Open Public Services – Monetizing the Margins

The UK Cabinet Office white paper on Growing the Social Investment Market is a visionary document, laying out a framework for how government will be re-engineered wholesale to make it more socially conscious and dynamic.

The key is in ‘Open Government’, including open data, open source software but more importantly entirely new modes of transparent and participative ways of governing.

The UK wants to create ‘Open Public Services‘, offering citizens involvement in ‘participatory budgeting‘ and the Right to Buy and even the Right to Challenge the delivery of government services, enabling local communities to take ownership of local, government-owned assets, like under-used buildings, and via Social Finance models transform these into thriving social organizations that achieve real change where it’s needed.

Given the scale and depth of challenges in low-income areas, in-house government administrative programs simply can’t achieve impact, and they’re finally starting to recognize this and the fact the solution is to devolve power into the hands of the communities themselves.

They plan some exciting steps, like setting up a new bank, ‘The Big Society Bank’, and other social investment mechanisms so that the social enterprise sector can be super-charged to be more business like and take on much more investment capital to scale this up.

Key to this are ‘Social Impact Bonds‘. To move to more effective ‘Payment by Results’ models for government services, government is looking to ramp up use of this new financing approach for services, involving the business world and their models and measurement methods.

Monetizing the Margins

Open data can play a key role as it reveals the insights needed to understand how to better organize these programs, through helping plan better ‘Business Value’ scenarios for open data projects.

This is nicely explained in this post of Nick Charney. He also says open data will wither in a vacuum without ‘supporting activities’ – In short it’s not that great on its own, but it blossoms with a surrounding team process of problem analysis, robust R&D method and thoughts towards sharing it with a larger group of stakeholders.

Nick’s use case is a great example: tracking infectious diseases, because it’s the ability to define new perspectives on to the data that creates the insights for new treatments, and that view is best shared across a global community.

The key ‘x factor’ ingredient of the open data movement is that it taps into the general dynamic of open source, ie. you benefit from an app developed independently by someone else, so not only do you not pay for it, but you get the wisdom of their use case too.

For example publishing data about garbage recycling is a mundane bank of information, but someone can identify the more dynamic way to use it, like generating SMS alerts to remind people.

All of these little micro-apps tweak just how effectively the ‘Digital Nervous System’ of a city operation works, and critically it achieves this level of sophistication by not spending money and instead empowering its entrepreneurs.