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.

Image by palindrome6996 via Flickr

Recently in Canada the Federal Government announced the ‘Shared Services Canada’ initiative, a consolidation program intended to save $$ hundreds of millions through data-centre efficiencies.

We ran a Cloud Best Practices webinar on the topic, to introduce the role that CMM might play (Cloud Migration Management).

My initial introductory presentation was on the topic of shared service technologies, most notably Federated Identity, a theme we continue on this blog through a focus on the USA Government program ‘Open Identity for Open Government‘.

This is their initiative to implement an open standards based federated identity ‘ecosystem’, where as it explains on this other page this is achieved through implementing these technologies via shared service design models. Of course this means they could be incorporated into the design process for Canada too, and aligned to various program goals like enabling a universal government identity for staff (“GEDS 2.0″).

In short these are practices that Canada will likely start to follow in the near future, as will many other Governments throughout the world, highlighting the associated commercial opportunity too.

What’s important about the standards framework that the USA Government has defined is that it encourages external suppliers to implement and offer managed services based on these specifications. For example Verizon recently joined Google, Equifax and others in offering these Identity services to the American public sector.

What’s most critical about these programs is the role they play as smart economic stimulus. For example in this Whitehouse blog they make the specific point they are looking for more suppliers, they cultivate an active market by adopting modern technologies that drive related service innovations in their local supplier base, ie. American firms who therefore become more competitive.

Trusted Cloud Providers

To achieve this service providers go through an accreditation process with ‘Trust Framework Providers‘, organizations like the Kantara Initiative, who stipulate the best practices for these Identity systems and also oversee the approval of players within the system.

The US Government has approved Kantara to act as an authority over who can be approved to act as an Identity Provider, and with related innovations growing in their local markets, it’s likely this combination will expand out from the USA into the international community.

Ie. they’ll adopt Kantara standards and the related products will enter their markets.

This refers to an ‘upgraded’ version of Michael Porter’s theorem of the role clusters play in local economic development.

The role of an NGC is defined in the CATA business plan ‘Innovation Nation‘, a suggested blueprint for improving the innovation capacities of Canada.

In this document they call out for more industry cluster development, and make the critical point:

“CATA believes that market-oriented collaborations models should be evaluated and measures should be taken to incent more companies in Canada to act as anchor companies and to encourage more SME companies to cluster around large anchor ones with good reach into the global markets.”

Absolutely this is a great idea. Consider an organization like Salesforce.com who operate in Canada, employing hundreds of people, who are a global firm and most importantly who provide a ‘product distribution’ platform for exactly this purpose. Ie. local Canadian Salesforce.com developers can create module add-ins that are then sold globally through the Salesforce.com Apps Store.

Similarly another startup I can currently helping, Data Gardens, provides technology within the VMware industry, adding value to their ecosystem in the same way and that could be helped to expand internationally the same way too.

As the Radian6 acquisition highlights this ‘acceleration pathway’ can even lead to a final exit for the startup, generating over $300 million new inward investment to the province in this case, so this a strategy capable of substantial levels of this investment attraction.

By further combining these foundations with support programs using the latest techniques like ‘Open Innovation‘, economic development teams can better help entreprenreurs identify and exploit these niche opportunities, creating ‘high performance innovation clusters’.

Although written in 2004 the white paper Roadmap for Open ICT Ecosystems (53-pages) is still a timely read for the new Cloud economy we’re entering, as well as a primer for the relationship of open source software to the business of government.

When you combine the activity of open standards (for example formats for Open Data) as well as cutting edge open source software, like OpenXDI, it highlights a key point that entirely new e-government capabilities are becoming increasingly possible and available, and these can be directed towards specific public sector goals.

OpenXDI – Platform for universal identifiers

For example XDI is a protocol for enabling an emerging identity data ecosystem via the same principles.

In their own 2004 white paper The Dataweb: An Introduction to XDI (21-page PDF)  they introduce and describe the concept of ‘the Dataweb’, an open source system like the Roadmap plans out, that the XDI protocol will enable once rolled out.

The central principle to XDI is that it provides the mechanisms for universal identifiers across the Internet, unique “i-names”, to achieve the same addressing system for data that HTML provides for the web, and so this Dataweb is a similar universe of information, but now linked data rather than just linked web content.

By doing so it is therefore logically very relevant to any associated government scheme, for example like the Indian UIDAI. This ambitious program is setting up to operate an Identity system for over 1 billion indian citizens, requiring core foundations like unique identifiers.

