Innovative State

by Aneesh Chopra

  During the three-week mad dash to finish, they chose the ­largest-possible data set they could find: all of the content that made up the Federal Register. One of the government’s time-­honored transparency vehicles, created in 1935 by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s signing of the Federal Register Act, the compendium had been designed “to bring order to the core documents of the Exec­utive Branch and make them broadly available to the American public.”36 First published in March 1936, the “government’s daily newspaper” included any government action that, by law, had to be disclosed to the public—everything from Presidential executive orders and proclamations to agency rules and regulations to meeting announcements. The publication was intended to encourage the public’s participation in actions that had been proposed, and fully informing it when such actions became final.

  In the decades following the Federal Register’s introduction in 1936, the federal government would expand exponentially in terms of the number of agencies, personnel, and programs—­Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid were among the notable new entitlements; and the Presidential Cabinet doubled in size from Roosevelt to Obama, partly due to the Departments of Health and Education. In light of this expansion, transparency became even more critical to the populace, to make sure everything was running as it should. But it became even tougher for people to turn to the Federal Register for that assurance, since the compendium’s size and complexity grew in accordance with that of the government. It became, over the next seven decades, a rich, enormous (more than 81,000 pages in 2010), and nearly indecipherable roundup, written by regulators for consumption only by the lawyers of the regulated.

  The corresponding website, initially developed in 1994, turned out to be even less accessible, due to its aesthetics. It was little more than a PDF version of the complex printed edition, and that PDF had serious problems. It was virtually unreadable, in part because agencies had to pay by the page to get content included, so they went to comical extents to shrink that content, often forgoing paragraph breaks. That site was the only means of access for people who weren’t inclined to pay nearly $1,000 for an annual subscription to the hard copy, or didn’t have the time to travel to a law library and sift through hundreds of pages, simply to find the one thing that impacted them. These challenges in accessing useful information, whether through the print or online mediums, contributed to well-heeled lobbyists knowing infinitely more about what was happening in Washington than the general public ever could. Certainly, the lobbyists didn’t mind, since they could command thousands-per-hour fees for the dispersal of that knowledge to billion-dollar industries. So much for helping Regular Joe from Idaho.

  When Burbach and his team first encountered what he called “the tons and tons of data” that made up the Federal Register, that data struck them as extremely meaningful: information that people could use not only to know more about how government was running, but also so they could better run their businesses without running roughshod over regulations.

  But it was impossible for the technology-savvy trio, let alone the average citizen, to understand much of it. Burbach, Carpenter, and Augustine couldn’t change that complex regulatory content—and, as neophytes to government, they wouldn’t have known how. But that inexperience, in some ways, was actually an advantage. They came to the task without preconceptions of how the data should be presented, but they brought their ­expertise—drawn from their knowledge of the consumer Internet and their mastery of web development—which allowed them to envision presenting the material in radically different and simpler ways than were previously considered.

  Their early prototypes were imperfect, as Burbach acknowledges. But because they weren’t working inside an agency or beholden to immediate presentation to the public, they could continue tinkering, driven only by the desire to give people the search for government actions most relevant to them. At the Sunlight Foundation contest at the Gov 2.0 conference in fall 2009, their web application GovPulse won second place. They kept working on the application in their spare time, and won first place in a related competition sponsored by the world-renowned Consumers Electronics Show in Las Vegas. They returned to San Francisco, but unbeknownst to them, their work was intriguing government officials on the other coast. The archivist of the United States wanted to incorporate their innovations directly on his domain in time for a seventy-fifth anniversary event. So they formed a company called Critical Juncture, and set out to meet the aggressive 90-day timeline to reconceive and relaunch the FederalRegister.gov site.

  In their efforts to democratize access, Burbach, Augustine, and Carpenter presented the material in a format with which the public was extremely familiar: one that resembled a newspaper site, divided into topical headings and sections. It also allowed users to set alerts, so they would be notified when a new government action applied to them or their particular type of small business. On July 15, 2010, the new site launched, and 11 days later, to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the act behind the Federal Register, the trio was honored at the National Archives. Later, the team and its government partners tore down more of the wall between the government and its citizenry. They did this by reinterpreting the existing legal requirement that any regulation that would appear in the Federal Register must be accompanied by a physical copy no less than one day in advance for public inspection. That provision had historically allowed those “in the know” to get a jump on important regulatory matters in advance of the general public, simply by walking into a reading room. But, why not post an electronic copy of the public inspection document for everyone to read? With that in mind, Critical Juncture built an online reading room mirroring the access rights afforded to insiders.

  And true to the spirit that moved them to tinker with the documents in the first place, the team set out to publish an application programming interface to enable the next group of innovators to build on top of their work, free of intellectual property constraint or cost. To come full circle, the Sunlight Foundation, home to the initial contest that sparked their involvement, would go on to build a new tool called Scout. This innovation not only improves search capability, it expands it beyond the Federal Register to include any relevant Congressional documents.

