Like all large, long-lived organizations that believe they are immune from the brutal force with which technology and innovation reshape the world, the government, and especially the Federal government, struggles to understand whether they should do anything, and if so what, in leveraging the web and sharing information broadly.
(Note: The private sector is replete with examples of large, successful, entrenched organizations that thought themselves immune. Nortel, Polaroid, DEC, and Data General (below), are a few of many.)
Nonetheless, there are several initiatives underway, some of which have the potential to make an important difference. One of them concerns public access to Federally-funded research and began earlier this week with the Federal Office of Science and Technology Policy’s announcement of an online forum on this issue. The fact that the question is being asked at all, and that the discussion is public and online, is in and of itself progress.
However, the topics to be discussed—implementation (12/10 – 20), features and technology (12/21 – 31), and management (1/1 – 7)—suggest that the operating assumption may be that any new effort will require rules, infrastructure, and headcount.
My comment, as a resource-constrained entrepreneur (and taxed taxpayer), advocates a different approach:
While raising this issue is progress, it will only matter if and when something is implemented. Rather than cautious small measures made after lengthy deliberation and implemented over a period of years, why not take a revolutionary, innovative approach and do something simply, cheaply now.
Starting January 1:
- Grant applications are made public upon submission.
- Progress and results reports are made public upon submission.
- All research that includes Federal funding of any sort must disclose the amount of the funding and the agency giving the grant when the research is published or presented in any medium.This requires no cost and only a few minutes of time. Use existing documents, which means the cost of creation is zero, and existing publishing infrastructure, such as scribd.com, which is free to all and already used widely by the SEC and other Federal organizations. (My document stream on scribd, most of which concerns historic preservation.)
The excellent search (full-text, author, keywords, tags) will take care of discovery. Free tools enable embedding documents in web pages and blog posts.
Implementation is as simple as requiring all grant requests going forward to include a standard compliance line that places the burden on those submitting grant requests. And for those individuals, their only cost would be uploading already-created documents, which takes less than 5 min./document.
Finally, if instituting this in a few days seems unfathomable, make it January 1, 2011. Either way, let’s make it incredibly simple and straightforward to understand, very cheap/free to implement, and comprehensive in scope.
It will be interesting to see if and when progress is made. Meaningful change is very hard in any bureaucracy.
There is one area in which states do face a direct and compelling challenge that often motivates them to adopt new technology: Warfare.
The management team at Data General, a company founded in 1968 by former DEC execs, would have been advised to pay closer attention to the message in their own commercial. The company, which rode the minicomputer boom up and down as technology and competition evolved, was acquired by EMC (founded in 1979). EMC promptly closed down or sold off everything except Data General’s storage business.
