Gartner analyst Andreas Di Maio says:

It should be used as a key tools in managing the direction of an open government and government transformation program. It consists of five levels, ranging from scenarios in which organizations are unaware of or denying the pressure for socialization and commoditization of processes, data and services, through to higher levels in which open government becomes a funded, enterprisewide strategy covering all relevant aspects of stakeholder engagement.

The ultimate level of maturity is where constituent engagement fuels service and operation transformation, leading to measurable and foreseeable improvements in the effectiveness and efficiency of government action.

The usual 5-level CMU CMMI rip-off.  Come on, guys, can’t you be more creative? GAO’s new EAMMF has 7 levels! As for the levels, I also notice that the model takes outside inspiration: At its heart, it is Obama’s model (Government should be Transparent, Participatory, and Collaborative), or what Beth Noveck calls collaborative democracy, with a bottom and top layer on.

Actually, I am not sure Obama and Noveck would see the three core values of open government as three steps on a maturity ladder. The values are interrelated in more complex ways, I’d say. But of course, the open gov agenda has indeed moved along similar stages (well, at least the open data focus has often been the first step towards open government).

Speaking of ladders, I too thought of Arnstein’s Ladder of Citizen Participation when I saw the maturity model. Not for it similarity though, but for its lack of the upper steps of the ladder with the higher degrees of citizens control.

I’d love to hear more about what Gartner sees in the Level5. Engaged? Somehow I doubt they mean citizen control …

Peter Krantz‘s Opengov.se is an one-man, non-governmental initiative that aims to highlight available public datasets in Sweden. The site contains a commentable catalog of government datasets, their formats and usage restrictions. A percent figure on the front page indicates the share of datasets that are available with an open license and in at least one open format; the figure is currently 17%.

The first goal of Opengov.se is “to highlight the benefits of open access to government data and explain how this is done in practice”. A second goal is “to enable public access to the documents that constitute the government decision-making process”. A first step in this direction was launched in September 2009 with the Govtrack section, that makes it possible to browse government committee instructions. The data is scraped from the government website. The data is then linked to committees, departments, laws and European union legal acts, enabling monitoring mechanisms such as when committes are formed in a particular area. For added coolness, an API based on Google’s GData protocol enables citizens to create custom feeds.

The Danish government has created their version with the Datakildekataloget (Data Source Catalogue).

Datakildekataloget is implemented as part of the Government’s multimillion dollars Digitaliser.dk, “a social network and tool for development, knowledge sharing and a forum for the digitisation of Denmark”, run by the National IT and Telecom Agency, ITST. Digitaliser.dk also hosts the Danish e-GIF (e-government interoperability framework) and a machine-readable version of FORM, the Government Business Reference Model.

Awesome! “Totally Two Dot Oh”, as the sign says. “Find the gold”.

Well, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Project NemDigitaliser is my ‘hands-on’ experiments with the data provided through these initiatives, and some technical notes about these (JSON and Callback, API use cases, Standards Catalogue API (e-GIF access), Data Source Catalogue API, and FORM API).

I may come across as grumpy in those notes, sorry. But it’s mainly because the idea of building a ‘social platform’ for providing structured data about government data is so intriguing. It’s very, uhm, meta. It’s Government Data².

This paragraph will serve other purposes than ‘just’ being the first words in this blog. More about that later. Later.