 Many of you may know Tim O'Reilly. Tim is the head of O'Reilly Media, one of the early publishers on the internet, the whole internet guide. I actually began buying his books in the late 80s when there weren't many people writing books about computer networks. He is famous for his books, but he's even more famous for having help coin terms like open source and web 2.0. His conferences have really been places that the open source world can convene. That's been rare. There's been a lot of technical for-pay conferences, but things like Pearl and Python and Linux didn't have a place to meet. His open source convention is a well-known gathering place where people working on this kind of material can get together. Most recently, he's been doing the government 2.0 expos and summits, which have served a very similar purpose for people working on getting government online in a more cluful way. We're also very pleased to have our Secretary of State, the Honorable Deborah Bowen, who has been an advocate for putting government online since her days in the state legislature. If you do the inventory of California materials, I think you'll see the Secretary of State does a much better job than some of the other places. I think that's leadership. That's the policy makers thinking that this is important, that citizens do need access. I've asked these folks to talk with us about why this matters. We've been looking at in-depth issues of intellectual property and the inventory of materials, but why do we care about putting the law online? Tim talks about government as a platform and then we have access to government as a basic democratic kind of value. I'm really pleased that we have the two such qualified people to speak on this subject. We'll turn it over. Tim, maybe you can start. Yeah, thanks. So, I want to tell you a little bit about my thinking about open government, which some of us have been calling GOV2O because of the analogy to GOV2O. And I started obviously getting very interested in this back because I worked with Carl as far back as 1993-94 supporting his work. He really is, that may or is the father of the open government movement, the idea that we could use the Internet to give access to the workings of the government, to data produced by government. But I got really very interested most recently after the, during the election of Barack Obama, just as a technologist by looking at how effectively he was using social media, how effectively he was using technology to reach out, to harness the power of the public towards the aim of getting elected. But it struck me that if all this was a revolution in politics, that was much less interesting than if it became a revolution in governance. And so, I started to think more about what did it mean for us to apply the technologies of GOV2O, whether it's social media or cloud computing, or these new kinds of services that are really at the heart of GOV2O, data-driven services, data-driven applications that literally aren't as the collective intelligence of millions or tens of millions or hundreds of millions of people, to produce really remarkable results that we are still just trying to understand integrated into our society. It seemed like the government needed to be part of that discussion. And so, I did what I often do when I don't really know what I'm talking about, which is I organize a conference because what you do then is you find all the interesting people, you talk to them, and then you start to reflect what you hear. That was the advice I got from Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google. He said, Tim, just kind of talk to a lot of people and then tell us what you learned. And I kind of started reflecting the story that I thought, oh, this is going to be way, way too geeky, you know, because it's sort of out of the computer industry. But it really resonated, and it was this. It was the idea that in the computer industry, leverage comes from platforms. And we have kind of a unique teachable moment around this right now because the lessons of the iPhone are so fresh. The way that smartphone applications were developed and delivered only two or three years ago looked a lot like the way government software might be procured. You know, you get together, you put out, you know, I'm sure Verizon put out an RFP of some kind, or they worked with some few chosen partners and figured out here are the features of the phone, bang, let's run with it. Apple did that, too. They did a really good job with some revolutionary new features. But the real revolution started when they opened the iPhone as a platform for developers. So they built 20 applications, they got approaching 200,000 for features that they didn't really expect. And I looked at that, and I thought, wow, that's a really wonderful metaphor for how government needs to work in society. Particularly because at this inflection point where we see that the increased percentage of GDP consumed by government cannot go on forever. People want more and more services, but they're not willing to pay for them by levying higher and higher taxes on themselves. And so we have this fundamental contradiction that is, you know, creating great schisms in our society and in our governance. And it seemed to me that the lessons of computer platforms that you can actually do less and get more are extremely potent and profound for our site. Now, government has always acted many ways like a platform provider. You know, so for example, when Eisenhower had built, or commissioned, the international and the U.S. highway system, they didn't specify what was put at the ends of the highways. They said, oh, we're going to build infrastructure that is going to lift the capabilities of our society, same thing with rural electrification. I think that there's some great stories. More recently, the internet, the GPS, President Reagan, in 1982, made a very, very important decision to open up this military asset for civilian use. And over the last 25, 30 years, we've seen just how powerful that decision was. And it led not just to use of those facilities, but a huge amount of private sector investment. And now, certainly in the last half dozen years, a real revolution in how we have access to the location and information of this huge startup culture, big entrepreneurial opportunities. And that's a great government as platform lesson. You know, create capabilities that are expensive. It was not something the private sector was going to do, put up location satellites. Even the government had real doubts early in the years. It was a big boondoggle. And yet, it was the kind of investment in a platform that took us along the way forward. Look at weather, the same thing. You know, we get our weather data, whether it's from Google or the weather channel, or from the daily newspaper, because the federal government puts up satellites, collects data from, you know, from boys, from ships, from independent weather stations, and organizes it, and then passes it out to the private sector to then commercialize that data. And I, so in thinking about this analogy, and looking at four great examples, I couldn't help but be struck by another analogy one that Carl was making. And that was that if you think of government as a platform, and the best design government acting like a platform provider, rather than like an application provider, delivering the actual end-user services. And that, of course, is the, I think, where we go wrong a lot with government. We've started to treat it like a vending machine. Donald Kell in his book, The Next Government of the United States, is the term vending machine government. We have this idea, we put in our taxes and together our candy bars in the form of, you know, roads, schools, taxes. We rode schools, you know, fire departments, armies, you know, police. And then when we, you know, we don't get what we want, you know, where we think costy much, we get to shake the vending machine, and that's already a part of the situation. And you see that that's a fundamental flawed model. We want to move away from vending machine government and into a model where government is providing capabilities that allow us to do things for ourselves. So, so, but in thinking about this analogy and the lessons of, you know, what can we take from computer platforms and their success in driving a marketplace forward, you can't help but be struck by the analogies between open-source software and the law. Carl has observed that the law is the operating system, if you like, of our country. And just as we've had a revolution of technology through the use of open-source software such as Linux, more importantly through open-source software such as the World Wide Web, people forget the protocols were open. The original implementation was put into the public domain. This was this huge, generous platform creation gesture, which led to untold, uncounted societal benefits, proliferation of economic activity. So through openness, we get innovation, we get an economic engine. And that economic engine turns out in example after example to be greater than the economic invention, the economic activity that we get when we allow individual parties and comets to hold tight to some particular piece of proprietary information or software, we get this huge benefit. Same thing is true back to the early days of the IBM personal computer. IBM published the specifications for that computer. Anybody could build them. That was why we had a PC revolution. So then you start looking at the situation that we've been documenting in this workshop, you know, where access to primary legal materials is difficult, is expensive. Somehow this thing which belongs to all of us, you know, as a nation, is locked up in a variety of ways. It's made inaccessible, it's made expensive. You have to ask, what are we missing in our society because people are held back from access to effectively the source code of democracy? And with that, you know, I think, you know, I'm just thinking about this. Deborah Bowen has actually been doing things about this for the last couple of decades, and I'd love to hear your perspectives on why, you know, this idea of access to primary legal materials is important, and also just in general, what are the issues that you see from a government point of view in how government can start to act more effectively to open things up to catalyze activity in society rather than, for example, these sort of, you know, backdoor deals that end up favoring some small number of parties that's not creating that explosion that we see with open platforms. Great. Well, you know, I started into this both as a practicing lawyer in the 80s and then as a volunteer, I guess you would call them a community activist, if you're a lawyer and you're willing to do volunteer work, a seamless supply of clients, as I did. And somehow I tried to make my paying clients subsidized all the hours I used to do my free work. But the basic issues that I confronted, a lot of them were just, you know, when and where is a decision going to be made at the local level, and we were talking a lot about planning and land use decisions, by whom and then what information is available, what does the staff report say, because there may be issues that were missed, there may be factual inaccuracies. If you don't have access to that framework for decision making, you basically are just shut out of the process. And what that meant at the time, 1991, let's say, was you had to drive down to the city hall and look at postings on the bulletin board. And then, maybe if you were there when they were open, which if you had a job was no small task, you could get a copy of the staff report one day, maybe before the hearing, so that you were left scrambling all night trying to figure out how to best take your two-minute shot, which is what public participation generally is, in the city council or planning commission meeting. And the city of Santa Monica really changed things by putting up a dial-up bulletin board of planning commission agendas. And that was the one model that I was familiar with that gave people access. So at least you could stop running to Santa Monica city hall to see whether or not something was on the calendar. And it led me when I got to Sacramento in 1992 as a new legislator to realize that I had this computer that had all of the information about the legislature, all the votes, all the committee reports, everything, but you couldn't get access to it from outside the building unless you paid somebody a couple hundred dollars a month or a couple thousand dollars a year. But it was our data from that same viewpoint. Our tax dollars paid to create all this information. I think this for me, I started out with the bulletin board concept and a couple of guys from Silicon Valley and they were guys and then it said, no, you should make this a requirement that this information be available on the world's largest non-proprietary computer. And we were off. And at one point, they actually wrote a front end over the weekend because the cost estimate for doing this was eight hundred thousand dollars for taking the information we had available online. Sounds a lot like Carl's story with the SEC. Yeah. So they went home and wrote up front end over the weekend. It was kind of clunky, but we went to the Senate Rules Committee and that was the end of the eight hundred thousand dollar estimate. So it was openness in the process itself that actually moved the bill because I had a lot of resistance internally from people who wouldn't even set it for a hearing. Control over the information meant in the legislature that you, as the legislature, knew what information any single constituent wanted because they had to call your office and tell you what bill number they wanted. So you knew what everybody was interested in. If somebody had a sudden urgent two in the morning to look for something, all they could do was write a letter and put a stamp on it to ask for it. So that was, I think, that's one of the... Reducing participation in order to make it easier to control. And that certainly is true when it comes to decision making and input. It's way easier to get through a planning commission agenda if there are 10 people who are paid by their money clients to represent their interest and nobody from the public who might, no group of 70 people each wanting two minutes. Democracy is messy and it takes time and people have to make hard decisions and choose between competing interests. If you set up a system that eliminates a lot of that, it just runs a lot more easily. The most efficient form of government is a dictatorship. It's very efficient. There's one person, all the decisions get made that way. There's no participation, no appeal, but there are no processes that take time. You either okay the well in the Gulf or you don't. There's no hearings about whether or not it's set up to be safe. As it turned out, there weren't any hearings on that. Except after the fact. I was struck by the institutional barriers that there were and part of it was that Mosea can't do this. So it was all about transfer protocol and we were all saying I'm trying to configure our on X law protocols and failing as much as succeeded. So just the whole way of thinking in the way the government had grown up was that things became available on paper. But we were 600 years past food. So a lot of it was just that. It's not evil intention. It's just that's the way it's always been done. And similarly contracts when they were put out for someone to publish something had exclusive rights in them. So that California did not have any control over its code of regulations. We weren't allowed to distribute or print or put a copy of the California Code of Regulations online because there was a 10-year contract I think it was bankrupt with not sure. And we had to wait until that was over before we could put our own information online. But it's important because the whole concept of democracy is that it is complicated and as society gets more complicated the decisions and the dilemmas are more complex. But the idea is that in any corner of it there will be some person or group of people who are extremely interested in that particular thing. Whether it be a planning commission agenda or the rules for reimbursement of doctors for Medicare or whatever it is. And so that not all of us have to either be involved or be involved in a lot of things. Small groups of people involved in very particular things will actually generate. The long-tail theory. The long-tail politics is some issue that some small group really cares about. This whole system works. Now we have this greater challenge with tools that have moved us from I give you access to my information. That was the first stage of it. I give you the legislative information online. The huge battle over that bill was whether we were going to charge for it. The Senate put a hostile amendment in that bill that said we were going to charge for it. I think some bureaucrat had visions of a revenue source for the Senate. And I went home and had nightmares about Thomas Jefferson hawking the constitution on the home shopping channel. And I thought this is going to be a precedent for putting things online. It's never been done anywhere before. And if I allow this to be passed with a charging provision in it we'll never recover from it. And so I was ready to kill my own progeny. Unfortunately it wasn't necessary, but there's that piece of this too is that when you're doing this at the beginning you really have to be more careful about your compromises. It's everything that we do and now we're trying to figure out how to get people who are all interested in the same thing, not just to get the information and then provide feedback, but then to communicate this way too with each other and be more free flowing. It's impossible for any bureaucrat or politician to control that kind of energy. And I'm not even sure we know how to develop it in the best possible sense. It seems to me that there's a real challenge to develop institutions that work with some of this new technology. I think those of us who are technologists have seen this evolution happen again and again. And it gets misused terribly. We saw this with the World Wide Web where it became the blink tag. These web pages kind of flashed in that way. Eventually the market figured out that's not what we do. But even then we went down a certain path and it became more and more like broadcast. But then the market started to discover that there were different ways. They figured out that relevancy really mattered and they figured out how to apply relevancy to deliver better results became this priority of the company. Things changed. Now we're at that stage with social media. Big issues being raised about privacy. I think we're going to solve them. Being in a similar way with all this open government stuff, there's going to be a lot that goes wrong. There's going to be a lot that is hard. Everything from, hey, that discussion really did need to be private. There's going to be a lot of discussion about the constitution and the absence that we could never have done this to the public. There's a book called A Few Honest Man that kind of draws that out. We don't know the answers but I think we have to engage with how we move our democracy forward into a world of technology. We have hundreds of millions of people in this country. We don't have the way it was back in 1789. We have to figure out how to grow and adapt. As I told one senator who was in his 80s on that day in 1993, he said no one would use this. And I said it's not respectfully, it's not for you or even for me, it's about the kids who are in second grade now. That's long enough to go so that those kids are the kids who are part of the Obama generation. And they use it in ways that nobody can see. But we still have the problem of silos, the problem of government and bureaucrats thinking that it's their data and that they own it. Police departments thinking that the police reports are their property rather than public property. We have the challenges of figuring out how to handle error correction because there will never be a situation in which every single jot and tittle of government data that is made public is correct 100 percent. It's not in the private sector either but the consequences are different. I'm also thinking of the experience that Carl had when he was opening up various kinds of it was the congressional record so on social security record social security numbers of service members were in there. And that was always true. Transparency revealed the problem. It didn't cause the problem. And as a result of it being revealed it could be addressed. But there's a whole saying that it takes a human to error to really follow things up requires a computer. Yeah, that's fair. Because you can replicate the error at an alarming rate and speed. We have social security numbers in our UCC filings and I took down our whole UCC filings in 2007 for about three months probably one through redaction across and it's amazing what people will write it on the form where they're not supposed to. So you can't even do that with a computer. You have to have some eyeballs look at all the creative things that people did that aren't in touch. Let's come to some specific questions. So first of all I want to kind of get a sense. Is this a progressive versus a conservative issue or is this just non-political? I don't think there's anything that's non-political. But I don't think it necessarily divides right, left, or progressive conservative. And it also seems to depend so much on where you are. So when there's a struggle with this idea of particular access to primary leadership, any kind of open government. What are the fault lines? How do people come on one side or the other of that issue? What are the driving factors? We still have to get money from this or you mentioned control earlier. I can understand that the bureaucracies are drivers of control. But I think we then say the legislature. What are the sides? I think they are not much different now than they were in 1993. One of them is security. I had another legislator tell me somebody is going to get into this and change my votes on all the tax measures to look like on one of those goddamn tax and spend the liberals. And that could easily have gone the other way. So that is an issue. How do you know that the record that you're looking at is actually the record? How do you know that this? Are you looking at using digital signatures? I carried the digital signature built in California in 1995. We've had it for that long. I think the market went a different direction. We thought we would establish the infrastructure to take advantage of it. It just turns out that's not right. And you well know we have a lot of problems that we haven't addressed with terms of service being in a click through the reality of consent. It also comes back to what lessons can we really get from technology. You're right when you say that the market took a different solution. The market took the solution of error correction, not error prevention. If you look at how Wikipedia works you look at how Google doesn't give you the one true result. I'm feeling lucky it's not the default mode. It's actually hey here it gives 10 results. You don't like those? Go to the second page. I always go at least to the fifth page even if I look at it because I want something that's not obvious. Also thinking there's this great startup here in the Bay Area called CrowdFlower that works on using Amazon's mechanical work. Again it's a lot of the work that they do that drives their business is crowd sourcing error correction. Spam detection. In some sense I think algorithmic detection of forgeries is probably the way the market is going rather than over. Yeah and it is. I've made that point a lot with banking because banking people ask me about the e-signatures of competitions and you know can you compare the signature to a little scroll and what do they do with that banking thing and the answer is that is not how banks look for fraud. Banks to my knowledge never compare to scroll if you may know the grocery store with some signature they have. It's irrelevant. They're looking at patterns in the data. Absolutely. So and that's obviously less than the government needs to get with the technology. I don't know how to adapt that to things that have crucial impact to some person I mean with a banking area you can make up for it with money. We're not allowed to make up for an error in a UCC filing or a privacy breach or a privacy breach. Yeah the healthcare folks are resting under that. Yeah. I think we learned this morning that most cities sort of copyright over their laws and codes you know is that something that's just a matter of education or is there more to it you know I don't think here whether it's copyrighted or not as long as it's being accessible. I don't think that the legal argument about copyright is not that important. If it's there and it's accessible with no charge you got what you want. Yeah. And yet true it could be you know some administration in the future could change it so it's all better if you had the legal underpinnings correct. I think that follows. Once people get used to having it out and the world doesn't end and there's a lot of fear. When I first had an email address in 1995 for which I had to ask the speaker special permission because it had never been done. We were terrified. What were we going to get and how were we going to respond with it on more steps. We didn't print it on any kit for the first few months. I told the people what it was and I wrote it and they're still legislators who don't have email addresses because they don't want to deal with that. Or they have an email address that's behind this such a complicated web form that it's again a way of getting access. Yeah, so do we have any questions from the audience? Five minutes. Okay. Hi, I'm Brian Carver and maybe it's because I was on the IP panel earlier but I want to challenge the idea that free public access is all that really matters when it comes to these codes and so on. Yeah, that's really not what I meant. I don't think it's all that matters but I do think that in large measure where the law goes follows people's changing views about what it should be. That's why we're getting changes in gay marriage. That didn't proceed cultural shifts. It follows cultural shifts. Yeah, I guess the main one was if all we have is free public access and there is some assertion of copyright, then look back to Tim's vending machine model of government. The municipality has produced the code. Here it is. We've provided it to you. But that's all you can do is eat the candy bar and you're done. You can't reuse. You can't build services on top of it. It's not a platform that innovators can take and reshape or reuse in creative ways. Well, if the method in which something is made available precludes use in those ways then the statement I made is not applicable. It has to be made available in a way that is primary. We have a workshop in 2007, machine readable, machine processable but also with terms of use that allow that kind of creative reuse. And certainly people like West have lots of creative things they do with materials they get but that's because it's under their control. It's not really available for entrepreneurs to come up with new applications. Other questions from the audience? So let's kind of come back just sort of just to sort of your experience here in the state of California in so obviously a fairly trying time from a budget point of view. A lot of people saying this is fundamentally broken. How do you place open government in the context of the kind of breakdowns that we're starting to see in the accepted ways of doing things? Opportunity or threat to open government? Well, I don't think it's a threat because I think where we are in California is that the openness that we've created now cannot be taken away without a huge outcome. I don't think there's any way in which we would find access to the code or various other things that California could be taken down without a huge stink. And at this point the infrastructure is in place for those kinds of things. But budget does play an issue in at least my ability to go further than I have. And we have by comparison, California has a great financial disclosure from campaigns. It's not even near of what I would like it to be. But I'm not even going to ask right now for funding to redo that. I'm operating with 25% less budget than I had three years ago. And we're looking at core functions. But some of this openness actually is money saving. So the more I can get statements of information corporate statements of information filed online and made accessible online, the fewer people I need whose job it is to type in the contents of a piece of paper. So some of it really works together. And you can do the small pieces. What you can't do right now is a big new project for which there's not some dedicated funding. I'm more wondering if there's a point in where the operation of our government is so broken that we get an opportunity to think fresh thoughts. I had a wonderful Samuel Johnson quote where he said nothing to concentrate the mind like a prospect of being handed a fortnight. And yet it hasn't seemed to happen in California yet, despite the prospect of being handed a fortnight more than once. I think, you know, the system in California is so complicated that most people, if they start taking a look at it, throw up their hands quite quickly and say, I just don't have time for this. And I have to ask to what extent the initiative process, which is a kind of over government, is responsible for that level of complexity and whether there are lessons there for where, how you want to structure openness. And we have carved up revenue streams into this pocket, that pocket over here in such a way that I think when I left the legislature, the legislature had control of something like 11% of the general funding. So, you know, I think that is a key lesson from technology. Pretty likely you do need to do it over time. You don't kind of keep making your operating system more and more complex. It becomes more and more. It is like that. If you keep adding to the software, every suit it takes 5 minutes for the system to load and then something else comes along that people move to that. Unfortunately it's not that easy to change code. As we were all finding out. There are people like you who have made an enormous difference and I just want to thank you very much for the work that you do. I'm glad to see a large group of people who understand the value of doing this and that it's become really a part of the framework for the way we see who we are as a people. We see ourselves as having access online and we agitate if we don't have enough. It's just it's really great to see. We do have still a lot of lessons. We have a ways to go. Really harnessing the power of citizen input from multiple directions is something that I don't think I've seen a good model for use yet. But maybe someone who's listening to this can help with something like that. I certainly have seen some great examples in crisis response for example. If you look at the response in the state department very much, great example of how they harness social media how they harness interesting open source projects. They did lead the effort but they created context and supported it. Just amazing constellation of companies and tools brought together to really create a crowd sourcing platform to say there's somebody under a building right here. This guy from Patrick Meyer from Mooshahidi which is this project in Kenya that was originally designed for reporting election violence but has now turned out to be a crowd sourcing platform for originally any kind of important real time data that he found himself. The US Marine Corps is taking action for me because they didn't know that he wasn't in the country. It's astonishing in emergency situations what we've created but I noted at the Obama inauguration we had a bunch of people who were shut off into the purple tunnel where they stayed during the entire inauguration called the purple tunnel of doom they got told your line should go around this way and it never opened up. They never got back into the mainstream of the line and part of the problem there was that there was very limited signal access because it was in the tunnel. But it is the place where I want to see this develop more robustly is in the policy making context not in the response context but in the context of a discussion about for example K-12 curriculum which I think we've divided K-12 curriculum up in a way where instead of integrating civic education as part of the science curriculum so if you're doing a unit on climate change you then say well who makes these decisions and class everybody has to write a letter to somebody or we're going to do a class project on getting dump trucks in our town on something other than fossil fuel so that you link the underlying subject matter to what happens in our government political system the only way we're going to do that is if we get a lot of people who don't currently talk to each other talking to each other across a very broad spectrum of people and it's really a big policy change to change that in the civil and civic education classes so we give you all this information online but we don't tell you how any of it looks and what to do with it when you're in school so a big challenge ahead is not just access to the materials but also the hard work of actually making change happen educating the next generation of citizens of showing people what the laws and levers are that control our democracy so they can actually do something intelligent with it that's what I'm thinking about right now I'm past we have to provide access I assume that the places where it's not there that good citizens will rise up and that it will happen but then how can we take this technology and go one step further with it so that we have a healthier democracy with more people engaged and understanding what the issues are so that we don't get so many people saying well it doesn't really affect my life you know what I'm saying which I just always have to be very careful before I respond to that we all received our election packets recently from our signature audience they're black and white we removed the red and the blue ink and saved 625,000 dollars thank you very much