Impacts and Sustainability of Open Governments

Open data and open source innovation for governments have been increasing in recent years and therefore is currently an important subject of discussion. Last week, Chris Cruz, the Deputy Director & Deputy State Chief Information Officer of California, gave a speech on the utilization of technology in the state of California. He especially emphasised the state’s achievement on offering open data to allow transparency and creating Innovation Lab to encourage citizens to contribute to the government with their ideas.

Open data is key to a successful government in today’s world, especially since everyone can access data very fast and easily. The civic participation is not only about transparency but also about making data and information useful for development. With an open government, citizens can use this data to contribute new ideas to improve the government. [1] As Cruz stated, free datasets are available for citizens to download and this decreases the separation between the government and its citizens. However, there are some issues related to the operation of open data. In a technological aspect, having most information in CSV format instead of scanned PDFs makes the data more accessible. This allows the data from the tables to be easily read and processed even without having Microsoft Excel. [2] That is why, the trends across years can be sorted and filtered quickly, making the government more vulnerable. Although, this enables the government to have maximum transparency, it also means that they should be conscious of the data that they make available to all citizens. This will be more meaningful as the datasets in opendata.ca.gov increase and carry more valuable data. In addition, there should be relevant amount of views and contributions from the citizens in order for this mechanism to work and to achieve the main goal of open government. If there is no interest in utilizing these datasets to develop projects by the citizens, then it might be used for bad intentions. For example, right after same-sex marriage was made illegal in California in 2008 with Proposition 8, the site Eightmaps.com launched. This website showed the names, locations and donation amounts of people who donated to support Proposition 8. Therefore, this caused the donators to be vulnerable to attacks by same-sex marriage supporters. [3] This event shows how powerful open data can be and what it can cause when in wrong hands, so security and privacy should be the major concern of the government.

The government should take advantage of the skills of citizens to improve government functions. For this purpose, in Cruz’s opinion, California is following the “Google way of doing business”. Innovation Lab is a platform where citizens can submit their open source projects and the government invests in the ideas it is willing to implement. Although having an innovative government is necessary in this technology era, the sustainability of this initiative is an issue. Since the projects accepted to the Innovation Lab are open source, it is important to discuss the long-term execution. Newly graduates, innovators, entrepreneurs are choosing successful businesses and startups rather than spending their time, effort and ideas towards developing the government. This seems to be a larger problem especially in the state of California where the home of technology, Silicon Valley, is located. The government is encouraging these people by allowing access to open data and accepting projects via Innovation Lab. Even though the ideas accepted by the government get funded, it is not a stable income source. As time is becoming more valuable each and every day, I do not believe that the government will be able to reach enough enthusiasm from entrepreneurs. Therefore, the business mind-set that the government is trying to apply does not seem like a long term solution to advance the use of technology throughout the state.

 

[1] Goldstein, Brett, Lauren Dyson, and Abhi Nemani. Beyond Transparency: Open Data and the Future of Civic Innovation. San Francisco, CA: Code for America, 2013. Print.

[2] https://opengovdata.org/

[3] http://odimpact.org/static/files/case-studies-us-eightmaps.pdf

[4] Noveck, Beth Simone. Smart Citizens, Smartes State: The Technologies of Expertise and the Future of Governing. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2015. Print.