Friday, December 20, 2013

21st Century Government - The Homestretch

I'm walking backwards, laying out a practical pathway to get to a decent vision of 21st century governance. The home stretch is all about implementing consensus to create 21st century governance. This is a consensus that doesn't currently exist but at this phase, the vision's been laid out, talked out, consensus has been forged and a critical mass of the politicians have come on board or been booted from office. Expectations have been reset and now it is time to get on with the work.

Actually implementing 21st century governance is exactly the sort of mid level work that many are claiming is disappearing and will never be seen again. Grabbing data and creating scripts to reformat for import, creating reports and even dashboards takes more patience than intelligence. It's production, and like most repetitive production does not require extremely high levels of intelligence to execute. Ordinary education, ordinary workers can accomplish the vast bulk of this job.

On the government end this is mostly accomplished by adding in requirements for openness into their normal IT development schedules and not with flashy big bang exercises that will suck up all their scarce IT dollars. After all, the only thing that they need do on their end is dump the raw data in a directory. It's such a simple task that it's going to be hard to explain why they would resist doing it. Once they do it, then it's up to the private sector to interpret the data into something that everybody can use.

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