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March 30, 2011
GRAMA and Cost
Speaking before the GRAMA working group today, Craig Call said "informed people make wise choices says." This is a great way to look at open records and open government. Another thought "GRAMA reduces the need for litigation and thus reduces overall costs." We should view open records as a responsibility of government, not a burden.
That said, GRAMA is the worst way to get open government. GRAMA ought to be the way exceptions are handled, not the way routine access to data is made. Exception handling costs any business money. Government is no different. The rule ought to be open access to public records.
Here's some thoughts I had about a few categorized issues:
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Fees and Fee waivers - Transparency requires free and open access to public records. Free is an important part of open. Government can make "open" records closed when they jack up the price to the point people can't afford to see them. That said, I'm sympathetic to those who say that businesses who use voluminous GRAMA requests as the raw material for their business (like Mr. Pooper Scooper) should foot the bill. But I believe we should err on the side of open rather than saving money. In fact, I think that if we require government to bear the burden of GRAMA requests, they'll find cheaper ways to comply. I don't mind a cost for paper copies if online copies are free. To avoid unfair hits on small cities or lightly populated counties, the state should provide subsidies to create more open government.
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Format - One thing that I felt after listening to much of the discussion today is that way too many people have "paper" on their mind. Certainly there are a lot of historical records that are only paper and we'll be living with those for a while. But we need to move more of our thinking to electronic, structured data. Just scanning something and putting it online as a PDF doesn't solve most of the problems we face. It also doesn't create a record that is useful for mashing up in interesting ways.
People use the word "digitize" when they mean "digital" too often in these conversations. "Digitize" implies that we are creating a digital version of something formerly analog. Most of the interesting records are already digital. People say "digitize" because it sounds complicated and expensive. Creating a digital copy of a million records is easy if they're already digital and in structured format.
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eGovernment can help with costs - Government ought to, as a matter of course, make any record classified as public, available online. GRAMA ought to require that all public records be made available online within a strict time limit and that such access include, where possible, access to the structure of the data (i.e. iCal versions of appointments, Excel files for spreadsheets, etc. rather than PDF printouts of the pages). The state should provide eGovernment help to cities and counties. We should also move toward structured data in systems and methods of automatically redacting sensitive information from records that would be otherwise public.
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Public Records - GRAMA should clearly state what records are public (it does), it should also create structures where government workers can determine what is public and what is not without sending everything to counsel, and should severely restrict government entities (state and local) in how they charge and otherwise cause unncessary reviews. We should find ways to give government workers cover for GRAMA decisions. The current law makes incorrect disclosure or non-disclosure a Class B misdemeanor. That creates an environment where clerks will pass almost everything to counsel.
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Servicing GRAMA Requests - GRAMA should institutionalize the notion of a GRAMA ombudsman (hat tip to Craig Call for this idea). An ombudsman can help the public create requests that are easier to answer and mediate disputes without going to court. There ought to be penalties for government wrongly denying GRAMA request. Public employees should be trained to see servicing GRAMA requests as an important part of their job, not a distraction.
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Software - Taking these ideas to the area of Software, Brent Gardner of the UT Association of Counties said they were fighting a GRAMA request in order to protect the proprietary software they'd developed at great expense. That makes no sense to me. Any software developed at public expense ought to be open and public. GRAMA ought to require all software developed with public dollars be open source. Vendors need to understand that they records in their software, sold or developed for government use, will be made public and they cannot restrict through licensing the free disclosure of that data with its underlying structure intact.
Update: A couple of thoughts after some discussion with others: First, the "GRAMA for Free" policy (i.e. no fees for GRAMA requests) should only apply to public records. The idea is to incent government to make public records open and online. Second, public records requests should not require any identification of the requester. Anonymous requests should be honored. Obviously the best way to meet these requirements is to simple put public records online as a default.
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Social Media as Enterprise Exception Handling
Kaliya sent me notes by David Terrar from talks by JP and John Hagel from the Dachis Business Summit. Good stuff. Here's a quote from Hagel that caught my eye on social media and exception handling:
Where can I maximise impact from this deployment? He suggested the richest area is around exception handling, which he called the shadow economy of the enterprise. He suggested 60-70% of knowledge workers is devoted to exception handling, and this is the ideal place to use social tools to find the right people and connect to the data.From Dachis Business Summit - you know, the Social one!
