The Semantic Government
Those who follow the "Web 2.0" hype know that the hype has moved on. People are talking now about "Web 3.0" or the "Semantic Web". However, in government, we are behind the times. We're still talking about "Gov 2.0". The time has come for us to move on, too.
Here in Canada (and in many places elsewhere in the world) we are seeing a growing disconnect between the citizenry and their government. That's why we see so many calls for "democratic renewal". People are not seeing the "once every x years" election cycle providing meaningful dialogue between citizens and representatives.
As governments scale back due to economic pressures, more and more citizens are looking to other groups (community groups, advocacy groups, charities and other non-profits) to provide what they are looking for - not to government. That's one of the reasons we see all of these calls for "open data". So that the government data can be made into meaningful information and maningful services by other groups. People do not believe that the government itself can make its information meaningful and relevant.
Ultimately, people are finding less and less in government that is meaningful to them in their day-to-day lives.
It is time for us to close this gap. It is not enough for us to "open government" and release our meaningless information. We need to imbue our information with meaning and make everything we do meaningful to our citizens.
Who will join me in this crusade? We need to look beyond "Gov 2.0" to a government with meaning - a "Semantic Government".
;-)
Here in Canada (and in many places elsewhere in the world) we are seeing a growing disconnect between the citizenry and their government. That's why we see so many calls for "democratic renewal". People are not seeing the "once every x years" election cycle providing meaningful dialogue between citizens and representatives.
As governments scale back due to economic pressures, more and more citizens are looking to other groups (community groups, advocacy groups, charities and other non-profits) to provide what they are looking for - not to government. That's one of the reasons we see all of these calls for "open data". So that the government data can be made into meaningful information and maningful services by other groups. People do not believe that the government itself can make its information meaningful and relevant.
Ultimately, people are finding less and less in government that is meaningful to them in their day-to-day lives.
It is time for us to close this gap. It is not enough for us to "open government" and release our meaningless information. We need to imbue our information with meaning and make everything we do meaningful to our citizens.
Who will join me in this crusade? We need to look beyond "Gov 2.0" to a government with meaning - a "Semantic Government".
;-)
Views: 9
Tags: 3.0, buzzwords, collaboration, government 2.0, humour, mostcomment, open government, web 2.0
Comment
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Comment by Keith Moore on April 7, 2010 at 12:08am -
David, we t Open Government TV join you in helping to create jobs and making government more efficient and more realistic to stakeholders who seek to engage and do business with government to provide solutions that reflect increased diversity and promote innovation.
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Comment by Dave Manzolillo on April 1, 2010 at 10:55am -
Good to see all the conversation on this topic. I attended (and presented a Semantic Wiki for Climate Change findings) the ISWC2009 conference in VA, and one of the Seminars was how Semantic Technologies can be applied in Government (here is the link). We used a product (TopQuadrant) to drill into Data.gov datasets to identify IT spending trends across agencies.
Besides mashing up Data.gov feeds, there is a (IMHO) a huge need to categorize and organize government content. There is already a slew of products that do linguistic analysis on a corpus of docs & data (Attensity and Content Analyst in Intel Community). The IC is definitely the early adopter in the Semantic Content Analysis front, and other agencies now desperately need this capability of making sense of the exponential growth of content. I am hopefully exploring opensource alternatives in the meantime, some more manual process maybe involved (using SME's to tag), but still offer a lower TCO.
Call it Semantic or Web 3.0 or whatever, the need is there. Web 2.0 tools have empowered all of us, now we need to be able to understand the meaning.
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Comment by Steve Ardire on March 30, 2010 at 5:23pm -
Structured Dynamics are developers of Citizen DAN http://www.citizen-dan.org an open source Community Indicators System (CIS) offered as a Cloud Computing Semantic Portal. A proof of concept will be stood up in May for a major Canadian city.
The CIS will support both quantitative (statistical) information and qualitative (stories and narratives) indicators to identify and track economic, environmental, cultural, and social indicators presented as graphs, trendlines, timelines, map visualizations with “dashboard” views of indicator data that can be interactive and linked. Citizens can navigate, filter, analyze, and visualize these indicators to better identify, quantify, and track quality of life issues and community well-being.
Then at http://semtech2010.semanticuniverse.com/ this presentation will reinforce above
"Sizzle for the Steak: Rich, Visual Interfaces for Ontology-driven Apps"
http://semtech2010.semanticuniverse.com/sessionPop.cfm?confid=42&am...
