Since President Obama said he’d name a “federal CTO,” I’ve been watching with interest to see who he’d pick. A lot of people expected that he’d pick a big name industry figure, but he went another direction and chose Aneesh Chopra, the Secretary of Technology for the state of Virginia. Chopra’s name is not one I’d heard before, but Tim O’Reilly makes a compelling argument for why he’s a good choice.
Chopra’s experience is specifically in driving technological advancement in government. I agree with O’Reilly that picking someone who’s never worked in government would limit what can be achieved, because learning how things work in a government setting takes time. Chopra is not going to need to get up to speed.
What I’d like to see is Chopra writing a blog himself, or at least Tweeting. If the federal government is doing interesting things on the IT front (and I expect it will be), part of the value he can provide is teaching states and municipalities what they could be doing as well. I hope he takes the outreach part of the job seriously.
Ed Felten and some co-authors have written a paper discussing a more modern approach to open government. They suggest that the best approach is that rather than government agencies focusing on building Web sites that provide access to government data, they should focus on providing the data itself in an open format so that it can be utilized by anyone.
Here’s the meat of the proposal:
Rather than struggling, as it currently does, to design sites that meet each end-user need, it should focus on creating a simple, reliable and publicly accessible infrastructure that “exposes” the underlying data. Private actors, either nonprofit or commercial, are better suited to deliver government information to citizens and can constantly create and reshape the tools individuals use to find and leverage public data. The best way to ensure that the government allows private parties to compete on equal terms in the provision of government data is to require that federal websites themselves use the same open systems for accessing the underlying data as they make available to the public at large.
Sounds like a great idea to me. I love the idea of forcing government agencies to eat their own dog food in order to propel this kind of approach.
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