AM Jul 24th from TwitterFox
- discussing the IDC-Framework (ideation, deliberation, collaboration): http://tinyurl.com/q74b7d #gov20 #social media #ogi #opengov #web2011:19 AM Jul 23rd from TwitterFox
- Radical Transparency as Management Strategy? http://bit.ly/9Z6e5 #gov20 #opengov #enterprise20 #web20 #transparency #radical transparency4:04 PM Jul 21st from TwitterFox
- I will address the ESPP Graduates tonight (www.espp.de). What should I tell these future public policy entrepreneurs from over 20 countries?11:57 AM Jul 17th from TwitterFox
- CDC has a chilling year-by-year visualization of obesity trends from 1985 to 2008: http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/…11:11 AM Jul 17th from TwitterFox
- A necessary reality check on the Government 2.0 Hype by A. Schellong: http://www.iq.harvard.edu/b… #gov20 #opengov via @schellong11:25 AM Jul 14th from TwitterFox
- Carl Malamud and the struggle for open sourcing the code of law: http://tinyurl.com/leqvxd #opengov #malamud #vivek kundra11:11 AM Jul 14th from TwitterFox
- When the world is changing, we need to re-learn how to read-write engaging manifestos: http://tinyurl.com/lhavfj #generation m #manifesto8:49 PM Jul 13th from TwitterFox
- How to structure governmental online deliberation processes: http://tinyurl.com/mthmov #deliberation #collaboration #gov20 #opengov11:17 AM Jul 13th from TwitterFox
- Learning by Historical Analogy: Lessons from Information Revolution 1.0: http://tinyurl.com/ns63rq #infosociety #web20 #gov2010:48 PM Jul 12th from TwitterFox
- Reflecting the Rise of the Ideation Platform (with Justus Lenz) http://tinyurl.com/lc8hl2 #opengov #gov203:14 PM Jul 11th from TwitterFox
- Sofia Elizondo (BCG) on the End of Classical Strategy: http://tinyurl.com/mrwzq4 #enterprise20 #strategy #BCG9:24 PM Jul 7th from TwitterFox
- Aristotle Reloaded: Beth Noveck challenging representative and deliberative democracy: http://tinyurl.com/neym7u #opengov #gov201:18 PM Jul 7th from TwitterFox
- Do RSS our family-stream at: http://picasaweb.google.com… and write a guest blog for http://www.shapingnetworkso…8:44 PM Jul 6th from web
- Will teach gov20 strategy to 70 austrian mayors in 1 hour. Anything specific I should say? #socialmedia #gov203:29 PM Jun 26th from TwitterBerry
- Is engineering finally permeating governance? http://tinyurl.com/lx79an #gov20 #engineering #governance #techcrunch #auren hoffman12:12 PM Jun 24th from TwitterFox
Is there an added value in such an exercise? Or is this just part of the new recycling game we are playing?
Network Society and the Futures of Modernity
I just spent the day at the Futures of Modernity Symposium in Munich, held in honor of Ulrich Beck, the grand sociologist and author of Risk Society (1992). The idea of the event was:
Throughout the world, contemporary societies are facing the challenges posed by a set of heterogeneous phenomena of social change which are not only placing existing convictions and interpretations in question, but are already creating new and multiple realities that escape the established categories of thought. The emerging outlines of a Cosmopolitan World Risk Society cannot be grasped in terms yesterday’s sociology which takes its orientation from industrial society in the nation-state and from the exclusiveness of European (i.e. Western) modernity. Nevertheless, the multitude of social phenomena which point to epochal transitions towards a new future open up novel horizons of critical analysis and discussion and pose a range of pressing questions that must be addressed today if we are to be ready for the challenges of tomorrow.
It was a great event, however, I was shocked that nobody spoke about the emancipatory potential or the totalitarian dangers of new forms of technologically mediated ideation, deliberation, and collaboration. New forms of collective action such as peer production, crowd-sourcing, and networked governance were completely ignored, as if all that had happened recently was the 40th anniversary of the landing on the moon and the 20th of the fall of the Berlin Wall. What about Twitter, the opening of the Facebook stream APIs, or the Open Government Initiative? :)
Ulrich Beck’s main thesis is that we live in a second modernity. Modernity for Beck is the move to instrumental rationality (ends-means rationality) as the main mode of thinking. This means during modernity (roughly 17th to the end of the 20th century) the aim was to control nature and human institutions to reduce risks to our societies.
