1. Government as a Platform
Tim O’Reilly
@timoreilly
Puerto Rico Tech Summit
May 13, 2015
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2008: Change We Can Believe In
Technology helped President Obama get
elected.
Could technology also help the nation do
a better job of actually helping deliver
services to its residents?
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Would it make a
difference if we could
bring together
government innovators
and tech innovators to
work together on
finding solutions to big
problems?
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Modern Technology Best Practices
• User centered design
• Agile, data-driven development
• Cloud deployment and modern technology stacks
• Open source software
• Open data
• Citizen engagement
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Government as a Platform
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Government as a platform means an
end to the design of only complete,
closed “applications.” The
government should provide
fundamental applications, and
services on which we, the people,
can build additional applications.
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High speed broadband
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Laying fiber under the streets is the 21st century equivalent of
building superhighways, electric grids, and modern sanitation
infrastructure
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Weather Data
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Up to date weather info?
A marvel from Google?
Actually, by way of government
institutions such as NOAA (US)and
other government agencies around
the world.
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GPS: A 21st century platform launched in 1973
Massive investment for uncertain return
Policy decisions can have enormous impact
Marketplaces take time to develop, and go in
unexpected directions
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“We’ve opened up huge amounts of
government data to the American people,
and put it on the Internet for free.... And
what’s happening is entrepreneurs and
business owners are now using that data
-- the people’s data --to create jobs and
solve problems that government can’t
solve by itself or can’t do as efficiently.”
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President Barack Obama
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What Went Wrong
Clay Shirky
“The preferred method for implementing large
technology projects in Washington is to write the
plans up front, break them into increasingly detailed
specifications, then build what the specifications call
for. It’s often called the waterfall method, because
on a timeline the project cascades from planning, at
the top left of the chart, down to implementation, on
the bottom right. …the waterfall method amounts to
a pledge by all parties not to learn anything while
doing the actual work.”
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How Modern Technology Companies Work
Break massive projects into smaller pieces
Release them iteratively and learn as you go
Focus relentlessly on user experience
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Some of what that entails
Low level “infrastructure as a service”
Storage
Computation
Internal “Housekeeping” services
Security
Performance monitoring
Connection to other services
Insurance providers
State exchanges
Data as a service
Identity
Location
Employment status
Income verification
User Interface
Web site
Email
Call Center
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Jeff’s Memo
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• “All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service
interfaces.
• Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.
• There will be no other form of inter-process communication allowed: no direct linking,
no direct reads of another team’s data store, no shared memory model, no back-doors
whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the
network.
• It doesn’t matter what technology they use.
• All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be
externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the
interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.
• Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired.”
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Write RFPs to require government sites to be built
on top of internal APIs that can also be used to
support external 3rd party sites.
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Language from the recreation.gov RFP
5.3. Public Interface Support Services
The system shall be designed in such a way that it is easy for third parties to
access the data and information contained within the Recreation.gov system in
machine-readable formats, so that third parties may easily integrate this information
into their applications, websites, products and services.
All elements of Section 5.3. shall be included in the R1S system at “Go-Live”.
The Contractor shall make it easy for a user of a third party application or website
that has chosen to integrate with Recreation.gov to search for inventory and real
time availability, and complete a reservation.
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5.3.1. Information Sharing
Objective: Third parties and members of the public shall be easily able to receive
access to the sharing service following Government and industry best practices,
such as self-provisioning. The information will play key roles in attracting new and
returning site visitors, informing and educating visitors on a wide-range of topics
and providing the basis of end-to-end travel planning experience.
The Contractor shall deliver automated and manual services in machine-readable
formats for the sharing of the consolidated recreation information described herein.
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5.3.1. Information Sharing (continued)
The Contractor shall ensure the data available via the sharing service represent the
most current data available on Recreation.gov, including (but not limited to)
recreation area information, maps, photos, activities, links to additional resources,
specific reservable inventory availability, and – when available – information about
specific pieces of inventory (i.e. campsite descriptions). In general, all of the
information available to users of Recreation.gov itself shall be made available to
third parties via the sharing service.
The sharing service shall provide a method for third parties to search available
inventory using common search criteria such as date range, location, site type, and
other attributes. In general, the same search capabilities provided to users of
Recreation.gov itself shall be made available to third parties via the sharing service.
.
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5.3.1. Information Sharing (continued)
The Contractor shall ensure the following information / data is not available via the
sharing service:
Personally-Identifiable-Information from individual users, such as name, address,
and birth date
User financial information such as credit card or bank account number
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5.3.2. Third Party Sales Strategy
Objective: Users of the third party applications, websites and services shall be able
to easily initiate transactions and complete reservations in the R1S system with a
minimum of hassle or complications following travel and hospitality industry best
practices.