Using these best practices, like planning an open source ecosystem, and combining them with functionally specific standards and software, enables Government to harness these powerful emerging forces.

For example a taxonomy of municipal apps would look something like:

1. Municipal Apps
   1. Emergency Management
   2. Business Permits
      1. Entrepreneur FastTrack
   3. Dog Pound
   4. … etc.

By making this an open source project then we can invite government CIOs and other key contacts to help define this and share with the industry.

Our next step is then to populate this catalogue with a listing of all the different FOSS apps available in each category. Following that we’ll then identify a Cloud implementatin model, so you can ‘Pick and Deploy’.

For example XDI is the OASIS standard that Gluu is announcing their support for, and they’re implementing this through their OpenXDI (abbreviated “OX”) project.

XDI is a framework for Internet-scale Federated Identity data management, that will provide foundations for Open Government through enabling ‘Linked Data‘.

This sets the scene for another very popular topic which has arisen: ‘Big Data‘, referring to the large amounts of computer information that all these different systems now generate.

This can be managed by tools like Hadoop, also an Open Source Software package.

As these different trends converge to evolve a singular environment, the key concepts will blend, such as having ‘Big Linked Data’. In short all this raw data is related in key ways most notably when it is about You. Identity standards like XDI enable you to ‘tag’ data this way and thus enable this linkage relationshps.

With the volume of personally generated data (Twitter et al) expanding exponentially then a key facet of managing Big Data will be via leveraging these common identifiers.

Principally this was answered by the combination of Microsoft’s Nik Garkusha in his presentation on the Microsoft Open Government Platform for the Future, and Andy MacLeod of Cisco, covering the UK G-Cloud agenda.

Andy MacLeod, Cisco – Overview of the UK G-Cloud program

The UK has been a pioneer of both Cloud Computing and also Open Government, through their ‘G-Cloud‘ initiative.

Andy MacLeod is the Director of Strategy and Policy for the Public Sector team in Cisco UK, playing a key role in aligning Cisco to the requirements of this program.

In his presentation he covers:

• G-Cloud: The brand – How G-Cloud provides a single over-arching theme for IT transformation, from data-centres through service delivery, via common infrastructure, standards and capabilities.

• G-Cloud Authority - A single decision-making unit for standards, certifications and industry uptake engagement.

• G-Cloud Architecture - The required mix of platforms, applications and networks.

• The ASG - Application Store for Government – A new approach to adopting software and sharing best practices.

• Data Centre consolidation strategy - Ongoing migration and closures of underused data-centres.

Nik described the Microsoft vision for an “Open Government Platform of the Future“, covering topics such as:

• How to take the Gov’t beyond just sharing data & drive more use of open data?
• How to enable “Gov’t as a Platform” to drive a vibrant ecosystem of citizen-ready applications (not just data dumps)?
• How to empower citizens to use & add value to open data apps via familiar web, mobile & social media channels?
• How can technology enable governments to transition to this future, and how will government organizations need to evolve in process?

You can download Nik’s slides directly here.

By this I mean simply adding a ‘web interface’ to an existing legacy process, without modernizing the process itself, means you’re undertaking one half of the equation. Really for a transformation to a 2.0 model it’s more about the democratization of the process that’s important, the technology simpy facilitiates that.

It’s not until we apply “crowdsourcing” to the process itself and make it entirely Open can we call it Government 2.0.

This is because while there is more interaction online, via blogs and twitter et al, the more core processes can be entirely decentralized, in terms of the decision-making model that determines who actually decides what laws.

A headline example of this is Beth Noveck’s Peer to Patent project which does so for the patent application workflow.

The new ‘KLISS‘ project in Kansas is so exciting because it’s applying the same transformation to the very core of government itself, the law-making process.

As described in the presentation from Sean McGrath of Propylon, and his presentation ‘Re-inventing participative Democracy, one Cloud at a time‘, Kansas is deploying a new Cloud-based application that will reinvent the legislation process for the Kansas Legislature.

CIO Don Heiman explains in this video the logic behind the project, including the critical point about a ‘Legacy 2 Cloud’ reason: Their key system was a mainframe which they could no longer support because the only expert retired!

Before this migration to Cloud computing there process consisted of cutting out pieces of paper and glueing them to the current bill being debated.

In short Internet technology is ideal for co-ordinating any kind of political movement, whether that be anarchic uprisings as much as it can be for simple municipal level e-government.

The base reference for our best practices in this area is the work of Propylon for the Kansas State legislature, the ‘Kansas KLISS‘ project.

This describes how to achieve ‘Digital E-Democracy’ via a Cloud-based application.