The Future of Government Information Sharing

By Rahul Joshi | 1 June 2011 | Permanent link | 0 comments

6,000 years ago, the governors and kings of Sumer’s city-states probably had the same core concerns as today’s governments: maintaining law and order, and creating conditions for prosperity amongst their people. In terms of communication within the government, it is likely that efficiency has always hinged on the unobstructed flow of raw data from the bottom up, and the percolation of policy decisions from the highest levels of the hierarchy to the lowest, with minimal distortion.

Some of today’s public sector concerns, however, would have been completely alien to them. Because while political systems and structures come and go and offer lessons for posterity, technology-enabled government seems to be an endless buildup in which everyone has to learn as they go along. But what is it a buildup towards? And what key points on this exponential graph can we extrapolate from, to predict reasonable outcomes for the current trends?

In the FutureGov Forum in Singapore last month, the theme of sharing and collaboration emerged as the focal point of public sector ICT concerns. It reminded me of a presentation I had heard from Martin Stewart-Weeks, Director, Public Sector (Asia-Pacific), Internet Business Solutions Group, Cisco at the FutureGov Forum India almost exactly one year ago, and the massive changes that have occurred since then: we have had Wikileaks come and go, social media engagement has exploded, and there have been sweeping global changes across the political spectrum, with implications on government transparency and accountability.

In his presentation, Stewart-Weeks talked about Paul Baran, from The RAND Corporation, who, in conjunction with the United States Air Force, conducted seminal research on distributed networks in the 1960s. Baran was attempting to design a communication system that would be robust enough to withstand attacks; Stewart-Weeks took those basic premises and models of communication into a very interesting and unexpected territory – the realm of government information sharing architecture. “And we are genuinely and somewhat ambitiously suggesting that we are witnessing the emergence of a new public sector,” he had said.

As I looked again at Baran’s research paper after the 2011 Singapore Forum, it was difficult to miss the fact that with ICT effecting greater communication within and across governments, the natural progression of the way public sector shares data roughly resembles the development of computer networking in general, as Stewart-Weeks had suggested.

And in my estimation, we are looking towards a final scheme of intra- and inter-governmental communication that is a dense, somewhat homogeneous network of well-connected nodes. The challenge, already, is no longer access to information, but the aggregation and processing of information.

The parallels with the evolution of governmental communication structure are striking. When information was a precious and a somewhat unwieldy commodity, and the predominant governing ethic was to “rule”, the structure of public sector communication resembled figure (A): a central core that dealt directly with geographically or functionally outlying nodes. Soaking up information was less important than rulings and laws being strictly implemented.

As nations have gotten larger and a centre-heavy system has become too ungainly, government communication architecture has slowly morphed into structures described most accurately by model (B): a federal body to direct long-term and large-scale vision, with local municipalities acquiring greater power to expedite on-the-ground change. Similarly, information gathered on the ground over urgent, non-policy-related issues can be immediately put to use.

But today, with the rapid take-up of social networking, mobility, and transparency legislation, governments are required to “serve” more than to “rule”. Their role is slowly being redefined: to make the increasingly complex and globalised life of the citizen easier to manage, rather than to direct or to shape it. This has forced the public sector – albeit tentatively, with data privacy issues never too distant on the horizon of the public eye – to be more actively accountable to its citizens.

With the requisite means now available, public departments have started to function as depicted in diagram (C): freely exchanging ideas and solutions, and no longer bound by the intractability of having all information pass through a single node before it disseminates to the relevant others.

Where is it heading? Some governments might be dragged kicking and screaming into the era of openness, and public-private-partnerships (whether legally sanctioned or otherwise) might be willing to help where civil service momentum is weak.

At the same time, miscreants will have a greater capability of disrupting government operations thanks to the egalitarian nature of the internet: data packets are data packets, whether sent by a peasant over a mobile phone or by the President of the United States. Security may grow to be the broadest issue that encapsulates or at least comments on all other concerns within public sector discourse.

Even within the short period separating the India Forum in 2010 from the Singapore Forum in 2011, the landscape has changed tremendously: information these days is more voluminous, flows faster, comes from unpredictable sources, and flows through a multitude of qualitatively different channels.

The pyramidal and strict hierarchy of data flow within the public (and the private sector for that matter) has become decidedly flatter and less distinct, and may continue down that road. Government agencies have gained independence while becoming more interconnected: a trend that might persist to the point of ideas and processes taking supreme precedence, and the particular scope of the agency becoming less relevant, given the excess of solutions and information available.

A “distributed” model of communication might be a prescriptive design from Baran’s point of view, but it may end up as the organic, inevitable outcome of the current process of governmental change.