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Comment by Anni Rowland-Campbell on March 30, 2010 at 5:18pm -
David, I'm delighted that you've made the connection. We've been investigating the implications of semantic technologies (more broadly than the semantic web) for a number of years and recently completed the project - "Early Leadership in the Semantic Web" as part of Australia's Gov 2.0 Taskforce. We are now organising a conference here in Australia - www.metadataaustralia2010.com - which will bring some of these themes to the fore and as part of this we have two "camps" in both Australia and New Zealand which will extend the conversation. Our main philosophy is that (a) by introducing web 2.0 technologies into any organisation whilst it has its benefits, much of what it does is result in MORE data (unstructured) that the organisation - public and private - needs to deal with and (b) governments publishing data isn't necessarily useful for an end consumer / constituent. What is required is meaning and context to that data and the ability to turn it into true business intelligence. Voila "semantics"!!
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Comment by Bob Woolley on March 30, 2010 at 4:52pm -
Buzzwords seem kind of useless to me. From an IT perspective e-gov needs to recognize the varying context of citizen users, who quite frankly, go to government primarily when they have a need that government may fill. We need to do a better job of making government organizational stuff transparent. Citizens need to be able to meet their needs without having to navigate government. This is a major theme for utah.gov.
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Comment by Mary Groebner on March 30, 2010 at 11:02am -
And seconds ago I read a blog post that talks about the relationship factor really well, and echoes this discussion. have at it: http://community-roundtable.com/2010/03/relationship-inflation-and-the-role-of-communities/
@David: I like the sarcasm. :)
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Comment by Mary Groebner on March 30, 2010 at 10:40am
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@Savi - I totally agree.
It doesn't matter what we call it. IT folks will inevitably latch onto buzzwords that seem like software versions (1.0, 2.0, 3.0), while folks from other disciplines and backgrounds will grab for their own sort of equivalent of that buzzword (like 'semantics').
Of course, the average citizen doesn't care what we call it - they want us to be efficient, effective, transparent, open, inclusive, etc. because they want us to provide service (yes, even in the form of collaboration/partnership) to get the things done that they think government exists for in the first place.
To me, it's all about rebuilding trust in government, which at root is no different than rebuilding trust in another human being at an individual level. Government is afterall just a bunch of individuals (of, by, for the people, afterall). If you try to rebuild trust on an individual level you start by admitting your part in the problem (I didn't trust you, I didn't include you, I didn't respect you, etc.), admitting that you're human and make mistakes (yes, this data is dirty and I need your HELP in cleaning it up or yes, we know there are useful applications that could be built upon this data and we need your HELP in identifying what they are so here, you do it - kinda like the civic apps contest in PDX or the newly announced apps for climate change contest in BC), and moving forward from there, rebuilding trust a little bit at a time over a lot of different issues. (And yes, putting data out there without metadata or context would be the equivalent of an insincere apology, where you are saying the words but you don't really MEAN that you want to include/involve/respect them).
I think we've got seriously enough problems trying to convince people within government (due to a variety of reasons almost all starting with the words 'fear of') to go forward with this approach regardless of what we call it. So I think it's most important to frame it in context/language that we all AGREE on that are much more foundational than any new buzzword possibly could be (i.e. public service, accountability, efficiency, of/by/for the people)
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Comment by Bill Brantley on March 29, 2010 at 9:38pm -
@Firoze: Totally agree. I think a large part of the fatigue is the attitude that whatever new technology is in vogue, it is claimed that it will solve all of our problems. As a professor, I received a slew of emails about how to use iPad in the classroom. Before that it was Twitter and before that, Facebook.
Like you say, none of this is new. And it sounds like you are also saying it goes beyond technology. Maybe dropping the version numbers will help to reinforce the idea that OpenGov is more than the technology.
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Comment by Firoze Lafeer on March 29, 2010 at 4:00pm -
@Bill: Yeah, it's buzzword fatigue. And I think in this case that fatigue might be harming open government and transparency.
Putting context and meaning around data is not a new idea. And adopting existing standards rather than reinventing the wheel is not a new idea.
I think if we look at it in those terms then we hopefully US .gov's can make substantive, albeit imperfect, steps to making all this data more useful.
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Comment by Steve Ardire on March 29, 2010 at 3:57pm
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Sorry to be pedantic but it's really quite amazing that people here are not acknowledging the key message from http://www.mkbergman.com/873/changing-it-for-good/
The open semantic enterprise is not magic nor some panacea. Simply consider it as bringing rationality to what has become a broken IT system. Embracing the open semantic enterprise can help the New Normal be a good and more adaptive normal.
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