Since I first got involved with eGovernment projects in the mid-nineties I have been encouraging governments that I have been working with to look towards international standards as a route to solving system interconnect challenges, an important step on the path to providing more predictable and useful services to the citizens and businesses that they work with.
More recently, along with everybody else in my field, I have found myself increasingly involved in eGovernment projects that are using Web2.0 technologies (sometimes called Gov2.0) to improve the way that they work with their constituents.
Working with these projects I have become aware of two factors that have changed the way that I think about a subset of the communication standards that the projects rely upon.
1. Companies like Facebook and Twitter are still evolving, rapidly and in real time. To maintain their pace of innovation they need to be able to constantly update the APIs and protocols that clients use to interconnect with them.
2. As software development has become more agile it is increasingly easier for developers to keep up with these rapid changes. The myriad of twitter clients that change as the TwitterAPI changes is a good example of this agile software development in action.
This change has led me to think more about the evolution of innovation, and when it should and should not intersect with a standardization process.
The whole curve introduces more complexity than would be suitable for this blog post, however to drive the conversation of today’s topic I would suggest that at the start of the curve, while services are still evolving and users requirements are still being understood, it frequently not appropriate to standardize these emerging technologies.
At the same time as companies like Twitter and Facebook have adopted a policy of publishing the details of their interfaces in an open and transparent manner they have provided a platform that is suitable for governments to adopt, in the way that those same governments could only have adopted internationally peer review standards in the past.
The Gov2.0 projects have introduced us to an era where we do see governments adopting technology that we would have considered emerging and unstable in previous years, and they are adopting those technologies with a great deal of both success and a great deal of support from their citizens.
We have a new form of standardization that happens in real time.