Second modernity develops when we realize that we cannot control all risks because the complexity of institutions we created to control risks, states, the financial markets, insurance companies, nuclear energy, or genetic engineering, themselves create new uncontrollable and global risks.
Beck states that in second modernity we have left modernity, but cannot go back to premodern forms: all flavors of fundamentalisms (Christian, Islamic, or other) are modern responses to the challenges of our age not premodern uprisings. He also warns that post-modernity neither gives substantive answers to the challenges that risks confront us with, nor to the inequalities of our worlds. This means we are effectively living in a Gramscian interregnum.
This framework of risk society allows us to describe all types of phenomena from the injustice of the subcontracting in the global supply chain to the risk propensity of Wall Street bankers that show no remorse about their actions, explaing responsibility away by calling it “systemic failure.†Because these human manufactured uncertainties are of planetary nature, Beck calls for cosmopolitan Realpolitik as a response to the challenges of second modernity. He asks, how can national states re-conquer a state-political meta power vis-à -vis those economic actors – in order to force a cosmopolitical regime upon world-political capital that includes political freedom, global justice, social security, and ecological sustainability?
And here is where I would want to disagree. It is not by re-awakening early modern zombies that will save the planet.
The emancipatory power of concepts like radical transparency, open collaboration, and network governance stems from an emerging new paradigm in social theory. Unfortunately, at this point there is no enough political philosophy or social theory discussion on this important topic, which will probably shape human societies for the next 300 years.
Clearly, it is time to collaborate on this “beyond modern” planetary political theory and public policy project!
Discussing the IDC Framework: Ideation, Deliberation, and Collaboration
as we are learning to use social media in organizations, we overestimate some aspects of this new approach and are confused about others: What is new, what is not? What is hype, what is real? Therefore, it is a time for careful definitional work. Yesterday, Andy Blumenthal, the CIO of the FBI did this in an article in Government Technology where he outlined the difference between communication and collaboration:
Information technology has traditionally been about “communication” of information — capturing it, processing it, moving it, storing it, finding it and using it. But now, with Web 2.0, we have evolved from communication to “collaboration.” Well, what’s the difference?
…the real difference between communication and collaboration seems to be related to an organizational and cultural transformation taking place…
We’ve always communicated. But much of the communication was within our own stovepipes — particularly within our own chain of command — to our bosses, staffs or peers primarily within the same organizational function. That was where most of our communication took place — in our organizational verticals.
Now, however, we are transforming from mainly vertical communication to the horizontal collaboration. We are breaking down the stovepipes, which one of my colleagues euphemistically calls “silos of excellence,” and we are instead working across organizational and functional boundaries — hence, we are doing some genuine collaboration!
This is a useful conversation starter and it reminds us of that we are still only learning to “collaborate.†I want to distinguish between three modes of technology-enabled collaboration: Ideation, deliberation, and collaboration, what I refer to at the ESPP as the IDC framework.
All three are useful to governments (and business) when confronted with specific policy issues. Often but not always, you might start out with an ideation phase, move to a deliberation phase, and then to collaboration, the classical example is the Open Government Initiative. Of course, collaboration and deliberation is part of ideation and vice versa, but on the project level, they can be clearly distinguished.
Ideation
ideation is the process of collectively coming up with ideas and developing them. What is need is a platform that allows participants to post ideas, to comment, and to weed out the bad apples.
Deliberation
we understand deliberation best, because it has its analog in the offline world and there is sufficient text about it (Aristotle, Habermas, Sunstein come to mind). The idea is to create a space in which the better argument and not the structurally advantaged position wins. What is needed is a platform to present ideas, discuss them both syn- and diachronically, and to weigh them in concordance with the underlying governance principle (think Digg-style, Reddit-style, or IMDB-style).
