4iP Blog

“We must use all available technologies and methods to open up the federal government, creating a new level of transparency to change the way business is conducted in Washington, and giving Americans the chance to participate in government deliberations and decision-making in ways that were not possible only a few years ago.”

From From Barack Obama’s campaign platform on technology

It’s the final day of the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference and time to draw some early conclusions. This year’s conference focused on how the way we live is changing - through policy, technology and ideas with the schedule loosely following tracks like: city tech, developing markets, geo-location, health, materials, mobile and wireless signals.

While not a theme in it’s own right I’ve detected a strong sense of civic duty and public service flowing through many of the plenaries and sessions. The USA’s strong sense of identity and patriotism seems to more than make up for the lack of public service funding. However, if the ETech programme organisers are anything to go by (and in my book they most certainly are) the context for a project like 4iP couldn’t be better. These are tricky times and digital public service media has an important role to play in addressing some of the problems we face as a society.

I won’t reiterate the importance of working on stuff that matters but only empress the sense of urgency I now feel. The intergalactic radioactive crisis cloud we face today is an opportunity to do things differently and to change the way we live, work and play. Barack Obama’s presidency and the amazing fact that 30% of the civilian work force in the US Gov Executive are retiring in the next five years offers an unequaled opportunity in the US. Clearly the political landscape and timetable is different in the UK but we’re probably subject to similar time pressures. Practically speaking, we have two years to get it right and two years to implement before the naysayers regroup.

Encouragingly fixing democracy was where the drive and ambition was most tangible. Tim O’Reilly announced the inaugural Government 2.0 conference and there have been sessions from Greg Elin of Sunlight Foundation, Mike Mathieu of Front Seat and Rebecca MacKinnon of Global Voices. If you want to get things done quickly there’s probably no better audience than a room full of hackers and alpha-geeks - all Utopian dreamers with DIY attitudes.

Broadly speaking Sunlight Foundation and Front Seat represent the two major works streams in the e-government and democracy space. The Sunlight Foundation are principally concerned with release of public / governmental data while Front Seat build web 2.0 technologies and social media services that facilitate better engagement between the government and it’s citizens.

Greg Elin’s talk provided a whirl-wind tour of how opaque yet surprisingly accessible US federal government is along with a buffet of action-able resources, initiatives, and activities.

There are times when hackers, coders and campaigners rightly get agitated with governments hiding data that should be in the public domain. But Greg reminded me that governments doesn’t just have legacy systems, they *are* a legacy system.

Governments are an application designed for one user at a time, with the elected official as that one user. I won’t even go into just how much of the US Government is paper based suffice to say that we won’t find ourselves sticking bills into subversion anytime soon. In some ways both the US and UK Government have suffered from being an early adopter. Like the London Underground and NY Subway they suffer from all the first mover problems with prehistoric technology falling apart and patched together because so many things came online before the current situation.

But things are changing. Greg sees organisations like MySociety, FrontSeat , Stamen as creating alternatives that force government to adopt another model. He mentioned the awesome Apps for America, Sunlight’s annual development contest where prizes go to developers who can use data from Sunlight and it’s partners to make Congress more accountable, interactive and transparent. This is practically identical to some of the work 4iP is funding / wanting to fund in the UK. Ironically, being Channel 4, our branding isn’t quite as sexy.

So the Sunlight view is an optimistic one. People at all level of government are starting to understand that making things public means putting them online *forever* in a format that’s both human and machine readable. Papers like the Power of Information and initiatives like Show Us A Better Way give me reason to be optimistic in the UK too.