Technology and 21st Century Government
Tim O’Reilly
O’Reilly Media
@timoreilly
World Government Summit on Open Source
October 11, 2012
@codeforamerica
Thursday, October 11, 12
I’m the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, a company that focuses on changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators. We
have been deeply involved in open source software and the development of the internet. I spend a lot of my time evangelizing big ideas with
impact and urging people to work on stuff that matters.
I’m here to talk about lessons from the technology industry that can be applied to 21st Century government. We’re applying these lessons at
Code for America, a non-profit that works with cities to help make government work better for everyone.

The paradox of government
It’s too big, and it costs too much
yet...
There are problems that the private sector alone can’t
solve
Thursday, October 11, 12
Let’s start with what you might call the paradox of government. It’s too big...

“What if we felt about
government the way we feel
about our iPhones?”
- Jennifer Pahlka,
Thursday, October 11, 12
Jennifer Pahlka, the founder and executive director of Code for America, has one simple answer to this paradox. “What if...?”
I suspect that, like Apple customers, we’d be happy to pay our taxes, because we love the product we’re getting.

“I believe that interfaces to government
can be simple, beautiful, and easy to
use.”
- Scott Silverman
2011 Code for America Fellow
Thursday, October 11, 12
Code for America runs a service year program that brings talented web developers and designers to work with cities
for a year. Last year, fellow Scott Silverman, who had previously worked at Apple, explained why he had applied to the program.
He said...

Lesson 1:
Get people excited about government!
Reinvent the “citizen experience”
Thursday, October 11, 12
So lesson 1 is from Apple, by way of Code for America:
What if government set out, like Code for America does, to reinvent the citizen experience, to make interfaces
to government be simple, beautiful, and easy to use? What if we made government so wonderful that people were happy
to pay their taxes?

Thursday, October 11, 12
Here’s an example from Code for America’s work in Boston last year. There was a bit of a PR crisis as the Boston Globe had just run an article criticizing how hard
it was for families to choose a school for their children. The current “interface” was a 28-page brochure in tiny type that explained all about the rules but ended up
leaving people still wondering what schools their children were eligible to attend.

Thursday, October 11, 12
Fortunately, there was a Code for America team on hand. They quickly whipped up an application that helped to solve the problem. Simply type in your address
and whether you already have other children in a particular school

Thursday, October 11, 12
and get back a map showing what schools your children are eligible for, which ones are in your “walk zone” and so on.

Thursday, October 11, 12
and an interface for finding out more about the school. Nothing special in the consumer internet, but a revolution in government software. A city of Boston official
said that this application run through normal channels would have taken two years and cost $2 million. It took the Code for America team about 10 weeks, part
time. This has a huge effect in raising the bar on what’s possible.

Thursday, October 11, 12
Or consider another Code for America project, BlightStatus, developed for the City of New Orleans. The goal of this project was to unite disparate databases
showing information about the status of blighted properties in New Orleans into a single interface, available both to government officials and to citizens. No one
had a unified view of this data. Now simply type in an address

Thursday, October 11, 12
and you get up to date status information

Thursday, October 11, 12
that you can also see on a map. When this interface was shown at a community group meeting, people were coming up to give the developer a hug. How often
do developers of government software get greeted with hugs?

Lesson 2:
Use Data to Drive Decisions
Thursday, October 11, 12
There’s a second important lesson of the consumer internet. Use data to make better decisions. Companies like Google crunch
enormous amounts
of data to figure out what results to show, and what advertisements to pair with those results. Their success at helping people
get right to the answers they need has changed our world.
But under the skin, it’s important to realize that Google is a great model for a 21st century regulatory system.
I know that “regulation” has become a dirty word in Washington, and that
everyone likes to talk about making markets work better without explaining how to do that.
Well, I’m not going to back down. One of the things that makes markets
work better is the right kind of regulation. Your car’s carburetor or fuel injection system is a regulatory system. The autopilot
of an airplane is a regulatory system, and Google’s system for surfacing the best content and not showing you spam is a
regulatory system, using algorithms (i.e. rules) and feedback loops to keep on course.

