Acquire Today Traversing Digital Babel: Information, E-Government, And Exchange Articulated By Alon Peled Issued As Pamphlet

Peled points out, while money has always bought you power and influence, it is now the case that possession of data and the ability to process it into knowledge can earn you money, power and influence.
Oftentimes a great deal of all three, As has always been the case, the world is split into silos and rivalries exist in order to acquire and retain power, money and influence.
This is nowhere more a reality and has the potential to improve the world than in the databases maintained by government agencies,
However, there are immense problems beyond the rivalries between government agencies and their natural tendencies to retain their data and preserve their power.
Governments were among the first to incorporate

computers into their operations and over time their systems have been updated many times, A legacy system in a government agency can now be over fifty years old and was originally programmed in a proprietary language, Furthermore, the early developers of that system are most likely all deceased or at the least elderly so the option of consulting them generally does not exist.
Built on separate machines, the databases held by these government entities have fundamental incompatibilities that are not easily resolved,
There is an image on page four illustrating the computer system used by the IRS, The timeline starts inand the representation shows layers and layers of major updates having been piled on top of what came before.

Yet, the potential monetary and political advantages of resolving these issues are so enormous that there is no alternative but to solve these problems.
Peled makes the point that other than in the area of national security, data collected by agencies is a public commodity, Therefore, it should be made available as quickly and in as universally usable a form as possible,
In chapter six Peled describes the Public Sector Information Exchange PSIE a structure whereby government data is provided to interested parties, It is a natural expansion of the Freedom of Information Act, where the government is petitioned to release nonsensitive data to a requestor.
This is a sound program and one that has great potential to improve social efficiency and possibly even save lives, When retrospectives are conducted on major terrorist events, it is generally discovered that there were many red flags regarding the perpetrators that were not acted on.

Chapters seven and eight are devoted to stating the major challenges to the creation of PSIE's and putting forward a political strategy to properly promote them.
As followers of government are well aware, sometimes getting the proper political support in a world where interests are segmented and powerful corporations are involved is usually very difficult.
Even though it is always necessary and the advantages are obvious, Peled understands these problems and he puts forward suggested solutions that are at least plausibly executable, which is the soundest possible position from which to start.


This book was made available for free for review purposes and this review appears on Amazon,
A groundbreaking approach to information sharing among government agencies: using selective incentives to “nudge” them to exchange information assets,

The computer systems of government agencies are notoriously complex, New technologies are piled on older technologies, creating layers that call to mind an archaeological dig, Obsolete programming languages and closed mainframe designs offer barriers to integration with other agency systems, Worldwide, these unwieldy systems waste billions of dollars, keep citizens from receiving services, and evenas seen in interoperability failures on/and during Hurricane Katrinacost lives.
In this book, Alon Peled offers a groundbreaking approach for enabling information sharing among public sector agencies: using selective incentives to “nudge” agencies to exchange information assets.
Peled proposes the establishment of a Public Sector Information Exchange PSIE, through which agencies would trade information,

After describing public sector information sharing failures and the advantages of incentivized sharing, Peled examines the U, S. Open Data program, and the gap between its rhetoric and results, He offers examples of creative public sector information sharing in the United States, Australia, Brazil, the Netherlands, and Iceland, Peled argues that information is a contested commodity, and draws lessons from the trade histories of other contested commoditiesincluding cadavers for anatomical dissection in nineteenthcentury Britain.
He explains how agencies can exchange information as a contested commodity through a PSIE program tailored to an individual country's needs, and he describes the legal, economic, and technical foundations of such a program.
Touching on issues from data ownership to freedom of information, Peled offers pragmatic advice to politicians, bureaucrats, technologists, and citizens for revitalizing critical information flows.
Alon Peled is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, .