Collaboration
we have most difficulties with collaboration, because it is new. Collaboration allows access to the work-flow by self-selected outsiders. The idea is to make the work flow modular, granular, and redundant, so that very different contributions can be integrated without endangering the quality of the output. A collaboration platform must be governed by a combination of self-enforcing code, simple but strong core principles, and an inclusive culture (think Canonical’s Launchpad or Wikipedia).
What do you think? What would a full-fledged framework look like? Is it mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive (MECE)?
Strategizing Radical Transparency
Sometimes very simple ideas are counter-intuitive. Radical transparency clearly is one of them. Let me define the concept, ask why one would want (not) to go “radically transparent,†and how to implement the strategy.
What is radical transparency?
Radical transparency is a management approach in which all decision making is carried out publicly and the work flow has open application interfaces. It is a radical departure from existing processes, where (a) decision making was never fully open, to ensure security and the discretion of the decision makers and (b) the work flow was a black box, where outside intervention would be looked upon as outside meddling.
| Decision Making (policy cycle) | Ensure access to draft documents, allow commenting, and include the public in final decisions. |
| Work Flow (implementation process) | Design application interfaces that allow the public to access the work flow in real time, participate in a granular and modular fashion, and |
What is the value added of the approach?
It is important to realize that radical transparency is not a requirement put upon a process from outside stakeholders, but an actively chosen strategy. So why go transparent? Radical transparency impacts value identification, capacity, and legitimacy of any project.
| Value definition | Value definition profits from the wider discussion. Group think is potentially avoided. |
| Legitimacy | It increases legitimacy, because stakeholders are involved in the decision making process and trust is increased. |
| Capacity | Capacity is increased if radical transparency allows you to integrate “self-selected experts†into your decision cycle and resulting work flow. It saves costs! |
When to apply it?
As with any management strategy, radical transparency is not a panacea. So the question is what types of problems are amenable to the approach and what types of problems are better left in the dark.
| Coordination Issues | In today’s world, many issues are coordination issues. The legitimacy and quality of standard-setting will approve dramatically. |
| Consensus Building | Many issues today have become trans-national and cross-sectoral. This means that there are no established and institutionalized decision making procedures. In such situations, radical transparency can dramatically increase the legitimacy (and effectiveness) of the procedures. |
| Uncovering distributed expertise | In today’s world expertise is not anymore monopolized by professionals. However, finding this distributed expertise is expensive. By utilizing radical transparency (in combination with functioning quality control), one allows for self-selection of expertise. |
| Utilizing the love of the amateurs | There are topics where we know that amateurs will be very willing to cooperate. Think of the inclusion of amateur astronomers in the identification of new meteors. |
When to not apply it?
There are other issues, where it is best not to pursue a radical transparent approach:
| Security | If radical transparency endangers (national) security, the topic should be off-topic. However, it makes sense to clearly and openly delineate the boundaries of such limitations. |
| Privacy | If there is no way of ensuring the anonymity of data and if the issue would impact the privacy of individuals, the approach should not be used. |
| Secrecy | If the competitiveness of an enterprise depends on the secrecy of the process (think the Coca Cola formula), radical transparency shall not be used. |
| Design | If the design of the output should follow a specific (totalitarian) idea, it is not sensible to open up the process. Apple Computers uses this approach. |
| Capture | If the platform is relevant enough that it can be captured by off-topic participants, management of the process becomes tedious. This has happened with the UFO believers and the Obama birth certificate debaters on the Open Government Initiative. |
How to design radically transparent procedures (a rough guide to implementation)?
|
Scope |
Define what data you will free. |
|
Trajectory |
Explain the limitations explicitly, outline the next steps to full transparency. |
|
Open Access |
Make sure you make all data available in machine-readable format, ideally in real-time. Do not massage or edit it! |
|
Engagement Principles |
Do not define who will be able to access your data, let your collaborators self-select. But, define standards for participation, do this in code and convention. |
|
Moderation |
Structure the conversation, define expectations, but allow for flexibility and participation in the debate about the core principles of the collaboration. Do not ask open questions like “what do you think of Europe? How do we integrate minorities?†|
| Reflexivity | Design reflexivity into the process. Use work flow mapping and meta-data on the deliberation processes to mirror the community back at its members. Sophistication will increase. |
The Politics of Open Sourcing Governance
Carl Malamud is a public domain advocate heading public.resource.org. His approach is the publication of public domain information from local, state, and federal government agencies. Over the years the publication of governmental data has become a surprisingly lucrative business for niche publishers. The gain of open access to the general public is distributed, while the loss of a revenue stream to the individual publishers is very clearly felt, so they have invested a lot to prevent the government from opening up.
