IT: transparency and information, toward open government

One thing that worries me is our politicians’ lack of vision when it comes to information technology.

Through @utaladriz on Twitter I found out about data.gov; I admit I hadn’t been following the Obama administration’s IT proposals.

Digging into the subject I got to the origin of all this: a memorandum President Obama sent on the first day of his term, titled “Transparency and Open Government”.

The memo is very short. It sets out the need to ensure the public trust and to establish a system of transparency, public participation and collaboration to strengthen democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.

Three principles:

• Government should be transparent.
• Government should be participatory.
• Government should be collaborative.

All of this led to several initiatives, whose detailed history you can read here.

One of the most important of them is Data.Gov.

At first I thought Data.Gov was about web services. In fact the site implements the lowest layer of a government information architecture: the data layer.

Data.Gov provides access to hundreds of thousands of datasets.

Data is not enough, of course; the value comes from the applications that access this information. To address that, the US government opened a space for debate on how to use this information, and a contest to develop applications based on data.gov.

There are already several interesting examples, such as ThisWeKnow, a site that lets you explore the information the government collects about the different communities in the United States.

Now this is an interesting paradigm. The government makes the raw data available so that society, its citizens, are the ones who build the applications that extract information from these datasets.

It is an interesting mechanism: efficient, effective, open.

In Chile we have the capacity to do it. We have excellent developers who could produce APIs and services to access this data. There are also plenty of advanced users capable of applying mashup techniques to get useful information out of it.

So what is our Transparency Council waiting for to implement something like this? Why don’t we see proposals like these in the candidates’ government programs?

The paradigms of the candidates’ IT advisers, from the little we have seen, are outdated: a traditional structured vision that thinks in monolithic applications, huge ambitious systems that sound impressive and useful and will only mean an enormous expense of time and resources (for example, Piñera’s health ATM, a pharaonic mega system whose implementation looks unfeasible).

This paradigm is simpler, and it works (web 2.0 works this way).

Let’s publish the data, and let society build the systems it needs to get information out of those repositories.

Is it that hard? Truth is, I don’t know. It may be that in Chile we don’t even have these datasets. But the ones we do have, why aren’t they available?

I would love to visit EstoEsLoQueSabemos.cl (“this is what we know”), a site created by a community of users and developers who spend their free time giving us useful information that our government has collected in the course of its work. That would be powerful, and it would truly bring us into the information society.