Check out Steve Hamm’s article from BusinessWeek discussing how the federal government is starting to take the lead on providing information platforms of which the rest of the commercial world and regular citizens can build upon.

The most successful companies in the tech industry learned long ago that they would be far stronger if they created an ecosystem of allies who build businesses on top of theirs. They designed their technology as platforms, or foundations, for others to build upon. (Think Microsoft’s Windows and the hundreds of thousands of applications created to run on top of it.)

Now governments are following the same path–most notably the Obama administration. It’s attempting to create an innovation platform that organizations and businesses can use to make themselves stronger and/or help improve the performance of government. Tim O’Reilly, the founder of O’Reilly Media and promoter of the Web 2.0 and Gov 2.0 phenomena, calls this the Obama administration’s most important technology initiative. “The government is starting to think like a platform provider rather than an application provider,” he wrote me in an e-mail.

The most significant step so far has been Federal CIO Vivek Kundra’s Data.gov project. Launched on May 21, Data.gov is a collection of federal data housed on the www.data.gov Web site that’s open to public access. It’s not just a bunch of impenetrable databases, through. Kundra and his team has provided easy-to-use tools that people can use to make use of the data–and they welcome suggestions on additional data sets and tools that people would find useful. The project launched with 47 data sets and now hosts over 118.000 of them.

A couple of examples of how Data.gov has been put to use:

Datamasher: Allows people to compare vital economic and demographic data by state, and view it graphically. There are more than 1,500 mashups of data available so far.

FlyOnTime.us: Allows travelers to see the on-time records of specific flights between cities.

One unintended effect: In an era when traditional media is short of people and resources, non-journalists can do their own investigating and data mining.

This notion of providing an innovation platform is central to the national innovation strategy being developed by the federal Chief Technology Officer, Aneesh Chopra. He’s in the final stages of working up his platform for consumer e-health, and says he’ll reveal the details soon. For now, here’s a high-level teaser: “The government doesn’t have to run everything. We can create the conditions whereby we improve our collective well-being.”

I have a feeling that Big Government, Obama-style, is going to be a new sort of Big Government. Likely better, too.



 

Posted via email from bizautomationsoft’s posterous