I don’t see anything in Eureka Streams I can’t do in Drupal, or a number of other high-quality open source projects that have existed for years. Lockheed has reinvented the wheel — why?

So here's the nice thing about the open source community: competition. If I think I've come up with a better way to solve a problem, it can easily compete with the incumbents. Low barrier to entry, we say. Let the best ideas win. Unless, apparently, the best ideas come from a company I don't like.

Then things start going sideways:

The author of Eureka Streams, who goes by the name Sterlecki at Github, has left no previous tracks there. Linkedin lists the same picture as belonging to Steve Terlecki, a Lockheed software developer.

The stuff’s legit, so we’re left again with the question of motive. Is the military-industrial complex reaching out to open source, is this just proof of press reports showing our spy efforts have more bloat in them than a Macy’s Thanksgiving float, are we being co-opted, or am I just too suspicious?

Wait, what? Open source advocates have, for years, been trying to encourage more code to come out from behind corporate skirts. Where companies can build business models around governing and supporting open source projects, we want them to take the plunge. If more code is open, that makes everyone smarter. And that, my friends, is exactly what Lockheed Martin did today. Someone who probably never contributed code in their lives just gave the community a project they've been working on for months, or even years. I think that's amazing. In return, this brave developer gets painted as a nefarious secret agent out to steal our thoughts and bug our laptops. Or whatever.

So here's the great thing about open source: we can prove Blankenhorn wrong. They use the Apache license, and it's on Github. We can go through the code and find backdoors, secret plans, and mind-control rays. This reminds me very much of the reaction to the release of SELinux. Conspiracy theories everywhere, but code is auditable and now it's in the mainstream Linux kernel. Do we really want to throw out these contributions, when code doesn't lie? When it's so easy to ensure there's nothing nefarious inside?

You can feel however you like about Lockheed Martin or the US Department of Defense. You can choose to contribute to the project, or not. You can choose to use the software, or not. But is it in the community's interest to summarily dismiss contributions based on those preferences? Lockheed's thousands of developers are sending up a trial balloon. If they fail, we lose access to those developers forever.

I think this kind of fearmongering is exactly what prevents large corporations and government agencies from releasing their code. These knee-jerk reactions harm the open source community at large. We pride ourselves on our meritocracy. A 14-year-old in his mom's basement is the same as a 30-year-old Lockheed developer is the same as a UNIX graybeard. You are just as good as your contributions. We need to welcome Lockheed's contributions, not throw them back in their face. Whether the project is useful or not, they've enriched the open source community. Let them succeed or fail on their own merits. If they do fail, we hope that they'll do better next time. Maybe this is a Drupal-killer. Who knows? Let's give it a try.

At the Sunlight Foundation, we spend each day striving to make government more open and transparent by ensuring government data is easily accessible to the public online and in real-time. Around the country there are countless others trying to do the same.

Between the nonprofit and advocacy community working on this issue, the consultancies and companies, and the government itself, there is a tremendous amount of time, energy and resources being devoted to our cause. In the midst of our diligence, though, the community of open government advocates rarely stops to communicate exactly why we do what we do to the public – and why it’s so critical that we succeed in our mission.

OpenGovies need to remember to continuously break things down for those outside our echo chamber. When doing so, it’s useful to have a benchmark, and the one I use is, “Would what I’m saying or writing make my family in Middle Tennessee care enough to act?”

After a lot of trial and error, in big and small towns across the country, I think we can boil down the need for our work this way…

An open government built on open data is worth fighting for because, through it, we will achieve three exceptionally valuable results for society: Accountability, Better Services and Economic Opportunity.

Here’s what we mean.

1) Transparency and Accountability

Online, real-time data makes it possible for any citizen to understand what’s (actually) going on with government at any time from anywhere. And when they know, citizens can act.

