Open Public Innovation, as a Service

Image by Lance Shields via Flickr

A key theme for our upcoming webinar will be ‘Open Government Cyberinfrastructure’.

This refers to the increasingly pervasive Internet infrastructure that continues to grow around us, from the underlying telco lines through to the new ‘Cloud’ software it is running.

As more and more open source and open data software is “baked in” to this infrastructure the more it will evolve to become ‘Open Government Cyberinfrastructure’, a public computing utility that enables a more Open society and critically important, a more innovative one.

Open Government Innovation

I thought David Eaves made a great point of this link, between Open Government models and technologies, and a broader development of national innovation, in his post analyzing the poster child of digital innovation in the public sector, the Digital City Roadmap from New York.

In their report New York highlights how Cloud computing provides the required platform for enabling more of this innovation, a message repeated in the UK in their ‘G-Cloud’ initiative. In their Digital Britain innovation policy they make the critical point that government can invest in Cloud infrastructure not only for their own IT use, but as a platform for innovation in general by the public too.

The report outlined that the government is looking to improve service delivery and reduce costs through adoption of “Government cloud computing, the “G-Cloud”, and they also describe the enabling role it would play in making the nation itself more innovative.

“with Cloud building on next generation broadband with high definition video and also more revolutionary applications. These will include tele-presence, allowing for much more flexible working patterns, e-healthcare in the home and for small businesses the increasing benefits of access to cloud computing which substantially cuts costs and allows much more rapid product and service innovation.”

The key point is that it’s public Cloud infrastructure, ie it’s own and used by the public.