I came home from Washington DC with a sprained ankle and a brain buzzing with possibility. The ankle was the result of an unfortunate pairing of sandals and an uneven sidewalk. The buzz was the result of the unexpected pairings of social media and NASA, the TSA, and the US intelligence community.
How can opening up your proprietary software/data make any business sense?
The GOV 2.0 conference, organized by Tim O’Reilly and others in the open-source/open-data movement, was three-day event this past month. Open source advocates evangelize that everyone share their data and core technology, with the faith that there are other people out there who can innovate in ways you have not considered. This is most easily illustrated by the iPhone:
The phone itself was developed by Apple.
They opened their code so that other developers could create apps for it.
Those developers pair the iPhone tech with data from a nearly infinite variety of sources: GPS, traffic, medical info, games, social networks, etc. etc. etc.
Those apps in turn create a huge demand for the iPhone.
Everybody wins.
Apple was smart enough to know that no matter how smart they are, they still have a finite amount of resources, and there are a lot of other smart people out there with access to more data and ideas that they can muster themselves. They saw how they could increase marketshare, profits, and overall street cred by loosening their control and trusting the crowd to surprise them. There is plenty of benefit to share by empowering others to innovate.
Crowdsourcing = Smaller Government
It is a common perception that our government is simultaneously wasteful, restrictive, uncommunicative, disempowering, compartmentalized, and inefficient. And a good deal of that is well-earned, having been dramatically illustrated after 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, and certainly with the current economic crises. Again and again we hear about our government’s duplicated efforts, waste of resources, lack of collaboration, and inability to connect the dots, sometimes with devastating consequences.
Those promoting OS/OD see the same opportunities in government as Apple saw with the iPhone, but with a greater focus on public service as opposed to profit models. Tim O’Reilly gives a terrific talk about this, and here are some other smart opinions on what Gov 2.0 is.
My super-abbreviated take:
Match the right skills with the right data resources: the government has huge repositories of data, much of it non-confidential, which is lying fallow instead of being put to good use. Most innovation comes from the private sector. The math, she is done.
Use existing solutions o increase transparency and collaboration: agencies would be much more results-oriented and cost-efficient if they could communicate and collaborate better. The public has already adopted the social networking and collaboration tools that government could be using, too.
Bring the DIY ethic back to civic participation: there is an untapped potential for innovation if people who aren’t busy running the country contribute to our civic life and democracy in general instead of waiting for our tax dollars to work. Beginning with the development of new tech to the crowdsourcing of data contributions through the final end use by regular folks.
So basically, if we can use government data to create our own solutions, we don’t need the government to do it for us, and government can be smaller. Now, contrary to what conservatives often express, being progressive does not mean being pro-big government. It means that you feel the government has a basic duty to help people achieve a basic level of health, security, happiness, and opportunity. That can mean laws safeguarding civil rights like equal compensation and freedom of speech, direct help which requires tax dollars like unemployment benefits, or indirect help like public schools and homeland security which require tax dollars for infrastructure. It can also mean transparency of data such as the Freedom of Information Act or access to birth certificates, building information, etc. The more that we can safely access ourselves, the less need there is for a government office to have to provide it.
How the TSA Blew My Mind
The first day was the Gov 2.0 Expo Showcase, a sort of sneak peak of new technologies and the government agencies, private startups, and community volunteers who are making them. Now much of this is common thinking in the tech world - we thrive on collaboration and share info constantly. But this mindset, born of a confidence that sharing is a good thing and listening to your users brings positive results - is less common in government agencies. So I was beyond thrilled when I heard and saw so many speakers talk about moving in this direction. Even those who did not include the jargon of user experience still spoke to it.
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is, to many us, nothing more than those invasive, uniformed folk at the airport who make us suffer the indignity of partially undressing in public and who rifle through our luggage for wayward shampoo bottles. Well, they are that, and more. Those people also have the logistically challenging job of following prescribed security protocols developed by analysts far from the field to check every single person who boards a commercial flight in the US: over 2 million people per day. They are basically a widely distributed workforce who had little means for providing feedback and no opportunity to inform the procedures they were stuck with.
Some forward-thinking person high up the TSA food chain saw that there was a high level of customer dissatisfaction and very low employee morale, and realized that the front-line perspective was missing, so they create the TSA Idea Factory. In essence, this is a limited social networking site where users can submit and vote on ideas. The most popular ones filter up to management, who have made a commitment to consider and respond to them. This has proven to be an effective way for employees to be heard, and for management to avail themselves of the best ideas for improvement, resulting in demonstrably higher levels of customer satisfaction and employee morale across the country. Open collaboration such as this is democracy in action at a level that impacts people’s daily lives. Which begs the question: If this can happen at the TSA, what else is possible?
The very fact that a national security agency would so openly and broadly communicate with its employees signals a huge shift in mindset of government agency. And there were plenty more reasons to be hopeful for more, as I’ll show in my next post.