Applications which make it easy to see how tax dollars are spent, how our elected officials are being influenced, or how legislation that citizens can weigh in on are moving through Congress, can all be built on open government data. This transparency and public engagement made possible through open government data is a game changer for the media and for citizens’ ability to hold our government accountable at every level. Imagine an electorate being able to make informed decisions based on data rather than punditry and political spin…

In short, open, transparent, and accountable is the way participatory democracy was always supposed to be. And for perhaps the first time ever, we have affordable, ubiquitous technology today which can make it truly possible within a generation. Let’s create something that would make our Founding Fathers drool.

2) Better Government Service

Love them, hate them or indifferent, the services that government provide touch every citizen’s life every day. From schools to roads to health clinics to electricity grids to defense, we as citizens have invested in (and trusted) government with a very large portion of our livelihoods.

Open government data will allow for citizens and government alike to more easily see what’s working and what’s not by the numbers. Through open government, and the applications it allows for, we’ll ensure that tax dollars are more wisely spent and services more effectively and efficiently provided.

Need an example? Take a moment on SeeClickFix and report that pesky pothole or downed road sign in your neighborhood.

3) (Tremendous) Economic Opportunity

Perhaps the greatest by-product of creating a more transparent, accountable government through freely available open government data, is that in so doing, we will simultaneously create one of the most vast opportunities for new enterprise in recent history.

The Weather Channel is a $3.5 billion company built on data freely available from the NOAA. Companies like Garmin, or companies that produce smart phones, running watches or any of a hundred other devices that have geo-locational ability are similarly all profiting tremendously from the open government data in the Global Positioning System (GPS). In fact, one could argue (as Gov 2.0 evangelist Tim O’Reilly has done) that Ronald Reagan is the father of social network phenom FourSquare by making GPS data available to the public over twenty-five years ago.

What government data set will create the next new highly valuable and profitable business? Anil Dash, the founder and executive director of the new Expert Labs, says the trove of new health data recently released by the Department of Health and Human Services. I would agree.

When it comes to the opportunity with open government data, the sky is the limit. Were I a gambling man, I’d put money down that government would produce more jobs in the next 10 years by opening it’s data (an iniatiative that is ultimately a cost-saver), than through the $787 bn stimulus package it passed last year.

The only tricky part is that government doesn’t inherently want to get to where we need them to go. Government won’t become more transparent and accountable by opening its data on its own – and nor will it provide better services or create the kind of opportunity that the OpenGov community can already envision.

We’re going to have to demand it of them. And that’s what we’re doing through the Public=Online Campaign this year. We hope you’ll join us.

Microsoft Director of Innovative Social Engagement Mark Drapeau asks, ‘Why has government gone from zero to Web 2.0 in 60 seconds?’

What do you think?

Mark Drapeau, Director of Innovative Social Engagement, Microsoft, asks, ‘Why does government implicitly endorse Web 2.0 companies?’

Mark Drapeau, Director of Innovative Social Engagement, Microsoft, says the future is mobile, but is government stuck in the past?

What do you think?

At Adobe, we have been lauded and criticized for our role in enabling open government. When we have been criticized we listen and learn so we can improve our business strategy to support the goals of open government. (If you don’t believe me, look to our current collaboration on Design for America with the Sunlight Foundation and PDF best practices forum on GovLoop as evidence of this commitment.) But regardless of your view of Adobe technologies, you will be hard pressed to find an Adobe decision maker who hasn’t internalized the Open Government Memo, felt inspired by it and willing to support its goals.

Conversely, I don’t think the decision makers at Apple have internalized it, because Apple’s recent actions reflect no understanding of Open Government’s true possibilities or principals. I still find it hard to believe that a company that founded one of the most generative platforms in the PC era (the Apple II – which shaped an innovative spirit that enabled the Internet era to follow) could possibly work so hard to close down the openness of the Internet. Yet that is exactly what the iPad and iPhone strategy does – a strategy that contradicts the President’s Open Government goals and undermines Internet era innovation. If you are not sure what I’m talking about, I’d suggest you read the introduction to Jonathan Zitrane’s Book, the Future of the Internet, and How to Stop It, which was written before the Open Government Memo was published.

