Alon Peled

Abstract. A growing number of public organizations outsource the construction of critical Information Technology (IT) sys-tems. The current public administration theory depicts a world in which the authoritative bureaucrat controls the subjugated vendor. Yet, following three years of ...

T he Y2K problem (also known as the "Millenium bug") has become an enormously popular topic of concern and discussion. A large number of Web sites, TV programs, newspapers and magazines, and popular books explain how a sensible computer engineering decision ...

Web-based learning environments are popular on campus nowadays. These software packages improve communication between instructor and students, enable students to take charge over their learning processes, and provide feedback data to the instructor. Universities and ...

Our geographic scope in this analysis is the Levant: Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and the Palestinian Authority. There are three reasons for this narrow focus. First, the Arab states in this circle seem to constitute a technological-economic sphere. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) of the ...

ADMINISTRATION & SOCIETY / January 2001 Peled / TWO TALES OF ONLINE GOVERNMENT Can the new information and communication technologies (ICTs) such as the Internet change the power relationships within a bureaucracy? The dominant centralization ap-proach ...

This paper develops and tests a theoretical model, which proposes to examine cities’ commitment to the concept of open government data (OGD) according to three typical levels. Level 1, Way of Life, indicates high commitment to OGD; Level 2, On the Fence, represents either a low or erratic commitment; Level 3, Lip Service, refers to either scarce or no commitment. This study shows that these types exhibit distinct behavior in four key indicators: (1) Rhythm, (2) Coverage, (3) Categorization, and (4) Feedback. This theoretical framework is examined using longitudinal mixed-method analysis of the OGD behavior of 16 US cities over a period of four years, using a corpus of municipal quantitative metadata and primary qualitative data. This methodology allows us to represent, for the first time, cities’ evolving OGD commitment, or “OGD heartbeat”.

The computer systems of government agencies are notoriously complex. New technologies are piled on older technologies, creating layers that call to mind an archaeological dig. Obsolete programming languages and closed mainframe designs offer barriers to integration with other agency systems. Worldwide, these unwieldy systems waste billions of dollars, keep citizens from receiving services, and even -- as seen in interoperability failures on 9/11 and during Hurricane Katrina -- cost lives. In this book, Alon Peled offers a groundbreaking approach for enabling information sharing among public sector agencies: using selective incentives to "nudge" agencies to exchange information assets. Peled proposes the establishment of a Public Sector Information Exchange (PSIE), through which agencies would trade information.

After describing public sector information sharing failures and the advantages of incentivized sharing, Peled examines the U.S. Open Data program, and the gap between its rhetoric and results. He offers examples of creative public sector information sharing in the United States, Australia, Brazil, the Netherlands, and Iceland. Peled argues that information is a contested commodity, and draws lessons from the trade histories of other contested commodities -- including cadavers for anatomical dissection in nineteenth-century Britain. He explains how agencies can exchange information as a contested commodity through a PSIE program tailored to an individual country's needs, and he describes the legal, economic, and technical foundations of such a program. Touching on issues from data ownership to freedom of information, Peled offers pragmatic advice to politicians, bureaucrats, technologists, and citizens for revitalizing critical information flows.

Government Accountability Office reports and secondary sources reveal that the U.S. Congress has employed three distinct legislative approaches to address the federal counterterrorism information-sharing impasse: coerce, consent, and coax. One main example illustrates each approach: the Homeland Security Information Network project exemplifies the coerce approach; Intellipedia illustrates the consent approach; the office of the Program Manager of the Information Sharing Environ- ment exemplifies the coax approach. Secondary examples are utilized including those of regional Fusion Centers, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the National Counterterrorism Center. The merits and challenges of the three approaches are discussed and compared. The conclusion proposes ideas for using the approach most appropriate to specific counterterrorism challenges.

