osrin.net

The City of Edmonton and OGDI

Posted on January 15, 2010 by oliver

I’ve been trying to avoid “blogging the news” recently but this one was hard to pass up.

The Canadian City of Edmonton was in the news for a couple of unrelated reasons this morning, first of all as the Olympic torch arrived, and secondly for plans that they have to work with Microsoft’s OGDI platform.

From Peter Galli’s blog on Port25;

The Canadian City of Edmonton has become the first North American city to use Microsoft’s Open Government Data Initiative (OGDI) solution, and is working with the company to develop the region’s first public open data catalogue, an online site that will give citizens and developers easier and more transparent access to information and allow them to develop new solutions and suggest ideas that enhance public infrastructure and services.

More information on OGDI can be found here. From the page;

The Open Government Data Initiative (OGDI) is a cloud-based collection of software assets that enables publicly available government data to be easily accessible. Using open standards and application programming interfaces (API), developers and government agencies can retrieve the data programmatically for use in new and innovative online applications, or mashups that can help:

Improve citizen services

Enhance collaboration between government agencies and private organizations

Increase government transparency

And more…

OGDI promotes the use of this data by capturing and publishing re-usable software assets, patterns, and practices. The data repository already holds over 60 different government datasets that are readily available for use in new applications, and is continuously updated with additional government datasets.

Edmonton’s Open Data Catalogue is already public and operating in “community preview mode”’ if you want to go take a look.

Posted in eGovernment | Tagged opendata | Leave a comment

Twenty Ten!

Posted on January 6, 2010 by oliver

So, as promised here is some detail on the issues that I think will be getting attention from me in 2010.

A few of the items on the list continue from last year, and there are a couple of obvious new ones.

Gov20. This has been a major focus area in Australia and New Zealand over the last twelve months and a great deal of progress has been made. This coming year needs to be a year that sees implementation of many of the Gov20 ideas and proposals. There were some grand and exciting plans discussed during 2009 and it would be great to see them become reality.

Increased focus on the semantic web. I hear you yawning already, but I think that some of the spill over topics from the Gov20 conversation (massive amounts of published government data for example) coupled with advancing semantic search tools, along with semantic tools appearing in products like Bing, have the potential to give this topic a push.

Government Interoperability Frameworks. In a post from March of last year I suggested that it was time for governments to begin to rethink the way that their interoperability frameworks are written. Many of them have devolved into little more than a list of standards, delivering very little by way of interoperability between government systems and people. I’m already seeing some of the Australian state governments taking a more scenario based approach to interoperability, along with work from organizations like CSTransform offering new ideas around government interoperability policy.

The move to IPv6. The move is not going to happen in 2010, but by all accounts the date when we will see IPv4 address space exhausted is getting closer. Couple that with IPv6 dependant features creeping into several market available operating systems and I would expect to be involved in more discussions around IPv6 in 2010 than in previous years.

National broadband networks. Each of the respective national broadband networks in Australia and New Zealand has the potential to have a significant impact on the way that we think about, build and implement software standards. Organizations like the Institute for a Broadband Enabled Society (IBES) at Melbourne University are starting to think about use scenarios for these networks and in 2010 I would expect to see a similar organization form in one of New Zealand’s Universities.

The future role of IT standards. This might sound like an odd one. Standardization as we know it today is a long and arduous process, but for many good reasons. Developing an ISO level standard involves process to consult over one hundred nations at a national level and will sometimes involve many hundreds of contributors and reviewers. As Web20 technologies play a bigger role in government systems delivery I’m expecting to participate in conversations about how we speed up the standards development process to accommodate rapidly changing public API and data definitions. (think Twitter and Facebook).

Technology to enable standards development. This final point involves a project that myself and a handful of colleagues have been discussing lately. If we’re going to see broad participation in the standards development process, for IT or other markets, we need to think about ways of reducing the cost and complexity of involvement. Technology itself potentially has a role to play here if we can find low cost ways of enabling cross group collaboration for any standards development community. More on this later…

Posted in General | 1 Comment

Two Thousand and Nine

Posted on January 3, 2010 by oliver

The first week of a new year is a great time to reflect a little on what went well over the last twelve months (along with areas that could use a little improvement) and to start to think about the conversations that the next twelve months will bring.

