John Moore

I wanted to share with you my presentation on the ROI of Open Government. While it is clearly not as interesting without the commentary I hope you find it useful.

ROIFromUnlockingGovernmentData

My open data friend from Canada, Jury Konga, recently gave a very good presentation on Open Government.  I asked him to provide a brief introduction to go along with his slideshare presentation (embedded below).  This is Jury’s introduction.

There are a myriad of definitions, blogs, videos etc about Open Government but when we get back to basics – it’s about a renewed focus on providing public service excellence to citizens and businesses. In looking at Open Gov, I chose to relate it to 4 core or key elements: Citizen Engagement, Open Data, Collaboration and Innovation. If any one of these elements is missing from government operations, it becomes difficult to associate it with the “Open” branding.

Open government cannot succeed through technology only.  Open data, ideation platforms, cloud solutions, and social media are great tools but when they are used to deliver government services using existing models they can only deliver partial value, value which can not be measured and value that is unclear to anyone but the technology practitioners that are delivering the services.

We see this clearly today in the United States where the ongoing battle to save open data is sending shock waves through the twitterverse.  People “in the know”, engineers, social media advocates, and journalists are amazed at the cluelessness of the United States Congress.  The fact that they cannot understand the clear value being delivered is entirely their fault, right?  The reality, of course, is that open government has primarily been the domain of the technologist.  Other parts of the organization have not been considered, have not been educated, have not been organized around a new way of...

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Even when elected officials and municipal employees are pushing back, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes due to fear, an individual citizen can find a way to reduce confusion by sharing information with fellow citizens.  Lack of understanding, lack of transparency, leads to confusion and mistrust, it happens everywhere.

I recently decided to take on a project in my home town, at no cost to the town, that would seek to eliminate citizen confusion by releasing open government information.  My goals were  to create a simple, low-cost, immediate payback, process that others could follow in their own towns and cities.

First, some background.  My town has a population of approximately 15,000 citizens, mostly apathetic when it comes to politics (around 30% average voter turnout), and has a small group of citizens that are very negative that have a...