Lay summary:
The article explains the three key U.S. congressional legislative approaches to improve information sharing in the federal counterterrorism domain. These approaches are based on either coercing federal agencies, calling on their voluntary consent, or coaxing them with funding or legislation, to share information. The article analyzes each approach and proposes the integrative strategy of employing one or a combination of these approaches to suit each separate information sharing challenge.

Publication significance:
Effective information sharing in the U.S. federal counterterrorism domain is a critical challenge that presents security dilemmas but is essential to protect national interests and save lives. U.S. Congress is a pivotal body in addressing this challenge. The article categorizes and analyzes U.S. congressional approaches to improve counterterrorism information sharing. An innovative strategy of integrative application of the approaches based on individual case assessment is proposed.

DOI: 10.13140/2.1.1454.1769
Open Data (OD) programs have become popular. OD proponents argue that OD programs are necessary to reinvigorate participatory democracy and active citizenship. However, the debate between proponents and critics of these programs relies on anecdotal data. The paper describes a methodological innovation (dubbed “The Public Sector Information Exchange (PSIE)”) to automatically capture, process, store, and analyze metadata information about the Open Data (OD) information assets published by government agencies at any level of government (e.g., federal, national, regional, municipal) worldwide. The analysis of the initial PSIE data (currently only about some datasets published by U.S. federal agencies) supports the argument that OD programs have become the playground of a small number of agencies and that many OD information assets are either incomprehensible or impossible to find. The concluding section of the paper discusses how to incentivize agencies to improve cooperation with OD programs.

Open Data (OD) pinned agencies on the horns of a transparency dilemma: Surrender valuable datasets to comply with new OD policy, or resist freeing valuable data and face criticism from the public, the media, and politicians. Agencies have developed creative data release strategies to confront this dilemma. Public administration scholars cannot afford to miss this rare opportunity to empirically examine when, why, and how agencies agree to release the most valuable resource of the 21st century—information. The study proposes that agencies carefully manipulate the type and timing of dataset release. The paper suggests that agencies sometimes adopt “data branding”, as seen on OD portals, or “data hugging”, as on for-sale sites such as the American National Technical Information Service (NTIS) site. Most agencies employ mixed strategies: “hugging” certain datasets and “branding” others. Given the value of data to agencies, incentives may offer a solution to free valuable data. A new “Agencies and Open Data” research program is proposed and the paper describes how a research team is currently constructing a large corpus of data to support this research program.

ince 2009, eighty-one countries subscribed to President Obama’s Open Government program including its dominant Open Data (OD) component. Do OD 2.0 plans address the problems detected during the first generation of this program (2010-2012)? If not, how can these plans be improved? The article is a review of the main lines of criticism of the original OD program based on lessons learned worldwide. OD1.0 suffered from bad design, flawed execution, and adverse consequences. OD 2.0 plans fail to address the critical flaws of the first OD program. The analysis of OD 1.0 reveals two primary lessons for converting OD 2.0 into a more focused and effective openness program: OD 2.0 architects must consider agencies’ data release strategies, and avoid creating a transparency “policy bubble”. Numerous countries followed the path of the original American OD program; therefore, the future of this program will have an impact on bureaucracies worldwide.

Since 2009, eighty-one countries subscribed to President Obama’s Open Government program including its dominant Open Data (OD) component. Do Open Data 2.0 plans address the problems detected during the first generation of this program (2010-2012)? If not, how can these plans be improved? The paper is the first-ever review of the main lines of criticism of the original OD program based on lessons learned worldwide. OD1.0 suffered from bad design, flawed execution, and adverse consequences. Open Data 2.0 plans fail to address the critical flaws of the first Open Data program. The analysis of OD1.0 reveals two primary lessons for converting OD2.0 into a more focused and effective openness program: OD2.0 architects must consider agencies’ data release strategies, and avoid creating a transparency “policy bubble”. Numerous countries followed the path of the original American Open Data program; therefore, the future of this program will have an impact on bureaucracies worldwide.

