This article, ‘Fostering Innovation through Open Government‘, from Aneesh Chopra the US Chief Technology Officer, is a great snapshot of the link between new technologies and open models and the policy benefits they will drive.
In this case he focuses on the topic important to us all, economic development through innovation.
This kind of link is key. It’s critical for any Government model to be linked to some form of tangible social benefit, so that it means something to all citizens as well as those “in the industry”.
Aneesh does an awesome job of insightfully explaining how Open Data and Cloud platforms are providing a new set of tools not just for government staff but for citizens too; that’s really the key message, that citizens are empowered to become part of the software landscape for re-engineering how Government works.
Following that the key step is to then involve them the same way in creating the policies themselves. Software is programmed only to implement the wishes of its business model master, and so it’s equally important to extend this co-creation model to include policy setting too, ie. Open Policy Innovation.
Social Innovation
That way citizens are involved soup-to-nuts in co-creation of the society and civic operations they want, and if this includes all dimensions of their lives they’ll be entirely empowered to do something about the less savoury parts of it, and this is the essence of ‘Social Innovation‘.
The relationship between Open Data and software developers is the same effect Government needs to repeat between all citizens and all aspects of government. In particular meaningul progress in key areas like societal poverty will require “solutions from within”, and so this approach is key to Campaign2020.us.
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