Thursday, October 11, 12
A great example of a data driven site built by government is the new look of the UK government site. Mike Bracken and his team
there have re-engineered the official website, to get away from one based on government departments trumpeting information
about themselves to instead base one on what people are really looking for. They mined the search logs and put together a site
that is focused on citizens and their questions.

Thursday, October 11, 12
These are the design principles that Bracken and his team articulated. Anyone building for government should study these
principles.

Thursday, October 11, 12
Code for America has applied these same principles to a redesign of the Honolulu web site. The original site is like a lot of
other government websites - it talks about the city and what it has to offer. But it doesn’t necessarily start with what citizens
want to know.

Thursday, October 11, 12
Here’s what Code for America built with the city of Honolulu.

18
Thursday, October 11, 12
What the Code for America team working with the City of Honolulu did seems obvious to those of us in Silicon Valley: they mined
the visitor
logs of the existing site and the city’s call center to find out what people are really looking for.

The Lean Startup
The goal of a Lean Startup is to move through the
build-measure-learn feedback loop as quickly as
possible.
Thursday, October 11, 12
This whole model of using data to decide what works is at the heart of one of the most powerful methodologies to hit Silicon
Valley. The Lean Startup model isn’t about running cheap startups, it’s about figuring out “the minimal viable product” that you
can build that will give you validated learning about the market. You measure and test, and use that data to refine your ideas,
and improve your offering incrementally to perfect it as quickly and cheaply as possible, with as little wasted cost and effort.

Key Lean Startup Principles
§ Minimum Viable Product
§ Continuous Deployment
§ A/B Testing
§ Actionable Metrics (vs Vanity Metrics)
§ Pivot
Thursday, October 11, 12
Here are some of the key lean startup principles. For more info, http://leanstartup.com

Lesson 3:
Create an architecture of participation
Thursday, October 11, 12
Lesson 3 from technology is to create what I call “an architecture of participation.”
What’s so wonderful about the Web is that, like “the market”, it doesn’t prescribe what people should do. It creates a space
in which people can create and participate, adds some regulatory mechanisms to keep out bad actors like spammers, then
lets the best stuff float to the stop.

Thursday, October 11, 12
Now, when I use the word “participation”, you might be tempted to think of government participating in social media, like
Facebook

Thursday, October 11, 12
or Twitter

Thursday, October 11, 12
Or fantastic sites like the White House’s We the People site (the code for which has been released as open source.)
But great as these things are, participation has to mean more than better mechanisms for people to have their voices heard.

Vending Machine Government
Vending Machine Gov concept from Donald Kettl:
The Next Government of the United States
Thursday, October 11, 12
The notion that we just need better ways to make our voices heard is rooted in a notion I call “Vending Machine Government”
We put in taxes and get out services, and when we don’t like what we get
The term was introduced by Donald Kettl in his book _The Next Government of the United States_. He meant it in a different
way than I do - that one of the roles of government is precisely to create predictable services, like a vending machine.

We Need to Do More Than Shake the Vending Machine!
http://image06.webshots.com/6/2/57/50/190125750NgQXwu_ph.jpg
Thursday, October 11, 12
we shake the vending machine.
The use of social media by government is just giving us another way to shake the vending machine. It doesn’t fundamentally
transform our relationship to government.

“Are we just going to be a crowd
of voices, or are we going to be
a crowd of hands?”
- Jennifer Pahlka,
Code for America
Thursday, October 11, 12
Jen Pahlka said this well. In her TED talk, she asked, “Are we...

28
Thursday, October 11, 12
And
that’s
also
what
Code
for
America
took
into
account
when
designing
Honolulu
Answers.
Rather
than
having
the
city
staff,
or
the
Code
for
America
fellows,
write
the
answers,
they
convened
a
gathering
of
ciBzens
to
suggest
new
quesBons
and
write
the
answers
in
plain
English.
Both
ciBzens
and
government
staffers
worked
together
at
this
weekend
“writeathon”

Thursday, October 11, 12
That’s how you got from this - a page that gives all kinds of irrelevant information about driver’s licenses -

Thursday, October 11, 12
To this: a plain language version of what citizens really want to know.

