[Open letter to the new federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra and new federal Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra]
Gentlemen:
Below are given 10 specific reccommentations with respect to IT policy initiatives which the Obama Administration might consider, to help make the federal government more efficient, effective, transparent, and useful.
As one of its last official acts, on January 14th, 2009, the previous Administration released a study by Dr. Marburger's OSTP, entitled "Harnessing the Power of Digital Data for Science and Society". Its recommendations should be implemented, but it doesnt go nearly far enough; a follow-on study should be undertaken immediately with a broader - and more specific - mandate.
The following suggestions are vendor-independent and do not entail large new investments in hardware or dramatic changes in the deployed computer infrastructure of any federal agency.
1. Bar Code (and Inventory, Annually) Every Object Owned by The Federal Government -
Other large organizations do this, but the bureaucracy still makes do with 1970s-era Property Control procedures, which are not standardized throughout the government. Each year, [untold] millions of dollars worth of computers, projectors, cellphones, tools, and other items fall through the cracks and go missing, undetected, in the purses and briefcases of federal and contractor employees because of lax oversight. Contemporary "3-D" barcode technology can encode significant amounts of information on inventory control decals (i.e. identifying a specific custodial official with cognizance over the object), but even first generation serial/sequential code tags could rapidly bring some semblance of control to the federal tangible assets database.
2. Digitize/Eliminate Microfiche/Print/CD Data Handling -
The National Technical Information Service and other agencies continue to maintain vast quantities of federal data and legacy documents in archaic, obsolete formats, including, most embarrassingly, 'microfiche'. These biodegradable sheets of acetate house millions of pages of books, reports, and scientific papers, containing information gathered at taxpayer expense. The microfiche sheets must be carefully maintained in specially controlled conditions, or they will chemically decay and the information content be irretrievably lost. Hundreds of thousands (millions?) of square feet of federal agency warehouse space is also funded on a continuing basis to store mass quantities of books, tapes, and CDs, which will, in all likelihood, never be sought in those formats by anyone, in the government or general public, ever again. Reallocate future storage and maintenance costs to digitizing this material, once and for all, and invest the recurring savings thereafter in future media transition planning.
3. Set All Federal Data Free.
Dont just give away - aggressively - the remaining hardcopies of papers, reports, books, tapes, and CDs, declare the data Free to the public (who paid for it to begin with) in perpetuity. There are no unclassified documents held by the government that should not be available free to the public for electronic download (and probably many that are which should be also). If you look, you will find that the costs of securing and accounting for online document data sales often exceed the revenue that such sales generate. If you make it all free, enterprising IT entrepreneurs will organize it and spend their own resources extracting useful information from it. This is not conjecture; its happend before: a good example is FreePatentsOnline.com which offers without charge"All the Inventions of Mankind".
4. Stream & Archive Live Video of Every Federal Meeting -
The hundreds of boards, commissions, councils, and other committees at work throughout the federal government, from the FTC and FCC on down, would benefit from the open meetings requirements that the Sunshine Laws of many states establish for state level agency deliberations. In many cases, the meetings are already 'open to the public' - if you are in Washington, D.C., and you register in advance, and you get there early enough to get a seat in overcrowded meeting rooms. But this is the 21st Century, and web cams cost $20, not $20,000. For less than a board spends to air condition its meeting chambers over the course of a year, its meetings can be webcast to anyone interested in its proceedings. This would prompt greater public participation in regulatory decision making, and help free many agences from captive control by lobbyists for the industries they regulate. Perpetual archiving of all such meetings - gavel to gavel - would provide valuable evidence in court where decisions are challenged as capricious (or unduly influenced) by parties victimized by such decisions. Many agencies employ court stenographers to document these meetings, a cost easily saved by the electronic video record (which can be machine transcribed for free at any later date that a written record is desired).
