Aspen ideas Festival Talk on Gov20

Government as a Platform Tim O’Reilly

O’Reilly Media, Inc.www.oreilly.com

July 3, 2009Aspen Ideas Festival

Friday, July 3, 2009

We’re perhaps best known as a computer book publisher

covering topics from the frontiers of emerging technologies.

What We Really Do at O’Reilly

•Find interesting technologies and people innovating from the edge

•Amplify their effectiveness by spreading the information needed for others to follow them.

•Books, Conferences, Online Publishing, Investing, Research and Consulting

Watch the Alpha Geeks

Rob Flickenger and his potato chip can antenna

• New technologies first exploited by enthusiasts, then entrepreneurs, then platform players

• Two examples– Wireless community networks

predict universal Wi-Fi– Screen scraping predicts web services and the internet as platform

"The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet."

--William Gibson

The "Killer Apps” of the New Millennium

The network as platform

•Software delivered as an online service•Driven by huge databases that literally get better the more people use them

•“Harnessing collective intelligence”•“Data is the Intel Inside”

The smart phone plus local search. Today pizza, tomorrow news?

Remember What I Said Earlier?

Hackers are “lead users” who tell us where the future is going.

Companies apply their insights in new contexts to build next-generation products.

theyworkforyou.com

A vision of technology in government

"We need to connect citizens with each other to engage them more fully and directly in solving the problems that face us. We must use all available technologies and methods to open up the federal government, creating a new level of transparency to change the way business is conducted in Washington and giving Americans the chance to participate in government deliberations and decision-making in ways that were not possible only a few years ago."

– From Barack Obama's campaign platform on technology

What might that entail?

Gov 2.0

•Citizen contribution and collaboration•Use of social media•Transparency•Rapid application development•New methods of procurement•Cloud computing

Gov 2.0

•Citizen contribution and collaboration•Use of social media•Transparency•Rapid application development•New methods of procurement•Cloud computing

•Government as a platform

Our government has always been a platform for collective action

“We must all hang together or we will assuredly all hang separately.”

—Ben Franklin

Vending Machine Government

The consequence

mybarackobama.com is a self-service organizing platform

Can we build something similar for the actual operations of government?

•Government to Citizen•Citizen to Government•Citizen to Citizen•Government to Government

What Can We Learn from the Success of Technology Platforms?

Some Lessons from Successful Technology Platforms

1. Embrace open standards: they encourage innovation and grow the market

The first IBM PC

IBM’s original forecast for the PC

Now more than 80 million web sites

Source: Netcraft Web Server Survey: http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2009/05/27/may_2009_web_server_survey.html

Generative Systems

“Generativity is a system’s capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences.”

Some policy areas where open standards apply• open, portable electronic health records• open government data enabling competition by third parties to provide services

2. Build a simple system - let it evolve

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.”

John Gall, in Systemantics: How Systems Really Work and How They Fail

“Hourglass” Architecture

CTSB, NRC, “The Internet’s Coming of Age” (2001)

anytask

anymedium

the Internet’s not-so-secret

anydevice

anyperson

Simple is one of the hardest things for government to do

“We’re going to be publishing government data and beginning with a default assumption that information should be [available] to the people... If you look at what happened when data has been democratized, when data has been put in the public domain, you’ve had an explosion of innovation.”

-Vivek Kundra, new Federal CIO

I need your help

We need to find and promulgate a series of simple interventions that will have large downstream consequences, by opening up the power of the market to solve the problems we face as a nation and a world.

Complex problems paradoxically require simple answers

3. Design for cooperation

“The book is perhaps most valuable for its exposition of the Unix philosophy of small cooperating tools with standardized inputs and outputs, a philosophy that also shaped the end-to-end philosophy of the Internet. It is this philosophy, and the architecture based on it, that has allowed open source projects to be assembled into larger systems such as Linux, without explicit coordination between developers.”

Anatomy of a Linux System

No, my friend, the way to have good and safe government is not to trust it all to one, but to divide it among the many, distributing to everyone the functions he is competent to.... It is by dividing and subdividing these republics from the great national one down through all its subordinations, until it ends in the administration of each man’s farm by himself.

The Internet Domain Name System

From DNS and Bind, by Cricket Liu, http://my.safaribooksonline.com/0596100574/dns5-CHP-2#snippet

How did DHS Virtual Alabama Get Participation from Agencies w/o control?

4. Learn from your users, especially ones who do what you don’t expect•45% of all mashups are on Google Maps, only 4% on Microsoft Virtual Earth, 3% Yahoo! Maps

housingmaps.com - the very first Google maps mashup•It was a “hack.” Google learned from it, quickly, and turned it into a supported feature

If you’re really building a platform, your customers and partners build new features before you do

USAspending.gov

5. Lower the Barriers to Experimentation

Gene Kranz: Failure is not an option

But for most projects this is not the case!

“I didn’t fail ten thousand times. I successfully eliminated, ten thousand times, materials and combinations which wouldn’t work.”

Thomas Edison

6. Build a culture of measurement

•If it works, do more of it.•If it doesn’t, stop doing it.•Build systems that respond automatically to user stimuli.

it.usaspending.gov

Measure Outcomes, Not Just Output

• Are we measuring the right things?

Let’s assume that you purchase a flashlight at Wal-Mart. The cash register reads the bar code price tag and reportedly within fourteen seconds, the Wal-Mart central warehouse is notified that the store needs a new flashlight to replace the purchased item.

7. Throw open the doors to partners

More than 50,000 iPhone applications in less than a year!

Preferred application partners

•Struggling to catch up in the application marketplace

So why do governments still make deals like these?•No bid contracts•Preferred providers•Earmarks•Sole source licensing of government data to single-source providers

Government as a platform means an end to the design of many complete “applications.” Instead the government should provide fundamental services on which we, the people, (also known as “the market) build the applications.

Government is a vehicle for collective action

•Frank DiGiammarino, recovery.gov:

–Convener first, problem solver second

–Pull the right people together–Enable action through knowledge, resources and visibility

The Digital Commonwealth

For more information

•http://radar.oreilly.com•http://gov2summit.com•http://twitter.com/timoreilly•tim@oreilly.com

•http://www.slideshare.net/timoreilly

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