Datos abiertos costa rica open innovation 2

Civic Tech Platforms & Coalitions (or: Governments That

Work Like The Web)

Andrew Hoppin | @ahoppin

http://nucivic.com

(some content courtesy of Nick Grossman)

Falling Government Budgets

Rising Government Needs

We live in a time when government budgets are shrinking, but our needs for government services is increasing…

Better Government…

…Less $

3

So what we want is a government that works better, but costs less money! How can we possibly accomplish this? With Open Innovation. Governments need to innovate faster, and collaborate better— with the communities they serve, with the private sector, and with each other.

The Architecture of the Web

DNS

HTTP

IPHTML

CSS

Standards

The Web has an “open architecture”and serves as a “platform” to build on

The seminal example of Open Innovation is the Web itself. The Web enables innovation that scales commensurate with how many people participate in it, not just on how much money is spent… The more people that participate, the most powerful it gets, because it is based on open standards like HTML, HTTP, IP, etc. These shared open standards and networked architecture make it an open platform, vastly more powerful than any closed or proprietary system.

creating the

potential for new things to happen

“The idea behind open innovation is as simple as it

is powerful: the creators of new ideas don’t have to

be within your organization in order to be helpful.”

– John Palfrey, Harvard Law School

Open InnovationOpen Innovation

This is the big idea: break down the wall between people inside your organization and people outside your organization, and join a larger network. It is a new way for you to scale your impact as an organization. Entrepreneurial private sector companies know this, and government is no different.

Open Government Innovation

Transit

Open311

Let’s look at how some governments have used open innovation to improve transit.

Let’s take the example of transit— when your bus is late and you don’t know how long it will take to get there, it’s disempowering for commuters that rely on public transit.

SERVER

CLOSEDarchitecture

Integrated, proprietary

USER INTERFACE

HARDWARE

← few apps

STANDARDS & APIs

OPENarchitecture

Modular,open source

STANDARDS & APIs

many →apps

MTA (New York City Transit) built a real-time bus data system as a platform -- opening up the data, and providing it to developers via an Application Programming Interface (API). This stands in contrast to the ‘closed’ model, where a single end-to-end hardware+software solution stores, processes and serves all of the data. This open approach can often drive mean re-architecting IT infrastructure, but it’s worth it, because it gets more people involved, and it can be iterated faster, making government work better, at lower cost.

And the system kept on improving, responding to customer feedback quickly and iteratively.

“I no longer sit with pitted stomach wondering where is the bus.

It’s less stressful simply knowing it’s nine minutes away, or whatever the case”

Source: OneBusAway

44% of respondents reported beingmuch more satisfied

The result: OneBusAway did a survey of riders, which shows what a powerful impact adding a simple information layer can have on riders.

Not only did this make a difference in New York City, but because NYC shared the code and adopted open data standards, this effort turned into a multi-city platform called “OneBusAway,” creating an ecosystem of governments, entrepreneurs, data, and apps to inform and empower transit riders in many locations around the USA.

In Portland Oregon there are a whole library of mobile apps of different types to interact with the TriMet transportation system.

This baker used the data feed to display for his customers when their bus is about to come— from inside the store.

And this entrepreneur wrote an app to wake you up early if you’re going to need extra time to get to work, because there are delays on your bus… Innovations that help people’s lives that government would not likely have developed itself, if it had kept the data to itself.

GTFS

2005

2012GTFS

GTFS

GTFS

GTFSGTFS

? ??

GTFS

General Transit Feed Specification

So how did this happen and how did it scale? A coalition of partners including New York City, a non-profit (NGO) called Open Plans, Google, and Portland TriMet collaborated to create a new open standard for public transit data, called the General Transit Feed Specification. Government, NGOs, and companies collaborating together to make it possible to get put public transit schedules into maps and on to your phone.

And these organizations shared not only a data standard, but they also shared their code… They open sourced everything, allowing this innovation and collaboration to spread further faster.

Open Government Innovation

Transit

Open311

Let’s look at another example— what we call “311” data in the USA, which is the phone number that people can dial for non-emergency municipal services… to report a problem to their local government, such as a pothole in the street, or a tree falling on a power line, or someone making too much noise!

