Featured, Government - Written Thursday, September 10, 2009 by Nick Vitalari - 15 Comments

Collaborative platforms and open data as keys to the new public-private ecosystem

In my two last two posts I focused on collaborative platforms and ecosystems in private sector and in the public sector. In my previous post, I specifically discussed the emergence of what I called the New Public-Private Ecosystem and key examples. I noted that this new type of public-private collaboration would lead to a reconstruction of our notions of what activities are done by public organizations and what is done by private organizations. I further argued that the New Public-Private Ecosystem would be fueled by open collaborative platforms that seamlessly enable differing public and private organizations to combine respective capabilities to collectively serve the common good as well as spur innovation and drive new economic efficiencies.

This week I’ve had the pleasure of attending a very well executed Government 2.0 Summit held in Washington D.C. I was pleasantly surprised to find many ‘kindred spirits’ at the conference and additional examples that signal the rise New Public-Private Ecosystem.

Tim O’Reilly, whose firm conducted the conference, opened with a keynote that argued that the twin developments of open data and the power of shared platforms had the capacity to revolutionize government. He noted that platforms such as Google, eBay, Amazon, Craigslist and Apple’s iPhone App Store were successful because they harnessed user contributions to create enormous collective value – value way beyond what they could do alone. He then went on to argue that this same logic could be applied to the role of government services. He argued that the government needed to begin to think of itself as a platform. He pointed to how the investments made by the U.S. Department of Defense in globally positioned satellites (GPS) spurred others to develop applications, products and services, and spawned an entire industry. Continue…