According to Clay Johnson, director of Sunlight Labs and co-founder of Blue State Digital, the biggest barriers to politics-driven innovation in an online setting can be easily circumnavigated thanks to—what else?—social media.
“From the perspective of [government] building products and innovating on the Web, there are two enemies. One is consensus, and the other is lawyers,” Johnson says. “The net force that is trying to get into government and apply the same technologies is finding that consensus has to be built, and lawyers come into the equation. And all of a sudden, creativity comes to a screeching halt.”
What, then, is enabling innovation to seep into political discourse, thus changing the rules of engagement for all types of communications, from public affairs and lobbying to advocacy?
“There is a way around [these barriers to innovation]. It’s through publishing data,” Johnson says. “When the government publishes data, people can do interesting things with it to advance their agendas.”
Of course, the legitimacy of this theory depends upon one thing: the government actually publishing data. As it turns out, the Obama administration did just that when, on May 21, 2009, it launched data.gov, an online catalogue of data generated across all federal agencies.
In a statement to the press, the administration’s chief information officer, Vivek Kundra, said, “This can be a creative platform that drives readable, machine-ready information across the government, giving the American people a greater voice in the government’s priorities and broader access to results.”
As for the types of innovation and engagement that this could precipitate, Johnson points to applications that already exist, and that wouldn’t be possible without access to vast amounts of data.
“There would be no weather.com or Google Maps without government data,” he says, “so [data.gov] will create a virtual seed fund for private enterprise to do interesting things.”