Matthew Burton

In the coming weeks, O’Reilly Media will publish Open Government, a collection of new essays on how technology can make DC more transparent and efficient. Today, O’Reilly released a preview (PDF) of the book that features the first eight chapters. My chapter is included; its entire text is below.

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The federal government should fire me. Like the thousands of other contractors who develop software for government agencies, I am slow, overpaid, and out of touch with the needs of my customers. And I’m keeping the government from innovating.

In recent years, the government has become almost completely dependent upon contractors for information technology (IT). So deep is this dependency that the government has found itself in a position that may shock those in the tech industry: it has no programmers of its own; code is almost entirely outsourced. Government leaders clearly consider IT an ancillary function that can be offloaded for someone else to worry about.

But they should worry. Because while they were pushing the responsibility for IT into the margins, the role of IT became increasingly central to every agency’s business. Computing might have been ancillary 20 years ago, when the only computers were the mainframes in the basement.…

UPDATE: Given the events of the past day, I feel it’s worth referring back to my post from last February in which I discuss how intelligence failures are normally dealt with, and propose a more common sense solution. BRIDGE, the program I discuss below, would have provided a model for doing some of the things I recommended.

Back in October, the Director of National Intelligence killed a program called BRIDGE. (I’ve written about BRIDGE before.) As such a vocal advocate of BRIDGE with a financial interest in its success, my bias is clear, but for whatever that biased opinion is worth, BRIDGE’s death was the biggest government IT failure of 2009.

The cause of BRIDGE’s death is the most frustrating aspect of it, and it’s a reminder of what makes government innovation so logistically difficult: BRIDGE wasn’t deemed a failure or a waste or a PR risk. Technically, it wasn’t even killed; it was just put on ice. Following the presidential transition, new priorities were made at the top levels of the bureaucracy. These priorities had nothing to do with BRIDGE in particular, or any other tech-related goals. BRIDGE just got lost in the shuffle along with countless other programs that deserve attention.…

NOTE: I don’t normally write personal stories here, but I think this may help someone. It might even get the NYPD to stop taking advantage of people. In its own way, this story is about government efficacy and information sharing, so it’s not totally out of place on my site.

I just moved to a Brooklyn brownstone. Right outside my door is a curb cut at an intersection. People park there. Then they get towed and fined about $400. But this shouldn’t happen, because this particular curb cut is at a T-intersection, and there is no crosswalk painted on the road. This makes it a legal parking spot. The law was changed last year. Look, see?

Maybe you found this post because you’re one of the poor schmucks who had their car towed. I wish you luck in recovering it. In the meantime, don’t worry: while you can’t recover the time you’ll spend at the tow pound, you can get your money back. But the burden of proof is on you, so you have to make your case effectively. I think I can help you do that.

My own car was towed from a similar spot in August. I put together a pretty detailed package of evidence to make my case.…

Around this time yesterday, I, along with countless others, tried to bring down the Web sites of Iran’s information and justice ministries, and state-sponsored media outlets. The idea was to silence the pro-Ahmadenijad, anti-dissent messages coming from these outlets, and in so doing, strengthen the opposition protests in Tehran.

You didn’t have to be computer smart to take part: a developer in San Francisco had set up a push-button tool that would, upon your click, immediately start bombarding 10 Web sites with requests. I clicked Start, and in the 10 little boxes below, I could see the pages load and reload. About half of them were already down.

This was exhilarating. The goal was to promote democracy, and I could actually watch as it happened. Empowering.

But there’s more to it than that. I’m conflicted about the virtue of this idea. I’m still trying to sort out my thoughts about what happened, but I know that we will be talking about yesterday morning for years to come. We turned our collective power and outrage into a serious weapon that we could use at our will, without ever having to feel the consequences. Network warfare became available to the general public. That is frightening.…

For comments, see the original post on Personal Democracy Forum.