On a personal note, last year was a challenging one for me. I made a conscious decision to spend more time at home with the family, and took on a new role in Microsoft that would make that possible. So far, five months later, it has been a significant mental shift and has obviously resulted in a very different daily routine.

My previous three years were spent as Regional Technology Officer for our Asia Pacific business and pulled me into discussions about pretty much any technology policy related topic across Asia and the South Pacific. A broad set of topics spread across an even broader set of countries, both in terms of geography and demographics.

This new position revolves around the standards setting communities in Australia and New Zealand with three main areas of focus;

Increase Microsoft participation in local standards development and testing activity
Understand standards related requirements and policies in Australia and New Zealand
Help the product development groups understand how they need to support us

The first five months have been a genuine voyage of discovery for me. I’ve met a long list of people in both countries with a lot of enthusiasm for IT standardization and all that it entails, I’ve been introduced to each of the respective government views on the role of IT standards in systems design and deployment (sometimes expressed in no uncertain terms!) and I’ve crossed the Tasman Sea more times than I care to count.

At the same time I’ve been discovering new parts of Microsoft. For the last fifteen years I have held various senior roles in our Public Sector sales organization, leaving that behind to join a more central corporate function has involved building new networks inside of the company and expanding the number of topics that I need to involve myself with inside of Microsoft. On some levels it amazes me that it is possible to spend almost a decade and a half with a company and still find news areas that drive significant personal growth within the organization.

Finally, the field facing team that I’m now part of is a new component to our corporate standards group. Our corporate standards organization has been around for a few years now but last year was the first time we put dedicated people in the national subsidiaries with a focus on standards related work. The result, as with any new team, is that we have had to find ways to work together. Just getting to know the people that I work directly with has taken up a significant chunk of time over the last few months.

In many ways 2009 was a reboot and restart year for me… it involved massive personal and professional change and I think I’m only just starting to feel like I have some sense of clarity around what I need to be doing from here.

I’m conscious that a number of things I wanted to do in 2009 didn’t get done, my most significant failing over the last few months has probably revolved around communication. This blog is an example, it has been getting very little of my attention in recent months – I’m assuming that readers have little or no interest in the details of my long list meetings involving introductions to new people and organizations.

So I begin 2010 with a long list of new people that I now work with (inside and outside of Microsoft), some ideas around how I think Microsoft can do a better job of working in this area in Australia and New Zealand and a handful of personal projects that I want to get done over the next twelve months that I think will benefit the standards development environment in general.

I’ll find the time over the next few days to write up a few of those in detail… I promise!

Posted in General | Tagged ramblings | Leave a comment

Lost Conversations, Lost Decisions, Lost History…

Posted on November 11, 2009 by oliver

Originally posted on “TalkStandards”, 11th November 2009

There is no debate that standards have always played an important role in the design and delivery of eGovernment systems, since the mid-1990s we have been seeing standards play critical roles in data exchange, authentication and the way that information is ultimately presented back to the user.

Early eGoverment systems represented a small revolution for many governments, providing ways to increase levels of administrative efficiency while at the same time providing services that were much more broadly available than in previous years.

However, if we turn and look specifically at agencies responsible for archiving governments information then the shift to digitally delivered services also brought some new challenges. Archiving paper is well understood, archiving digital records adds complexity that is still being worked out in many jurisdictions. Only now are we starting to see standards emerge for storage and maintenance of these digital records, over ten years after we saw the mass shift to digital by governments all over the world.

The issues will be obvious to many, governments have a decade wide void in the records that they have managed to keep, information has been simply lost as individual computers and email inboxes have been redeployed or the hardware has been recycled.

At this point in time we are witnessing a second iteration of that revolution, governments, citizens and businesses are collaboratively talking about Government 2.0 (or gov20), examining ways that they will use microblogging, social media and the publishing of massive government datasets to find new ways for government to interact with citizens and for developers to deliver a range of tools that could not be developed by government alone.

Within these gov20 conversations we are seeing more than just the digitization of government services, politicians are finding new ways of communicating directly with their electorate and senior departmental officials are finding new ways to more deeply understand the people that their services ultimately serve.

So once again we are seeing a massive shift in the technology that is being used to run the business of government, and once again we don’t yet have the standards to retain the conversations that take place over microblogging services, or the huge amount of inbound information that departments will eventually use as part of their decision making processes that they collect from an array of social networking tools.

