The impact of sharing data: Beth Noveck at the Long Now
Written by Noah Flower on Friday, March 5th, 2010
Filed under Synthesis
If you share it, will they come? If you listen, will you learn? And if you ask, will help arrive? A resounding “yes” was the answer delivered by Beth Noveck last Thursday at her Long Now Foundation lecture, Transparent Government and the Long Now of Democracy (MP3 audio). She shared a wealth of examples illustrating the government’s new progress towards data-sharing, public input, and crowdsourced effort—many of which were equally inspiring for philanthropy. Noveck is the head of Obama’s Open Government Initiative where (she jokes) she has the dubious honor of being assigned to implement her very own theory of “collaborative democracy” from her 2009 book, Wiki Government. Stewart Brand’s snappy summary her talk is on the Long Now site, so I’ll share the three main points that I felt were relevant for the social sector.
1. Sharing data creates new opportunities for impact. You just never know who will find your data interesting and what use they can find for it. Thanks to the USDA making its datasets public, there are now new games in development for reducing childhood obesity. Thanks to the Federal Register being put online, there are now two websites that can guide the public through the shifting maze of federal regulations in an intuitive and accessible way. The aggregated library of raw government data now available at data.gov has had over 64 million hits and countless developers have used that data for web-based projects. Imagine the possibilities if foundations considered themselves libraries of information and analysis on the public problems they try to solve.
2. Even messy public input can become quality ideas. One questioner asked Noveck if she had figured out how to set up the process of public input so that it wasn’t just the “angries and the crazies” who showed up—a common challenge whenever the stakes are high. She shared her reflections on the early public input session that the Open Government Initiative held in order to gather suggestions for how the government could become more transparent. It was a process that some bloggers derided as ineffective since the bulk of the early posts were dominated by demands for Obama’s birth certificate, demands for information about UFOs, and various other questions representing extreme points of view. She noted that while that was a challenge at first, other users of the site were very effective at flagging those posts as “off-topic,” shunting them to the side and clearing the board for productive debate. The result: detailed and thoughtful proposals that a large group composed together using MixedInk, a wiki-like tool for collaborative composition that I blogged about at the time. The effort has now matured into the OpenGov Tracker, an IdeaScale-powered board where (as of today) 1,399 ideas have received 14,576 votes and 2,427 comments that address the prospects of transparency and participation at every federal agency. Foundations might have similar worries about what could happen if they asked the public for input on their choices, but today’s tools are increasingly effective at allowing online crowds to truly be wise.
3. Build your organization around the power of outside experts. Noveck is the inventor of a new system for running the patent office called Peer to Patent which taps the expertise of scientists, engineers, and other experts in relevant fields to help patent officers make the detailed assessments required to evaluate the merit of a given patent claim. The task is not entirely unlike that of evaluating grant proposals: while the decisionmaking power rightly lies in the hands of the institution, the expertise to wield it well is distributed throughout the relevant field, and today’s technology makes it easier than ever to tap this distributed knowledge at will. Imagine if the typical foundation model was to specialize not in certain topics but in the cultivation of trusted expert networks with the right mix of knowledge—a resource that would be equally useful for other funders.
