Andrea Di MaioAccording to what reported by Government Computing News, during his address at the American Council of Technology and Industry Advisory Council’s Management of Change Conference, Vivek Kundra – the US Federal CIO – said that government’s technology initiatives “attempted to break down the vertical technology silos that evolved across government but ultimately resulted in horizontal, cross-agency silos”.
This is an excellent point, which I’ve made for a long time to government clients who were praising the transformational potential of their e-government programs. In many cases, successful transformation programs have just turned silos into different silos. All that is left of those programs are new silos, but the actual transformation process did not stick.
Proponents of new, Web 2.0 approaches like Kundra believe that these will favor creativity and sustainable change. It is very early to say whether change will be really sustainable or we will witness the creation of yet another breed of silos.
For the time being it seems to me that initiatives tagged as “open government data” just revive the old silos, with a transparency touch: whoever is accountable for information is supposed to make it available, for others to figure out how to use that.
When it comes to the use of such information, I have no problem with vendors, intermediaries, social groups, and individual citizens creating their own mashups.
But I am a bit more dubious about how many government agencies will create and use theirs. No doubt this is a useful thing to do, but who is going to be accountable for the actual mashup (and – in particular – for the consequences of mashing up)? Think about an agency creating a mashup from sex offender lists (published at state level) and primary school locations (published at county level): would that agency be accountable for revealing a high density of sex offenders around primary schools?
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Category: web 2.0 in government Tags: open government data, Vivek Kundra
