I attended the Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington DC last week. It was a fascinating experience – both in terms of learning, and in how to conduct a conference rich with content and filled with diversity of ideas without the boring presentations typical of most Indian conferences. The Gov 2.0 Summit theme was “Government as … Continue reading Gov 2.0: 10 Learnings for India – Part 1
2. India needs to leverage the new, emerging technologies of cloud, social and mobile across government. A combination of cloud computing, social media and mobile technologies promises to make technology implementations faster, better and cheaper, and at the same time more participative and real-time. Many implementations of this are now visible across the US. Some … Continue reading Gov 2.0: 10 Learnings for India – Part 3
3. India needs to make map and other geographical data freely available for mashups. Location is one of the most important elements of data analytics. Given India’s size and diversity, what is needed is the ability to layer information on maps and then do comparisons. Mapping technologies have advanced a lot through the years, and … Continue reading Gov 2.0: 10 Learnings for India – Part 4
1. India needs to embrace the open government and open data movement. When President Obama took over in January 2009, he issued the Open Government and Open Data directive. The focus was on making government more transparent, accountable, collaborative and participative. One outcome is that government departments are making available their raw datasets on a … Continue reading Gov 2.0: 10 Learnings for India – Part 2
4. All financial spending data should be released in XBRL by Indian government departments. XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) is the lingua franca of accounting data. It is XML-based and is being increasingly adopted by companies worldwide (and in India). What it does is to allow data to be interpreted and processed in a standardised … Continue reading Gov 2.0: 10 Learnings for India – Part 5
6. India needs to invest in creating a broadband infrastructure to facilitate movement of data. While we marvel at the telecom revolution in India, we should not forget that it has been restricted only to voice services. The real data revolution has been still-born because of lack of proper broadband infrastructure in India. Gov 2.0 … Continue reading Gov 2.0: 10 Learnings for India – Part 7
7. Indian governments need a CTO and CIO. To make all this happen at the central and state levels in India, qualified professionals must be involved to execute various IT projects across departments. One Nandan Nilekani can only do so much – especially when he has his hands full implementing the UID project. What the … Continue reading Gov 2.0: 10 Learnings for India – Part 8
8. India needs to focus on civic education to create engaged citizens. As one of the speakers said, quoting Jefferson, “Democracy is not instinctive; it has to be taught.” That is a lesson we in India need to take to heart. During the election campaigning last year, I could not but help feel that Middle … Continue reading Gov 2.0: 10 Learnings for India – Part 9
9. The Indian government needs to think itself as an agent and servant of its citizens. This point goes beyond technology and cuts to the heart of Gov 2.0 initiatives – and to the core of India’s problems of governance. When the British left India, we changed the skin colour of our rulers and we … Continue reading Gov 2.0: 10 Learnings for India – Part 10
10. India needs a deep rethink on the role of government in our lives. I wrote much of this series on an Air-India flight back from New York to Mumbai. What business does the government of India have running an airline? What business does it have taking taxpayers money time and again and putting it … Continue reading Gov 2.0: 10 Learnings for India – Part 11
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