Aspen ideas Festival Talk on Gov20

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

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

3. 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

4. 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 Friday, July 3, 2009

5. "The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet." --William Gibson Friday, July 3, 2009

6. 6 Friday, July 3, 2009

7. The "Killer Apps” of the New Millennium 7 Friday, July 3, 2009

8. 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” 8 Friday, July 3, 2009

9. The smart phone plus local search. Today pizza, tomorrow news? Friday, July 3, 2009

10. 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. 10 Friday, July 3, 2009

11. Friday, July 3, 2009

12. theyworkforyou.com Friday, July 3, 2009

15. 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 Friday, July 3, 2009

18. What might that entail? Friday, July 3, 2009

21. Gov 2.0 •Citizen contribution and collaboration •Use of social media •Transparency •Rapid application development •New methods of procurement •Cloud computing Friday, July 3, 2009

22. 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 Friday, July 3, 2009

23. Our government has always been a platform for collective action “We must all hang together or we will assuredly all hang separately.” —Ben Franklin Friday, July 3, 2009

24. Vending Machine Government Friday, July 3, 2009

25. The consequence Friday, July 3, 2009

28. mybarackobama.com is a self-service organizing platform Friday, July 3, 2009

30. Can we build something similar for the actual operations of government? Friday, July 3, 2009

31. •Government to Citizen •Citizen to Government •Citizen to Citizen •Government to Government Friday, July 3, 2009

32. What Can We Learn from the Success of Technology Platforms? Friday, July 3, 2009

33. Some Lessons from Successful Technology Platforms 1. Embrace open standards: they encourage innovation and grow the market Friday, July 3, 2009

34. The first IBM PC Friday, July 3, 2009

35. IBM’s original forecast for the PC Friday, July 3, 2009

36. IBM’s original forecast for the PC Friday, July 3, 2009

38. 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 Friday, July 3, 2009

39. Generative Systems “Generativity is a system’s capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences.” Friday, July 3, 2009

40. Some policy areas where open standards apply • open, portable electronic health records • open government data enabling competition by third parties to provide services Friday, July 3, 2009

44. 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 Friday, July 3, 2009

46. “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 Friday, July 3, 2009

47. Simple is one of the hardest things for government to do Friday, July 3, 2009

48. “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 Friday, July 3, 2009

49. 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 Friday, July 3, 2009

50. 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.” Friday, July 3, 2009

51. Anatomy of a Linux System Friday, July 3, 2009

53. 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. Friday, July 3, 2009

54. The Internet Domain Name System From DNS and Bind, by Cricket Liu, http://my.safaribooksonline.com/0596100574/dns5-CHP-2#snippet Friday, July 3, 2009

55. How did DHS Virtual Alabama Get Participation from Agencies w/o control? Friday, July 3, 2009

56. 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 Friday, July 3, 2009

57. housingmaps.com - the very first Google maps mashup •It was a “hack.” Google learned from it, quickly, and turned it into a supported feature Friday, July 3, 2009

59. If you’re really building a platform, your customers and partners build new features before you do Friday, July 3, 2009

61. USAspending.gov Friday, July 3, 2009

63. 5. Lower the Barriers to Experimentation Gene Kranz: Failure is not an option But for most projects this is not the case! Friday, July 3, 2009

64. “I didn’t fail ten thousand times. I successfully eliminated, ten thousand times, materials and combinations which wouldn’t work.” Thomas Edison Friday, July 3, 2009

67. 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. Friday, July 3, 2009

69. it.usaspending.gov Friday, July 3, 2009

70. Measure Outcomes, Not Just Output • Are we measuring the right things? Friday, July 3, 2009

73. 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. Friday, July 3, 2009

74. 7. Throw open the doors to partners More than 50,000 iPhone applications in less than a year! Friday, July 3, 2009

76. Preferred application partners •Struggling to catch up in the application marketplace Friday, July 3, 2009

77. 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 Friday, July 3, 2009

84. 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. Friday, July 3, 2009

87. 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 Friday, July 3, 2009

92. The Digital Commonwealth Friday, July 3, 2009

93. For more information •http://radar.oreilly.com •http://gov2summit.com •http://twitter.com/timoreilly •tim@oreilly.com •http://www.slideshare.net/timoreilly Friday, July 3, 2009

Aspen ideas Festival Talk on Gov20

Aspen ideas Festival Talk on Gov20

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Aspen ideas Festival Talk on Gov20