The concept of “government as a platform” is a simple one: just as the value of the iPhone has been maximised by opening up the iPhone and allowing users to create apps (200,000+ to date), so should government open itself up to maximise its value.
There’s a number of ways government could work as a platform:
- Data: opening up data, to enable geek communities to mash-up and re-use government data – creating new applications for it.
- Policy: opening up the policy-making process to allow citizens to more openly participate and share ideas.
- Function: opening up various aspects of functionality of government, to enable citizens to contribute to the running of various services.
And the exciting thing is that UK government is doing just this – although I’m not sure it knows it’s doing this in such a relatively joined up way. Here’s the progress so far:
- Data: earlier in the year, the Cabinet Office created www.Data.gov.uk, as a space to share government data through and create innovative apps on top of.
- Policy: the Coalition government have kicked things off with a number of different policy crowd-sourcing initiatives – opening up the policy-making process at the earliest stages. The first of these initiatives was Nick Clegg’s Your Freedom crowd-sourcing website (which used our Dialogue App).
- Function: David Cameron’s pronouncements of “we’re all in this together” and more specifically his Big Society concept hits the nail on the head re: handing certain basic functions of government back to the people – including opening up the schools system to allow parents to run schools.
This handing over of “function” to citizens is perhaps the most radical manifestation of government as a platform, letting citizens not only innovate with data and ideas, but turning those ideas into practice.
