Tim O'Reilly on Open Government | Hacker News Reader

Tim O'Reilly on Open Government

codingacrossamerica.com

42 pointsmakaimc12 comments

I was the co-founder/CTO of ElectNext, and I think we had a great idea with good execution, but we found it extremely hard to monetize. Cyclical elections and lack of public interest are big challenges. I'd happily do more volunteer side projects to improve American government, but I'd be reluctant to try building another business around it.

I suspect a successful Open Gov business is mostly about finding a market. The people spending money on elections are mostly campaigns, and open government is not necessarily in their interests. Being in this space seems like studying environmental science: sure you hope to protect the wilderness, but most potential employers want your help getting around the laws. (Pardon my cynicism.) I think Votizen is essentially lead gen for campaigns, and we felt a lot of pressure to go that way. Perhaps one market would be helping big-dollar contributors find the best people to fund?

Even if you want to sell to campaigns, you should be aware that most election IT is partisan. Democrats have their solutions and Republicans have theirs. There is too much distrust for a vendor to service both sides.

On another note, one of the great things about open government work is that it makes sense for all kinds of political viewpoints. My co-founder worked on the Hillary campaign, while I'm pretty libertarian. Most of the people I met doing Open Government work were very liberal, but in my opinion anything that increases government transparency and accountability is good for reining in state power.

EDIT: added 2 paragraphs.

Reining in state power isn't an anti-liberal idea.

Elections are a really bad example of governance, mostly because they're a minimalistic form. It's really not worthwhile, IMO, to go after anything to do with elections at all if you want to make money. Instead, try to figure out a way to loop the government into dealing with everyday problems. Tax-help companies, like H&R Block and TaxAct, are actually early instances of this: they're providing navigation of arcane bureaucratic nightmares. There is probably no end to the number of areas you could find to niche up and optimize a citizen's interface with their governments.

I mean... I just find your comment odd. Elections are such a tiny slice... what problem are you even trying to solve, besides "how do I extract money from this process"?

I think you're right about elections being too small, both from a business perspective and from an impact perspective. The problem we were trying to solve was that people vote blindly for most lower-ballot positions. We wanted to make it easy to vote intelligently all the way down your ballot, without researching each candidate individually. I guess it's understandable we couldn't find a way to support a business doing that.

I wonder if it might be preferable to make it easier to put things on the ballot instead. You could look into the process for that and see if there's a way to humanize it or make it more transparent.

I can't think of a way to business model that, though. Maybe a Kickstarter deal where people vote for inclusion via pledges and you take a cut? That doesn't sound like a great idea. Dunno.

Off-topic: The body text is almost unreadable in Chrome/Windows, with gaps in many of the characters. Note to self: avoid font family Calluna.

The GPS example he references is an interesting exception to the norm of public services in the US. GPS infrastructure is made freely available for personal and commercial use at public expense, ostensibly due to its value to the US military. Contrarily, Internet and energy infrastructure is privatized, along with most other basic services we depend on. The correlation between the government putting a bunch of position and time broadcasting satellites into orbit at public expense and maintaining open source repositories as a matter of course seems weak, however. GPS infrastructure has an obvious practical value to the public and few other parties could have undertaken the project; maintaining one more OSS Python/Django inter-office communication tool project at public expense might not make quite as much sense.

Thank you, that's really great feedback. I'll change it as soon as possible.

Hey HN, Tim O'Reilly came and talked to our tech team at CFPB last Thursday. He had some really interesting points on open government so I wanted to spread them more broadly.

I'd love to start open-sourcing my idea but I got 1 offer to help compared to the hundreds of people I've show it off to:

Here's my video from Oct. http://youtu.be/3m194rui52Q

Just finished a small prototype of some features but it's only a fraction of that video

I find that ressources on open source governance is pretty scarce on the Internet and it surprises me that there is no proper "initiative" or "think tank" to develop this idea.

Not saying it's easy, but if you want raw data, there is a lot out there.

    FEC filings from the last few decades: http://www.fec.gov/data/
    Bills and legislators: http://www.govtrack.us/
    Lots of data, but hard to access: http://votesmart.org/
    A nice tool/repository for extracting and sharing data: https://scraperwiki.com/

This is just the tip of the iceberg. I'd be happy to talk with anyone else about finding what they need.

Would this help? https://github.com/oreillymedia/open_government

Lots of great work going on here: http://codeforamerica.org

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