  “It’s cascaded from an open data side project, meant to be only a couple of weeks, into something that is affecting the regulatory sphere,” Burbach said. “We sort of fell into this, but it’s a good example of how by using open data, you can effect change.”

  Open data continues to demonstrate that it can effect change outside American boundaries as well.

  In September 2010, President Obama presented global leaders at the United Nations with a challenge: “When we gather back here next year, we should bring specific commitments to promote transparency; to fight corruption; to energize civic engagement; to leverage new technologies so that we strengthen the foundations of freedom in our own countries, while living up to the ideals that can light the world.”37

  His first international stop to further this endeavor was far away, but closest to my heart. The U.S. President and India’s Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, officially announced the launch of the Dialogue on Open Government aimed at delivering tangible benefits in both countries through the joint development of an open data web portal, with a goal to expand its reach to countries around the world. India was an appropriate ally. It had already built a robust technology industry. And, in 2005, it had enacted the Right to Information Act, setting goals related to more accountable and effective government.

  On November 7, 2010, at St. Xavier’s College in Mumbai, President Obama toured the first Expo on Democracy and Open Government. The expo featured 10 technology applications utilizing open data to empower India’s citizenry, including an innovative text message service that informs voters within the final two weeks prior to an election if any candidate in their jurisdiction had any criminal records.

  The highlight of the tour, however, was
the latest innovation championed by Sam Pitroda, who would serve as my counterpart in the Indian government as Advisor to the Prime Minister on Innovation. Together, we would cochair the U.S.-India Open Government Dialogue. Pitroda, as noted earlier, had repeatedly left behind lucrative opportunities in America to pursue his grander mission of empowering the Indian poor, especially the rural poor. First, he set out to do so through the telephone. Then, as chair of India’s National Knowledge Commission, he set out to empower them through the expansion of fiber broadband, with an emphasis on providing greater access to government data.

  Now he had the chance to show President Obama how all of that infrastructure investment could impact India. Through video conferencing, he connected the President from the bustling urban campus in Mumbai to a modest local government building in Kanpura, the first village in the country to be connected through optical fiber to rural broadband service. And not just any broadband ­service—rather, service at speeds not available in most parts of America. After the residents held festivals and dressed colorfully in anticipation of the event, some, including local politicians and a sufficient number of English speakers, got to participate in the conversation. Such visual communication, from a major city to a remote village in a country as geographically and economically diverse as India, was an impressive feat in information technology.

  Even more impressive than what the President saw, however, was what he heard. People enthusiastically shared stories about how the broadband connectivity had relieved some pressures, gaps, and difficulties in their lives. A student spoke of how, in using it for graduate education, he could stay and care for his mother rather than trekking two towns over for classes. A nurse related how the digital access to health information allowed her to target people in need of immunizations.

  Then there was the farmer who, in speaking about seeds and tools, provided the true takeaway from this endeavor. His story illustrated how this access to government information—a result of open government principles powered by technological innovations—could fundamentally improve the way a society operates. In order to borrow money for a farm in India, as anywhere, a bank requires proof of land ownership. That requires traveling, by one means or another, to a distant city center and hoping that the government official turns over the necessary information. And for generations, that has often meant returning empty-handed, and then resorting to borrowing from a local lender at egregious interest rates. Yet, under Pitroda’s vision of a country connected by fiber optic broadband, the villager could get what he needed without the middleman. Within weeks of his village’s connection, the farmer was able to access his own data in a safe, secure manner, printing out his proof and executing a bank loan.

  “These are the principles and benefits of e-governance,” Pitroda said.

  These were principles and benefits that the President clearly comprehended, as was evident in his comments to the villagers: “One of the incredible benefits of the technology we’re seeing right here is that, in many ways, India may be in a position to leapfrog some of the intermediate stages of government service delivery, avoiding some of the 20th century mechanisms for delivering services and going straight to the 21st.”38

  Pitroda was ecstatic about the global attention the interaction received and hopeful that the spotlight would inspire the people of India to continue their efforts. More than anything, he was amazed at the President’s grasp of what Indian leaders were trying to accomplish, especially as Pitroda spoke of the grand vision, to connect 250,000 rural village centers with government information in the same manner. “Most political leaders, in a short period like that, will not get it,” Pitroda said. “He immediately got it; he understood that we are trying to democratize information to empower people, and it is going to result in a better democracy. That’s how we are going to be different from China or anybody else.”