Of course, if you’ve followed the recent news, you know Apple is at odds with the broader developer community. So you can color my point of view as you wish, but I’d still ask you to consider whether you think that Apple’s strategy contradicts the principals of open government along the three main pillars of transparency, participation and collaboration. Here is my argument:

• Development for the App Store is not transparent. The Open Government Memo “promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing.” But if government wants to use the App store to do this, they’ll have to acquiesce to publishing restrictions, development guidelines and performance metrics that are defined by a closed process dictated solely by Apple. Open government developers will not find transparency at the App store. In fact, the development process is so closed that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) actually obtained the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement by using a FOIA request to a Federal agency! (I’ll save EFF an additional FOIA request, they can find Adobe’s license agreements here).
• The iPhone and iPad are not participatory: The Open Government Memo encourages participation through “public engagement (that) enhances the Government’s effectiveness and improves the quality of its decisions.” Mobile devices are a great new platform to enable this type of participation. You can get this kind of information on your iPhone from the White House iPhone application for example. But if you are one of the 298 million Americans who choose to use a different mobile platform, you don’t get the same access. Download is limited to Apple controlled devices. If you want non-Apple users to participate with a similar application (not mobile browsing), start from scratch, and remember those ongoing extra development costs come from the taxpayer.
• Apple is not collaborating for mobile platform openness. The Open Government Memo charges government with collaborating across agencies, private sector and non-profits to innovate. What a great way to evolve formative ideas! If you want to see what collaborative mobile application development looks like check out the Open Screen Project (OSP) where dozens of mobile technology companies like Google, RIM, Intel, Motorola, and Verizon Wireless are working to provide a consistent environment for open web browsing and standalone applications. OSP includes 19 of the top 20 major mobile manufacturers – Apple chose not to collaborate. They are first to the mobile app market, and it appears that their vision for the future of mobile doesn’t include anyone else.

Six months ago, when government executives held up iPhone apps as examples of open government I cheered because the elegant and intuitive design of these devices helped people understand the possibilities of open government. But now I cringe because they are self limiting examples of a closed world where only the most fortunate have access. Open government strives to engage more people, but the government is not going to buy everyone a standard issue piece of proprietary hardware to do so. And it is unrealistic to expect that when the government builds one good application that they then have to expend the resources to rebuild it for every other mobile platform. In the Internet age, cross-platform application development is good for innovation, good for job creation, good for government and the future of our country. Innovating openness requires all of us to think along the lines of President Obama’s memorandum.

So I return to the question of my post – will you read the Open Government Memo on an iPad? Of course you can, but if you do I hope you will recognize the irony in doing so.

If you’d like an extra dose of irony for your re-read of the Open Government Memo on your iPad, please read it via a cross platform technology that is managed by the International Standards Organization, was invented by an American technology company, and spurred years of innovation – you can do so here in PDF . (And before you offer your comments juxtaposing the differences between PDF and Flash on this point, please consider Adobe’s record and philosophy on evolving open technology, which you can learn more about by clicking here)

Mark Drapeau, Microsoft Director of Social Innovation, Public Sector, shares his thoughts on finding the best ideas for government.

I’m not sure I can recommend reading all of the plans cover to cover, but if you’re an advocate or have a vested interest in the future of a Federal agency, these plans are fascinating peek into each agency’s interior life. It’s not just the content of the plans, which run from exciting to comical to mundane. You can also learn a great deal about how agencies view themselves from the way these plans are presented and marketed. It will come as no surprise that the Department of Justice’s rather unlovely document spends a lot of time thinking about reducing its FOIA backlog. The Department of Energy clearly understands itself to be a first a research organization, based on its flagship data sets. The Department of Defense plan is crisp, to the point, and focuses on getting the behemoth to better collaborate and interact with other agencies, rather than the public.

The organizational psychology betrayed by these plans is for another post. My interest is in where agencies found open source. I’ve long advocated for open source as a concrete, tangible way to encourage collaboration between agencies and between the government and its citizens. I was pleasantly surprised, frankly, to see how many agencies agree. Here’s what I found, in no particular order.