As a standards community, in support of the ongoing evolution of eGovernment, now is the time for us to start to think about how we will solve these complex challenges. Work needs to begin on archiving standards that will retain the information that is driving decisions today and as technology plays an increasingly larger role in the business of government archiving standards needs to be a core part of systems design, not a problem that we try and solve after the fact.

Posted in eGovernment, Standards | Leave a comment

Searching Open Government Data in four dimensions

Posted on November 9, 2009 by oliver

The current trend of governments releasing massive and diverse datasets will demand something different from internet search tools in the future, something that we might consider a little extraordinary today.

Today most of us search in a single dimension, we tap a term into our favourite web search tool and get back a list of links that represent pages that are currently published somewhere on the net. Most of us are not planning on doing any level of analysis on that information, we are just trying to find something, so the list of links are enough for us.

Governments are starting a new trend though, massive amounts of machine readable data that we can use to draw our own conclusions to complex questions about our environment or our society.

In his now infamous TED presentation, “Let my dataset change your mindset”, Hans Rosling gave us a preview of the way that many of us will be using these government datasets in years to come, along with similar datasets that we will eventually see commercial organizations publishing in the same way.

Using available data, developers will continue to build new applications that could never have been funded by government, citizens and businesses will be able to offer complex and well thought out advice to policy makers, economists will be able to build empirical models that demonstrate societal trends and eventually historians will reconstruct the environment that we leave behind.

For all of this to work internet search has to evolve, a list of links won’t meet our needs. Here’s three examples;

First of all, a piece that we’re close today, we need to be able to search by geography. When we begin to break down massive datasets the geography becomes important, any piece of data has a special meaning when we can tie it to a country, a county, a town or a particular street. Most of the government policy makers I meet have had a long term understanding of the role of geographic data in government process, but few tools exist to enable the publishing of that data externally in a way that is useful.

Secondly, we need to be able to search by timeframe. Future analysis of data, either for an economist constructing trends over a limited number of years or long term reviews by historians will require us to find a way to roll datasets back to a point in time that is relevant to the users analysis.

Finally, it is not enough for a single country to solve this, international standards need to evolve to support this type of search.

Very quickly we will find ourselves at a point where it will not be enough for us to look at an issue in the context of a single country. In the short term, policy advice to a given government could be enhanced by the ability to cross analyze that advice with data from similar nations – e.g. to lower the cost of building a kilometre of road in New Zealand, I might also want to look at the costs in the UK, Canada and Australia. – and in centuries to come historians will need a way to show how global society evolved.

We are not far from a point where we are going to see a need to enable a software instigated search for data relating to a particular issue, in a certain place and during a given timeframe.

It is then that we will really begin to experience the power that published data gives us.

Posted in eGovernment, Technology | Tagged gov20, opendata | 4 Comments

Protecting Our Digital Heritage: Standards, Collaboration and Awareness

Posted on November 5, 2009 by oliver

Originally posted on “Microsoft On The Issues”, 5th November 2009

For governments, the digital revolution presents some important challenges, including how best to ensure that their digital documents will be accessible and readable essentially forever, regardless of how technology evolves. This is a question I encounter often in my role as a Regional Standards Officer, working with various public agencies in Australia and New Zealand that have responsibility for archiving records and other documents.

Fortunately, the challenge of e-archiving has been addressed over the past decade or so through standards development and other collaborative efforts around the world. International standards offer guidance on how to capture documents and how to use metadata to ensure that they can be located and understood by future generations. Published specifications for the Open Document Format (ODF), Open XML and Portable Document Format (PDF) also ensure that documents in these formats will be readable long after the formats are obsolete.

That said, a lot more work is still to be done.

Although ODF, OpenXML and PDF account for the bulk of documents produced today, other formats need to be documented. Microsoft has put documentation for our Office binary formats, for example, into the hands of the British Library for reference by future generations. We encourage other vendors to take similar steps with their storage formats.

New standards are needed to ensure retention of at least some of the massive volume of data produced in social networking activities, such as the micro-blogging increasingly used by elected officials to interact with constituents. Broad collaboration on enhanced standards and processes would help clarify how much of this data needs to be retained, and how to store it.

Microsoft is committed to working with governments and all other interested parties to meet these challenges and preserve the history of this decade, and the next, and the next.

