Tim O'Reilly's Hymn for Open Government

A bit more poetic than usual, even for him:

There is a greater and greater gap between the systems used to manage complexity in the private sector and the same systems in the public sector. An average citizen carrying an iPhone has access to real-time "situational awareness" that outstrips military systems costing millions of dollars. From WalMart to Wall Street, from Google to the next generation of personal robotics, intelligent algorithms process massive amounts of data in real time, and respond automatically in close to real time. Meanwhile, government regulators too often rely on paper-based processes and reports that trail events by months, if not years.

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The idea of building a platform, rather than building all of the end user applications yourself, turns out to be surprisingly relevant for government, allowing the private sector to build applications that the government might never have imagined, or been able to budget for if they did. As governments open their data and services to developers, we're seeing an explosion of innovation, and the development of new citizen services by the citizens themselves.