5. Crowd-Source the Federal Grant Selection Process -
The legendary Sen. William Proxmire's (D-WI) "Golden Fleece Award" famously documented cases of questionable, exotic, and, sometimes, downright bizarre instances of federal funds - generally research grants - wasted on projects of dubious merit. To this day, Members of Congress have no difficulty in citing ongoing abusive examples of such waste, and no institutional mechanism yet exists within the government to reign it in. Of course, now we have the Digital Environment. Crowdsource the grant selection process among qualifying applicants, and let the taxpayers and other stakeholders (i.e. cancer patients for cancer studies, zoologists on wildlife, etc.) choose from among the competing submissions. This will bring a vital measure of "Common Sense" to the process, often elusive to pointy headed bureaucrats in Washington, weeding out the most 'obviously silly' in favor of projects more generally agreed to be worthwhile. In most cases, the aggregate wisdom of the general public should be quite adequate to make the selection (without predjudice, favoritism or influence peddling), while in highly technical subject areas, the choice could be crowdsourced among a more focused audience, drawn from the appropriate professional technical societies relevant to the discipline. For example, the depth of knowledge of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, American Nurses Association, National Education Association - and many others in other fields - could be harnessed, enabling their members to review and vote onilne as to which federal research grant proposals best advance the state-of-the-art in their respective disciplines.
6. Generate Crosscutting Thematic Bitstreams -
We're still addressing problems in the 21st Century with bureaucracies designed in the 1930s. But contemporary issues like Transgenerational Poverty, Environmental Energy, Preventive Wellness, and Early Childcare do not fit neatly into the vertical departmental boxes drawn decades ago. The number of interagency task forces and interdepartmental agreements endeavoring to tackle such issues has mushroomed in recent years, and yet the struggles between parochial fiefdoms remain, inhibiting those federal workers 'down in the trenches' who would actually solve these problems if given half a chance. Use inexpensive digital video and web 2.0 tools to create crosscutting thematic bitstreams (video, audio, data, documents) which channelize enterprise (govt) wide content to specific interdisciplinary problems (i.e. "Poverty"). As viewers and co-producers of such a channel, agents anywhere within the federal government (and, ultimately, state and local governments, and NGOs) can contribute information content to be shared among all other participants with cognizance over the problem for their particular agencies. Emerging inexpensive digital media appliances, such as the second generation [.mp4 video capable, WiFi enabled] Digital Picture Frame (<$50) now empower users to move continuous vidstreams off their working Windows Desktop, taking them to the Physical Desktop instead - where real estate is now at less of a premium. More importantly, these cheap, addressable displays can be taken home, or to lunch, or on the road, wherever WiFi service exists, to download and play the streams waiting for any given individual, permitting the content to be watched 24/7. Channellized collaborative content input, on interdisciplinary and interdepartmental themes can more effectively disseminate institutional knowledge, establish stakeholder 'buy-in' for proposed initiatives, and eliminate knowledge gaps which lead to inertia, dissention, inaction, and conflict.</p>
7. Create an Employee DNA Databank for Epigenetic Research -
The federal government represents the largest body of individuals within the same health maintenance framework in the western world. The Administration's emphasis on digital medical records and 'Health IT' can easily be taken One Small Step further with the comprehensive personal genome sequencing of every federal employee, and the use of this database by the NIH in its ongoing quest to understand the epigenetic factors underlying many diseases. Decoding the Human Genome was the first step, which taught us that the role of genetics in health is far more complex than previously imagined. Recent discovery of the sixth human nucleotide proves that only through the accumulation of a genome library of massive numbers of people - correlated with their medical histories and responses to treatment - can the most important secrets of diseases (and aging) be understood well enough to permit universally effective cures to be developed. The potential cures which the NIH and other medical researchers worldwide could develop from the analysis of this data is of incalculable value. Not only would the addition of personal genomes to the federal personnel medical records be of immense benefit to federal employees (particularly in their later years), the federal commitment to do so would drive down the cost of practical personal gene sequencing by orders of magnitude, making it available for everyone. Meanwhile you would effectively establish the 'Gold Standard' for the capture and security of personal genetic information which would become the new baseline for handling such data throughout the healthcare, insurance, and human resources industries.