His latest letter to the US CIO and CTO is a great example of the types of political battles we will be seeing all over the world in the years to come.
Dear Mr. Kundra and Mr. Chopra:
I am writing to request your assistance in making available at no charge and for bulk
access two of the most important legal databases maintained by the executive branch:Publications in the Federal Register System, maintained by the National Archives
and Records Administration (NARA).Patents, maintained by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).
While the U.S. government maintains a minimal web presence for both databases,
those web sites are only useful for casual browsing. In both cases, the underlying
source code for the documents is only available for substantial fees.
A yearly subscription to the Code of Federal Regulations for bulk access to the “SGMLâ€
source code with images is $17,000/year. The same $17,000 fee applies to other
NARA databases such as the Federal Register. While there are PDF versions of the
Federal Register and text versions of the Code of Federal Regulations available for
browsing, it is impossible to easily download them in bulk, and the underlying source
code which could be used for creating new versions of these documents is prohibitively
priced.
Likewise, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office makes a web site available for casual
searching and browsing, but the only bulk access to patent data is limited to the first
page of a patent. To get the full text of current and historical patents requires a very
substantial fee. For example, the Patent Grant Data/XML v. 4.2 ICE (Current Calendar
Year Subscription) (EIP-5300P-OL) costs a breathtaking $39,000.
These fees are so substantial that they actively discourage the use of these key U.S.
government databases by public interest groups and scholars, limiting access to a few
well-heeled corporations. In particular, at Public.Resource.Org, we would make much
more extensive use of these databases if we could afford access, helping fulfill our
mission of making America’s primary legal materials available to the public.Our desire to work with this data is shared by many other groups, including our
colleagues at the Sunlight Foundation, Columbia University, Cornell University,
University of Colorado, Harvard University, Northwestern University, Stanford
University, and GovTrack.US. All of these academic and nonprofit groups have notable
track records for providing innovative uses of government data, and the lack of bulk
access to these databases has greatly discouraged development of new applications.
Patents and “the law†have a very special place in our system of government, being the
only two executive branch databases specifically called out in the U.S. Constitution:
The very purpose of the patent database is to “Promote the Progress of Science
and useful Arts.†The very essence of a patent is publication, and deliberately
restricting access goes against the explicit language of the Constitution. While
we are sympathetic with the desire of the U.S. Patent Office to derive revenue
from the sale of these bulk feeds, such a policy runs directly contrary to their
primary mission. Filing fees imposed on those that seek economic gain from
the public through the issuance of a patent are more than sufficient to make up
any revenue shortfall created by making bulk data available at no cost.
Likewise, the purpose of the Federal Register system is to provide a systematic
vehicle for notification and publication of regulations that are enacted by the
government. Restricting access to this data by putting it behind a series of
$17,000 pay walls yields less than $200,000 in annual revenue to the
government, yet is costly enough that only a few well-heeled corporations have
access. The public interest simply can’t afford to play.
Initiatives such as Data.Gov have been very successful and you are both to be
applauded for the dramatic change in philosophy in the U.S. Government when it
comes to release and dissemination of information. However, it is my worry, a worry
shared with my colleagues listed above, that any progress on releasing the USPTO and
NARA databases in bulk will become entangled in bureaucratic delay, and I am writing
to urge that you make these crucial documents of our democracy available sooner
rather than later.
Respectfully yours,Carl Malamud
The exciting idea of “bulk access” is to make government data available not in edited form, but in machine readable (xml) formats, so that the user can decide what to do with it. In the words of Ed Felten et al:
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.
Is this salient for your work? How is it different in Europe, the Americas, Africa, or Asia? What is your experience with fully opening up databases to the public?
