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March 11, 2013

Big Data, Smart Government

Isaac Lopez

Big Data is leading to the rise of smart government, says Alexander Evans, counselor for the British Diplomatic Service in discussing the impact that the tech trend is having on the interaction and accountability of government to its citizens.

Using India as an example, Evans explains how big data is forcing disruptive transformations in the way that governments operate. “India is seeing a dramatic change in the way in which government operates,” says Evans. “It used to be that you had to prove as a citizen why the government should tell you something about its activities. Now the government has to find a reason why it shouldn’t tell you something about its activities.”

 This new paradigm says Evans, has revolutionized the engagement of Indian citizens with their government. Similar shifts are happening in America, where local governments are democratizing data through open web portals (such as New York’s Open Data portal) that give citizens the opportunity to view any of the data recorded by the city. 

Additionally, groups like Code for America, a sort of peace corps for coders have cropped up, where citizens with coding skills volunteer a year of their time to tackling local challenges using these open big data repositories by the respective cities that they are assigned to. These projects work to create improvements in everything from budgeting, to solving problems in the justice system.

These results will be increasingly pronounced say some advocates as governments start making more compute power available through the cloud to their different agencies. According to some, sharing the resources, including data and compute power will serve to shorten planning and implementation cycles, leading to faster, more complete services.

 

Related items:

Civic Hacking Targets Optimizing Government 

New York City Calls in the Code Corps 

Big Data Cloud Combo Boosts Government 

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