ReadWriteWeb – How Tim O’Reilly Aims to Change Government
The “government as a platform” idea is continuing to take root. Tim O’Reilly, Mr. Web 2.0 himself, has this grand vision for the US government:
“What I’ve learned from all these conversations,” O’Reilly says,”is about government as a platform. It’s not just social media use by government, or government using wikis. No, it’s something more profound. How do you think like a platform provider? We’ve moved our government from a lean vehicle for collective action, and over the last 200 years it has become so strong that it’s now 40% of GDP. I want to go back to the original vision of the role of government: a convener of things that we as individuals and companies can’t do alone. Standard setting, pilot programs; government providing enabling technologies for citizens to serve themselves.”
A big vision for sure — one that is sure to resonate with the hackers, developers and the transparency movement (Sunlight Foundation, MySociety, Visible Government etc.)
And he’ll be pushing it next month at the Gov 2.0 Summit in DC. (For those in Ottawa, he’s coming to GTEC in October to spread the same message.)
Drilling down — here’s a hint of how O’Reilly’s vision might look:
“… there’s an opportunity for government to say if people want to build services on this then we need the data we make public to be granular and timely. We should not be publishing updates once a month. Real time, local, responsive to users – those are new thinking for government.”
Indeed. But it’s clear that the US Government is receptive – moving ahead with initiatives like data.gov. The UK is also making strides in this direction.
But whither the Government of Canada? Are there any examples of our federal government moving in this direction? Is there an example of a GoC API out there? Some easy-to-use XML feeds? I’m not aware of anything. But then I’m just a lowly digital communicator…
What's a spaghetti test?
You make a good point. I, too, am not aware of any GoC public APIs or (raw) datasets. Yes, there are some databases out there, but nothing that can easily be extracted in order to re-purpose and mash-up the data into something new. The GoC definitely lags behind in public data availability and transparency.
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