Delivering government service with better software?

Hey, maybe a lot of good government software will be delivered by spontaneous, ad hoc actions, and sometimes by government folks using new approaches to tech:

Peter Corbett makes a great point at technosailor.

We must, in the words of our President, “pick our selves up, and dust ourselves off, and work to bring our country back”.

That work will be done by all manner of Americans.  My tribe - the technology community - has the biggest opportunity to make the most difference.  We have never before had the opportunity to do so much for so many though the shear brilliance of arranging ones and zeros in the cloud to create applications that solve problems big and small for pockets of citizens niche and mass. Our fabric is digital, and therefore replicable, and scalable and most likely to have a really big numerator by which we can divide by zero.

Tim O’Reilly has called for the developers and entrepreneurs to “work on stuff that matters” and I say the stuff that matters lies beyond creating the next Facebook or Twitter – that ‘stuff’ includes mobile applications for making citizens safer in their cities, and boring – dreadfully boring things like creating apps that help our governments track their permits and procurements better.

Vivek Kundra has been a pioneering force in the practice of participatory democracy through technology development and will soon take the reigns at the Office of Management and Budget as the administrator for e-government and information technology. 

Comments

[Aaron Brazell]

Hey Craig-

Thanks for the link!

Personally, I feel like developing better technology is a means to an end. Most folks in the "Government 2.0" space focus on the marketing aspect of the social web, rather than identifying the core missions of the agencies (can't paint the Gov't with a broad brush) and building solutions to meet those missions. Corbetts post certainly highlights the need to bring real tech to the table to meet real problems.

I think whoever taps into the understanding of core missionality is the winner in the Government 2.0 space.

End of the day, we don't want our taxdollars going to feed nonsensical twitter feeds just because "it's the thing to do". We want our taxdollars funding the missions that the agencies exist to serve.

There's a post coming on this. :)