In order to provide the best experience for the user and insure a clear path for
future innovation, the Contractor shall offer technology that facilitates the
ability for users to initiate and complete reservations from within third party
services.
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The Government has identified interest by commercial travel and recreation
planning companies that help facilitate Recreation.gov transactions as a part of a
commercial endeavor in which they could earn commissions on the inventory they
help sell. This indicates that such an arrangement could benefit both the
Government and the Contractor, by creating an additional sales & marketing
channel for increasing the number of reservations processed using the system.
The travel and hospitality industry, where such third-party sales channels and
commission systems are the norm, provides numerous examples of how such a
commission system could work. Most of these systems involve some sort of “per-
transaction” fixed or percentage-driven commission paid to participating third
parties that originate reservations.
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“You never want a serious crisis to go to
waste. And what I mean by that is an
opportunity to do things that you think you
could not do before.”
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Rahm Emanuel
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“The legitimate object of government is to
do for the people what needs to be done,
but which they cannot, by individual
effort, do at all, or do so well, for
themselves.”
-Abraham Lincoln, July 1, 1854
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Data is the 21st Century Platform
We need standards for:
• Identity
• Payment
• Location
• Credit history
• Health history
• Privacy
• …
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Who sets the gauge rules the world
Sixty per cent of the world's
railways use 4 ft 8 1⁄2 inch
standard gauge, developed by
George Stephenson in 1822.
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http://www.warwickshirerailways.com/lms/lnwrns305.htm
In 2008, when President Barack Obama was elected, with a campaign slogan “Change we can believe in,” I wondered whether part of that change could be bringing government digital technology into the 21st century.
So I decided to do something to bring Silicon Valley to Washington. Jen Pahlka (whom you saw on stage earlier today) and I launched the Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington DC in 2009, with a focus on bringing together people from Silicon Valley with government leaders so that they could learn from each other.
One of the key ideas I wanted government to learn was that the most successful Silicon Valley technologies are platforms, and that government programs (both technology programs and real world programs) are most successful when they think of themselves as platforms as well.
I wrote an influential essay on the subject, which I published as part of a book called “Open Government.” In it, I said:
The lesson I wanted to share was the lesson of the Apple iPhone. In 2008, Apple had launched the App Store, and it was that, almost more than the phone itself, that transformed the smartphone market. Rather than the few dozen apps provided by Apple and the phone carriers, suddenly there were thousands, then hundreds of thousands, and eventually over a million apps. And customers went crazy. The center ad from Apple was the notice of 25 billion downloads. We’re well over double that now, and there are 1.3 million apps. This looked like a great target for government to emulate.
One of the clearest expressions of the government as a platform is the road system, encompassing local, regional, and national highway systems. Government not only builds and maintains many of these roads, but also sets and enforces the rules of the road. But government doesn’t specify everything. The crowdsourced destinations we call cities determine where the roads go, and we the people are free to use them to go where-ever we want.
The US Interstate system, which provided a transformative economic foundation for the US, was championed by
President Eisenhower in 1956. It was a masterpiece of platform thinking.
One of the clearest expressions of the government as a platform is the road system, encompassing local, regional, and national highway systems. Government not only builds and maintains many of these roads, but also sets and enforces the rules of the road. But government doesn’t specify everything. The crowdsourced destinations we call cities determine where the roads go, and we the people are free to use them to go where-ever we want.
The US Interstate system, which provided a transformative economic foundation for the US, was championed by
President Eisenhower in 1956. It was a masterpiece of platform thinking.
Government has been in this business for a long time. Consider weather.
Here’s Google’s forecast for San Juan when I was creating the slides for this talk. But where did that data come from?
I’ve always found myself wondering why people aren’t more aware of how government data powers non-governmental services that citizens take for granted, many of them never taking the time to think how much government investment went into building the infrastructure that makes it possible for the private sector to offer services like weather predictions.
How about Global positioning satellites? Here government investment in a hard, long term project, is paying off in uncounted new private sector developments.
A huge project with uncertain return, started in 1973 and now showing enormous fruit in the 21st century, with huge value add from the commercial sector. Everything from maps and directions on your phone to future self-driving cars spring from this platform investment, and the key policy decision to open the data and make it available for commercial use. No one dreamed of the unexpected applications that became possible by opening up this data. That’s why we need open web services by default.
After the 2012 election, when President Obama talked about his second term management agenda, open data, and its role in enabling private sector to build on government as a platform, was a key part of the message.
But the results weren’t as great as I’d hoped. The nonprofit GovLab recently put up their “OpenData 500” - a list of 500 companies enabled by government open data. Not bad. There are thousands more. But nothing compared to the 1.3 million companies built on the Apple iPhone platform.