In the aftermath of Thursday’s virtual White House town hall, most of us in the tech-politics arena have been pondering one question: How do we improve upon this system to create a better virtual democracy experience? The conversation usually comes back to the problem exemplified by the marijuana questions, which were far and away the most popular questions asked of the president. Some thoughts:

To the tech-politics gurus bemoaning the marijuana questions:

“The marijuana people” did not “game” the system. They didn’t “sabotage” it. They didn’t get advanced notice. There is no (public) evidence of astroturfing or systems exploitation. They played fair. “Sabotage” is shouting from the back of a room during a Senate testimony. All these people did was show up at the polls. It’s the same thing you and I do every other November: they voted. If that’s sabotage, then senior citizens are incredibly cunning saboteurs. It’s fine to look for better ways of building this system. But stop equating fervent yet fair participation with cheating. I see the marijuana questions as a huge success, in two regards.

First, people participated. Yes, marijuana was #1 and #2 in the energy category, and this was caused by disproportionate enthusiasm for Open For Questions.…

The below is a chapter I wrote for Threats In the Age of Obama (Amazon), recently published by Nimble Books. The book is divided into two portions: one set of chapters on future threats, and another set on ideas for dealing with them. My chapter–in the latter section–focused on information technology solutions.

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What is the perfect information technology solution to coming national security threats?

There isn’t one solution to multiple threats. Rather than searching for a single solution, our national security community should adapt its IT procurement strategy to develop many solutions, each addressing a specific threat at the lowest possible cost.

The existing strategy is as follows: after being caught off guard by an unforeseen crisis–a terrorist attack, an outbreak of violence, a surprise nuclear test–we reflect on our failure and identify a single cause. Maybe we didn’t have enough information. Maybe we had too much information and couldn’t sort through it all. Or maybe we had the right information but we didn’t collaborate.

After pinpointing the cause we spend years–and tens of millions of dollars–trying to develop a handful of Perfect Software Tools to remedy the deficiency. Much of that time and money is spent on procurement bureaucracy: the first line of code is written after months of identifying requirements, issuing RFPs, waiting for bids, and awarding contracts.…

The Washington, DC government just procured 47 Web-based tools in 30 days.

That’s gotta be a record, because government software procurement is a nightmare. For a single piece of software, it probably takes 30 days just to write the RFP–Request for Proposals, a document that explains what the government wants and how much they’ll pay for it.

Once the RFP is announced, government contractors spend the next few months submitting their bids, before the government at long last chooses a winner. It’s already been several months, and not a single line of code has been written. The winning contractor delivers the final product a year or two later. (Oh, yeah: even if the product stinks and nobody ever uses it, the contractor keeps the money–your money.)

So what government contractor is responsible for this unprecedented success in DC? None. The DC Chief Technology Officer (Vivek Kundra) simply opened its data catalog and asked the general public to have at it. One month later, the DC government has dozens of new mashups and mapping tools for city transportation, tourism, law enforcement, and public safety. The CTO estimated that the normal contracting process would have taken up to two years.

This is phenomenal, but it’s not the best part.…

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!…

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.…

A few updates to report on the Open Source Developer-Government Co-op project (but nothing new to report regarding a better name for this thing).

1. Early on, I said my big concern was avoiding the legal landmines that forbid the federal government from accepting free work. Tom Bruce at Cornell’s Legal Information Institute felt my pain and connected me with some former government IT acquisition executives. They have been incredibly helpful, making light of technicalities that would have taken me months to discover on my own. The gist of what they’ve told me:

• The federal government is loathe to accept products for free, unless they are also offered to everyone else for free.
• Charging the government $1 for a service or product is better than giving it away; that means the buyer and seller have agreed on a price, a point that may not be disputed in the future.
• You cannot attach for-profit maintenance/service agreements to a low-cost sale or giveaway. That’s rightly seen as non-competitive.
• Educational institutions are great vehicles for ideas like this one. They are funded outside the government and have the public interest at heart. When working with such an organization, government buyers can be confident that the sellers do not have any plans to make a mint off of taxpayer dollars.

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