US Agency for International Development

The USAID plan was a total surprise. I had no idea how many open source initiatives were being conducted by USAID. Page 30 contains this gem on their Global Development Commons work:

With over four billion subscribers in the world, the mobile phone is often the key to connecting and exchanging information with people in developing countries. The 2008 USAID Development 2.0 Challenge, implemented by the Global Development Commons, invited innovators and entrepreneurs from around the world to participate in a global competition to seek access to information and build new connections to the global community. Crowdsourcing and Open Innovation have become increasingly important engines of innovation globally, leveraged by the commercial, non-profit, academic and government sectors to identify opportunities and solve problems. USAID’s Development 2.0 Challenge yielded 115 submissions using high impact, low-cost, open source solutions.

The winner among the 115 submissions was the RapidSMS Child Malnutrition Surveillance system, which “enables health practitioners to share and track children’s nutritional information with the touch of a cell phone.”

The agency also operates the Intra-Health OPEN Initiative, which is “a suite of free open source solutions to supply health sector leaders and managers with a collection of new tools.”

Social Security Administration

The Social Security Administration is another open source underdog. Imagine all the pent-up innovation they can unlock once this project is underway:

We are in the process of creating internal capacity to host websites and applications based on open-source software solutions and we look forward to a lively exchange of ideas and program code within the growing Federal open–source software development community;

As part of SSA’s fifth goal, “making government more sustainable”, they see open source software as an essential tool:

We are a Federal leader in the use of Health Information Technology. Our work with the private sector may yield transferable ideas and tools. We will share our results and products as appropriate. For example:

• We look forward to sharing the products of our open–source platform efforts across the growing Federal open–source development community, as well as partnering with other agencies in future endeavors; and
• We are in the process of designing and developing an Electronic Technology Repository for communities of innovation. We expect this repository to employ open–source social networking and other tools to permit users to better manage agency knowledge, avoid unproductive duplication of effort, and share experiences. The repository will support the storage of shared materials and project artifacts, discussion boards, wikis, blogs, subscription feeds, and other pertinent information. We envision sharing these resources with other Federal organizations as well.

Others have criticized open source as being irrelevant to the open government movement, but I think interagency collaboration doesn’t happen anywhere near as often as it should, it can be made easier with open source, and it’s outstanding that the SSA seems to agree.

Department of Defense

The DOD has been using open source software for years. Though I was a bit surprised that it wasn’t explicitly mentioned in the DOD’s open government plan, and even more surprised that the much-hyped forge.mil project isn’t referenced at all, the plan includes a number of initiatives that happen to take advantage of open source tools:

The Wikified Army Field Guide, based on Mediawiki, will allow warfighters to collaboratively edit the Army’s field manuals, allowing the documents to be more accurate and responsive:

…as the battlefield changes rapidly, field manuals must keep pace.  Under the traditional process – in which a select few were charged with drafting and updating field manuals –manuals often failed to reflect the latest knowledge of Soldiers on the ground.

Using the same free software behind Wikipedia, the Army’s “wikified” field manuals invite military personnel – from private to general – to collaboratively update the Army Tactics, Techniques and Procedures Manuals in real time.  In so doing, the Army provides a secure means for battle-tested Soldiers to share their experience and advice from the field.  Wikified Army Field Manuals ensure the men and women who serve our Nation have access to the best possible information when they need it.

This is a very exciting opportunity to capture all the innovation happening “at the edge” and quickly incorporate it into useful, official documentation. It makes so much sense, I’m surprised it hasn’t already been done.

The plan also highlights XMPP, which is a tremendously popular instant-messaging protocol that runs, among others, Google Talk. It may surprise you to learn just how much XMPP’s most popular implementation, Jabber, is already being used inside the DOD. The Defense Connect Online program uses Jabber to provide secure IMs inside the DOD, and they announced in November that this would be opened up to the outside world. Because they standardized on an open standard with robust open source implementations, literally dozens of different chat clients are now available to these non-DOD DCO users.

