During the past 15 years, the World Wide Web has created remarkable new methods for harnessing the creativity of people in groups, and in the process has created powerful business models that are reshaping our economy. As the Web has undermined old media and software companies, it has demonstrated the enormous power of a new approach, often referred to as Web 2.0. In a nutshell: the secret to the success of bellwethers like Google, Amazon, eBay, Craigslist, Wikipedia, Facebook, and Twitter is that each of these sites, in its own way, has learned to harness the power of its users to add value to—no, more than that, to co-create—its offerings.
Now, a new generation has come of age with the Web, and it is committed to using its lessons of creativity and collaboration to address challenges facing our country and the world. Meanwhile, with the proliferation of issues and not enough resources to address them all, many government leaders recognize the opportunities Web 2.0 technologies provide not just to help them get elected, but to help them do a better job. By analogy, many are calling this movement Government 2.0.
Much like its predecessor, Web 2.0, “Government 2.0” is a chameleon, a white rabbit term, that seems to be used by people to mean whatever they want it to mean. For some, it is the use of social media by government agencies. For others, it is government transparency, especially as aided by government-provided data APIs. Still others think of it as the adoption of cloud computing, wikis, crowdsourcing, mobile applications, mashups, developer contests, or all of the other epiphenomena of Web 2.0 as applied to the job of government.
All of these ideas seem important, but none of them seem to get to the heart of the matter.
Web 2.0 was not a new version of the World Wide Web; it was a renaissance after the dark ages of the dotcom bust, a rediscovery of the power hidden in the original design of the World Wide Web. Similarly, Government 2.0 is not a new kind of government; it is government stripped down to its core, rediscovered and reimagined as if for the first time.
And in that reimagining, this is the idea that becomes clear: government is, at bottom, a mechanism for collective action. We band together, make laws, pay taxes, and build the institutions of government to manage problems that are too large for us individually and whose solution is in our common interest.
Government 2.0, then, is the use of technology—especially the collaborative technologies at the heart of Web 2.0—to better solve collective problems at a city, state, national, and international level.
The hope is that Internet technologies will allow us to rebuild the kind of participatory government envisioned by our nation’s founders, in which, as Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to Joseph Cabell, “every man…feels that he is a participator in the government of affairs, not merely at an election one day in the year, but every day.”[4]
As President Obama explained the idea during his campaign: “We must use all available technologies and methods to open up the federal government, creating a new level of transparency to change the way business is conducted in Washington, and giving Americans the chance to participate in government deliberations and decision making in ways that were not possible only a few years ago.”
Allowing citizens to see and share in the deliberations of government and creating a “new level of transparency” are remarkable and ambitious goals, and would indeed “change the way business is conducted in Washington.” Yet these goals do not go far enough.
There is a new compact on the horizon: information produced by and on behalf of citizens is the lifeblood of the economy and the nation; government has a responsibility to treat that information as a national asset. Citizens are connected like never before and have the skill sets and passion to solve problems affecting them locally as well as nationally. Government information and services can be provided to citizens where and when they need them. Citizens are empowered to spark the innovation that will result in an improved approach to governance. In this model, government is a convener and an enabler rather than the first mover of civic action.
This is a radical departure from the existing model of government, which Donald Kettl so aptly named “vending machine government.”[5] We pay our taxes, we expect services. And when we don’t get what we expect, our “participation” is limited to protest—essentially, shaking the vending machine. Collective action has been watered down to collective complaint. (Kettl used the vending machine analogy in a very different way, to distinguish between the routine operation of government and the solution of new and extraordinary problems, but I owe him credit for the image nonetheless.)
What if, instead of a vending machine, we thought of government as the manager of a marketplace? In The Cathedral & the Bazaar, Eric Raymond uses the image of a bazaar to contrast the collaborative development model of open source software with traditional software development, but the analogy is equally applicable to government.[6] In the vending machine model, the full menu of available services is determined beforehand. A small number of vendors have the ability to get their products into the machine, and as a result, the choices are limited, and the prices are high. A bazaar, by contrast, is a place where the community itself exchanges goods and services.
But not all bazaars are created equal. Some are sorry affairs, with not much more choice than the vending machine, while others are vibrant marketplaces in which many merchants compete to provide the same goods and services, bringing an abundance of choice as well as lower prices.