Posted in General, Standards | Leave a comment

Open Government Data and The Great Expectation Gap

Posted on October 20, 2009 by oliver

The level of activity around the world in opening up government data is nothing short of astounding. Governments at every level have engaged citizens, businesses and developers in combinations of public discussions and hackfests to look at how the data that they hold can be used in new and exciting ways.

As I talk to friends in government, participate in various events around open data and watch the work that developers are doing in this area I can’t help but think that there is a massive gap between the expectations that government leaders have for open data, the tools that developers are building and the objectives of the general public.

On one side of the conversation you have government ministers and departmental heads. My conversations with this group often come back to ways that data can be used to make government more efficient. Ministers have looked at the success of crowd sourcing in other sectors and are keen to find ways to apply those ideas to the machinery of government.

In many cases ministers are looking for assistance from the community to analyse the cost of building a kilometre of road, maintaining a hospital bed or operating a prison cell, then helping find ways to reduce those costs and increase governmental efficiency.

As an example, in a recent speech to The Institute of Public Administration in New Zealand, Bill English the countries Deputy Prime Minister said;

A second concept for the future is “inside out government”.

Government holds a wealth of information. Some of it – quite rightly – is sensitive and access should be strictly controlled – tax records for example.

But in other areas, I see no reason why we can’t turn government inside out, so to speak, and make the same data and information available to those outside of government.

Government can tap wider resources in the community to analyse and use government data to help solve problems and produce insights. A ministerial committee is exploring this concept.

Inside out government also requires government to be open to good ideas from business.

We want to see ideas generated in the private sector and NGO sector genuinely considered and appraised – not simply ruled out on the basis that these sectors might not understand all aspects of government.

As I have said in previous articles, governments have a business to run and business leaders will look for ways to improve the way that it works using the assets and tools that they have available.

On the other side of the equation we have the tools and applications that are being built with the data that governments are already starting to publish, the theme of many of these applications appears to be somewhat different.

Early applications and much of the conversation that is being driven outside of government tends to focus on government transparency and public control of departmental activity, delivering applications that will help the public understand ministerial expenses, ensure that bills are read in detail before votes are cast and alerting citizens as a piece of legislation that potentially affects them passes through parliament.

The reality is that there is significant benefit underpinning both of these agendas, more efficient government is certainly a good thing, as is a more transparent and accountable government. The work that needs to be done to accommodate both agendas is probably pretty similar, and some of the foundations that we’re seeing from initiatives like NZGOAL will go a long way towards delivering what both sides need.

To those who have worked around government for some time the risks should start to become evident. While the goals of the two agendas may be similar, the language and the end expectations differ dramatically.

In the example above where Minister English talked about inside out government there was a great deal of cheering for the prospect of the New Zealand government publishng more open data but I saw very little mention of how community led projects would help him meet his objectives.

Both sides need to start to listen very carefully to the other, if they don’t then I worry that we’re on a trajectory that will eventually lead to two very unhappy and dissatisfied groups of people.

I’ve used examples from New Zealand in this article, but I don’t see the debate being dramatically different in the many other countries that I’m also following.

Posted in eGovernment | Tagged gov20, opendata | 5 Comments

New Zealand’s Open Government (#opengovt) barcamp

Posted on August 30, 2009 by oliver

logo_beehive code_100%_72dpi The long week last week ended with my joining the Open Government Data barcamp event that several folks have been busy organizing in Wellington.

It is clear from the topics that were discussed that there is lots of great work going on in this area in NZ already.

As I spend more time in New Zealand I’ve noticed that there always appears to be discussion at this type of event around how we don’t want NZ to get left behind in whatever area of new technology is being talked about, in this case I’m pretty confident that it is just the opposite and that the NZ community is much closer to the leading edge than similar groups in other countries.

The output from the day and the details of the conversations will eventually be well documented on the wiki that is being set up, so I thought I would avoid general commentary and just share a thought that was with me as I left the event on Saturday.

Listening to the presentations I was trying to think about three different constituencies and how the topics that were being presented were relevant and would be received by them.

The first group is an obvious one and it is the one hundred and sixty or so participants at the barcamp event itself along with others from around the country who have an interest in this topic, many of whom are already working on solutions of one type or another. For this group the conversation brings obvious benefits, sharing ideas and best practice is always a good thing, as is knowing who else is working on projects that might be able to prevent expending effort on initiatives that may be duplicative.