“We don’t want government to
work like a Silicon Valley startup,
we want it to work like the
internet itself.”
- Jennifer Pahlka,
Code for America
Thursday, October 11, 12
Jen Pahlka said something else very important in her TED talk. She said “We don’t want...”
When government works like the internet, it lays down standards and infrastructure that the market can build on to deliver
new value for society. Government is not the provider of last resort, it should be the framer of rules and the builder of
foundations.

Lesson 4
Government should be a platform
Thursday, October 11, 12
Another way of saying this is that government is a platform.
The Internet is a good example of government acting to create something that the private sector can then build on.
But it’s not the only one. Government is in a unique position to do things that are hard, and big, that no one else can do,
and that enable the private sector. National highways, space travel, satellites, are good examples.

GPS: A 21st century platform launched in 1973
Thursday, October 11, 12
Consider Global positioning satellites. A huge project with uncertain return, started in 1973 and now showing enormous fruit in
the 21st century, with huge value add from the commercial sector. Everything from maps and directions on your phone to
future self-driving cars spring from this platform investment, and the key policy decision to open the data and
make it available for commercial use. We’re seeing similar platform policy decisions from the Obama administration
for healthcare and financial data today.

“The legitimate object of government
is to do for the people what needs to
be done, but which they cannot, by
individual effort, do at all, or do so
well, for themselves.”
-Abraham Lincoln, July 1, 1854
Thursday, October 11, 12
My notion of government as a platform is rooted in the notion that government is, at bottom,
a mechanism for collective action, a means for doing things that are best done together. So
I was delighted recently to discover that Abraham Lincoln had said much the same thing 150 years ago. But this notion
also suggests a level of restraint. The best government programs enable the private sector; they don’t compete with it.
I hope that government follows this lead, that it enables, and to use Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler’s notion, *nudges* the
market
in the right direction to produce socially beneficial outcomes, but that it does so with a light hand. As the Chinese philosopher
Lao Tzu said three thousand years ago, “When the best leader leads, the people say ‘We did it ourselves.’”
****
Below, just for reference:
Lincoln elsewhere pointed out: “The desirable things which the individuals of a people cannot do or cannot well do for
themselves fall into two classes: those which have relation to wrongs and those which have not. Each of these branch off into an
infinite variety of subdivisions. The first that in relation to wrongs embraces all crimes, misdemeanors, and non performance of
contracts. The other embraces all which in its nature and without wrong requires combined action as public roads and highways
public schools charities pauperism orphanage estates of the deceased and the machinery of government itself.”

Government as a platform means an end to the
design of only complete, closed “applications.”
Instead the government should provide
fundamental services on which we, the people,
(also known as “the market”) build applications.
Thursday, October 11, 12

What happens when you throw open the doors to partners
More than 50,000 iPhone
applications in less than a year!
Now at 688,000
Thursday, October 11, 12
Apple showed us the power of this kind of transformation when they turned the smartphone into a platform with the
introduction of the iPhone app store.

The old way: Preferred application partners
§ A few apps developed in advance by the phone
company
Thursday, October 11, 12
The old model looked a lot like government procurement. Get some vendors in a backroom, decide what to offer, and you’re
done. But this model clearly doesn’t produce the same kind of unexpected results and cornucopia of value creation offered by an
open platform.
Apple’s model should be comforting to government, since it’s not as wide open as the internet, but still open enough to fire up
the platform dynamics of unexpected innovation.

So why do governments still make deals like these?
§ No bid contracts
§ Preferred providers
§ Earmarks
§ Sole source
licensing of
government data to
single-source
providers
Thursday, October 11, 12
With the lessons of the iPhone and other platforms, why do governments still do single-source procurements and deals where
government data is licensed to a single player. This problem from 2009, in which San Francisco licensed its transit data to one
provider, who then tried to shut out other transit apps, was resolved in favor of open systems, but the problem persists in many
other areas of government.

Open311 - the Pulse of the City
Thursday, October 11, 12
Data is the platform for the 21st century, and government acting as a platform provider means opening up data services that
feed third party applications, just like Apple opened up the iPhone to third parties to create a vibrant new ecosystem.
For example, a data standard called Open311 allows web applications to seamlessly interact with 311 systems across the
nation.
(311 is the number you call to report problems like potholes or graffiti. It’s like 911 but for non-emergencies.)
Having a data standard allows outside organizations like SeeClickFix and Code for America to build third party applications
that provide new services both to cities and to citizens. Here’s CfA’s 311 Labs application, The Daily Brief, which shows the
pulse of the city according to 311.

