Openness in government will bring with it more than just transparency, it will bring a more efficient government – and just at a time when agencies need to do more with a very taxed funding base. There will certainly be some people from the old guard who don’t know how to best start opening up data and who are fearful of the transparency it will show. It’s also likely that these people will use false economic arguments within their organizations – saying that opening up data is too costly – to try to derail openness. With this post I hope to neutralize some of these arguments and point out a few reasons why openness is the only solution that makes economic sense.
Expanding the production possibility frontier
Open data will increase the production possibility frontier within an agency. Even if data is never made available to the pubic, smart open data policies will make it more accessible to an organization’s staff for a huge effect.
Too often agencies don’t know where programs are overlapping. This can be especially embarrassing for international development agencies that don’t know where all of their operations are taking place. Social intranets, geo tagged content, and aggregation tools are great ways to increase knowledge transfer within organizations, make government employees more effective, and also prepare data to become more publicly accessible. More efficient resource allocation in international development means we help more people around the world. More efficient knowledge transfer within security – and humanitarian – organizations will keep Americans safer here at home.
Open data will generate positive externalities
In talks with Mayor Fenty and Washington, DC’s CTO Vivek Kundra after our Apps for Democracy submission StumbleSafely won an award, we learned that the DC police force was using our map to better visualize crime hot spots near bars to improve their coverage during the key times of the day when it mattered. This is a great example of a positive externality coming from open data. Just as the beekeeper inadvertently helps pollinate the farmer’s crops in his quest for a jar of honey, open data will have many benefits for taxpayers that we can’t even imagine now. In another example, the same data that’s already being collected by USAID to help our development operations could also be used by American businesses to identify new market opportunities abroad. The data just needs to be structured in a way that makes it cost effective to access.
The “hybrid economy” in action
Practically speaking, how can agencies open up their data? This is a good question. Opening up data means more than putting out boxes for the public to sift through, and the data itself needs to be structured in a way that makes it open and actually accessible. There are serious worries that this could lead to an egregiously expensive technology investment, but there’s no reason it has to. The government should use open source software in this undertaking, and agencies should push their tech teams to step up to learn new skills to be able to effectively implement the new applications needed for this process.
Why open source? Government agencies should turn to open source applications because they are the only ones that have the functionality needed to meet the task of opening up so much data in a cost effective and inherently accessible way. In fact, the foundation of the applications needed for this undertaking have already been built and paid for by the private sector over the past several years. Government agencies can take advantage of this strong foundation and build on top of it – leading to a much more cost effective process. For example, mapping tools built for the New America Foundation could be used by any USAID funded organization to display information about their programs on a world map.
Once the government invests in these open source tools, the private sector will have access to even better applications. This cycle will continue to to go back and forth pushing the technology forward, and it’s not dependent on agreements between anyone or a single company or contractor. The free market of software has shown to be one of the most efficient markets in allocating resources, and increased actors in this area will only push it forward further.
Let’s not worry about all the work needed to get better data. Instead, let’s focus on all the great data the government and other agencies already have and put it in a format where technology can access it faster to make it more accessible and available (thank you RDF). We’ll quickly see how open data and access to it will impact and improve government and its work.