But the results weren’t as great as I’d hoped. The nonprofit GovLab recently put up their “OpenData 500” - a list of 500 companies enabled by government open data. Not bad. There are thousands more. But nothing compared to the 1.3 million companies built on the Apple iPhone platform.
This. Which of course had surpassed the Twitter Fail Whale as the most famous error message in the US. Policy folks who are not technical still know that if a website gets a lot of traffic, it can crash, and I believe that the initial thought was something along the lines of “go make sure they have enough servers.”
But it was much more complicated than that of course.
So what did I get wrong?
The UK government has asked themselves this same question, and has come up with a better answer.
Please roll this short video on the concept that was created by the UK Government Digital Service. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzPU6Pdw05s
I think the first thing I should have talked about more is one of the UK Government Digital Service design principles:
I should have also talked about another great Silicon Valley platform success story: Amazon. It’s not just the ubiquitous e-commerce site. It’s also a platform
I should have also talked about another great Silicon Valley platform success story: Amazon. It’s not just the ubiquitous e-commerce site. It’s also a platform on which nearly every Silicon Valley startup, and many giant enterprises (and even government departments) build cloud services. Amazon was a pioneer in defining what we now call Cloud Computing. How did this happen?
I’m proud to say I played a small role in this transformation. Back in 2003, I gave a talk about the coming transformation of the web into a platform (which I came to call Web 2.0), and in it, I said: “A platform beats an application every time.” Jeff heard the talk, and asked me to come give it to his tech team, and then to an All-hands meeting at Amazon.
With characteristic insight and decisiveness, Jeff thought through what this meant, and then had the discipline to rebuild his company as a platform. As reported in Steve Yegge’s Platform Rant https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX, he wrote a memo that went something like this.
They forced themselves to think through how to create a modular set of fundamental services that can be used like building blocks
They not only were required to use them themselves - no more silos or custom services that no one else can use —
but they also had to be the same services used internally that they would ultimately open up to the world.
So this is my advice:
Jeff has a kind of authority at Amazon that’s hard to come by in the government sector. But it’s a key part of the success of the GDS that it has top level sponsorship from Minister Francis Maude, who has been willing to crack heads when necessary. It takes a lot of will to make hard changes.
There’s a really good example of the kind of language you want in the RFP for the new recreation.gov contract. I won’t read you every bit of detail here, but I’m going to include it in the slides for reference.
Jeff has a kind of authority at Amazon that’s hard to come by in the government sector. But it’s a key part of the success of the GDS that it has top level sponsorship from Minister Francis Maude, who has been willing to crack heads when necessary. It takes a lot of will to make hard changes.
Jeff has a kind of authority at Amazon that’s hard to come by in the government sector. But it’s a key part of the success of the GDS that it has top level sponsorship from Minister Francis Maude, who has been willing to crack heads when necessary. It takes a lot of will to make hard changes.
The portion in italics is not in the actual RFP, but is added here to our recommendations for absolute clarity.
He can write a memo like this! Jeff has a kind of authority at Amazon that’s hard to come by in the government sector. But it’s a key part of the success of agencies that have made these kinds of changes that they have top level political, who has been willing to crack heads when necessary. It takes a lot of will to make hard changes.
But in a political context, you can often get the impetus to change when there is a crisis. As Rahm Emanuel famously said in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.
There’s a real question whether the US Digital Service would exist without the crisis of healthcare.gov, despite all of Jennifer Pahlka’s foresight and hard work in setting it up!
Perhaps Puerto Rico’s current financial crisis may also be just such an opportunity.
Remember what Jen said about the savings that the UK GDS received when they consolidated their publishing into the gov.uk site. Not only did the site get much more traffic, it cost a fraction of the original approach. And since then, ongoing savings in other digital services have been even more striking.
I want to end on one further note, about the urgency of government getting deeper into the data platform business. Abraham Lincoln said. One role of government is to look out for the interests of everyone.
Data is the 21st century railway. We need standards for things like identity, payment, location, credit history,health history, and many other specialized types of data that help us manage the services we deliver to citizens and other residents.
Because unless government gets in the game, the railway gauges are going to be set by private companies, like Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, and Uber.
There’s something else I should have talked about: a lesson from British history and the design of real world platforms. Most of the world uses a standard gauge of railroad track originally developed by George Stephenson in 1822. It was a foundational tool for the British Empire, and was eventually copied by other nations around the world.
But ultimately, the lesson of the railroads, going back to George Stephenson, is that you standardize railroads by building tracks. This was also key to the success of the Internet. While other networking groups went into excruciating detail of pie-in-the-sky standards that were never built, the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) model was (as articulated by Dave Clark) “No kings, no priests. Just a rough consensus and running code.” That’s why GDS director Mike Bracken is speaking such an important truth when he says “The strategy is delivery.” With that, over to Mike!