Government Data and the Invisible Hand

My Cisco colleague Richard Allan introduced me to a paper from Yale entitled "Governmnet Data and the Invisible Hand".  Worth a quick read.  The burden of its central message is that governments should stop setting up websites and start the less sexy, but ultimately much kore useful and revolutionary work of providing reusable data. 

Basically the authors suggest that in an age of relatively easy and cheap access to the tools of mash-ups and online forums, governments should spend much less time organising and presenting their data in ways they assume people want (and which mostly is done to reflect that goverment agencies themselves want and deem to be important) and much more time making the raw material - government data itself - easy to find, access and re-use.

This is the final paragraph of the paper:

"...we have proposed an approach to online government data that leverages both the American tradition of entrepreneurial self-reliance and the remarkable low-cost flexibility of contemporary digital technology.  The idea, though it can be implemented in a comfortably incremental fashion, is ultimately transformative.  It leads toward an ecosystem of grassroots, unplanned solutions to online civic needs."

It can sound a bit arcane and technical, but the impact of the idea from this paper might make this the biggest single thing governments could do to usher in the era of so-called "government 2.0". 

Copy attached (forget the reference to Princeton...got my US universities mixed up!)