Eight business models for government open data

Alex Howard has written an excellent article over at the O'Reilly Radar listing eight business models for government open data, a handy list for those in government agencies attempting to justify to senior management or Ministers why releasing government data is important and valuable.

The models listed in Alex's article, Open data economy: Eight business models for open data and insight from Deloitte UK, were identified by Michele Osella, a researcher and business analyst in the Business Model & Policy Innovation Unit at the Istituto Superiore Mario Boella in Italy.

(Note that these are classified in Europe as Public Sector Information (PSI) reuse cases.)

I've included the list of eight business models below and embedded Osella's presentation on the topic as a reference - it provides more detail and case studies on each.

From the article:

1. Premium Product / Service. HospitalRegisters.com
2. Freemium Product / Service. None of the 13 enterprises interviewed by us falls into this case, but a slew of instances may be provided: a classic example in this vein is represented by mobile apps related to public transportation in urban areas.
3. Open Source. OpenCorporates and OpenPolis
4. Infrastructural Razor Blades. Public Data Sets on Amazon Web Service
5. Demand-Orientated Platform. DataMarket and Infochimps
6. Supply-Oriented Platform. Socrata and Microsoft Open Government Data Initiative
7. Free, as Branded Advertising. IBM City Forward, IBM Many Eyes or Google Public Data Explorer
8. White-Label Development. This business model has not consolidated yet, but some embryonic attempts seem to be particularly promising.

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LiveBlog from Open Gov miniconf

Today I'm at the Open Government miniconference at Linux Conf 2013.

I'll be liveblogging part of the day.

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Can governments crowdfund (some of the time) rather than tax?

Taxation has become the accepted approach used by most governments to raise most of their funds.

In its simplest form it involves taking a percentage share of the income earnt by citizens and other eligible entities, such as corporations and putting all this money in a big pool for the government's use.

The government then decides how to spend this money - providing public services and infrastructure, welfare and health care, and paying for the machinery of government.

Taxation is often supplemented by other revenue raising approaches including 'user-pays' tolls or levies and the sale or rent of goods, public assets or rights.

While there's plenty of debate over how the money in government's pool is spent, the main approaches used to raise these funds have remained largely unchallenged for centuries.

With the rise of the internet, however, another approach to funding government is becoming more viable - crowdfunding.

Crowdfunding involves asking people to provide funds for worthwhile projects on a micro-scale, many individuals each donating a small amount.

This isn't a totally new approach. Rich philanthropists have donated millions for worthwhile causes, communities have come together to fund (and build) small public works and individuals have adopted park benches and potholes for many years.

However the internet has lifted crowdfunding to a new level, with the potential to cost-effectively raise millions of dollars through tiny individual donations in a managed way.

The practice is already beginning to grow in the US, as illustrated in the video below. US platforms like Neighbor.ly already exist and new ones, like Citizinvestor are sprouting.

A european platform, Brickstarter, is being built with a pilot planned with the Finnish city of Kotka later this year.

In the Netherlands, a foot bridge is being crowdsourced by Rotterdam's government, testing the concept for broader use.

There's even some use in Australia. ScreenWest (WA's government film financing body), has a crowdfunding project in partnership with Pozible to support the funding of WA films.

While it is still too early to tell how useful crowdfunding will be for governments, the crowdfunding approach has been successful in raising funds for arts projects and commercial products, even for establishing the world's first Tesla museum (which I've invested in).

Micro-financing, a related approach supporting people to lift themselves out of poverty with loans too small for banks to bother with, has also proven successful in many cases (I recommend checking out Kiva, which I use).

Perhaps, over the next few years, rather than debating tax increases or expenditure cuts, governments will consider broader, internet-enabled options for funding some activities or infrastructure - such as crowdfunding.

All it takes is an open mind and a willingness to innovate in revenue raising.  As the video below illustrates, this is already starting to get underway.

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How much of Australia is represented by federal politicians tweeting?

Recently Twitter announced (as reported in Mediabistro) that 100% of elected US Senators and 90% of Representatives were using Twitter, and mapped the country to show electorate coverage by state.

I track the use of Twitter by Australian federal politicians  through my Australians Politicians on Twitter Google spreadsheet (about 66% use the service), and decided to similarly map Twitter use across Australian electorates and states.

I found there are some major holes in Twitter use outside of metropolitan areas, as shown in the map below by electorate.

Note that my data is current as at 21 January 2013.

Australian House of Representatives Twitter users by electorate

Zoom in for city electorates and click on an electorate for the details of the tweeting member.

Representative tweeters by tweets
I've scaled the map below by number of tweets to show the level of activity by member.

Representative tweeters by followers

The picture looks a little different by followers, which has been scaled by member in the map below.

Australian parliamentary Twitter users by state (Senate & Reps)

At least by state, every jurisdiction has at least a few federal twitter users, and the maps below take in Senators as well as Representatives, giving a total level of tweeting by elected members by state and territory.

Federal parliamentary tweeters by state/territory by tweets
Click on the map to see the total tweets by all elected members in a state or territory. 


Federal parliamentary tweeters by state/territory by followers
Again the picture is a little different by followers, due to the impact of Kevin Rudd (Queensland) and Julia Gillard (Victoria), the most followed Australian politicians.

More to come...

I am in the process of mapping tweeting levels by political party and identifying the 'tigers' who are using the service very actively, compared to other politicians.

I am also mapping government agencies in a similar way - crosschecking around 840 tweeting federal, state/territory and local governments to find out who are the most active and most followed tweeters.

Keep an eye on my blog for more of this information over the next few weeks.

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Register now for the first free Gov 2.0 lunchtime event in Canberra for 2013

Canberra's free Gov 2.0 lunchtime events continue for the fourth year in 2013, with the first monthly event featuring two great presentations:

• “R.I.P. to the media release, hello crowd sources” on the use of social media in real-time emergency communications by Darren Cutrupi of the ACT Emergency Services Agency, and 
• "The British Invasion - how Gov 2.0 is taking the UK by storm" on the state of Government 2.0 in the UK, from British-based Ben Fowkes of Delib UK.

Update: Note that Ben isn't able to give a presentation on the UK GovCamp that was scheduled on 19 January as it was delayed due to snow.

For more information, or to register, please visit the Eventbrite page at: http://gov20february2013.eventbrite.com/

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