Referenced Wed Mar 30 2011 08:51:30 GMT-0600 (MST)
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March 28, 2011
Pictures from Kynetx Impact
Doc Searls took some great pictures of Kynetx Impact last week and posted them. There are some fun shots in here. I'm disappointed its over and looking forward to next year already. Here's one of me and Craig Burton from Doc's set:
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March 24, 2011
Killing Conspiracy: WikiLeaks and GRAMA
Over the last decade, I've lived my life more publicly than I did before thanks to the rise of technologies like blogging and Twitter. Many of my friends don't understand the level of information I'm willing to just put out for the world to see or what motivates it. The primary motivation--at least the primary reward--has been a life that is richer and more fun because of the connections I've made, the discussions that have ensued, and the friends I have who I'd have never known without blogging and Twitter.
That said, like most people, I chose what to make public and there are certainly things I don't blog about or even post on Twitter. Some of those are simply because I don't think about it or don't have the time. But there are times when I don't post something because it would betray a confidence, spoil a negotiation, or--I'll admit it--not portray me in a light I'd enjoy.
I've contemplated what it would be like to live my life completely in public. For example would I be willing to open up my email to public scrutiny. Could I make everything public? The answer is that I could, but it would change what I put in email. When you expose something to public view, you necessarily change the nature of the conversation. I'd undoubtedly come up with other channels to carry out those conversations. Expose them then! The conversations shifts again.
The issue of government transparency and open government has been much on my mind lately. First, like many, I've been fascinated with the WikiLeaks discussions. Secondly, I've been closely following the GRAMA (Government Records Access and Management Act) controversy in Utah--and now I'm involved.
WikiLeaks is instructive about GRAMA in ways you might not expect. In State and Terrorist Conspiracies (PDF), Assange writes:
How can we reduce the ability of a conspiracy to act?...We can split the conspiracy, reduce or eliminating important communication between a few high weight links or many low weight links. Traditional attacks on conspiratorial power groupings, such as assassination, have cut high weight links by killing, kidnaping, blackmailing or otherwise marginalizing or isolating some of the conspirators they were connected to.
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Conspiracies are cognitive devices. They are able to outthink the same group of individuals acting alone Conspiracies take information about the world in which they operate (the conspiratorial environment), pass through the conspirators and then act on the result. We can see conspiracies as a type of device that has inputs (information about the environment), a computational network (the conspirators and their links to each other) and outputs (actions intending to change or maintain the environment).
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Since a conspiracy is a type of cognitive device that acts on information acquired from its environment, distorting or restricting these inputs means acts based on them are likely to be misplaced. Programmers call this effect garbage in, garbage out. Usually the effect runs the other way; it is conspiracy that is the agent of deception and information restriction. In the US, the programmer's aphorism is sometimes called "the Fox News effect".
You might be thinking "yeah! That's what we want to do! Use openness to eliminate conspiracies between legislators in Utah!" And of course, we do, in the traditional way that the word "conspiracy" is used. But if you read Assange carefully, he considers all government--not just bad government--but all government a conspiracy. Assange is an anarchist. And he believes that the way to anarchy is exposing the secrets of government.
I don't think most of the people pushing for open government in Utah are anarchists. They do in fact, want government to work and work well. They simply want to create better government with transparency. What makes this difficult is that too much transparency may be as bad as too little.
Negotiations cannot be done in public and politics is largely a negotiation. Compromise requires the ability for people to talk without fear of exposure when negotiations fall through. The end might justify the compromise, if it's reached, but if it fails, the talks might be politically damaging. Exchanging support on bills by legislators might require finesse and taking uncomfortable positions. Even threats are often part of a negotiation.
I believe in the Sunlight Foundation's Principles for Transparency in Government (a larger list of ten principles is also available):
- Transparency is Government's Responsibility: Transparency must first and foremost be understood as government's responsibility, since public demand and private/non-profit responses can reach only so far. Accordingly, both Congress and the branch must make broad changes in our federal information and technology policies to establish on-line, on-time public access as a priority for virtually all the operations of the federal government.
- Public Equals Online: Whatever information the government has or commits to making public, the standard for "public" should include "freely accessible online." Information cannot be considered public if it is available only inside a government building, during limited hours or for a fee. In the 21st century, information is properly described as "public" only if it is available online, 24/7, for free, in some kind of reasonably parse-able format. Almost all of our public sphere is now online, and our public information should be there, too.
- Data Quality and Presentation Matter: The Internet has redefined effective communications and publishing. It is a 24/7 open medium, in which now-standard practices include continuous, contemporaneous dissemination, permanent searchability and re-usability, among other key features. The government must adopt the principles that all information and data that the government has decided or hereafter decides should be public must be (i) posted online promptly, (ii) complete and accurate, (iii) searchable and manipulable and (iv) permanently preserved and accessible. Among these four, timeliness is particularly vital for information concerning any ongoing decision making process, such as legislation or regulation. Disclosure should move at the same pace as influence over such decisions; thus arbitrary periodic filing requirements (e.g., annual, quarterly or monthly) violate this standard and render postings less useful to facilitate trust and participation. Fortunately, the Internet enables inexpensive real-time publishing, such as real-time updates we have come to expect for news and stock market transactions. These standards of contemporaneous disclosure are particularly important when it comes to disclosure of lobbying contacts, consideration of legislation, promulgation of regulations or awarding of grants and contracts.