The second hat I tried to wear was that of the general citizen. Transparent government, open government and participatory government are all great goals, but are not always top of mind for the general citizen (whoever that is). Over the last decade we have learned a great deal about this area while working on various eGovernment solutions, focus groups have frequently told us that what they want is a less intrusive government, and to pay lower taxes – most other noble goals end up being secondary.

Not quite as forward thinking as the citizenry that many of us would wish for, but a frequent reality all the same. For many taxpaying citizens solutions that build upon open government and open data have to slide quietly into processes that they already interact with, or disappear under the covers completely to be dealt with by a third party group or agency.

Finally, as a third group, I tried to think about how government agencies themselves would view the conversation. While we like to think about a government agency as “our government” with a duty to serve us, we also have to consider the fact that an agency is a business much like any other. Money is raised in the form of taxes, grants or loans and gets spent on carefully planned projects.

Additional projects like building applications that use or publish open data sets have to be funded somehow, in many cases that involves cutting existing projects or in extreme cases finding ways of raising more funding.

For this conversation to be highly relevant to government I still think there needs to be some thought around what the business case for an agency would look like, and how ministers would be encouraged to drive policy that makes open data relevant to the way government operates on a daily basis.

It is the intersection of the objectives of at least these three groups that would eventually deliver the environment that would have to exist for open data sets to be an every day reality in New Zealand’s governance structure.

It was a thought provoking day, personally I enjoyed it, hopefully I’ll get invited back to the next one… and next time around I have a few ideas of my own that I would like to throw in to the conversation!

Posted in eGovernment | Tagged gov20, opendata | 3 Comments

gov20, if it was my plan I wouldn’t start there

Posted on August 27, 2009 by oliver

There are a couple of ways of looking at gov20 technologies and their role in national governance, most of the chatter that I’m seeing at the moment is focused on just one side of the opportunity.

Certainly there is a role for gov20 technologies in increasing government transparency, but what about the efficiency of government itself?

As I have said before on this blog, we often think about Government as a monolithic organization that serves faceless services to the tax paying population.

In reality government is much like any other major organization with hundreds of departments, thousands of business processes and tens of thousands of employees. Changes can be complex, they need to be well understood and represented in a business cases that clearly explain the benefits that will be realized through any money that is spent.

To give you an idea of the size of governments, the United Kingdom’s National Office of Statistics presents the UK civil service at around 500,000 full time employees and Statistics Canada shows the Canadian federal government consisting of around 300,000 employees. These numbers are representative of national government employees only, and don’t include state or local employees, it does not need to be said that these are big organizations.

So, I hear you ask, what does this have to do with gov20?

There are several areas where I think more internally focused use of gov20 technology could bring significant efficiency to the way that government works, helping the civil service understand what might be happening in other major agencies, or helping track policy changes coming out of the various executive branches of government.

Implemented correctly these technologies could make government significantly more nimble and better prepared to deliver the external agendas that are currently being discussed in blogs and in the press.

For example, one area where I feel we might be able to see some immediate benefit would be in dealing with the perception that governments are risk averse, instead using technology to ensure that government employees are better informed about the way their business process interacts with others and preparing them to react more rapidly to changing environmental circumstances.

From the outside government can often appear to be slow to react to a changing environment, in my experience the civil service tend to be anything but, in many cases they are dealing with programs of unimaginable size and complexity.

When you are a company delivering a new service you get to make some choices about who your customers will be, what quality of service you might offer and how that service will interact with the rest of your business. Governments rarely get to make those choices, changes to business practice have to be considered in terms of how it will impact processes across the rest of government, and developed in a manner that does not disenfranchise any part of society. As such a change program in Government can be significantly more complex than it would be in the commercial world, and it takes time for organizations to work through that complexity.

I’m surprised that we have not started to see vendors offering social networking and web20 solutions that aim to solve some of these complex issues inside of government, finding ways to use technology to connect a few hundred thousand internal employees of a particular government to provide information and insight on upcoming programs along with a forum to quickly work out any related challenges.