New York City was the first city to implement this in the USA, but now 1000s of cities have implemented it. But its utility was limited until New York City opened up the data…

When they did, Wired Magazine visualized the data, and the city gained numerous insights, including the (now obvious) fact that most noise complaints happen at night. This allowed New York City to improve its staffing- most people responding to noise complaints should be working at night!

It also allowed community organizations to assess quality of life issues throughout the city, by mapping the data.

2009

311311

311Open311

Open311Open311

Again, New York City didn’t keep this to itself. Open Plans, Code for America, other cities, and startup companies combined to create an open standard for 311 data…

The Open311 standard was used to develop specific tools such as an open API that facilitated the publication and sharing of 311 data, as well as capturing data from multiple sources.

This allowed other cities across the US such as San Francisco, and now worldwide including Buenos Aires, London, Santo Domingo, and others to more quickly and affordably roll out 311, and to learn from each other’s municipal innovations that made their cities work better.

It allowed entrepreneurs to build new businesses providing better user interfaces to help citizens report 311 issues, and to help governments have better tools to manage the issues at scale.

And of course many of these governments and entrepreneurs shared their code, so that innovation could propagate faster.

Open Government Innovation

Transit

Open311

So how can a government set itself up to leverage and contribute to open government innovation?

Boston

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Open Source Code

Open source code, and code repositories, are fundamental to government open innovation. Proprietary intellectual property simply creates friction that slows down open innovation. When tax dollars are paying for this work in the first place, I believe that is unacceptable. Instead of reinventing the wheel, there should be a common foundation, so different applications can focus on creating new capabilities rather than recreating core functionality. Create a rich developer ecosystem.

App Stores...

App Stores, or Cloud Marketplaces, are also key to being able to find out about a solution— especially an open source solution— in an online vendor-neutral marketplace— and quickly and easily researching it, procuring it, and implementing it. This speeds up the process of actually implementing in your own geography an innovation that has proven to work somewhere else. Streamline procurement of innovative and open source solutions.

Facilities

Open Data...

Open data is of course fundamental to breaking down the walls between your organization and its peers and its customers and its partners, allowing innovation that helps you to arise anywhere. Open all your data.

http://flickr.com/photos/rocketqueen/1573565705/

Open Standards...

GTFS

Using only open standards allows you to join and leverage the network, by speaking the same language as all of your peers and partners. Use open standards.

Talent...

Governments historically have a hard time recruiting and retaining the most innovative technical talent, but having a workforce and a culture that is passionate about open innovation is key… Hire entrepreneurs… Hire coders that never thought they’d want to work inside government. Partner with NGOs. Work with small innovative companies committed to openness. Hire innovative technical people.

Communities & Collaboration

By opening up your data, and inviting developers and other problem solvers to collaborate in solving your government’s problems, you can explicitly catalyze open innovation, though hackathons and app contests. Encourage and incentivize collaboration from outside your organization.

Infrastructure & DevOps

Host in a cloud environment, but don’t lock yourself in to any particular cloud vendor… Strong cloud-based infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS), and contemporary “devops” tools, are key to allowing you to focus on solving the business problem you are expert in, rather than spending time trying to manage code, and keeping websites online and secure at scale, which is not the core competency of most governments. Leverage commoditized technology infrastructure services that are not your core competency.

2015 Ecosystem: 1000s of Cities, 10,000s of Apps, 1,000,000s of Data Sets...

All these factors combined have led to a burgeoning civic technology movement worldwide, powered by open innovation, that is helping government to transform the lives of its communities, and helping its constituent communities to help reform and transform government.

identifying emerging standards

success stories & lessons learned

where are there gaps?

sharing software

building practitionercommunity

outlining the core “civic

stack”

Supporting Open Innovation in Gov’t

EMERGING GROWTH

Open311 Transit??

What are the essential civic platforms?

Weather

MATURE

GPSGov CMS

Distributed innovation

API

API

API

government

industry

citizen

With this structure, innovation can develop and spread organically, a software ecosystem can grow on a common foundation without reinventing the wheel, citizens get interoperability and consistent interfaces, governments get more efficient internal processes, etc

But Most NYC IT Projects Still Look Like This...

One word of caution… even in New York City today, the birthplace of OneBusAway and Open311, and the longest running government municipal apps contest, most software projects still look like this… This is hard, and it won’t happen overnight. Which is why its so important that conferences like this one are happening here today.

Andrew Hoppin | @ahoppin

[email protected]

http://nucivic.com