Presentation to Association of Local Government IT Managers web symposium about open data, gov 2.0, and the like.

1. Open Data
Nat Torkington
ALGIM Web Symposium
May 2010
Going to start by looking at some thought-provoking projects, and then I’ll talk about the
thoughts they provoke.

2. Wellibus

3. Routes

4. Select

5. $$$?
You might ask how much this cost MetLink. iPhone developers are hot property, the skills
aren’t common, apps have to be reviewed by Apple, ....

6. Nick Parfene
It cost nothing. This guy wrote it. He’s a Wellingtonian, his girlfriend had been nagging him
to give her the bus schedule on her mobile device.

7. Public Transit Data
He did it using the Metlink Google Transit data feed. Metlink offer the data to Google so they
can appear in Google’s maps. Nick piggybacked off that.

8. Actively used
He has over 500 users every day.

9. Projects

10. California had a $26B budget gap in 2009, cities lost redevelopment money, Santa Cruz had
$9.2M deficit. Started a website to engage public. Wasn’t a blog, used a company
“Uservoice” whose tools promoted productive discussion and minimised unproductive.
Published 10 years of budgets. Had accountants, business people, citizens making
suggestions. They were able to make thoughtful informed cuts and optimisations.

11. Boston non-profit in partnership with the city, running social networks for neighbourhoods.
Started with one neighbourhood, expanded to 18.
Connect to neighbours, crime reports, common interests, chat, volunteerism, events.

12. A legion of systems to report problems (out lights, downed lines, flooded streets, buggered
roads, etc.).
It’s Buggered Mate. See Click Fix. FixMyStreet. Hundreds of these.

13. District of Columbia released a lot of data, then ran a contest. $2.3M of software creation for
$50k project (grand prize won $10k). Winner was an iPhone and Facebook app combo for
doing 311 “fix my street” style requests. Many cities following this course.

14. Cities are releasing data, and lots of it, in reusable formats. They hope to make businesses
more efficient, citizens better directed, and services cheaper.

15. I know what you’re
thinking
You’re thinking about your own web sites.

16. Local Govt Web Sites
You’re delivering information in PDF files, your web site holds PDF forms that must be mailed in, even the digital databases you maintain don’t have online
interfaces.
And I know why.

17. I’m talking science fiction dreams, which would take megabucks to realise,

18. But this is what they give you. Every year you look at your budgets and

19. it’s not good.

20. Chillax
Don’t panic, as Douglas Adams would have said. I’m not asking the impossible.
As Krishna was told by Arjuna, "a man must go forth from where he stands. He cannot jump to the Absolute, he must evolve toward it"
Let’s boil it down.

21. Gov 2.0
Gov 2.0, “e-democracy”, or whatever the hell it’s being called today.

22. Last 20 years of computers
It’s just looking at the amazing successes of the last 20 years of computing

23. We can do better
and applying them to government.

24. What’s worked?

25. Build open, extensible
systems
IBM PC took off because everyone could build compatible hardware
Web took off because anyone could use code and build their own website, and they interoperated
APIs and open data

26. Design for cooperation
Small systems loosely joined
DNS is federated, not centralised

27. Learn from your users
Google maps
(used by 45% of all online mashups)
hired the first guy to make a mashup
fedspending.org used to be run by OMBwatch

28. Lower the barriers to
experimentation
Failure should be an option.
Edison: “I didnʼt fail ten thousand times. I successfully eliminated, ten thousand times, materials and combinations that did not work.”
Much innovation comes from a single engineer within an entity like the New York Times, putting archives up on an inexpensive, rented server from Amazon. The
low cost of failure made it easier to experiment.

29. Build a culture of
measurement
Amazon driven by numbers
Need good metrics!
You are what you measure. Canʼt change what you donʼt measure.

30. Build a community
You want this to succeed.
You also want to get credit.
(“Why do we need NOAA when we have weather.com?”)

31. Invisible Walls
(aka Planned
Interactions)
Wikipedia succeeds because of what you don’t see

32. Build simple systems
and let them evolve
Twitterʼs original design doc was 1/2 a page of paper, and there are now 11,000 applications built on top of it (written by third parties).
The hourglass model: run on many systems, support many applications, but connected by a common protocol.
“Complex systems built from scratch never work. You need to build a simple system and let it grow… Complex problems paradoxically require simple answers.”

33. Open Data
The easiest step for governments to take is opening data. This means

34. 1. Machine readable

35. 2. Reusable

36. (“Creative Commons”)

37. 3. Self-service

38. 4. Open format

39. 0. Useful!
Temptation is always to release the easy stuff. Work backwards from the issue to figure out
what data would be most useful in the hands of citizens?

40. Open Data:
Necessary
Sufficient
why are we doing this?

41. Action
Insight
Data
Get the data in front of the right people.
Over the fence isn’t enough. It’s been tried, and then everyone scrambles to find users.

42. Community
You need to build a community of users.
fortunately you’re good at community. you already have one.

43. Don’t cargo-cult
Don’t use technology because it’s trendy, it ticks a box, or someone else used it.
Know what you’re hoping to accomplish, use the right technology with the right social
measures around it. What made Wikipedia great? Same invisible walls in the app that Santa
Cruz used.

44. Contests
Contests draw your community out of the woodwork. What if you don’t have a lot of
developers in your community?

45. Do the work to make
useful data available
Contests often used to try to excite people about irrelevant data. Release data people are
passionate about. This probably means a fight.

46. Standards let you
piggyback on the
world’s developers
Google Transit feed
Open311 project

47. It doesn’t end with data

48. Vision
So, here’s my vision that I’d like you to share.

49. Integrated workflow
Every process in your council is online, and has a web/mobile/smartphone/Babelfish
mindreader interface. Citizens can interact with the council conveniently, and efficiently.

50. “Build web services, not
web sites.” —Rod Drury
this leads to Rod Drury’s suggestion

51. Takeaways

52. 1) PDF isn’t enough

53. 2) Web maps aren’t
enough

54. 3) Release open data

55. 4) Connect with
citizens over data

56. 5) Cultivate local
developers

57. 6) Built web services
not web APIs

58. 7) Use standards

59. Redux
• PDF is not enough
• Web maps are not enough
• Release open data
• Connect with citizens over the data
• Cultivate local developers
• Build web services not APIs
• Use standards
With these tips, I hope you’ll go back to your councils and be thinking of the intelligent life
outside the org chart--who can you bring in to build a community of data users and app
developers so you can connect data to insight to action. If you have questions or need help,

60. Thank You
nathan@torkington.com
http://nathan.torkington.com
http://twitter.com/gnat
here’s my contact information. I’ll take questions if we have time.