Traversing Digital Babel - 9780262027878

The computer systems of government agencies are notoriously complex. New technologiesare piled on older technologies, creating layers that call to mind an archaeological dig. Obsoleteprogramming languages and closed mainframe designs offer barriers to integration with other agencysystems. Worldwide, these unwieldy systems waste billions of dollars, keep citizens from receivingservices, 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 informationsharing among public sector agencies: using selective incentives to "nudge" agencies toexchange information assets. Peled proposes the establishment of a Public Sector InformationExchange (PSIE), through which agencies would trade information.

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