Washington DC, 15 August 2011

(by Ton Zijlstra)

As announced earlier, last Friday Vivek Kundra stepped down as the first CIO for the USA. This week he started in his new work at Harvard's Berkman Center, and in a speech (pdf download) he looks back on his public service in the past 10 years. Part of it is a description of the experiences made with data.gov, which has been an example to many similar initiatives world wide.

Kundra says on his first open government data work in Washington DC:

"When I was the Chief Technology Officer of Washington DC, the emergence of consumer technology had dramatically raised citizens’ expectations of the services they could get from their Government. If you could use your phone to make a reservation at a restaurant, why not also check whether you could park there for free before leaving for dinner?

But in a climate of declining budgets, I knew that business as usual – throwing more Government resources at the problem – wasn’t the answer. We almost have an IT cartel that's made up of a few companies that benefit from government spending because they understand the procurement process better than anyone else, not because they provide better technology.

I wanted to find the innovative path and mobilize an army of citizen-developers who didn’t need an office in City Hall or a PhD in the procurement process to get work done for theirGovernment.

So we threw open DC’s warehouse of public data so that everyone – constituents, policymakers, and businesses – could meet in a new digital public square. We started with 200 live data feeds – everything from government contracts to crime statistics to economic development. And to spur citizens to turn this data into applications that the government didn’t have the resources to create on its own, we launched the “Apps for Democracy” contest, offering prizes for the best applications based on the data we released. Within 30 days, our $50,000 investment in the nascent “app economy” produced 47 applications – applications that would have cost about $2.6 million to develop traditionally."

This was a prelude for his later work for President Obama's administration:

"So it was with this experience in mind that I launched Data.gov to democratize data across the Federal Government and tap into the ingenuity of the public to develop tools that help the American people. We ran Data.gov like a lean start-up. On day one, we launched with a Minimum Viable Product with only 47 datasets. Two years later, there are 389,907 datasets covering every government mission area, from health care to public safety. Innovators from across the country have been busy putting the datasets to work. So far, hundreds of apps have been created."

"And Data.gov has spawned a global movement – 21 nations, 29 states, 11 cities, and several international organizations have established open data platforms. So in the coming months and years, we will see an explosion of apps based on open data platforms across the world.To hardwire this citizen-developer approach, we worked with Congress to pass the America COMPETES Act which grants agencies the authority to use prizes and challenges to spur innovation. And we are now seeing the results of the competitions across the Federal Government."

The full text is embedded below.