Open data – seeds of a second eGov revolution

The discussion around open data is gathering pace in several countries around the world, and the more I see of that discussion the more convinced I am that we’re watching the second significant revolution within government that has been driven by software.

The first change is one most of us take for granted today.

eGovernment became a buzz word during the late 90s and really pushed Government to consider new ways that services could be delivered. Many of us have quickly forgotten about the complexity of working with government in decades before then when we would have to visit an agency building and queue for hours or use one of the many call centres that appeared during the 1980s.

Today we expect services to be available online and accessible through a range of devices including mobile phones, home PCs or interactive television. For many of us these multi channel services are available equally, regardless of how much bandwidth we have, which societal demographic we belong to or where we might live geographically.

In the work I was engaged with back then the early push for eGovernment was frequently vendor led, with companies like Compaq, DEC, IBM and Microsoft taking a handful of marketing slides to government departments that painted the picture of a bright and rosy online future for the country.

It was the civil service who were able to do the hard work and translate that vision into the change and transition within the government that was eventually responsible for the delivery of the services that we see today.

During this time many countries around the world experimented with different ways of delivering online services. Over time a small number of those experiments became national programs that were then replicated around the world. A great example is the work around the eGovernment Interoperability Frameworks (eGIFs) that was pioneered by countries like New Zealand and the United Kingdom and has since become one of the accepted requirements for national level eGovernment programs.

At the moment it seems we are participating in a second revolution that has some very similar patterns to it, but with different goals and frequently different constituents driving the conversation.

Where eGovernment was about service delivery, open data is much more about the ability to make more informed and inclusive public policy decisions.

In place of the vendors offering the early marketing vision we are seeing civil society groups leading the discussion around the value of making government data available to the masses, and helping paint the picture of the benefits that could potentially follow.

While I am witnessing a growing number of experiments around the world it is not yet clear to me which country will find the right model for selecting and exposing datasets that are of value in the public policy making process, and be able to prove that their efforts in this space are really returning value back to the country.

From the outside Government looks straightforward enough. Direction is set, decisions are made, policy is written and eventually things happen.

Inside government it is often a little different. Thousands of processes across hundreds of departments, affecting millions of lives all have to be taken into account as major change is carefully managed.

With a hat tip of significant respect to everybody who has been involved in kick starting these discussions in their respective countries, at this point I find myself waiting to see who the academics and civil servants are who pick up the idea of open data and begin to drive significant programs within specific national governments and agencies, and then how replicable the policy and programs that they build are for other nations.

It is then that we will have a much clearer view of what “open data” really means, and what the real potential is within the complex machinery of national governance.