Matthew Burton

Because this is timely, I reserve the right to say some presumptuous/incorrect things that I never would have said had I had time to think it over, as I usually do when I post things here.

The Washington, DC Chief Technology Officer just launched a project called Apps for Democracy, a contest to create apps with DC’s data catalog.

I love this project. DC doesn’t get much revenue to work with, so this project makes a lot of economic sense–the tools they will get out of this contest would, through the standard contracting route, cost about 40 times the $20,000 in prize money they’re giving away.

But the economics, I’m guessing, is what sold the mayor on the project. I bet the initial motivation was much different: the CTO’s office understands that the public will create better tools, and more quickly, than government contractors can. They know that the benefits of opening their data far outweigh the speculated, yet unproven, pitfalls.

Also, I can tell the CTO likes to experiment. That’s really gutsy, because an inevitable byproduct of experimentation is failure. This is why most bureaucrats hate experimentation and would prefer to coast: sure, you won’t make progress by doing things the same way, but at least you can’t screw up!… Read the rest

The below was written with large organizations in mind. If you’re a techie, most of it will be old news, but you might find the intelligence stuff interesting. There’s also a PRINTABLE PDF version.

Recently, I was a panelist at the Director of National Intelligence’s Open Source Conference. The title of my panel was “Young Analysts Talk About the Value of Open Source.” The intelligence field’s definition of “open source” is different from what you might think: all it means is “information derived from public sources”: newspaper articles, television broadcasts, Web sites, etc.

To outsiders, it might seem odd to have a conference about this: doesn’t everyone understand the value of information? But when your desk has piles of secrets stolen from the enemy, it’s understandably difficult to spend time reading about things the whole world already knows. And because those secrets are transmitted over private, physically impenetrable networks, the Web isn’t available at everyone’s desk. So the Intelligence Community is slow to realize the power of publicly available information in anticipating threats.

Judging by the product booths in the exhibit hall, the conference revolved around helping analysts navigate the Web, and harnessing Web content en masse so that it can be delivered to analysts on a non-Web network.… Read the rest