
Tim O'Reilly on Open Government - makaimc
http://www.codingacrossamerica.com/tim-oreilly-open-government.html
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pjungwir
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.

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saraid216
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"?

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pjungwir
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.

~~~
saraid216
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.

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WiseWeasel
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.

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

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makaimc
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.

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MWil
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

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adlq
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.

~~~
pjungwir
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.

