Thursday, December 6, 2007

Should Government "Crowdsource" a Project? Could a large number of citizens help with a government project? Crowdsourcing is a technique of taking a project and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call. It can also be an easy way to get free user feedback and satisfy consumers' demands. It's an approach used in a variety of fields, including software development and PC manufacturing. More about crowdsourcing in the private sector at Should your company 'crowdsource' its next project?[Computerworld Breaking News] As a wiki video said "All of us are smarter than one of us." Compare with Hack, Mash & Peer: Crowdsourcing Government Transparency by Jerry Brito, Geo. Mason Univ, October 2007 (paper download) Abstract: In order to hold government accountable for its actions, citizens must know what those actions are. To that end, they must insist that government act openly and transparently to the greatest extent possible. In the Twenty-First Century, this entails making its data available online and easy to access. If government data is made available online in useful and flexible formats, citizens will be able to utilize modern Internet tools to shed light on government activities. Such tools include mashups, which highlight hidden connections between different data sets, and crowdsourcing, which makes light work of sifting through mountains of data by focusing thousands of eyes on a particular set of data. Today, however, the state of government's online offerings is very sad indeed. Some nominally publicly available information is not online at all, and the data that is online is often not in useful formats. Government should be encouraged to release public information online in a structured, open, and searchable manner. To the extent that government does not modernize, however, we should hope that private third parties build unofficial databases and make these available in a useful form to the public.  [emphasis mine.] 6:31:28 PM    comment [] California has a new State CIO California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger today announced the appointment of Teresa (Teri) M. Takai as the state chief information officer. Takai served as director of the Michigan Department of Information Technology (MDIT) since 2003, and also serves as the state's chief information officer. In this position, she has restructured and consolidated Michigan's resources by merging the state's information technology into one centralized department to service 19 agencies and over 1,700 employees. Additionally, during her tenure at the MDIT, Takai led the state to being ranked number one four years in a row in digital government by the Center for Digital Government. (More later) 6:16:52 PM    comment []

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