Data Management

U.S. Government Goes Startup

Mitch Wagner, California Bureau Chief, Light Reading

August 19, 2009

5 Min Read

Blogger Anil Dash takes a look at this year's crop of tech startups, and concludes that the most interesting one around is a little outfit based out of Washington D.C. Maybe you've heard of it? It's the executive branch of the U.S. government. Government technologists embrace the hard-working, open, innovative culture of the best of Silicon Valley, says Dash.Most significant, says Dash, is the government's focus on disclosing information, along with APIs that allow others to freely build applications on top of that information.

We've seen the remarkable innovation that sprung up years ago around the API for services like Flickr, and that continues full-force today around apps like Twitter. But who could have predicted just a year or two ago that we might have something like Apps for America, the effort being led by the Sunlight Foundation, Google, O'Reilly Media and [InformationWeek parent company] TechWeb to reward applications built around datasets provided by Data.gov. The tools that have already been built are fascinating. And, frankly, they're a lot more compelling than most of the sample apps that a typical startup can wring out of its community with a developer contest.

He cites sites like data.gov, USAspending.gov, Recovery.gov, and WhiteHouse.gov as examples of next-generation government applications.

Dash knows a little something about startups; he's a vice president at Six Apart, which makes Movable Type a pioneering blog publishing application.

Dash singles out CIO Vivek Kundra for praise. Kundra said the default status of government information should be public, not secret. This same culture of openness allowed sites like Flickr, Delicious, and Twitter to thrive. Instead of keeping information is secret unless the user specifies it should be public, the information is instead public if the user does nothing, and only secret if the user specifies it should be.

Kundra will be the featured speaker at the InformationWeek 500 Conference next month.

Dash goes on to describe the challenges that "startup.gov" faces, and what it needs to do in the future.

In a follow-up post, Dash rounds up responses from elsewhere on the Internet. Techdirt's Mike Masnick agrees with Dask:

A few weeks back I got to see the federal government's CTO, Aneesh Chopra, speak twice during his first trip to Silicon Valley. I've seen him speak before (before he was appointed, when he was CTO for Virginia), but I have to admit I was pretty skeptical going in. For plenty of reasons that you can guess, I'm pretty jaded by people in government, and it's rare to come across people who seem to be doing things for anything other than "political" purposes. But I have to admit that the amazing thing that came through in both Chopra's talks was that they were both entirely about actually getting stuff done, with a focus on openness and data sharing. Chopra talked, repeatedly, about figuring out what could be done both short- and long-term, and never once struck me as someone looking to hoard power or focus on a partisan or political reason for doing things. It was never about positioning things to figure out how to increase his budget. In fact, many of the ideas he was discussing was looking at ways to just get stuff done now without any need for extra budget. Needless to say, this is not the sort of thing you hear regularly from folks involved in the government.

Dash is, arguably, being excessively optimistic, because the Obama White House's record on transparency is decidedly mixed at best, as noted by the Washington Post in a May editorial.

With some notable exceptions, Obama's White House hasn't been dramatically more transparent than the notoriously secretive one before it.
There is still a tremendous predisposition against disclosure there. Internal records stay internal, while the distribution of key public documents is actually less reliable than it was in the Bush years -- especially on the White House Web site.
Administration officials routinely hold briefings where they demand anonymity for spin sessions that aren't remotely controversial or sensitive....

Very few White House officials are authorized to speak to reporters on the record, and those that do stick to "talking points, spinning and delivering pithy sound bites." And the White House blog is mostly "window dressing," the Post said.

The Secret Service refused a request for disclosure of the names of health-industry executives who visited the White House to discuss healthcare reform, the Los Angeles Times reported last month. The ACLU reports that the FBI issues gag orders against Internet service providers.

Still, says Dash, the current open government Internet efforts are a good beginning. He says: "[T]he recent web achievements by the executive branch are a lot like Microsoft's recent success with Bing; It doesn't mean that the whole giant organization is on the right track, it just means that it's still possible for these behemoths to do the right thing."

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