It’s interesting how both Jabber and the Wiki Field Manual projects aim to improve collaboration, and do so on highly collaborative open source platforms. I don’t think that’s an accident.

Department of Homeland Security

VirtualUSA is DHS’ flagship initiative, which couldn’t be more appropriate. From page 23 of the DHS Open Government plan:

On December 8, 2009, Secretary Janet Napolitano publicly launched Virtual USA (vUSA), an innovative information-sharing initiative that draws on practitioner input to help Federal, State, local and Tribal first responders collaborate to make fast, well-informed decisions. vUSA integrates existing frameworks and investments to provide real-time access to operational information—such as weather conditions; traffic; the location and operational status of critical infrastructure; fuel supplies; availability of emergency shelters and medical facilities; and other critical information—that allows users to improve situational awareness and to respond quickly in emergencies.

vUSA currently operates as two pilots – one in eight southeastern states: Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, Virginia and Tennessee; and the other in five states in the northwest: Alaska, Montana, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. In Virginia alone, vUSA reduced response times to incidents involving hazardous materials by 70 percent.

VirtualUSA is much more revolutionary than this lets on. It’s a very disruptive piece of software in its space. FCW has a succinct overview of the project’s history and what it means for first responders. DHS is funding this project, based on open source and open standards, in part because it wants to encourage collaborative toolbuilding and cooperation among the states, and also because this capability is too important to be in the hands of a single GIS provider, like Google or ESRI. Because it is an open source project, and uses open standards, VirtualUSA ensures that critical assets are not locked into a single vendor, and simultaneously lower the barrier to entry for new GIS vendors.

Department of Commerce

On page 18 of the Department of Commerce plan, under “Open Source Information Technology”, we find some familiar prose:

Also emerging from Commerce’s Open Government Ideascale community was a suggestion to “become more open through the increased use of open source software.” The Department has already begun using the open source tool, Drupal, for a number of its new websites and plans to increase this use in the future. Using open source technology will allow Commerce to develop new technologies and collaborate more readily with the public and other government agencies, and within the Department itself.

To make this happen, the Office of the Chief Information Officer and the Office of Acquisition Management will be consulted to ensure that open source offerings are fully considered during procurement processes. That consideration will include the value that the Department can receive through increased collaboration with the public and as a contributor to open source communities.

Nothing short of victory at Commerce for Open Source of America, whose suggestion this was. Congratulations!

Department of Labor

You’ll find open source in the strangest places. Until I read Labor’s plan, I didn’t appreciate how much data the Department of Labor is responsible for analyzing and disseminating. With that in mind, it makes perfect sense to find this initiative on page 29:

Create a “Developer’s Corner”

We plan to establish a “Developer Corner” on www.dol.gov/open that specifically targets and engages developers. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for developers to re-purpose our data, provide feedback, get technical help, bring developers with similar interests together and, ultimately inspire the best possible uses of our data for the benefit of the public. Ideas under consideration include a bug tracking system, RSS feeds for dataset changes, dataset versioning, public code competitions, data authentication, and an ideation platform to prioritize developer needs.

I think every department and agency that distributes data to the public (which is to say, all of them) should follow Labor’s lead and establish their own Developer sites. There’s no better way to stay engaged with this very powerful community.

Health and Human Services

The outstanding NHIN CONNECT project, which has a thriving open source community, got a mention on page 56 of HHS’s plan:

Nationwide Health Information Network – Direct

A key component of the Nation’s emerging health information technology infrastructure is the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) – a set of standards, policies, and services that enable the secure exchange of health information over the Internet. “NHIN Direct” is the latest development in the evolution of the NHIN. It’s an important effort to develop a “lightweight on-ramp” to the NHIN that will enable simple, direct exchanges of information between providers, labs, pharmacies, and consumers — and which will be easy to adopt and implement. In a process that launched on March 1, NHIN Direct is being designed in close collaboration with the community of potential users, with the entire process taking place in the open, in public, on a NHIN Direct wikispace. NHIN Direct will then be implemented in real-world tests and deployments by members of the community – with HHS’s Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) playing a coordinating and convening role. The gist of the NHIN Direct strategy is to utilize a community-driven approach to ramp up and power NHIN Direct-powered health information exchange.

