Government as platform

One of the cornerstones of FWD50 is that government is not only an institution, but a platform atop which better coordination can happen. Governments can give us access to our online data in a seamless way, actively notifying us when and how it’s being used, and providing secure ways to manage our identity and federate ourselves with useful applications and other organizations.

Consider these three examples:

A defense of our digital doppelgangers

Governments have traditionally been the keepers of our most sacred data — from medical history, to criminal record, to education and accreditation, to income. They drove the census, conscription, and taxation.

But in recent years, data science and pervasive algorithms mean that companies, not governments, know more. The law has long sided with corporations: They’re allowed to surveil emails, test for drugs, and other things we’d never tolerate from a government.

For marketers and companies, big data leaves an appetizing breadcrumb trail. Online properties today collect hundreds of facts about every visitor. They infer details about our musical tastes, gender, income, credit risk, and more, stitching our likes, clicks, keystrokes, inboxes and quiz responses together into a quilt—a digital doppelganger of our true selves.

This feels fundamentally, morally wrong. Unless there are good reasons to do otherwise — for example, when someone is under criminal investigation — a citizen’s data should be available to them in secure formats they control. A person who can review their entire life on Facebook will soon realize that to not be able to do the same with their government data is unacceptable.

We can be proactive as a nation in this regard. Within a decade, a digital timeline will be the dominant model of managing our lives, online and off. Our inbox is already the logfile of our life, full of airplane receipts, Amazon purchases, calendar invites, and bill payments.

Building a single digital platform for citizens is a moon-shot level undertaking that ties together all facets of government. It could be tremendously useful—or a totalitarian nightmare. But it’s important to note that it already exists, in the hands of companies outside our borders, leaving citizens little recourse for what’s collected and how it’s used (though Denmark does have an ambassador to the big tech companies.)

We will find a way to share information properly with citizens, so that nobody knows more about their lives than they do. This is a cornerstone of government as a platform.

An agent for our digital selves

Transparency is fine. But there is a vast difference between simply making data available, and telling someone that data is being used. For example, credit scores are available to most consumers, but few check them—except maybe to find out whether they’ve been hacked. But banks now notify customers when their credit scores have changed, making it far easier for them to identify fraudulent behavior or change spending habits that might affect them later.

We can take a similar approach to data transparency. If government data is being accessed — by the private or public sector — the citizen should know. This was once impossible, but is now commonplace on online platforms (such as Facebook notifying you when someone mentions you in a post.)

Citizens expect to be notified of things that matter to them. Government as a platform not only provides trusted access and accurate information about someone, it also gives them the tools and notifications to become an active participant in how their data is used.

A trusted key to technology

When a user signs into a website, they generally employ a combination of username or email, and password. In some cases, they use two-factor authentication. But they can also log in using the authentication of a major online property such as Google, Facebook, or Twitter.

This login process, based on Open Authorization [OAUTH—as Tim Bouma points out, the open authentication protocols are SAML (Secure Assertion Markup Language) and Open ID Connect], also grants the website access to certain permissions on the authenticating platform: Posting to a Twitter feed; seeing a user’s Facebook social graph; reading archived emails in GMail; etc. It is in the interest of the large Internet properties to do this, because they get extra visibility into site visitors and their activities.

Why doesn’t the Canadian government have an OAUTH? There is already a Canadian online identity tool (GCKey; Canadians have to create an account to use many online applications within the government, such as fraud reporting.) Enhancing this to encompass OAUTH would have significant benefits:

• Having an OAUTH that can be used to authenticate instead of using a password would significantly improve the security of many Canadians, particularly children and the elderly, as the government would have a strong method of enforcing reliable security behaviour.
• Unlike private interests, a federal OAUTH wouldn’t have commercial motivations behind handling authentication.
• Citizen government programs like Code for Canada could use OAUTH to let Canadians connect applications to their government information within the controls afforded to them by the user — and remove that access at any time — in the same way that a Google user can give an app access to a calendar, then revoke it.

Identity is the lynchpin of government as a platform. It links a citizen to their history, and provides the necessary security and means of notification. It’s at the heart of government as a platform, informing everything from national security, to taxation, to welfare. With technologies like blockchain promising traceable, verifiable, pseudonymous agreements and records, it’s time to rethink what’s possible.

The real platform question

Think about how music discovery has changed. We used to rifle through bins in record shops, or stay up late to hear a DJ introduce us to the latest tunes.

Compare this to today: We expect an algorithm to predict our tastes; we share links to tunes with friends, and buy albums with a single click. We don’t look for music; it finds us. The music industry is now a platform, consisting of tools (Traktor, Ableton) and sites (Soundcloud) and apps (Spotify) and storefronts (iTunes.) The platform includes smartphones, and smart speakers like Sonos, and the design of car radios, and even gift cards in pharmacies. We assume music will be ambient, pervasive, accessible, and effortless.

That is a platform.

Platforms are more than just software. They’re an ecosystem, and they take time to grow. They’re foundations atop which new things can be built faster, more consistently, and more reliably. If a platform includes accessibility as a design element, those things built atop it will be accessible. If it’s bilingual, things built atop it will function in two languages. If it’s secure, things built atop it will be secure. Services inherit their platform’s power.

The move to digital government is a move towards a consolidated, consistent infrastructure atop which government services are designed, deployed, and supported. But that consolidation holds its own risks, and with great power comes great responsibility. Never before has data been so effortlessly collected. Once, the cost of collecting information was prohibitive: We only went through the trash of suspects because they were suspects. Today, it’s trivially easy to go through everyone’s digital trash looking for suspects. In the wrong hands, or without proper advocacy and concern about digital marginalization, they can turn government into an inhuman automaton.

And this is the core of the platform discussion.

• On the one hand, the right platform allows us to build a better future that’s cheaper, faster, easier to use, and supports citizens. It does away with bureaucracy, hold times, and frustration. And it allows quicker interactions: If you’re getting a handicapped parking permit, the system can know whether you’re medically entitled to one.
• On the other hand, consolidation means effortless abuse. I once spoke with an EU privacy commissioner who told me that the French dislike traffic cameras—and their ability to out cheating spouses with photographs of moving cars—because “French society functions in the grey areas.”

So the real platform question is how we consolidate safely, while still allowing the grey areas of human society. There’s no easy answer to this problem, but the longer we wait, the longer we cede the future to private companies and overseas databases.