Thursday, October 11, 12
When we look at the projects being done by the White House Innovation Fellows, they are all about building a 21st century data
platform. MyGov is about reinventing the web paradigm from one centered on government to one centered on citizens (more on
that later), the Open Data effort is about identifying key data and partners who can use it. The Blue Button initiative is about
downloadable health records. And RFP-EZ is about simplifying government contracting so more small businesses and
entrepreneurs can participate in the ecosystem.

Thursday, October 11, 12
The Blue Button initiative started at the VA, but has now spread to many other health institutions. More than one million people
have now downloaded their health records.
And this means that they can be the basis for applications that the government didn’t develop or provide.

Thursday, October 11, 12
There’s now a similar “Green Button” initiative for utilities, for consumers to download their energy data, and a Gold button for
financial data, and another for school records.

Open data is a great start,
but it’s only part of the story
Thursday, October 11, 12
My purpose in this talk is to show how open source, platforms, and open government go hand in hand, and how lessons from
the software world can help us remake government for the 21st century.

Why open source matters
Thursday, October 11, 12
In particular, I now want to focus on why open source matters.

It’s one of the most powerful models
for an architecture of participation
Thursday, October 11, 12

“I couldn’t have written a new kernel
for Windows even if I had access to the
source code. The architecture just
didn’t support it.”
-Linus Torvalds
Thursday, October 11, 12
I first focused on this idea fifteen years or so ago in a conversation with Linus Torvalds. He observed...
That term “architecture” stuck in my head, and I realized how true it was of all the most successful open source projects - that it
was far more than a matter of just releasing source code. It was designing systems in such a way that someone could bite off a
manageable chunk and modify, replace, or extend it.

“The book is perhaps most
valuable for its exposition of the
Unix philosophy of small
cooperating tools with
standardized inputs and outputs,
a philosophy that also shaped the
end-to-end philosophy of the
Internet. It is this philosophy, and
the architecture based on it, that
has allowed open source projects
to be assembled into larger
systems such as Linux, without
explicit coordination between
developers.”
Thursday, October 11, 12
I thought about my own experience with Unix, the system that Linux emulated. It wasn’t itself open source by today’s standards
of licensing, but it had an architecture that allowed it to be developed collaboratively by a community of loosely connected
developers. It was the architecture that mattered. In writing an entry for this classic book on Wikipedia, I wrote...

The internet would not exist
without open source software
Thursday, October 11, 12
And that’s not just because the initial implementations of TCP/IP and so forth were open source. It’s not just because the
services we all take for granted are built on top of an open source foundation. It’s because the very architecture of the internet
and the www are shaped by open source.

Thursday, October 11, 12
Tim Berners-Lee put the web into the public domain, and that was a profound act of open source software. But the software
that Tim wrote is long gone, subsumed by other software that built on the architecture, communication protocols, and markup
language that he designed. An even deeper contribution was the fundamental architecture of the web, which allowed anyone to
put up a site without permission from anyone - all they had to do was speak the same language and communication protocol.

Thursday, October 11, 12
By 2008, the web had reached ONE TRILLION unique URLs. I don’t know how big it’s grown since then, but everything that grew
from the Web of 1990 was implicit in the participatory design that Tim B-L first came up with. Architecture matters.

Thursday, October 11, 12
You also see this architectural element in the success of the Apache web server. I remember back in the mid 90s, when there
was this media hysteria that Apache wasn’t keeping up, because it wasn’t adding features as fast as Netscape’s web server or
Microsoft IIS. The folks at Apache were clear: We’re an HTTP server. We have an extension layer (read “we are a platform”) that
allows other people to add new features. Fifteen years later, Apache is still the dominant web server, and Netscape and IIS are
footnotes in history.

Thursday, October 11, 12
And of course this same architectural design is also true of Drupal, the software that powers whitehouse.gov, the department of
energy, and many other government sites at the federal, state, and local level. Drupal has an architecture that allows anyone to
add new modules that extend its functionality. That’s why Drupal has become such a powerful platform for web development.
Like Apple with its App Store, Drupal created a platform, and the market went to work adding new features.