I should mention that my employer, Red Hat, is involved in this project.

National Science Foundation

There was nothing explicitly about open source in the NSF’s open government plan, but their plan is worth mentioning anyway, as the NSF already does a tremendous amount of work in the open source community. Here’s a search for “open source” on their web site, which yielded over 5,000 hits when I last tried it:

http://search.nsf.gov/search?access=p&output=xml_no_dtd&sort=date:D:L:d1&ie=UTF-8&btnG=Google+Search&client=NSF&oe=UTF-8&proxystylesheet=NSF2&site=NSF&q=open+source

NSF regularly awards grants under the condition that software developed under those grants is given an open source license. Some very progressive thinking, and shrewd IP stewardship from the NSF folks, so we’ll forgive them for not mentioning open source directly in their plan.

Department of the Treasury

Yet another revelation. Treasury plans to cultivate open source projects to facilitate collaboration between agencies and between Treasury and the public. I’ve written about exactly this kind of collaboration before, back in December, so I’m enormously pleased to see that Treasury agrees. I’ve emphasized my favorite passages here:

In the areas of transparency, participation, collaboration, and flagship initiative, Treasury strives to share its efforts across Government to avoid duplication across agencies and to improve value/outcome of efforts. Treasury seeks to manifest cross-agency transferability in at least two of the following ways:

• Make training available to other agencies by opening up classes/webcasts to other agencies; providing slides, video and/or audio after the training; and posting on an e-learning platform.
• Name an advocate who gets the word out about what the agency has to share and invites other agencies to contact that person to learn from him or her.
• Design procurements for enterprise (where government is the enterprise) or in such a way that what is created can be shared across government at no cost.
• Develop and post code so it can be shared with other agencies (open source or the contract written such that the government owns the code.)
• Share platforms utilized by the agency with other agencies at no cost.
• Create participatory events across agencies with related missions.
• Collaborate on projects and challenges with the public and with the private sector in partnership with other federal agencies that have similar missions.
• Share all materials, results, tools, and training that could be transferable to other agencies with the Interagency Working Group as an efficient central dissemination mechanism.

Veteran’s Administration

The VA is an enormous consumer of information technology, and gained early recognition from the open source community for its public domain VISTA electronic health record platform. On page 22 of the VA plan, it becomes clear that the VA is expanding its use of open source to lower the barrier to entry for developers who want to help the agency:

AViVA

A Virtual Installation of VistA Architecture (AViVA) is a recent innovation that we are using to support collaboration. AViVA creates a universal user interface for the electronic health record and includes prototyping of data connectors in order to securely link the AViVA platform to patient data from any source. The AViVA project incorporates HealtheVet as an update of the VistA legacy database system.

VA’s current electronic hospital management system uses a graphical user interface known as the Clinical Patient Record System (CPRS). CPRS data is stored in the legacy data system known as VistA. CPRS requires installation on each machine that operates the program rendering the program difficult to scale and expensive to maintain and update. AViVA’s implementation improves this model in two ways. First, AViVA creates a modular, web-enabled electronic health record system that can be easily and remotely maintained. Second, Medical Data Web Services (MDWS), which can be accessed by the Department of Defense, will allow the creation of applications for any data source to be plugged into the system.

AViVA is a very exciting program for the collaboration portion of our Open Government Plan and because we are committed to creating systems that allow health care providers to collaborate to provide the best care for Veterans. AViVA’s web based presentation layer will allow our doctors and nurses around the country to search patient records as simply and succinctly as you can search for pizza on Google Maps and as securely as the best retail financial service businesses. Additionally, AViVA creates collaboration between VA and DoD, our partner in caring for our nation’s heroes. Finally AViVA creates an open source platform that allows software to be shared with entities outside of VA, creating opportunities for further innovation and development beyond the agency.