Beginning by tackling some of these internal challenges may help government employees see the value of gov20 technology within their own environments, I’m confident that it would help spark new ideas around how social media and gov20 technologies could be used externally across many thousands of employees, rather than relying on a handful of departmental champions as we appear to be doing in many cases at the moment.

Over time I have a view that solving some of the internal challenges, and then looking at how you might externalize what government learns during that process, will rapidly get us to the full level of interaction that an increasing number of people crave, rather than pushing for potentially premature implementation of gov20 services that may be disconnected from internal processes and valid business cases.

Posted in eGovernment | Tagged gov20 | Leave a comment

The mythical “single standard”

Posted on August 2, 2009 by oliver

One standard, or multiple standards?

It seems like a pretty cut and dried debate, if there was a single standard for everything in the software world then life would be simpler. Wouldn’t it?

Back in the early 90s we thought that we had the whole single standard thing pretty much sorted out. For email we would use X.400, for ethernet communications we would use TP4 and so on.

I was working with many of our public sector customers in the UK at the time, and assisted with a number of projects aimed at delivering X.400 enabled mailboxes broadly across the UK civil service.

In the mid 90s along came the internet, bringing with it with the stack of protocols that we are all aware of today.

The agencies that I had been working with mostly had one of two strategies, either a pure X.400 implementation which at this point would be mostly redundant, or a broad strategy of interconnection with Notes, MSMail, Groupwise, X.400 etc., in which cases SMTP was just one protocol in a list of many and as such could be folded into an existing project plan.

Even then it was not the end of the road for X.400, as recently as three years ago we were still seeing the protocol being implemented in military environments where features of the X.400 specification remained crucial for email in the battlefield.

Moving to today, even given the pain that a number of technologists felt during the 90s, the debate around one or multiple standards in a given technology domain still goes on.

In many cases, if we play this debate out in a technology domain that we all know well then it makes very little sense.

Lets use high speed local area networks as an example. There is an obvious choice for a single standard that will work for everybody in this domain, it is TCP/IP. Isn’t it?

Choosing and mandating only TCP/IP has a couple of effects on my ability to communicate with the array of devices that I might find in any corporate datacenter today. Starting with legacy systems, I might have just restricted my ability to talk to those older systems which could be running protocols like IPX, Netbeui or various mainframe communication protocols that have existed through the years. On the other end of the scale, we’re starting to see and increasing number of devices implement the next version of TCP/IP, IPv6.

So for something as simple as networking it seems we have a need for a range of protocols to deal with all of the systems we might be planning to work with. The majority traffic on the wire will obviously be TCP/IP on any network today, but a percentage of it will be something else, and over time I would expect to see the majority migrate to IPv6 or a protocol that has yet to be developed.

This becomes the case for at least three reasons.

First of all, any evolving datacenter will either have existing legacy systems, or will have a need to connect to external third party customers or partners who are using legacy technologies.

The second is that developers (companies and individuals) continue to innovate in every area of the technology itself. Sometimes that innovation is incremental, sometimes it comes from another group and is ostensibly competitive.

The third is that while many standards look similar at the outset (Netbeui and TCP/IP are both just networking protocols for example) it quickly becomes clear as you delve into the details that they exist because at a point in time a development group perceived a scenario that could not be addressed by the many protocols that had already been defined and made available to the market.

My conclusions are by no means empirical, but I do find that this argument tends to fall on the side of preference for a “single standard” for a given technology domain in a handful of scenarios;

There could be a preference for a particular technology. This one is generally pretty obvious, you will hear something like “there should be a single standard in this area, and it must be my standard” thrown into the debate.

Simplicity of implementation may carry the highest possible priority for a small subset of projects, with a relative disregard for factors like legacy integration or future innovation. This is an interesting line of argument, and in my view only works for stand alone solutions that will have a short life span. Solutions that will never have to communicate with a legacy user community or technologies, and do not have to be ready to deal with innovative technology changes that might come along in the future.

Finally, it can sometimes come down to a lack of information being presented to the group making the decision. When you glance over a particular technology domain, choosing a single standard in that area generally looks pretty straight forwards but when you dig deeper it is rarely the case, as with my example of networking protocols.

Many of the software products that have enjoyed success in the market over the last couple of decades have done so in part because of their support for multiple standards and formats, I suspect the same will eventually be true for enterprise and eGovernment technology solutions that are being implemented today.

Posted in Standards | Leave a comment