Around the Corner

I hope that by now you've had the opportunity to follow the speakers who appeared at the Management of Change Conference. Aneesh Chopra, Rob Carey, Clay Shirky and Vivek Kundra were all very well received. Vivek Kundra provided his very compelling vision for a Federal government that is open by default. "Open by default" means that the beginning presumption for federal agencies is that their data should be published and publicly available, unless privacy or security considerations indicate otherwise.

Several days ago Vivek Kundra, our federal Chief Information Officer, spoke at Wired magazine's Disruptive by Design Conference where he elaborated on that vision by describing the work of Federal Agencies on data.gov. Nancy Scola of Wired reports: “The premise behind behind Data.gov goes to the philosophy around transparency and open government that the president has been talking about. What we want to do is democratize data and democratize information and put it in the public square,” said Kundra. “The default setting of the United States should not be that everything should be secret and closed.”

An open default setting allows the American people to find innovative paths to society's most compelling challenges. You might remember that in my first post here on Around the Corner I mentioned Nassim Taleb's Black Swan. In the Black Swan, Taleb, a notable economic skeptic, identifies selection bias as a high risk to large-scale problems. The Skeptic's Dictionary defines selection bias as the "self selection of individuals to participate in an activity or survey, or as a subject in an experimental study." Of course, Federal IT investments are not experimental studies, but the open by default setting removes selection bias by allowing any and all American citizens to actively participate in mashing up their own data in ways that they determine. Organizations like the Sunlight Foundation play an instrumental role in democratizing data by sponsoring x-prizes or contests like the ongoing Apps For America 2.

This week the government is accelerating the publication of data. Data will be published in as many formats as possible, as close to raw as possible, and there is a preference for machine readable formats.

I hope you will have the opportunity to mashup your data. You can find it here. If you can't find it yet, there's more on the way.

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You may have noticed my last few posts were about institutions, management and leadership. I'll continue to write more about these important aspects of innovation, but I want to take the opportunity in this post to recognize the power of participation.

Today, the pervasiveness of technology makes it possible for almost every citizen to actively participate in government. Both dramatic reductions in technology costs and new technologies that have recently become available allow individuals from diverse backgrounds to voice their opinions and engage in public dialogue. As President Obama points out in his Transparency and Open Government Directive, participation and public engagement improve the quality of government decisions. Participation improves government decisions because knowledge is widely dispersed throughout society and today's technologies make more of that information available to government executives. The National Dialogue, sponsored by the National Academy of Public Administration on behalf of the Recovery and Accountability Transparency Board, serves as a good example of the kind of public dialogue that can take place today.

That dialogue has concluded, but now you can participate in shaping President Obama's Transparency and Open Government directive. The Office of Science and Technology Policy yesterday placed this notice in the Federal Register that members of the public are invited to participate in the process of developing recommendations that will inform the Transparency and Open Government Directive. Visit the Open Government Brainstorm to submit your ideas on the best ways to "strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness by making government more transparent, participatory, and collaborative." You can also vote on ideas others have submitted, and the most popular ideas will rise to the top of the queue for possible implementation. When I visited the Brainstorm earlier today, there were already 166 ideas submitted and 4702 votes cast.

Equally important is participation in our broader civil society. Civil society is typically understood as the uncoerced collective actions of people around their shared interests, purposes and values that create public goods exclusive of traditional market mechanisms. Wikipedia is a great example of a social good produced by civil society. Those of us familiar with the open source software community would also recognize the Apache Web Server, the most widely used web server on the Internet, as another great example of a public good produced by civil society.

Yochai Benkler recognizes the significance of participation in civil society in his Wealth of Networks. Benkler introduces the term social production to describe the output of a civil society. He then goes on to examine how individuals and organizations participate in the production of public goods, then describes the economics of social production.

Today, whether through participation in government, or participation in civil society, participation is power. And technology places the power with you.

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