  In Pitroda’s view, the fourth phase of empowerment—after telecom, knowledge, and broadband connectivity—is innovation. In that spirit, White House CIO Vivek Kundra and I returned to India in March 2011 to formalize a simple but transformative first step not only toward the implementation of the ideals of the U.S.-India Open Government partnership, but also toward the expansion of the effects of that collaboration beyond our two countries. We would do this through open sourcing of the Data.gov platform, making the platform freely available all over the world, and we would achieve that through the formation of a joint software development team of a dozen developers drawn equally from India and the United States. The developers would work in a modern manner—using Skype in lieu of face-to-face meetings; and GitHub, the leading online code repository, to coauthor and test the software program. That resulted in a beta release about a year later, a free resource available to every government in the world.

  Pitroda’s preference was to introduce the platform where the need was greatest, in an underdeveloped nation in Africa. He had met the President of Rwanda while giving a speech on higher education at the State Department and through continued joint efforts between India and the United States. Work to pilot the service is under way.

  As we continued to work together directly, independent efforts involving other countries were ongoing and expanding, much of it a result of American leadership—dating back to the President’s September 2010 challenge at the sidelines of the United Nations. By the one-year mark, nearly 40 countries had made explicit commitments to join the newly announced Open Government Partnership, and seven countries had published their specific action plans, made in consultation with their citizens. As of November 2012, 58 countries had made concrete commitments, developed in consultation with their people and with support from a growing NGO community investing in the expansion of capacity to achieve the bold goals.

  There’s clearly been a lot of action in open data, over just the past few years. If the journey was judged by the increase in open data sets publicly available, the graph would be shaped like a hockey stick, with the blade pointing left.

  So, how do we score its success?

  One could score it by the increasing number of data sets that have been made available. On its first day of operations in May 2009, the Data.gov platform hosted 47 data sets. By November 2012, it would host nearly 400,000. One could score it by usage figures—for instance, in the first 24 hours after HHS posted raw hospital list price data, it was downloaded 100,000 times.39 One could try to count up the number of localities to which the movement has scaled, with the federal effort inspiring numerous state and local versions, in major metropolises such as San Francisco, California, and even tiny towns such as Manor, Texas.40

  But, in actuality, the power of the movement is even harder to quantify, because what is most encouraging is the increasing share of America’s brainpower that is focused on solving our collective problems, with input from those who had never intended to work on a government project.

  Open innovation allows them to contribute, even if it is merely a means to another personal end. Mike Krieger, a Brazilian immigrant, was working for a startup and considering others when he began tinkering with open government data as a weekend distraction. He used San Francisco’s crime information to create the iPhone app CrimeDesk, steering residents away from the most dangerous places to park, walk, or bike. While the public received that bene­fit, Krieger was getting the valuable technical experience he sought, and which would come in handy when he reconnected with former Stanford classmate Kevin Systrom on another potential project: “I wasn’t starting from zero. I had already built an app.” Together they would build the photo-sharing behemoth Instagram, which quickly attracted roughly 100 million active monthly users and Facebook’s attention, with the latter acquiring it for what was heralded as $1 billion, though it turned out to be closer to $715 million.41

  As America attempts to get and stay ahead in a variety of industries, it is benefiting from the full force of this data liberation movement in all sorts of expected an
d unexpected ways. Data, deployed through the latest technology, represents one of what Sam Pitroda calls “the new tools of today to solve the problems of tomorrow.” They are multifunctional tools, a Swiss Army knife of sorts, with functionality in an assortment of sectors, scenarios, and situations. It is becoming a virtuous cycle: as hundreds of data sets are made available, more challenges are conceived, more online communities and entrepreneurial companies create tools for consumers, and more Datapaloozas, beyond the original that spotlighted health, sprout up to showcase the innovations and inspire others to innovate.

  The Energy Data Initiative and its related challenges have targeted all areas of the energy spectrum, from fuel economy to environmental protection to consumption awareness. The Safety Data Initiative and its related challenges have focused on everything from emergency response to consumer product recalls to worker safety to drunk driving education to the performance of the body armor worn by law enforcement. The Education Data Initiative is aimed at students from preschool through college, and enables developers to empower those students, giving them better access to test scores, class grades, even federal student loan information.

  On May 9, 2013, President Obama kicked off a Middle Class Jobs & Opportunity Tour emphasizing the need for middle-class job creation, the need for Americans to develop the skills to fill those jobs, and the need for American employers to provide hard workers with a fair opportunity and a decent wage. To accompany this speech, he signed an executive order for an Open Data Policy called Managing Information as an Asset.42 It required that newly released government data be made freely available in open machine-readable formats while appropriately safeguarding privacy, confidentiality, and security. By tying these elements together—open government and jobs—he made the open data movement about more than the original purpose of transparency. It was, and is, about that transparency. But it is also about economics. It is about unleashing technology entrepreneurs to create products and services that consumers need and use, so the resulting economic activity can foster job creation.