Uncarved

Here’s a YouTube playlist of videos published by The White House, which includes the complete forum sessions that followed the President’s opening remarks.¹

The forum is a series of round table panel discussions, featuring executives from the private sector (CEOs, CTOs, etc), as well as government officials brainstorming, sharing their experiences, and making recommendations.

One of my favorite parts comes at 0:56:25:

If the inefficiency isn’t captured and measured, and staring you in the face, it isn’t gonna be tackled as a project in the first place… If the government takes on a culture of streamlining, and attacking inefficiency, and looking for resource maximization, you’re going to start looking introspectively and measuring things that will — for the first time — put a line of sight on the inefficiency.

Watching all of these isn’t exactly an edge-of-your-seat thrill ride, to be sure, but think about how many times you or I have even had the opportunity to be a “fly on the wall” during official government discourse. The very idea that this forum was live-streamed and published for free public access is a fantastic example of the sorts of operational practices that I deeply hope to see continue growing in practice, particularly even after the present Administration has completed its term in Washington.

Government 2.0 government, Government 2.0, open government

A post from earlier today on the White House blog by Peter Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget, announced the release of two new documents related to the Administration’s “open government” initiatives:

• The Open Government Directive (download as pdf, txt, doc or view on Slideshare)
• The Open Government Progress Report to the American People (download as pdf or view on Slideshare)

The post also includes a video of the live online chat in which federal CIO Vivek Kundra and federal CTO Aneesh Chopra announce the Open Government Plan, during which they fielded some questions in realtime from Facebook and Twitter.

Speaking of the value proposition of the initiative, Chopra explains:

So it’s having the conversation with each of our leaders to find out what are the big objectives that they wish to tackle on behalf of the President’s agenda, and in support of the American people. And how can the principles of Open Government, and in particular the datasets, allow others in the ecosystem to support — and advance on — those activities. We just can’t afford to have a federal government solution for every issue. By relying on the ingenuity of the American people we can advance these policy priorities in new and more creative ways.

I also particularly appreciate their speaking to an attempt to raise the quality of published data, particularly after it was discovered that some folks had provided shoddy data to Recovery.gov earlier this year.

Government 2.0 open government, video

Thursday was a happy day¹ for me. I was quite proud to learn yesterday that NYC has finally publicly demonstrated some evidence of tangible commitment to participating in the “open government” movement.

On 8 October 2009, NYC published a collection of open datasets in various machine-readable formats, from RSS feeds, spreadsheets, and more. These datasets are available at the NYC Data Mine. The NYC Data Mine is presently divided into two general types of datasets: the Geo Data Catalog, which offers “administrative and political boundaries, facilities and structures, and various imagery and base maps”; and the Raw Data Catalog, which offers all sorts of other types of data in the form of spreadsheets, RSS feeds, and various XML document formats.

Having browsed at what’s presently published in the NYC Data Mine, I must admit that – in its present state – I find the breadth of the offered data to be lacking. If this is the final state of things, it’d be lame compared – for example – to the data that the state of Utah has published.

That said, I’m willing to give NYC the benefit of the doubt here. Every effort has to start somewhere.

Moving forward, however, I’d still like to see the following:

• A complete itemization of the City’s expenditures, down to the dime, including staff and office-holder payrolls.

• NYC public school data, from student performance metrics to faculty information and budgetary expenditures to nutritional reports outlining what foods are served (and the serving volume) by each school.

• Geo data showing property and business taxes collected by the City, perhaps down to the block level (I can anticipate concerns over privacy issues arising at any greater granularity).

• Public heath care data, including frequency of reported ailments, injury, etc at each hospital, school, and other institution.

Note that, in all cases, data collection should err on the side of preserving anonymity, whenever there is reasonable concern that the data can be traced back to specific private citizens (especially with respect to specific individuals’ health and educational situations).

But the announcement of NYC’s Data Mine is only part of the story.

The City also launched NYC BigApps, a competition intended to raise awareness of this new open dataset, and to promote its use to create new tools to serve New Yorker City residents, businesses, and visitors.

From Mayor Bloomberg’s introductory post on the competition site’s blog:

NYC BigApps provides a competitive outlet for developers and encourages the general public to get involved as well. We welcome public comment on the process – indicate your support for the competition, share app ideas, and inform contestants on what type of app you’d like to see.

Ultimately it’s great to finally see NYC – my city – step up to the plate on the open government scene. There’s yet a long (long) way to go, but yesterday’s announcements do give me a glimmer of hope.

So — anyone up for a hackathon weekend… or three?

