Gov 2.0 and the Social Sector

By Steve Backman, March 16, 2010
“Change” may not be coming to Washington as fast as we expected a year ago. Yet at the grass roots level, in the technology realm, something is definitely happening, and its going to help the policy reform process. The same kind of democratizing, collaborative, open source/open content trend that has swept through nonprofit technology now is gathering momentum in local, state and even national government. That was my overall takeaway from taking part in the March 6 New England Gov 2.0 “Unconference” at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Even if you didn't attend, you can find a lot of notes and material here: http://gov20ne.pbworks.com/ or look for Twitter archives at #gov20ne.

About 250 of us gathered in Cambridge as part of a series of Gov 2.0 summits and informal conferences around the country initiated last year by O’Reilly (the publisher) and other partners. While I have followed these to some degree, this was my first outing. Read more about the national efforts here: http://www.gov2summit.com/. On the related blog, you can sign-up to be part of the nonprofit/public sector connection.


Feeling that my own work straddles the fence between nonprofit and public sectors, I wasn’t sure how I would feel or where I would fit in that day. Right at home: we had an energized mix of public officials, government technology policy staff, nonprofit policy advocates, community activists, software developers, and academic researchers and students. Judging by the conversations at this conference, those working in human services, policy advocacy and political activism need to pay close attention to what is happening here. The public and nonprofit sectors have a lot to learn from each other, they serve common goals, and progress around effective use of data and the web will be mutually reinforcing.

“Data” was likely the biggest buzz word at the conference—open data, sharing data, collaborative data, mapping and visualizing data and so on. This being an unconference, it aimed to self-organized by interest and we started by everyone giving a three words introduction of their background and interest. (Mine way, “share data now.”) Looking at the wordle (word cloud) of those introductions, you can see that data and open information drew many to the conference. (Creative Commons credit to http://www.wordle.net/ for the "Gov 2.0 Camp New England ")

Federal, State and Local Government agencies sit on enormous repositories of data that traditionally gets collected as a matter of course for regulatory reasons. We have business, economic, environmental and other data that advocacy groups need to be more effective. It’s often there but hard to get one’s hands on.

We also have mounds of data extracted from nonprofit social services and educational organizations at tremendous cost of time and infrastructure. Busy staff collect data to satisfy public grants as much or more than private foundation grants. From my point of view, this data may start as your data, yet once it passes to the government, it becomes public data. It makes sense that this data—in aggregated, depersonalized, privacy-protected form—be available back as well for communities to learn from, make their own assessments and evaluations of success and effectiveness.

In the public sector, making public data public serves the general good. Elected officials can commission and use (or ignore, as they see fit) qualitative assessments for policy making. The Gov 2.0 trend represents a desire for transparency around that government policy research.

Meanwhile, social sector advocates and activists have learned a lot about mining data to assess trends, correlate results with demographic and other community factors, and press for results and changes. We are all collectors of data and measurers of outcomes. This experience outside the government is an accelerant that will drive change inside the government. Organizational staff and consultants may gripe about grant requirements, yet we are also increasingly using the experiences to improve our own strategies and organizational management.

Toward a policy of "Data Impact Statements"

What should we look for, expect and advocate for in these realms?

First, the public wants more, easier, fuller access to government data. Yet government agencies have old systems, have legitimate boundaries around confidentiality and privacy, and have tight budgets and overwhelmed staff these days with little room to build elaborate data reporting systems. How do we strike a balance?

Where government agencies collect data, and most do, we should expect increasing transparency about what will be collected, at what cost in agency staffing and in compliance time and cost for those required to submit the data, with what quality, with what expected use internal to the government agency, and with what return back to the public. A few years ago, when incoming Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick asked for testimony to his Transition Teams, I proposed the concept of a standard “Data Impact Statement.” Like an environmental impact statement, government agencies would need to file a statement in a standard, readable format on any new initiative that collected data—individual filings or anything else. The statement would list what was being collected; what privacy, confidentiality, or security concerns there were about it; a pre-emptive judgment of the likely quality of the data; and what provisions the agency planned to make to put the data in the public domain.

In the not so distant future, we should aim that reactive freedom of information lawsuits will fade in favor of proactive Data Impact Statements throughout government. By having Data Impact Statements, at least advocacy organizations and human services agencies would be able to review, comment on, and press for change on what was going to happen with data their communities would provide and what of use they would get back. Over time, we can move toward uniform expectations—and funding to back it up.

Second, we should press that the release of data follow emerging technical standards. Web sites with pages of information, even if searchable, are not the same as reusable, transferable data format. The data evolutionary trajectory goes from text on the web, to tabular data on web pages, to downloadable text or Excel, to XML and now to the emerging concept of RDFa. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDFa and http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-rdfa-primer/. This year’s new Drupal release, for example, will embrace RDFa as a standard for web services and data exchange. I suspect that other modern data and community oriented software will as well.

Helping people ask, "How would this look on a map?"

Third, where the average person might reasonably ask, “how would this data look on a map,” public data should be presented with geographic information right there for use. The Gov 2.0 conference gave interesting attention to opening up data for spatial analysis, using geographical based information in crises such as Haiti and Chile, and innovative light-weight open source software like Ushahidi for social mobilization and response.

Fourth, even in the midst of glaring global policy issues from health care to the economy to the wars, we should give some attention to reinforcing national leadership coming in the tech sphere. The Obama administration has taken a strong stand on the democratizing of public data. The http://www.data.gov/ web site is both a growing repository of data anyone can use in the policy making process as well as a sounding board for developing technical and policy standards. It is a welcome initiative and I part of the framework that makes the Gov 2.0 conferences so timely.

Let data inform the educational policy debates

Fifth, if data is flooding in to government and beginning to steam out, we need keep a steady eye on privacy and confidentiality issues. Protect privacy yet don't let it derail opening things up.

A good example is in the realms of education policy. Policy advocates want to be able to do their own refactoring of data on mandatory testing, the record of charter schools, programs to reduce educational inequality, and other elements of No Child Left Behind and its local equivalents. Often this data usage gets lost or delayed because of how long it takes to resolve legal issues around protecting individual student and teacher performance data. In this day and age, we should be able to keep individual data confidential and make aggregated data public. We should also be able to let public school systems and community-based youth jobs and enrichment programs securely exchange individual level student data where both sides agree, have signed appropriate agreements, and have family sign-offs as well. This is probably the single most recurring technology related demand from staff I work with on youth and alternative education programs.

Mobile and Social Media And the Gov 2.0 Trend

Sixth, there is better access to existing data and there is creating new data. In particular, an additional important trend is the use Web 2.0 and social media technologies to inform, energize and empower the public. At the conference, probably the most frequently mentioned example of local tech initiative was the local transit authority’s initiative to put realtime tracking of buses and other transit in the hands of the public. Yes, others may have started on this long before Massachusetts. Yet it has been remarkable how quickly local developers rushed to create mobile apps and all kinds of technology ideas have surfaced around the transit data. At one level, having this information helps busy people know whether they can grab that extra cup of coffee and therefore promote local business at a time when the state really needs it. At another level, it will also help transit and environmental activists really focus in on questions about which areas of the city get what kind of service.

As we learned at the conference, many local communities are experimenting with mobile phone-based systems that enable people and organizations to report problems, oversee responses, and work collaborative to improve services.

All these trends and more will also aid business planning and development. For the moment, the main learning and drive in the Gov 2.0 trend is collaboration and sharing among nonprofit and public sector technologists and policy makers. If you aren’t yet following this trend, you need to.