In the technology world, the equivalent of a thriving bazaar is a successful platform. If you look at the history of the computer industry, the innovations that define each era are frameworks that enabled a whole ecosystem of participation from companies large and small. The personal computer was such a platform. So was the World Wide Web. This same platform dynamic is playing out right now in the recent success of the Apple iPhone. Where other phones have had a limited menu of applications developed by the phone vendor and a few carefully chosen partners, Apple built a framework that allowed virtually anyone to build applications for the phone, leading to an explosion of creativity, with more than 100,000 applications appearing for the phone in little more than 18 months, and more than 3,000 new ones now appearing every week.[7]
This is the right way to frame the question of Government 2.0. How does government become an open platform that allows people inside and outside government to innovate? How do you design a system in which all of the outcomes aren’t specified beforehand, but instead evolve through interactions between government and its citizens, as a service provider enabling its user community?
This chapter focuses primarily on the application of platform thinking to government technology projects. But it is worth noting that the idea of government as a platform applies to every aspect of the government’s role in society. For example, the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, which committed the United States to building an interstate highway system, was a triumph of platform thinking, a key investment in facilities that had a huge economic and social multiplier effect. Though government builds the network of roads that tie our cities together, it does not operate the factories, farms, and businesses that use that network: that opportunity is afforded to “we the people.” Government does set policies for the use of those roads, regulating interstate commerce, levying gasoline taxes and fees on heavy vehicles that damage the roads, setting and policing speed limits, specifying criteria for the safety of bridges, tunnels, and even vehicles that travel on the roads, and performing many other responsibilities appropriate to a “platform provider.”
While it has become common to ridicule the 1990s description of the Internet as the “information superhighway,” the analogy is actually quite apt. Like the Internet, the road system is a “network of networks,” in which national, state, local, and private roads all interconnect, for the most part without restrictive fees. We have the same rules of the road everywhere in the country, yet anyone, down to a local landowner adding a driveway to an unimproved lot, can connect to the nation’s system of roads.
The launch of weather, communications, and positioning satellites is a similar exercise of platform strategy. When you use a car navigation system to guide you to your destination, you are using an application built on the government platform, extended and enriched by massive private sector investment. When you check the weather—on TV or on the Internet—you are using applications built using the National Weather Service (or equivalent services in other countries) as a platform. Until recently, the private sector had neither the resources nor the incentives to create space-based infrastructure. Government as a platform provider created capabilities that enrich the possibilities for subsequent private sector investment.
There are other areas where the appropriate role of the platform provider and the marketplace of application providers is less clear. Health care is a contentious example. Should the government be providing health care or leaving it to the private sector? The answer is in the outcomes. If the private sector is doing a good job of providing necessary services that lead to the overall increase in the vitality of the country, government should stay out. But just as the interstate highway system increased the vitality of our transportation infrastructure, it is certainly possible that greater government involvement in health care could do the same. But if the lesson is correctly learned, it should do so not by competing with the private sector to deliver health services, but by investing in infrastructure (and “rules of the road”) that will lead to a more robust private sector ecosystem.
At the same time, platforms always require choices, and those choices must be periodically revisited. Platforms lose their power when they fail to adapt. The U.S. investment in the highway system helped to vitiate our railroads, shaping a society of automobiles and suburbs. Today, we need to rethink the culture of sprawl and fossil fuel use that platform choice encouraged. A platform that once seemed so generative of positive outcomes can become a dead weight over time.
Police, fire services, garbage collection: these are fundamental platform services, just like analogous services in computer operating systems. And of course, here we have an “antipattern” from technology platforms: the failure to provide security, for example, as a fundamental system service, leaving it instead to the “private sector” of application vendors, has imposed a huge downstream cost on the technology ecosystem. See Chapter 5 for more on antipatterns.
The question of Government 2.0, then, is this: if government is a platform, how can we use technology to make it into a better platform?
This question allows us to fruitfully extend the platform metaphor and ask: what lessons can government take from the success of computer platforms, as it tries to harness the power of technology to remake government?
[5] The Next Government of the United States: Why Our Institutions Fail Us and How to Fix Them, Donald Kettl, W. W. Norton & Company, 2008.
[6] The Cathedral & the Bazaar, Eric Raymond, O’Reilly, 1999.