Myplanet Digital: Better organizations through technology.

We’re in the process of cooking up a research report we’ve tentatively called “The State of The Digital Municipality 2010”. I’ve been rather busy sending out surveys, preparing complicated charts and graphs, and doing phone interviews. I’m not ready to unveil the results just yet, but seeing some of the initial feedback made me realize something:

We’ve got some serious work to do.

First, a quick refresher on Open Government. The idea of Open Government is that governments should be platform providers, rather than application providers. In other words, government agencies should provide citizens with the data and tools they need to solve problems, rather than try to solve all of those problems themselves. 

For example, local government agencies might offer up transportation schedules and routes in an open format so that users can mash that data up in innovative ways. Google Transit, through local datasets, now allows you to plan your route using public transportation in over 446 cities around the world (despite holdouts from the usual suspects like Toronto’s TTC). It even tells you when to catch the next bus/train and syncs up connecting routes.

The idea that public data should be available in a well-structured format is really starting to catch on in large cities. Toronto now offers up a wide range of public data, as does Vancouver. It has even caught on as a way to tackle natural disasters like the Haiti earthquake, as Tim Berners-Lee explains in this fabulous TED talk:

But let’s return to the subject of our research. A lot can be said about the successes (and many failures) of Canada’s major cities, but our focus was on municipalities with populations of 400,000 residents and under. Smaller municipalities are a group that don’t seem to get mentioned much when we discuss Open Government, but need to be included nonetheless if we are going to drag every corner of this country into the future. Fundamentally, it’s an issue of equality – you shouldn’t need to live in a large city to benefit from the levelling effects of freely available public data.

Our initial thoughts around Open Government were “Well, we imagine smaller municipalities know all about it but think it’s too expensive or don’t have the local expertise to implement it right now.”

But take a look at this chart. This is from our initial survey of Town Clerks and IT Managers at municipalities with <400k residents across Ontario:

From: The State of The Digital Municipality 2010, Dustin Walper, Myplanet.

Yikes. My initial reaction to this result was “Well, we must have screwed up the survey somehow...”, but out of the 18 statements we evaluated in this category these were the only two with such massively skewed results.

The implication here is clear: as technologists, we’ve spent so much time babbling about XML and SOAP that we’ve neglected to get out there and educate local policy-makers about the benefits and “how-to’s” of Open Government. It’s telling that municipal staff, the folks responsible for actually making policy happen, collectively don’t really know what this “Open Government” stuff is all about.

We’re in the process of repeating this survey with elected officials (mayors and councillors) across Ontario, and initial results seem to indicate greater awareness – if not discussion – around the topic. But it’s time we stop thinking about Canada (and indeed the world) as a collection of large cities and start working on inexpensive methods for bringing Open Government to everyone.