Andrea DiMaio

Last week I was having a conversation with a regional authority that is exploring how to make its public information easily available through mainstream social networking sites, such as Facebook or YouTube. Interestingly, the conversation moved very soon away from trust, security and reputation issues, and touched upon a rather new topic that I do not recollect any client had raised before.

Let’s suppose a government organization decides to push some of its video material on YouTube, or to use Flickr to share photos, or to create its own page on Facebook: is there a risk that other players in those spaces (say MySpace or Snapfish) complain that they are not  being treated “fairly” by government?

Electronic information and service provision so far has been mostly limited to individual agency web sites or government-wide portals, whose implementation and operation is either managed internally or tendered out to vendors through traditional public procurement mechanisms. Deciding to reach out to specific communities and channels implies making a choice, and this is going to create issues for conservative government executives. For instance, the increasingly popular “mashup contests” such as those promoted by www.showusabetterway.com or www.appsfordemocracy.org, while starting with very open premises, may end up making choices about which application is going to use which data.  Of course making data available in a mashable format will allow many others to leverage those, but the fact remains that some application developers, web sites, communities will get an advantage.

This is opening two new fronts in the whole web 2.0 discussion.

• The first one concerns how government organizations may circumvent public procurement by invoking the “power of information”: what if mashup contests and similar initiatives become the conduit to procure entire systems in a completely different way, breaking them into smaller chunks that stay below the threshold for competitive tendering? Or are mashup contests a new form of competitive bidding and, if so, should they be further regulated? 
• The second front is how to ensure a smooth functioning of the market created by such “power of information”. Players in this market include IT vendors, associations. professional services organizations, online communities, and government entities. What are the competition rules? Which traits would define a dominant player? How to ensure market neutrality when publishing a new piece of public information?

While it may look still too early to pose these questions, they will need to be tackled sooner than many think.