Government as a
Platform
Tim O’Reilly
O’Reilly Media, Inc.
www.oreilly.com
July 3, 2009
Aspen Ideas Festival
Friday, July 3, 2009

We’re perhaps best known as a
computer book publisher
covering topics
from the frontiers
of emerging
technologies.
Friday, July 3, 2009

What We Really Do at O’Reilly
•Find interesting technologies and people
innovating from the edge
•Amplify their effectiveness by spreading the
information needed for others to follow
them.
•Books, Conferences, Online Publishing,
Investing, Research and Consulting
Friday, July 3, 2009

Watch the Alpha Geeks
• New technologies first exploited by enthusiasts,
then entrepreneurs, then platform players
• Two examples
– Wireless community networks
predict universal Wi-Fi
– Screen scraping predicts
web services and the internet
as platform
Rob Flickenger and his potato chip can antenna
4
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"The future is here. It's just not
evenly distributed yet."
--William Gibson
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The "Killer Apps” of the New Millennium
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The network as platform
•Software delivered as an online service
•Driven by huge databases that literally get
better the more people use them
•“Harnessing collective intelligence”
•“Data is the Intel Inside”
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The smart phone plus local search.
Today pizza, tomorrow news?
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Remember What I Said Earlier?
Hackers are “lead users”
who tell us where the
future is going.
Companies apply their
insights in new contexts
to build next-generation
products.
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theyworkforyou.com
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A vision of technology in government
"We need to connect citizens with each other to engage them
more fully and directly in solving the problems that face us.
We must use all available technologies and methods to open
up the federal government, creating a new level of
transparency to change the way business is conducted in
Washington and giving Americans the chance to participate in
government deliberations and decision-making in ways that
were not possible only a few years ago."
– From Barack Obama's campaign platform on technology
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What might that entail?
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Gov 2.0
•Citizen contribution and collaboration
•Use of social media
•Transparency
•Rapid application development
•New methods of procurement
•Cloud computing
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Gov 2.0
•Citizen contribution and collaboration
•Use of social media
•Transparency
•Rapid application development
•New methods of procurement
•Cloud computing
•Government as a platform
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Our government has always been a
platform for collective action
“We must all hang together
or we will assuredly all
hang separately.”
—Ben Franklin
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Vending Machine Government
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The consequence
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mybarackobama.com is a
self-service organizing platform
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Can we build something similar for
the actual operations of government?
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•Government to Citizen
•Citizen to Government
•Citizen to Citizen
•Government to Government
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What Can We Learn from the Success
of Technology Platforms?
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Some Lessons from Successful
Technology Platforms
1. Embrace open standards: they encourage
innovation and grow the market
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The first IBM PC
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IBM’s original forecast for the PC
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IBM’s original forecast for the PC
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Now more than 80 million web sites
Source: Netcraft Web Server Survey: http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2009/05/27/may_2009_web_server_survey.html
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Generative Systems
“Generativity is a
system’s capacity to
produce
unanticipated
change through
unfiltered
contributions from
broad and varied
audiences.”
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Some policy areas where open
standards apply
• open, portable electronic health records
• open government data enabling competition
by third parties to provide services
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2. Build a simple system - let it evolve
“A complex system that works is invariably
found to have evolved from a simple system
that worked. The inverse proposition also
appears to be true: A complex system
designed from scratch never works and cannot
be made to work. You have to start over,
beginning with a working simple system.”
John Gall, in Systemantics:
How Systems Really Work and How They Fail
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“Hourglass”
Architecture
any
any device
task
any
person
the Internet’s
not-so-secret
sauce
any CTSB, NRC, “The Internet’s
Coming of Age” (2001)
medium
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Simple is one of the hardest things for
government to do
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“We’re going to be publishing government data
and beginning with a default assumption that
information should be [available] to the
people... If you look at what happened when
data has been democratized, when data has
been put in the public domain, you’ve had an
explosion of innovation.”
-Vivek Kundra, new Federal CIO
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I need your help
We need to find and promulgate a series of
simple interventions that will have large
downstream consequences, by opening up the
power of the market to solve the problems we
face as a nation and a world.
Complex problems paradoxically require
simple answers
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3. Design for cooperation
“The book is perhaps most valuable for
its exposition of the Unix philosophy of
small cooperating tools with
standardized inputs and outputs, a
philosophy that also shaped the end-to-
end philosophy of the Internet. It is this
philosophy, and the architecture based
on it, that has allowed open source
projects to be assembled into larger
systems such as Linux, without explicit
coordination between developers.”
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Anatomy of a Linux System
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No, my friend, the way to have good and safe
government is not to trust it all to one, but to
divide it among the many, distributing to
everyone the functions he is competent to.... It
is by dividing and subdividing these republics
from the great national one down through all
its subordinations, until it ends in the
administration of each man’s farm by himself.
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The Internet Domain Name System
From DNS and Bind, by Cricket Liu, http://my.safaribooksonline.com/0596100574/dns5-CHP-2#snippet
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How did DHS Virtual Alabama Get
Participation from Agencies w/o control?
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4. Learn from your users, especially
ones who do what you don’t expect
•45% of all mashups are on Google Maps, only
4% on Microsoft Virtual Earth, 3% Yahoo!
Maps
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housingmaps.com - the very first
Google maps mashup
•It was a “hack.” Google learned from it,
quickly, and turned it into a supported feature
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If you’re really building a platform,
your customers and partners build
new features before you do
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USAspending.gov
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5. Lower the Barriers to Experimentation
Gene Kranz: Failure is not an option
But for most projects this is not the case!
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“I didn’t fail ten thousand times. I successfully
eliminated, ten thousand times, materials and
combinations which wouldn’t work.”
Thomas Edison
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6. Build a culture of measurement
•If it works, do more of it.
•If it doesn’t, stop doing it.
•Build systems that respond automatically to
user stimuli.
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it.usaspending.gov
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Measure Outcomes, Not Just Output
• Are we measuring the right things?
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Let’s assume that you purchase a
flashlight at Wal-Mart. The cash
register reads the bar code price tag
and reportedly within fourteen
seconds, the Wal-Mart central
warehouse is notified that the store
needs a new flashlight to replace the
purchased item.
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7. Throw open the doors to partners
More than 50,000 iPhone
applications in less than a
year!
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Preferred application partners
•Struggling to catch up in the application
marketplace
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So why do governments still make
deals like these?
•No bid contracts
•Preferred providers
•Earmarks
•Sole source licensing
of government data to
single-source
providers
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Government as a platform means an
end to the design of many complete
“applications.” Instead the
government should provide
fundamental services on which we,
the people, (also known as “the
market) build the applications.
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Government is a vehicle for collective
action
•Frank DiGiammarino,
recovery.gov:
–Convener first, problem solver
second
–Pull the right people together
–Enable action through
knowledge, resources and
visibility
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The Digital Commonwealth
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For more information
•http://radar.oreilly.com
•http://gov2summit.com
•http://twitter.com/timoreilly
•tim@oreilly.com
•http://www.slideshare.net/timoreilly
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Friday, July 3, 2009