What role does politics play in the emerging Big Data domain? The paper argues that Big Data political power struggles surface at three distinct levels of analysis: the social sciences, the information state, and bureaucratic politics. At the social sciences level of analysis, Big Data threatens to divide social scientists into antagonistic methodological camps as it does not conform to traditional research techniques. At the information state level of analysis, a handful of powerful agencies and corporations created around data generation are consolidating their competitive advantage and are unlikely to support important data access and privacy protections. The one brighter spot for Big Data is found inside governmental bureaucracy. Here, trends such as “governance by numbers” at the sub-national level and mutually profitable data exchanges at the national level suggest that Big Data may propel agencies to share information better. The article concludes with a proposal to view Dr. John Snow and his work to stop the cholera epidemic in central London in 1854 as an early harbinger of the Big Data movement. Snow’s work displays redeeming features that may mitigate less desirable effects of Big Data projects across the three levels of analysis. These features are a sense of purpose, ingenuity, clever data collection design, collaboration, humility and humanity.

Lay summary:
The paper explores the role of political power struggles in the emergent big data domain. It finds that power struggles manifest in three arenas: the social sciences, the information state, and public sector bureaucracy. The most positive opportunities for utilizing and advancing big data are in the arena of government bureaucracy where big data may prompt agencies to engage in more efficient data sharing.

Publication significance:
Big data and its impact on the citizen, society and the state is of increasing importance in the information state. This timely paper examines the political power struggles that influence the potential of big data to benefit or burden citizens and the state. The paper's findings (that big data is potentially most beneficial at the level of government bureaucracy where it can prompt agencies to share data more efficiently) present a focused future direction for big data research and innovation.

How can agencies imbued with centuries-old public sector ethos jointly create a successful commerce-oriented enterprise with a thrift-focused organizational identity? How do successful political entrepreneurs overcome the concern that agencies will free-ride in the process of founding a new inter-organizational institution in an emergent technological domain? The paper argues that minor monetary incentives can nudge self-interested agencies to join a new institution and remain cooperative thereafter. Over time, these incentives thicken the bonds of trust among member organizations and reduce uncertainty regarding how other organizations will behave in an uncertain future. An incentives-cooperation-incentives cycle is born, that prompts member organizations to delegate additional powers and responsibility to the new institution. Through this process, the new institution grows to acquire an independent and unique organizational identity different from the identities of its member organizations. This argument is assessed empirically by comparing the efforts of National Mapping and Cadastral Agencies (NMCAs) in Australia and Europe to develop new continental geo-spatial institutions over the past two decades so they could survive in a new and competitive environment dominated by private sector products such as GoogleEarth.

Why and how do state organizations develop the impetus to negotiate and create an inter-state institution to improve cooperation in a new domain? This paper argues that minor monetary incentives can nudge state organizations to work more closely together to create a new institution in a new issue-domain. Over time, these incentives thicken the bonds of trust among members and reduce uncertainty regarding how other members will behave in the future. Eventually, the member organizations agree to delegate additional power and responsibility to the new institution. Six theoretical conjectures are tested based on the pool of variables developed in 2001 by the authors of the Rational Design of International Institutions approach (RD). Three of these conjectures refine existing RD concepts (“Distribution” and “Number”). The other three conjectures compliment RD theory by analyzing the impact of a new variable (“Selective Incentives”) on the relationship among existing RD concepts (Distribution, Uncertainty, Control, Scope, and Flexibility). The conjectures are examined against the first-ever political history accounts of the creation of the Australian Public Sector Mapping Agencies (PSMA) agency and the European EuroGeographics (EG) organization in the new geo-spatial domain.

The first five conjectures were strengthened by the empirical data. There are insufficient measurements to assess the validity of the 6th conjecture. Both PSMA and EG went through a single external crisis (2008) so it is difficult to conclude if hard incentives account for more Flexibility. The RD framework proved to be a robust and flexible approach for a study about the ‘creation years’ of new institutions.