Thursday, October 11, 12
In his TEDGlobal talk, Clay Shirky discussed this notion of how the architecture of open source and the internet have implications
for government. This is a really important talk, and I urge all of you to watch it.

“When you adopt a tool, you also adopt the
management philosophy embedded in that tool”
Thursday, October 11, 12
Clay talked about version control, and the fact that Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, eventually wrote Git, a version control
tool that supports the fundamental architecture of open source software. It isn’t just the architecture of the systems
themselves that matters, but the architecture of the tools that we use to manage and develop them.

Source Code Access with Centralized Control
Thursday, October 11, 12
Clay argues that previous source code control systems reflect a kind of “feudal” architecture, with centralized control.

The social graph of contributors to the Ruby language
Thursday, October 11, 12
By contrast, Git allows for everyone to have access to all the code all the time. This supports true, decentralized, internet-style
social coding. Government needs to figure out how to enable this same kind of decentralized contribution and innovation.

Thursday, October 11, 12
And that’s how Linus has managed to create the world’s largest collaborative software project, the Linux kernel, with more than
8000 developers

Thursday, October 11, 12
producing 15 million lines of code.

That magic happens for simple projects as well
Thursday, October 11, 12
Now I want to return to the notion of how open source helps that magic happen, and highlight its importance for simple
projects as well. I want to tell the story of how a single Code for America application has spread.

A Boston fire hydrant in winter
Thursday, October 11, 12
When the first Code for America fellows showed up in Boston in February of 2011, they ended up in the middle of what was
called “snowpocalypse” - a massive blizzard. One of the fellows, Erik Michaels-Ober, saw a fire hydrant buried in snow, and
heard tales of how this was a problem for the fire department. When responding to a fire, they first have to find and dig out the
fire hydrant.

Thursday, October 11, 12
Erik’s solution was to come up with an application that lets citizens “adopt” a fire hydrant, agreeing to dig it out after a blizzard.
This was a simple app that he wrote in a weekend. It has game dynamics to encourage people to participate, but basically, it
was a matter of finding the data for the location of the fire hydrants, putting it on a map, and letting people sign up for the fire
hydrant near them.

Thursday, October 11, 12
Erik put his code on Github, a site that lets people see each other’s Git repositories, take their code, and repurpose it.

Thursday, October 11, 12
All the Code for America projects are open source, and anyone can take the code and stand it up in a new city or modify it for
other purposes. It could even be stood up as a single cloud app that supports multiple cities, though no one has done that yet.

Community is a large part of the magic
A volunteer developer from Lexington KY deploys
Adopt A Hydrant for Syracuse NY, Providence, RI, and
Banff, Alberta... “because that’s where the snow is”
Thursday, October 11, 12
But volunteers from the Code for America Brigade (think volunteer fire brigade, but for coders and other civic volunteers) have
already stood the app up in other cities, liberating the necessary data and adapting the app. One volunteer developer from
Lexington...

Adopt A Siren
Thursday, October 11, 12
But the most interesting re-use case came from Honolulu, a place with no snow! Forest Frizzel, the deputy IT director of
Honolulu, was browsing the CfA github repository, and thought how the app could be adapted to track Hawaii’s Tsunami Sirens.
They test them every week, and need citizens to report whether or not they heard the siren. (Homeless people steal the
batteries, and there are other maintenance problems.)

Text
Thursday, October 11, 12
So there you have it. Soon after, Honolulu had Adopt A Siren. Other implementations include Adopt a Storm Drain and Adopt a
Sidewalk. This app can be used for citizen engagement around maintenance of any public asset.

§ Open source encourages re-use
§ Simple solutions to simple problems
§ Serendipity
Thursday, October 11, 12
Larry Wall, the creator of the Perl programming language, once said that Perl was designed to “make easy things easy and hard
things possible.” You all know how government software and procurement processes sometimes seem to make easy things
hard, and hard things impossible. But these examples show how open source software can indeed make easy things easy, and
hard things possible. I want that to be the thing you take away from this talk.

