Open Government

Chapter 6. Enabling Innovation for Civic Engagement

David G. Robinson

Harlan Yu

Edward W. Felten

Until recently, government data made its way to the Internet primarily through central planning: civil servants gathered the raw data generated by their work, processed and analyzed it to make maps, reports, and other informative products, and offered these to citizens seeking insight into school performance, crime in their neighborhoods, or the status of proposed laws. But a new, more dynamic approach is now emerging—one that enlists private actors as allies in making government information available and useful online.

Note

A portion of this chapter was previously published as “Government Data and the Invisible Hand,” Yale Journal of Law & Technology, Vol. 11, 2009.

Citizen Initiatives Lead the Way

When the Web was born, computational and network resources were so expensive that building large-scale websites required substantial institutional investment. These inherent limits made government the only free provider of much online civic information, and kept significant troves of data off the Web entirely, trapped in high-end proprietary information services or dusty file cabinets. Government officials picked out what they thought to be the most critical and useful information, and did their best to present it usefully.

Costs for storage and processing have plummeted, but another shift, less well known, is at least as important: the tools that let people develop new websites are easier to use, ...