The PSMA-EG comparison highlights the promise of the Selective Incentives concept. Minor monetary incentives intrigued the Australian mapping agencies just enough to join PSMA and remain cooperative thereafter. In contrast, EG grew to become a lobby because its founders failed to adopt a business model that would entice members to remain engaged with EG.

The Australian case study teaches an additional important lesson that is not fully captured by the RD approach. It is a lesson about the power of imagination while constructing a new inter-state institution. The Australians, imagined, dared, worked hard, took manageable risks, and created a new business model. PSMA Australia and its shareholding agencies are benefiting today from decisions made twenty years ago to walk down a non-traditional path to meet the uncertain digital future. Minor incentives can go a long way towards nudging agencies to join a new institution and remain cooperative thereafter.

Since 2009, eighty-one countries subscribed to President Obama’s Open Government
program including its dominant Open Data (OD) component. Do Open Data 2.0
plans address the problems detected during the first generation of this program
(2010-2012)? If not, how can these plans be improved? The paper is the first-ever
review of the main lines of criticism of the original OD program based on lessons
learned worldwide. OD1.0 suffered from bad design, flawed execution, and adverse
consequences. Open Data 2.0 plans fail to address the critical flaws of the first Open
Data program. The analysis of OD1.0 reveals two primary lessons for converting
OD2.0 into a more focused and effective openness program: OD2.0 architects must
consider agencies’ data release strategies, and avoid creating a transparency “policy
bubble”. Numerous countries followed the path of the original American Open Data
program; therefore, the future of this program will have an impact on bureaucracies
worldwide.

Since his first election in late 2008, President Obama has launched a blitzkrieg campaign to advance the Open Data Program (www.data.gov). This program dictates that government agencies release data on the Web, free of charge, in a readable format. The Open Data program claims that citizens will then download datasets and develop effective applications. Open Data supporters claim that this program will increase governmental transparency. Fifty-five countries (including Israel) adopted Open Data. Open Data fans describe Open Data as magic pixie-dust that can heal any illness of “middle age” democracies.
Yet Open Data supporters refuse to acknowledge critical flaws in the design, execution, and consequences of the program. Design flaws include an ambiguous Open Data definition, and unrealistic goals and project plan. Execution flaws contain lack of cooperation from public sector agencies, decontextualizing data to the point where it looses meaning, and the hidden, high cost of the program. Finally, Open Data has sacrificed privacy; increased the “data divide” between already empowered populations and weaker populations; and taught politicians, bureaucrats, and corporate executives how to “game the system” for private gain.
The paper urges politicians to develop a different type of transparency program that metaphorically resembles a restaurant kitchen. In this kitchen, the (transparency) chef and his crew must employ different tools and ingredients to prepare a good dish; the restaurant guests (the citizens) who enjoy the (transparency) dish do not care how it is prepared – as long as it is tasty! The paper concludes with concrete suggestions how to equip and operate this “Transparency Kitchen” to avoid “Open Data 1.0” pitfalls.

The paper employs three case studies of three separate computer projects to illustrate how information sharing among public sector agencies can be incentivized. The United States Department of Homeland Security's Homeland Security Information System (HSIN) project demonstrates that bureaucratic politics must take primacy over technology, to ensure efficient information sharing. The paper then proposes to advance information sharing via a Public Sector Information Exchange (PSIE). The Dutch RINIS project illustrates the potential success of such an information sharing arena. The deNovis bureaucratic language computerization project demonstrates the possibilities of automating a bureaucratic language to facilitate information sharing transactions in the proposed PSIE.