The problem is that this says how to make something public not what should be public. There's nothing here to help us tease apart the sticky problem of where or how we should draw the line between information that should be public because such exposure is in the public interest and information that should be kept secret because we recognize that the public's interest is served by a legislative process that supports private--even secret--negotiations and settlements.
I believe that separate channels is not an answer. As long as there is any channel that is not open to scrutiny, (i) conversations that people feel the need to protect (for what ever reason) will move there and (ii) those are precisely the places that the press and public will want to scrutinize. The others will be bland and uninteresting. If the GRAMA Working Group goes to a separate channel solution, then we've punted and not dealt with the real issue.
I do not have an answer. I think that like many things in life, this is one of those areas with no clear boundaries. We will need to decide what we value more. Are we willing to risk killing important compromises and deals in hopes of ferreting out all conspiracy? If Assange is correct, are we willing to risk destroying the ability of government ot act? Or are we willing to leave some places where conspiracy can hide in order to protect the legitimate uses of secret and private interactions? This is the real question before the GRAMA WG and we must deal with it.
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March 23, 2011
Clean Sheets and APIs
David Barrett of Expensify just led a session at Kynetx Impact on APIs. His talk was listed as "When APIs go bad. APIs are powerful, but when should you consider not providing an API for your data." He followed Sam Ramji who gave an updated version of his Darwin's Finches talk. The updates are recorded in two recent articles The Building Blocks for a Successful API Strategy and With APIs It's Caveat Structor - Developer Beware. Consequently there was some good discussion and interaction from the audience.
David's main point is that building an API isn't free and for many businesses won't add significant customers or value. So any online business shouls think carefully about whether building an API is worth the effort and expense. We teased apart many of the issues and there was plenty of push back, but in the end, I think we were still stuck on David's assertion that some businesses are better off going direct (in Sam's lingo) rather than using other people's apps to take their service to the customer (the indirect approach).
As someone who love access to my data and the ability to mash it up, I wasn't satisfied with this answer, but there it is. In Leave the Services Clients to the Services and Build Something Really Interesting, I wrote about a mashup I'd like to do with Foursquare, TripIt, and Expensify (which is why David was at Impact, as an aside):
I book a flight and hotel and forward the details to TripIt. Expensify responds to the TripIt event and watches for an airline transaction and creates a report for my trip that was just scheduled. I check into Foursquare at the airport, Expensify responds to that event and automatically begins tracking all of my expenses. While I am on my trip, Expensify continues to respond to events from Foursquare. If there is a transaction that matches a checkin it adds a comment to the transaction noting who I was with at the venue (i.e., dinner with Sam, Doc). After I check back into my home airport again Expensify continues to monitor transactions for a few more hours and then generates a report for me and emails it.
David, mentioned that only 11 people were checked into Impact using Foursquare. How might that change if people knew that's all they had to do to make an entry in the expensify account? But this scenario won't work without APIs.
I think that APIs are a lot like clean sheets for some companies. Here's what I mean. Consider the following graph plotting the cost of any given business decision against the competitive advantage it brings:
Clearly if you're making a descision on what features to implement, you want to be in the lower right quadrant: low cost and high competitive advantage. Do those first. Clearly the red quadrant is the last place you'd look for features, or is it?
Think about clean sheets. If you're a hotel, clean sheets cost a lot of money and everyone has them, so there's not much competitive advantage in having them. But there's a HUGE competitive disadvantage if you don't. No one can do without clean sheets. For many online services, an API feels like clean sheets. They want to be like all the cool kids and have an API, but they find that APIs cost a lot of money and don't result in much revenue.
There are ways to move out of the red quadrant. One direction is down: reduce the cost. That's what a lot of API services comapnies like Mashery and Apigee are doing, making it easier to and cheaper to put up an API and manage it. The other direction you can go is right, make the competitive advantage bigger. Some hotels have done that with sheets by advertising their high thread count sheets. That doesn't cost that much more, but it differentiates the otherwise costly, but necessary feature of "clean sheets" into a reason people come back.
I'm not sure how we can do that same thing with APIs, but it's the real way to work on the problem. There's a business or two in helping companies get more revenue from their APIs. Consulting is the obvious business here, but the real money will go to the services that provide this capability at scale.