National Aeronautic and Space Administration

“NASA is working to make open source software development more collaborative at NASA to benefit both the Agency and the public,” it says right on the first page of the NASA open government plan. Here’s an agency which has always relied on a vibrant research community, software developers, and a culture of innovation. I’m not surprised by their focus on open source, but I am delighted. Among other things, NASA will be sponsoring an open source code competition, has an entire section of their plan devoted to open source development, and will be developing their Nebula cloud computing system on open source software.

It’s fair to say that NASA’s plan is the strongest I’ve seen for the open source community.

Your Turn

Who did I miss? What other opportunities for open source have you found in the open government plans? Leave a comment and let us all know!

My how things have changed

I worked in the Senate from 1995-99 and got my first real introduction to the intersection of technology and government during the Microsoft anti-trust oversight hearing in March, 1998. That hearing was a major Washington spectacle including the CEOs of the major tech titans of the time. And my distinct memory was the anxiety that Senators and staff had about publicly discussing technology – which most Senators at the time didn’t use or particularly understand. The hearing itself questioned whether Microsoft violated anti-trust law by bundling its IE browser on the Windows desktop. And I remember explaining to my 96 year-old boss that the words ‘Browser’ and ‘Bundling’ were actually words despite the fact that his copy of Webster’s failed to corroborate my claim. And that the word ‘Desktop’ was actually a homonym and not a physical part of furniture. I have no doubt that the Senate staffers preparing for this week’s hearing had very different discussions with their Senators who were clearly knowledgeable and passionate on the promise that technology brings to government. This may seem like an obvious observation – of course this value is clear 12 years later. But while measuring the distance of how far we have come is positive and, perhaps, humorous, the distance we have to go is more daunting. Which leads to my second observation that we need to get Congress more involved in Open Government.

Vision meets the Law

The most interesting and frictional piece of the hearing came from Senator Coburn who wanted to know when Vivek and Aneesh planned to comply with the Federal Funding and Transparency Act of 2006 (FFTA) authored by Coburn and then-Senator Obama. Coburn applauded the Administration’s open government efforts, but questioned why so many initiatives had been undertaken by executive order when the one transparency law that was a fully codified law on the books had been ignored. He claimed we would be much further along if Vivek and Aneesh put their efforts towards fedspending.gov than towards the OGD and evangelism and “everything else.” He was referring specifically to OMB’s responsibility to publish a report to Congress on Federal sub-award and sub-contract spending. But generally he was referring to the very basic constitutional principal that the law of the land is established by Congress, not the Executive branch. And if we want to progress through openness and technology, we should focus on the Law because agencies and citizens have to follow it. It’s a remarkably simple commentary but one that doesn’t seem to have much energy in the Open Government movement. (Although I would love to know if I’m missing something). Most of the efforts have been about vision and possibility (marketing) or about data propagation (developer enablement). But I have not seen much in the way of true institutional incentive change – funding, organizational restructuring, program creation and requirements and economic incentives – the things that really do mean ‘change.’ Bills that become laws. Take a look at the Healthcare debate and ask yourself ‘when does change occur?’ It’s when Congress passes legislation. Now you may counter my comment with my own post – Sen. Coburn says himself the one transparency law – FFTA – is not enacting change. But he furthered that sentiment by inviting Vivek back every month to discuss the issue until he gets a suitable answer. A polite reminder of the inherent checks and balances in our system required to make change happen.

Congress is the most powerful branch of government in my opinion – but at least equally as powerful as the Executive branch- yet there is not the same level of energy coming from Capitol Hill equivalent to what is coming from the Administration. Which will make it hard for Open Government to progress at the rate we’d like to see it progress. I think this is something that needs to change, and I’m interested in your thoughts to who on Capitol Hill might feel that way as well.

You can read a transcript of my testimony here (pdf).

Video thoughts: