 I'm really pleased with these next two speakers who have been able to join us. Many of you may know Tim O'Reilly, Tim is the head of O'Reilly Media. One of the early publishers on the internet published The Whole Internet Guide. I actually began buying his books in the late 80s when there were many people writing books about computer networks. He is famous for his books, but he's even more famous for having help point 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 a government 2.0 expo and summits, which have served a very similar purpose for people working on getting government online in a more truthful way. We're also very pleased to have our Secretary of State, the Hon. Deborah Bowen, who has been an advocate for putting government online since her dates 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. And 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 the 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. And so 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. So I want to tell you a little bit about my thinking of open government, which some of us can call them gov2o because of the analogy to web2o. And I started obviously getting very interested in this back because I worked with Carl as far back as 1993, 1994, supporting his work. He is, in any ways, the father of the open government movement. The idea that we can use the internet to give access to the workings in government today to produce by government. But I got really very interested most recently 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 end of getting elected. But it struck me that if all this was was a revolution in politics, that was much less interesting than if it became a revolution in government. And so I started to think more about what did it mean for us to apply the technologies of web2o, whether it's social media or cloud computing, or these new kinds of services that are really at the heart of web2o. Data driven services, data driven applications that literally harness 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 in graded or in science. It seemed to me that 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 with 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 a story that I thought, oh, this is going to be way, way too geeky. 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. We have a 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, it looked a lot like the way government software might be procured. You put out, 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. So we have this fundamental contradiction that is creating great schisms in our society and in our governments. 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 society. Now, government has always acted many ways like a platform provider. So, for example, when Eisenhower built or commissioned the international and the U.S. highway system, they didn't specify what was put at the end of the highways. They said, oh, we're going to build infrastructure that is going to lift the capabilities of our society, the same thing with rural electrification. I think that there's some great stories. More recently, the internet, the GPS system, President Reagan in 1982, made a very, very important decision to open up this military asset for security 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 information, this huge start of culture of big entrepreneurial opportunities. And that's a great government as a platform lesson. 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 earlier in the years, which is a big boondoggle. And yet, it was the kind of investment in a platform that took us a long way forward. Look at weather, the same thing. 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 boys, ships, from independent weather stations, and organizes it, and then passes it out to the private sector within commercialized data. And 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 designed government acting like a platform provider rather than like an application provider delivering the actual end user services. And that, of course, is where we go wrong a lot with government. We started to treat it like a vending machine. Donald Kettle in his book, The Next Government of the United States, uses that kind of vending machine in government. We have this idea that we put in our taxes and get out our candy bars in the form of road schools taxis. 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, or we think constantly much, we get to shake the vending machine. And that's our idea. And, you know, so, you know, and you see that that's fundamental for our model. We want to move away from vending machine to government and into a model where government is providing capabilities that allow us to do things for ourselves. 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 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 comments 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 it. That was why we had a PC relish. So, then you start looking at the situation. Documenting this workshop where access to primary legal materials is difficult, is expensive. Somehow this thing which belongs to all of us as a nation is locked up in a variety of ways is made inaccessibly. 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 for democracy? And with that, I think I'm just thinking about this. Deborah Vaughn is actually doing things about this for the last couple of decades. And I'd love to hear your perspectives on why 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, to make these sort of backdoor deals that end up favoring some small number of parties and not creating that explosion that we see with open platforms? Great. You know, I started into this both as a practicing lawyer in the 80s and then as a volunteer, I guess you would call him a community activist. You're a lawyer and you're willing to do volunteer work. You have an endless supply of clients, as I did. Somehow I tried to make my paying clients subsidize all the hours I was doing 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're 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 it was, you had to drive down to the city hall and look at the postings on the bulletin board. And then maybe if you were there when they were open, which if you got 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 in general is, in the city council or planning commission. And the city of Santa Monica really changed things by putting up a dial bulletin board of planning commission on jambles. And that was the one model that I was familiar with that gave people access. So at least you could stop running to the 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 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 single viewpoint. Our tax dollars paid to create all this information. And that was the beginning of this for me. I started out with the bullet board concept and a couple of guys from Silicon Valley and there were guys who 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 $800,000 for taking the information you had to make being available online. It's a lot like Carl's story with the SEC. 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 $800,000 estimate. So it was openness in the process itself that actually moved the bill because I had a lot of resistance internally when people wouldn't even set it for a computer. 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. So we got a sudden urgent two in the morning to look for something. All they could do was write a letter for a stamp on it to ask for it. So that was, I think, one of the... Reducing participation in order to make it easier to work. And that certainly is true when it comes to decision-making and input. It's way easier to get to a tenement commission agenda if there are ten people who are paid by their money clients to represent their interests as nobody from the public, like no group of 70 people each wanting two minutes. If democracy is messy, 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. And the most efficient form of governorship 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's no processes that take time. You know, 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. Well, as it turned out, there weren't any hearings on that anyway. It's an act of the past. But, you know, I was struck by the institutional barriers that there were, and part of it was that, you know, Mosaic had to do with that. So it was all, you know, a biotransfer protocol, and we were all trying to figure our ex-on-ex-law protocols and failing as much as succeeding. But, 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 that. And so a lot of it is just that it's not evil intention. It's just that's the way it's always been done. And similarly, contracts were put out for somebody 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 on top of the California Code of Regulations online because it was a 10-year contract. I think it was bankrupt with New Hampshire. 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, effectively. The long-tail politics is some issue that some small group really cares about. Right. And that was Wilson's point. Now we have this greater challenge with tools that have moved us from I give you just 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's never 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 the charging provision, it will never recover from it. So I was ready to kill my own project. Fortunately, 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 compromises. But 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 in a much 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. Yeah, 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. Some new technology comes in, and it gets misused terribly. We saw this with the World Wide Web where it became the blink tag. I'm just, these web pages kind of flash back. Eventually, the market figured out, no, no, that's not what we do. But even then, we went down a certain path of it. It became more and more like broadcast. But then the market started to discover, no, no, there were different ways. Google figured out the relevancy really mattered and they figured out how to apply relevancy to deliver better results became this paradigmatic company. Things changed. Now we're at that stage of social media. Big issues being raised about privacy. I think we're going to solve them. The thing is, 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 hate, that discussion, really do need to be private. If you go back and read the accounts of the writing of the Constitution, you know, it happens that we've never done this in public. There's a book called A Few Honest Men 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 now. The way it was back in 1789 is not the way it is today. We have to figure out how to grow and adapt. Well, and we have. Because I told one senator who was in his 80s on that day in 1983, 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 kids who are in second grade now. It's long enough that those kids are the kids who are part of the Obama generation. And they use it in ways that nobody could have foreseen. 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 these 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%. And it's not in the private sector either of the consequences. I'm also thinking of the experience that Carl had when he was opening up various kinds of, it was the congressional record, social security record. Social security numbers of service 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 that old 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. When we had social security numbers down our whole New Zealand violence in 2007 for about three months, all of them were redaction across. And it's amazing what people were writing on the form where they're not supposed to. So if 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 used to. So let's come to some kind of specific questions. So, first of all I kind of get a sense. Is this a progressive versus a conservative issue or is this just not political? I don't think there's anything that's non-political. But I don't think it necessarily implies right, left, or progressive conservative. And it also seems to depend so much on where you are from my view. So when there's a struggle with this idea in particular of access to primary leases but certainly to 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? Oh wait, we still have to we have to get money from this or if you mentioned control earlier I can understand that the bureaucracies are drivers of control but I don't think what's the 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 I'm one of those goddamn taxes and liberals and that could easily have gone the other way so that is an issue. How do you know that the record that we're looking at is actually the record? How do you know that those? Are you looking at using digital signatures for that? I carried the digital signature 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 where we've gone and you will know we have a lot of problems that we haven't addressed in terms of service being in a click-through the reality of consent is nobody reads those taxes also comes back to what lessons do 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 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 here there's 10 results you don't like those if I always thought at least to the fifth page because I want something that's not obvious I was thinking there's this great startup here in the Bay Area called CrowdFlower that works on using Amazon's Mechanical Turk again it's a lot of it the work that they do that drives the business is crowd sourcing error correction spam detection so in some sense I think algorithmic sort of detection of forgeries is probably the way the market is going rather than over absolutely and it is and I make that point a lot with banking because banking people ask me about e-signatures competitions and can you compare the signature to a little scroll and what do they do with that banking thing that is not how banks look for fraud banks to my knowledge never prepare for scroll if you made a grocery store with some signature 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 to adapt that to things that have crucial impact to some person with a banking area you can make up for money we're not allowed to make up for an error in the UCC filing or a privacy breach the healthcare folks are wrestling hard with that yeah so I think we learned this morning most cities sort of copyright over the laws and codes you know is that something that's just a matter of education or is there more to it than that I don't really care whether it's copyrighted or not as long as it's made accessible I don't think that the legal argument about copyright is not that important it's there and it's accessible with no charge and yet it could be some administration in the future could change and so it's always better if you have the legal argument on this I think that follows people get used to having it out in the world doesn't it and there's a lot of fear when I first had an email address in 1995 which I had to ask the speaker special permission we were terrified what were we going to get how were we going to respond we didn't print it on anything but it was our order and there were still legislators who don't have the legal argument because they don't have the legal argument or they have an email address that's behind it's such a complicated form that it's a game access so do we have any questions from the audience 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 that's really not right I don't think it's all that matters but I do think that from 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 perceive cultural shifts it follows cultural shifts yeah the main point was if all we have is free public access and there is some assertion of copyright then we're 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 or reuse in creative ways well if the method in which something is made available concludes use in those ways then the statement I made is not applicable and it has to be made available in a way that that is real primary we have a shot in 2007 exactly, 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 material that they get but that's because it's under their control it's not very available for entrepreneurs to come up with new applications so other questions from the audience so let's kind of come back just to sort of your experience here in the state of California 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 this opportunity or threat to open government well I don't think it's a threat but I think where we are in California is that the openness that we've created now cannot be taken away without each outcome I don't think there's any way in which you would find access to the code or various other numbers in California that would be taken down without a huge and at this point the infrastructure is in place for those kinds of things but budget does play an issue at least in my ability to go further than I have and we have by comparison California has a great financial disclosure for campaigns it's not a year of what I would like it to be but I'm not even going to ask for funding to be do that I'm operating on a 25% less budget than I had a few years ago and we're really 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 and so some of it really works together and you can do the small cases what you can't do right now what do you mean project for which there is not some dedicated information I'm more wondering if there's a point where the operation of our government is so broken that we get an opportunity to think fresh thoughts I've made a wonderful Samuel Johnson quote where he said it does nothing to concentrate the bottom like the prospect to be hanged in a fortnight and yet it hasn't seemed to happen in a fortnight 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 I have to ask to what extent the initiative process which is a kind of open government is responsible for that level complexity and whether there are lessons there for where how we want to structure openness we have carved up revenue streams into this pocket, that pocket over here in such a way that I think when I look at the legislature the legislature had control or something like 11% the general fund I think that is really a key lesson from technology so you don't kind of keep making your operating system more and more complex it becomes more if you get into the software pretty soon it takes five 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 phones as we are all finding out but there are people like you who have made an enormous difference and I just want to thank you very much for the work 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 we educate and we don't hate great to see we 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 views but maybe someone has listened to this for a think about I certainly have seen some great examples in crisis response for example in the state department very much great example of how they harness social media how they harness interesting open source projects they didn't necessarily lead the effort but they created context and supported it just amazing constellation of companies that tool brought together to create a crowdsourcing platform to say there's somebody under a building right here this guy from Patrick Meyer she's this project in Kenya originally designed for election violence but it's now going to have to be a crowdsourcing platform for originally any kind of important real time data so he found himself the US Marine Corps is taking a direction from me because they became important and they didn't know that he wasn't in a country that's right I think it's astonishing the urgency situations what we created but I noted that the Obama inauguration we had a bunch of people who were shuttled off under the purple tunnel where they stayed during the entire inauguration the purple tunnel of doom they got told your line should go around this way and they never opened up and they never got back into the mainstream of the line and part of the problem there was there was very limited signal access it was in the pool 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 that if you're doing climate change you then say well who makes these decisions and class everybody has to write a letter to somebody or do a class project on getting dump trucks in our town to run on something other than fossil fuel so that you link the underlying subject matter to what happens in our government system the only way we're going to do that is if we get a lot of people don't currently talk to each other talk to each other across a very broad spectrum of people and it's really a big policy change to change that what we did is we just dumped all the civic education classes so we give you all this information online but we don't tell you how any of it looks or what to do with it when you're in school so big challenge ahead is not just big challenge 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 where the novels and letters are that control our democracy so that we can actually do something intelligent that's what I'm thinking about right now I'm passed we have to provide access I assume that in a place 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 who engage and understanding what the issues are so that we don't get so many people saying well it doesn't really affect my life which I just always have to be very careful before I respond to that right well with that we all received our election packets recently from the city of Toronto so I'm black and white we removed the red and the blue ink and say 625 L's ten minutes and then we're going to start again so we're going to start about five minutes after one