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March 22, 2011
GRAMA, Open Government, and Privacy
I'm been asked to serve on the working group to understand what, if any, changes need to be made to GRAMA, the Government Records Access and Management Act--Utah's version of the Freedom of Information Act. This issue has been of considerable interest to me since it came up in the final days of the 2011 legislative session.
The Utah lesiglature passed a bill, HB477, that restricted access to records by making some communications something other than government records (and thus out of the perview of GRAMA) and making others specifically protected. The bill also tries to deal with cost and privacy issues.
I am a believer in open government, but then you won't find anyone in this debate who will say "I believe in closed government." I'm a believer in eGovernment as an effective, efficient, and timely way to create more openness in government. I believe in the Sunlight Foundation's Principles of Transparent Government.
I'm also a believer in privacy and think that even in matters of public discourse, there are places where privacy serves the public interest. GRAMA already has privacy protections built in, but it's 20 years old, so I think it's fair to ask if anything needs to be retought.
And of course, that's the problem. For some nothing short of 100% transparency will do. For some, privacy is paramount. These principles are in conflict with each other and there are no perfect answers.
Some have written to me to express their dissatisfaction with HB477. I think the working group ought to ignore HB477 and start with GRAMA as it exists and ask what concerns people have and make suggestions about what should be changed. I don't have preconcieved ideas about what those changes should entail.
Most of the heat around HB477 seems to be aimed at the legislature, but we should keep in mind that GRAMA applies to the executive branch, public schools, and higher education as well (with certain restrictions). This isn't just about knowing what legislators are doing. It's about understanding the workings of our government.
As I've started to research the issue, I've created a delicious tag for HB477 that will show what I'm reading. Feel free to contact me (I'm @windley on Twitter) with ideas and concerns. I'm not interested in vitriol and personal attacks, I'm interested in ideas about how we can make government open.
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March 14, 2011
Leave the Services Clients to the Services and Build Something Really Interesting
Twitter's Ryan Sarver made news when he posted a message that asked developers to stop developing Twitter clients. There's been a lot of talk about this and certainly, if you're the developer of a Twitter client this isn't good news. Still, it seems like a natural idea to me. The providers of services like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare are likely going to be the dominant providers of clients for those services. But clients for a single service are the least interesting clients and provide pretty low value to their users.
Where the real value lies, and something the services are likely to never do as well as others, is in mashing up service offerings from multiple companies. I'm not talking about clients that let you post to multiple places at once or even ones that automatically tweet when you checkin on FourSquare. I'm thinking of things that add real value. Brad Hintze sent me this scenario this morning that links FourSquare to TripIt and Expensify:
I book a flight and hotel and forward the details to TripIt. Expensify responds to the TripIt event and watches for an airline transaction and creates a report for my trip that was just scheduled. I check into Foursquare at the airport, Expensify responds to that event and automatically begins tracking all of my expenses. While I am on my trip, Expensify continues to respond to events from Foursquare. If there is a transaction that matches a checkin it adds a comment to the transaction noting who I was with at the venue (i.e., dinner with Sam, Doc). After I check back into my home airport again Expensify continues to monitor transactions for a few more hours and then generates a report for me and emails it.
People would pay for something like this. As a developer, I'm more interested in that kind of value than in being a free client for someone else's free service. Bring it on!
If you're interested in this kind of application come to Impact next week and we'll show you what we're thinking. Use the discount code "fulling" to get $50 off.
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March 7, 2011
Come to Impact and Learn About the Future of the Web
In about two weeks on March 22 and 23, Kynetx will be hosting our annual Kynetx Impact conference. You can register for Impact here. We have a great slate of keynote presenters and a great program all about the Live Web. If you're not familiar with the Live Web, listen to Doc Searls descibe it in the following video:
The Live Web gets beyong the static architecture of the current Web (yeah, with all it's dynamicism, it's still pretty static). The Live Web promises to give users access to relevant information and services from dozens or even hundreds of data streams across the Web, on their terms. The Live Web is comprised of Apps and Services that create new value by dynamically correlating the events, data streams, and contexts that the user cares about.
At Impact you will learn about the platforms, technologies and approaches that make the Live Web possible today. Implementing the Live Web includes the mix of using new and emerging platforms like Kynetx with existing technologies and data through APIs, web browsers and mobile applications.
Keynote presenters include: Robert Scoble, Doc Searls, Jeff Lindsay, Sam Ramji, and Louis Gray. I think this is the best and most important tech conference happening this year. You're not going to want to miss this. Register now and use the discount code "windley20" to get a 20% discount.