Information sharing failures continue to haunt the public sectors of numerous countries. Over the past decade, several countries introduced new and interesting marketplace-oriented mechanisms to incentivize public organizations to improve information exchange. Three critical challenges assail the concept of empowering public sector organizations to exchange data among themselves for compensation. The paper argues that these three challenges represent three critical trade offs that politicians, bureaucrats and citizens must take into account in all matters regarding improving public sector information sharing. The spirited public debate in Iceland over the Health Sector Database Act of December 1998 demonstrates ways to overcome the trade off between information sharing and the ideal of active citizenship. The fascinating Australian CRIMTRAC case study illustrates means through which the trade off between information sharing and privacy concerns can be addressed. The Dutch RINIS case study illustrates how we can overcome the tension between the idea of public organizations owning their data and the ideal that the public is the true owner of all public sector data. By combining ideas from these Icelandic, Dutch, and Australian experiments we can advance the theory and practice of establishing marketplace mechanisms to support information exchange within the public sector.

Thus far, fifteen countries joined President Obama's Open Data Program (http://www.data.gov/opendatasites#mapanchor). This program demands that governmental departments and agencies publish their most valuable data sets on www.data.gov free of charge in a downloadable and open format accessible to anyone. By so doing, the Open Data program aspires to increase transparency, collaboration and participation within the government and between the government and its citizens. Israel too has recently adopted this Open Data program (http://www.shituf.gov.il/). The paper challenges the fundamental assumption of the Open Data program which claims that politicians can effectively change the behavior of bureaucrats. The data analysis of the USA Open Data program (www.data.gov) demonstrates, for the first time, that most federal agencies have adopted a passive-aggressive attitude towards President Obama's Open Data program. The paper highlights the inherent contradiction between Open Data's transparency goal ("all data must be freed") and bureaucratic agencies' goal of trading in data with other agencies. The paper also proposes that agencies comprehended that Open Data exacerbates the three critical back-office data integration problems of inclusion, confusion and diffusion. Therefore, agencies succeeded to appear as if they are cooperating with Open Data while, in fact, effectively ignoring the program. The paper concludes with a recommendation to abandon the futile Open Data program and, instead, adopt an alternative and much more effective marketplace approach to incentivize bureaucratic departments and agencies to better share electronic data.

Lay Summary:
The article analyzes performance data from President Obama's flagship Open Data Program. The Open Data Program encouraged federal agencies to publish government data on the Open Data website to increase government transparency and collaboration. It inspired similar programs worldwide. The data analysis reveals that poor program performance: Most agencies either did not participate in the program or participated minimally; data published was often incomprehensible or not of high-quality.

Publication significance:
President Obama's Open Data Program presented a fresh approach to increasing government transparency and inter-government information sharing. The article presents the first analysis of Open Data Program performance data and finds that the program performed poorly. It is essential that future government transparency initiatives review these results and engage with understanding why the Open Data Program did not thrive.

President Obama’s inaugural flagship Open Data pro- gram emphasizes the values of transparency, participa- tion, and collaboration in governmental work. The Open Data performance data analysis, published here for the first time, proposes that most federal agencies have adopted a passive–aggressive attitude toward this pro- gram by appearing to cooperate with the program while in fact effectively ignoring it. The analysis further suggests that a tiny group of agencies are the only “real players” in the Data.gov web arena. This research highlights the con- tradiction between Open Data’s transparency goal (“All data must be freed”) and federal agencies’ goal of collab- orating with each other through data trade. The research also suggests that agencies comprehended that Open Data is likely to exacerbate three critical, back-office data-integration problems: inclusion, confusion, and dif- fusion. The article concludes with a proposal to develop an alternative Federal Information Marketplace (FIM) to incentivize agencies to improve data sharing.

Lay Summary:
The article analyzes performance data from President Obama's flagship Open Data Program. The Open Data Program encouraged federal agencies to publish government data on the Open Data website to increase government transparency and collaboration. It inspired similar programs worldwide. The data analysis reveals that poor program performance: Most agencies either did not participate in the program or participated minimally; data published was often incomprehensible or not of high-quality.

Publication significance:
President Obama's Open Data Program presented a fresh approach to increasing government transparency and inter-government information sharing. The article presents the first analysis of Open Data Program performance data and finds that the program performed poorly. It is essential that future government transparency initiatives review these results and engage with understanding why the Open Data Program did not thrive.