8. Data Mining/Knowledge Refining from Legacy Federal Documents -
The legacy data held by our government is the largest body of dormant, unassimilated factual nonfiction literature in the history of the world. Millions of pages of scientific papers, proposals, studies, reports, etc. lie fallow, either becaue they preceeded the digital age or have foundered in the backwaters of the labyrinth, with no one to champion their relevance in the 21st Century. Empower each agency (deep down into the bureaucracy, practically to the individual program level) to designate its own Cognitive Archivist, charged solely with the responsibility for assimilating the prior institutional knowledge base toward the extraction of prospectively useful recovered data and 'lessons learned' which may assist the organization in more effectively accomplishing its mission in the future. Since the federal workforce is considerably older than that of the private sector, and will undergo wholesale changeout of personnel (estimated at 600,000) in the next few years, this initiative to build and protect a worker-independent institutional memory should receive a significant high priority from the new Administration. Perhaps more importantly, the Cognitive Archivist can develop these information resources into new knowledge-based services for their agency's user community, academia, and industry at large.
9. Digital 'Federal Academy of Science & Technology' -
In 1995, the Western Governor's Association established a bipartisan interstate compact to establish Western Governor's University, an open-entry, all digital, accredited online institution of higher learning. It offers Bachelors and Masters Degrees in Teaching, Nursing, Business, and Information Technology, with no barriers to admission, in an accelerated self-paced format driven by competency milestones rather than 'seat time'. Liberated of brick-and-mortar overhead, it provides a cost effective highly personalized university experience to tens of thousands of students from all 50 states. The enormous body of science and engieering data over which the federal IT establishment has custody is potentially the world's largest educational resource. Moreover, the dozen or so universities already owned by the federal government (from National Defense University to the Service Academies to the USDA Grad School) are all working to tranform themselves into 21st Century institutions, by bringing their course material online and enabling their students to access digital courseware from other institutions. A new, all-digital university [a virtual "Federal Academy of Science & Technology"] could be organized from latent federal information resources in science, engineering and technology, providing universal low-cost access to specialized Associates, Masters, and Doctoral programs, on a basis which is noncompetitve with - and nonthreatening to - the existing [Bachelors-based] university establishment. With annuitous tuition income as an after-hours bonus incentive, many federal employees could be enticed to utilize their in-depth knowledge of the information spectrum to create specific courseware from it, itemized to the structure of various master curricula professionally developed by domain experts in the selected disciplines.
10. Divest Legacy Federal Publishing Businesses to Endow a 'Knowledge Institute'
Legacy organs within the federal government, including most notably the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Energy Information Administration, and the Government Printing Office (among others) engage in 20th Century research and publishing practices which no longer meet the government's needs in the Digital Environment. While dead-tree publishing is rapidly becoming obsolete, the need for in-house specialty publishing houses for niche market econometric research has long been obviated by the rise of new cottage data industries in virtually every field imaginable. Today, the federal government could profitably sell off the BLS, EIA, and several other such internal specialty publishing houses, and invest the billions of dollars in capital it would recover to permanently endow an American Knowledge Institute [along the lines of the National Endowments for the Arts or Humanities]. Such a foundation would pursue the interdisciplinary and inter-institutional assimilation of knowledge in the rapidly accelerating and ever-more-pervasive Digital Environment. In addition to assimilating the vast trove of little known, seldom used federal document data, in ways as described above, an American Knowledge Institute could employ emerging techniques in Artificial Intelligence to analytically exploit the USPTO Patent Library, the MS Thesis/PhD Dissertation collections of all universities in the United States (and, potentially, worldwide), and the rapidly expanding Google Books scanned digital collection. The new knowledge synthesis which might occur from such an initiative, while unpredictable in scope, would be of a magnitude comparable to advent of the printing press or the internet itself.
These proposed initiatives go further than skipping Windows Vista, standardizing on Open Office, increasing federal users' web performance with Opera, releasing federal documents on BitTorrent, or preoccupying bureaucrats with a Twitter obsession. Though these would certainly each be advantageous in its own right, a more fundamental apprehension of the governments archival knowledge resources is called for, and would produce profoundly greater results.
Congratulations on your appointments, gentlemen. Good luck with those Aegean Stables...