Public formats in more than one sense
ReadWriteWeb just posted an intriguing article about the next generation of e-government. The post basically lists the arguments from an upcoming scholarly article about the subject. The main argument is simple: Government shouldn’t spend it’s time building web sites, instead it should “focus on creating a simple, reliable and publicly accessible infrastructure that exposes the underlying data”. Rather than building and maintaining a website of upcoming bills at ft.dk the Danish parliament should make the data available and have others mash it up in usable ways.
Now, I’m not a deregulating liberalist, and I’m absolutely certain that a strategy of only making data available to private entrepreneurs simply wouldn’t work in a Danish contexts. But I’m also convinced that a mandated policy of making data easily available to developers has explosive potential.
Let me list a few examples. The best Danish mapping service, Findvej.dk is a mashup of both publicly and privately owned data. It was built by one guy in with a good idea and access to the necessary data. The data was probably hard to find, and the service would be much better with even more accessible data. But you get my point.
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of possible counter-examples and I’ll just pick one. The weather. Denmark has a tax-funded, public weather service, which generates plenty of data every day, and this data is available to everyone through a web browser. Now, given all the data from the weather service, would I be able to build a better website serving all the same user groups as DMI? Probably not. But given access to that data I would be able to build a service which suits my needs much, much better that DMI.dk. And most likely, my service would serve others as well.
Why isn’t there an Danish version of EveryBlock? The reason isn’t lack of interest. The reason isn’t lack of data, because statistics and incident reports are being kept by the police. The reason is that the data isn’t accessible as an open building block (that metaphor didn’t work).
This presents a major challenge to government, and even if I’ve used Danish examples, those challenges are probably both very global and very local. The past few years have shown convincingly that web developers are hungry for interesting data to reinvent by merging across data sources, and this potential could be easily harvested by some sly government initiatives.
May 28th, 2008 at 9:02 pm
[...] wrote about the huge potential in government as a service the other day, and apparently i’m not the only one who has seen [...]