The hidden economic benefit of open source
Thursday, October 11, 12
Now I want to switch tracks a bit, and talk about the hidden economic benefit of open source software.
In particular I want to remind you that open source isn’t a fringe thing. It’s totally mainstream, and anyone who isn’t using it is
behind the curve. But I’m going to show how pervasive it is by talking about laundry.

Open Source and the Clothesline Paradox
Thursday, October 11, 12

There are all kinds of unexpected beneficiaries
“I built my business on open source software, and
I want to give something back.”
- Hari Ravichandran
Endurance International Group
Thursday, October 11, 12
I started thinking about this recently when I met with Hari Ravichandran of Endurance International Group. EIG owns Bluehost
and a number of other web hosting companies. As we talked I was reminded that, at bottom, web hosting and domain name
registration services are really subscription business models for free software - the DNS, web server, email, and so on. Hari said
to me

The Clothesline Paradox
If you put your clothes in
the dryer, the energy you
use is measured and
counted, but if you hang
them on the clothesline to
be dried by the sun, the
energy saved disappears
from our accounting!
Thursday, October 11, 12
In the course of our conversation, I remembered this great piece about alternative energy that I read back in 1975 in
The CoEvolution Quarterly, Stewart Brand’s successor to The Whole Earth Catalog. It’s called The Clothesline Paradox,
and it made the point that ... It struck me that open source is a lot like sunshine. It disappears from our economic
accounting.

WordPress
Thursday, October 11, 12
We look at the financial success of explicit open source companies like Red Hat or MySQL or Acquia, and while we’re proud of
it, it’s relatively small relative to the success of proprietary companies.

Thursday, October 11, 12
It’s a bit like the energy pie charts that Steve Baer talks about in The Clothesline Paradox, where solar
energy shows up as this tiny slice, even though it’s really the wellspring of absolutely everything else
in the energy pie!

Thursday, October 11, 12
Because of course the companies whose logos appear on this slide (and many more) were built on a foundation of
open source software, and wouldn’t exist without the generosity of those who created the internet and the world wide web,
Linux, and the cornucopia of open source tools and languages that made the fertile soup from which today’s tech innovation
sprang.
According to McKinsey, the internet is now responsible for more than 3% of GDP. That’s downstream value created
(but not captured) by open source communities.

ISP Services - a $79 Billion
market in the US alone
Web hosting and domain
name registration - a $5
Billion market
Thursday, October 11, 12
Talking with Hari, I realized that we also need to give credit to open source for the internet service provider market.
What does an ISP provide but subscription access to open source software, and to the vast, generative creativity of the
sharing economy of social media and the web? Sure, they provide infrastructure, but without that software and without that
free content, no one would give a rats ass about using their infrastructure.

Having a web site
increases the
productivity of small
businesses by 10%
Thursday, October 11, 12
But perhaps the most interesting thing that Hari pointed me to was a McKinsey report on the net’s overall impact on
growth, jobs, and prosperity. One of the things that caught our attention was the assertion that having a web site
increases the productivity of small businesses by 10%.

So that’s where the value gets captured - by everyone!
Thursday, October 11, 12
So that’s where the economic value created by open source ultimately gets captured: by people who may not even know
what open source is, but benefit from it nonetheless.

We worked with EIG’s
Bluehost unit on a
study to show the
benefits of open
source software in the
SMB market
http://oreilly.com/opensource/radarreports/economic-impact-of-open-source.csp
Thursday, October 11, 12
http://oreilly.com/opensource/radarreports/economic-impact-of-open-source.csp

Of the 700,000 SMBs in the Bluehost data...
Thursday, October 11, 12
More than 70% of the 1 million bluehost customers were SMBs. Applying the survey data they provided to the
raw data set, we made this extrapolation of their revenues. It’s a total of $124 billion. Given that we estimate that
Bluehost represents 10-12% of`the hosting market, that means we’re talking about a $1.3 trillion market.
It’s hard to quantify how much of this value to attribute to open source and the web, but it’s meaningful. McKinsey said 10%.

Open source as a platform enabled the internet as
platform
Open source in government can enable government
as a platform
Thursday, October 11, 12
In conclusion, I simply want to say that open source as platform enabled the internet as platform. Open source in government
can enable government as a platform, and government as a platform can unleash enormous benefits to our society and our
economy. Let’s make it so!