The advent of open government initiatives enables citizens and rule-writers to generate large numbers of public comments on a daily basis. This influx of data can create information overload for federal rule-writers who must process massive amounts of redundant text data to find germane and novel contributions. Search engine technologies and document management systems help to sort out information in the proverbial “document soup”.
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With so much focus on information-based transparency, Sunshine Week is a reminder that many forms of public access to government information are good for democracy.

Data.gov, the public catalog of diverse, high value, machine readable US government datasets is perhaps the best current example of information-based transparency. Recovery.gov has a similar transparency goal, but a different approach. It focuses on one topic, accounting for $787 billion in stimulus funding, by presenting summary level analysis of thousands of quarterly reports from the organizations that received funding.
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“Government is in danger of becoming irrelevant.”

That is one of the key conclusions of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on the Future of Government on which I serve. Agree or disagree, one thing is clear: Government has to change to keep pace with the 21st Century.
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Summary:
The heavy focus in the Open Government community on just “getting the data” has obscured some of the downstream requirements that are necessary to achieve the goals of OpenGov initiatives. Sometimes it seems there’s a perception that just exposing the data is enough – and there’s an expectation that useful applications will start to “magically” appear.

In order for Open Government initiatives to produce results that will truly affect political and cultural change, we need rich, usable, and USEFUL solutions that will add real value to citizens and agencies… and that doesn’t happen by accident or merely through community enthusiasm.
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There is a classic management book called Re-engineering the corporation by Michael Hammer and James Champy. When I first read it, I thought that there should be a book about re-engineering the government.

Today of course transformation of governments is a big theme.

But where to start that reorganization from?
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There has been a lot of interest in governments liberating data. The overall intention is: Data owned by the government in many cases is locked up and could be better by third parties (example Ordnance Survey data).
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Along with Open source and Open standards, we now have a new phrase; i.e. Open Government.

What does Open Government imply for standards?

Let’s take a step back. Prior to 1999, I used to work for an ERP vendor. ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) is a complex class of software that is typically intended to manage all the functions of a company (such as Accounts Payable, General Ledger, Billing and so on). Inspite of their complexity, there was a mad scramble to install ERP systems which was mainly motivated by the Y2K deadline.

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