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For far too long, we have seen governments as a vending machine - we put in taxes, and get out services. We get hospitals, police protection, roads, traffic lights and what other things. O’Reilly, an advocate of openening up governments, states that our idea of citizen engagement has somehow been reduced to what he calls a ‘shaking of the vending machine’. By that he means when something is wrong, people protest. But, with a dawning of an era that is so focused on information, the way information has been ordered and controlled has changed fundamentally. Also for governments. Forget E-government on Twitter, Facebook or on Flickr - there are much greater and more interesting opportunities for citizens to engage with their governments, and vice-versa. 

After more than a year working as a consultant for the Dutch government, I came to some conclusions.

Of course things go slow. Very slow. Sometimes so slow that you forget what you were doing but there’s more than meets the eye. One of those things is a relation with a community of people that are so much visible, involved and audible. For everyone who works in the information sector of the government it’s his or her task to provide citizens with information, services and support. But the most interesting thing is that there is a large community, waiting to be engaged in all these activities. 

It starts with buzzwords by the same people who coined other popular terms. But the terms ‘Government transparency’, ‘E-government’, ‘Gov 2.0’ and the verb ‘open-data’ are sparks of something that is fundamentally changing below the vending machine. Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, says he is cautious of ’the dancing-bear-effect-syndrome’ meaning that you are already so amazed it can dance, you don't look at whether it dances well. And he is right, terms like 2.0 have mostly blinded people and have failed to live up to the expectations that they proposed. 

But one thing  can easily be argued: the era of websites is over. And more and more people no longer  have to buy a newspaper to find something.  If the information is relevant, the content finds him or her. It happens every day through Social Media such as Facebook, Digg, Google News, Twitter and other web platforms. Call it the web 2.0 or 3.0, call it linked data or something else. The idea of information just ‘being out there’, discoverable through web services will play an important role in the way we receive information.

As more data, for example the data of newspaper The Guardian, opens up, more and more interesting uses of the data arise too. Blend this with the idea that business of government and state administration should be open at all levels to effective public scrutiny and oversight, and you have a good drink. Shaken, not stirred, as Ian Flemming would argue.

And this idea has support. A lot of support. The idea behind Vivek Kundra’s data.gov is that government agencies should not provide websites but web platforms that include data. Using API’s, a government can build applications, functions and search forms upon the data but the great opportunity is for citizens to create something magic. Jonathan Zittrain refers to this as ‘generativity’, the ability of open-ended platforms to create new possibilities not visioned by their creators. Platforms is the keyword here, forget unstructured data that is scattered in rusty tables and strange formats. 

Using your iPhone to see when garbage men will pick up the thrash with iCall and Google Calendar sounds like a nice application. And it is. But most likely, a government will never develop such a niche product with tax money, and why should it really? Yet, three developers in The Netherlands made their first prototype in less than a day during HackDeOverheid (translates to ‘Hack The Government’), a bar camp in The Netherlands that aims to promote, collect and use open-data. At the Rewired State in the UK, the Birmingham City Council website got redesigned and rebuild by two passionate developers within two days. The project titled 'BCC DIY', would have cost 2.8 million Pounds if the British government would have built it. 

Dylan’s ‘The Times They Are A-Changing’ captured the spirit of social and political upheaval that characterized the 1960s. Like always, today Dylan's lyrics are still relevant.>

Today and tomorrow, we are in a process where the architecture and organizational structure of the government is changing. The way Apple changed the mobile industry with their fairly open iPhone platform, Matt Mullenweg’s open-source blogging solution WordPress, Google’s groundbreaking Maps and the way Wikipedia organizes information have all proven that openness can lead to groundbreaking innovations. It's time for governments to do the same - it's time to open up and put a new meaning to the phrase 'let a thousand flowers bloom'. 

I don’t think I’m able to better describe it than O'Reilly himself when he says: ‘It’s up to the tech community to respond, with our ideas, with our voices, with our creativity and with our code’.