Government 2.0 government, Government 2.0

The mayoral election season is drawing upon New York City, and it’s time for the candidates to start taking on the causes that will define their election platforms. One of the issues that incumbent mayor Michael Bloomberg is starting to get vocal about a plan to implement MTA reforms, which his campaign website describes as:

A thoughtful, comprehensive 33-part plan that lays out tangible, realistic ideas to help the MTA reduce costs, reduce congestion, speed commutes, improve efficiency, enhance accessibility, and ultimately produce a safer, faster, cleaner, better mass transit system.

As a man whose daily routine has depended heavily on the operations of the MTA (particularly the subway system) for over a decade, this is a concern in which I’ve become heavily invested. I’ve encountered my share of frustrations with the organization’s results, and I frankly have much to say about ways to improve the overall quality of the MTA’s service.

To be sure, I have a number of specific thoughts about various points in this plan, but I’d like to focus on one particular point for the moment: the idea of turning 311 into they city’s “Mass Transit Hotline.”

I’m sorry — a hotline?

The stated goal of this hotline is to provide quick and easy access to transit information, such as service schedules, travel maps, and up-to-date alerts regarding planned and circumstantial service alterations. Indeed this is an important goal, but a phone hotline is honestly probably the one of the least effective possible ways I can think of to accomplish this goal.

Simply put, nobody likes to call in for “phone support” for anything. This is because phone support systems universally suck, for everyone involved.

Now, I do feel like it would be useful to also offer 311 as a source of travel information, but only for people who cannot get it by other means. It could be a valuable new offering for, say, the visually impaired. Or, as a last resort for a person in some other extenuating circumstance. As such, a transit hotline would be more of an accessibility enhancement for transit information.

The fact is there are already a number of ways to access timely transit information that are better and more effective than a call-in hotline. Unfortunately, the average MTA customer has no idea any of them exist.

One example is www.MyMtaAlerts.com. The tool allows registered users to subscribe to service alerts for information about specific subway lines, bus service, and more, which all get delivered to their email inbox, mobile phone, or both. Although there’s plenty of room for improvement, this tool does allow MTA customers to subscribe to important information about the specific parts of the MTA’s vast transportation system that is directly relevant to them, and gets the information into customers’ hands without the customers having to even think about asking after it.

Other tools, including a trip planner, schedule listings, and more, are also available at www.mta.info… provided you actually manage to discover them in the train wreck of a website (yea, I’ll confess: pun fully intended).

The fact that these do exist, however, demonstrates that the MTA is tracking and managing all this information digitally.

So the bottom line here is that, if Bloomberg wishes to make a meaningful difference in getting transit information into the hands of New Yorkers, he’ll have to focus on making this data more accessible.

This broadly boils down to taking the following actions:

1. Raise public awareness. Promote use of the existing tools in subway PA announcements. Rather than just reminding people that police may randomly search everyone’s bags, or discouraging people from giving money to panhandlers, or to step back from the yellow safety lines as trains enter and leave stations, these messages can encourage people to sign up for email and text message alerts online. Print subway ads. Run TV spots. Feature these tools prominently on MetroCards. This can begin immediately.

2. Redesign the MTA website. I don’t simply mean tweaking the colors, adding some gradients, and moving to some three-column layout. This site is in dire need of a ground-up rethinking of how it’s organized. Although I have loads of specific criticisms about this site, I’ll save those for a later post. For now, I’ll simply say that the home page needs, at minimum, to directly expose their existing travel tools. This can be pulled off iteratively, over the course of several months.

3. Expose the transit information via data feeds and Web Service APIs. The MTA is clearly tracking service information digitally, as it’s using it to power both the MyMtaAlerts website, as well as Google Maps’ capability to offer door-to-door travel directions via the MTA’s network. Connecting the infrastructure powering these services to data feeds and web services can allow both the MTA and third party developers to create new web and mobile device applications, designed to meet their customers’ evolving needs. This effort will take the longest of all, but will prove to be an investment that will have created a foundation for continued improvements for MTA customer service.

Having 311 take on the role of “Mass Transit Hotline” in an effort to get New Yorkers timely transit information is an idea would have, quite frankly, been deficient even in the 20th century.

But it’s 2009 now.

Bloomberg and NYC need to look to where government and society are moving. Mobile and web are the only information delivery solutions that can improve today’s commutes, while investing in improving tomorrow’s.

Government 2.0, Public Brainstorm Michael Bloomberg, MTA, NYC, politics

Tim O’Reilly, of O’Reilly Media, Inc., discussing the idea of government as a platform vs. government as a vending machine at OSCON 2009 (20 mins):

Tim’s thoughts here echo, add flesh around, and enhance some concepts that will be discussed in the piece that I’d been writing throughout parts of my recent vacation to Greece.

A more concise summary of these ideas is also available for those with time constraints (4 mins):

Check it out, Government 2.0 government, Government 2.0, Tim O'Reilly, video