My friend Kael Goodman, who used to be the CIO of 2 city agencies and has developed APIs for NYC as well as others, wrote a great post on the open government movement and some of the complexities and opportunities ahead. His post explains some of the complexity in NYC's 311 system on reporting just a pothole. Who knew that a pothole is sometimes a hummock and that different agencies respond to different holes? He links to great projects that are underway to take government information and use it in different ways, but he also sheds some light on the challenge of developing open government tools that make government itself more efficient. It is easier to take information and use it in interesting ways than it is to write information to a complex system. Open government is coming and it will be transformative, already there are great developments are underway in making it more transparent by utilizing the information that can be pulled out. Putting information back in, to gain efficiencies, make it more responsive, and save money is more complex.
(As a footnote: It is also useful to think about the privacy concerns of the open government movement. I've been told that every call to 311 adds information to the NYC police database. My modern European history professor, Hsi-Huey Liang, taught us that the rise of the modern state had an awful lot to do with the increase in police records. In large part today our privacy is already a moot point but the trade-off of helping government help us and providing even more information is still something to think about. To this end I'm about to start reading The Numerati
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catbobcat (crossing a road in Redding, CT.) blogging