Considering a New Information Architecture for the City of Houston

Abstract

SummaryFor 10 weeks during the summer of 2011, two Rice University student interns from the Rice Center for Engineering Leadership collaborated with faculty from the George R. Brown School of Engineering and the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy on a consultative engagement with the City of Houston. The program was initiated after stakeholders in the city's departments of Administrative and Regulatory Affairs and Information Technology indicated an interest in inviting outside talent to look at some of their most pressing issues. Under the supervision of Rice University adjunct faculty member Tory Gattis, the two students interns, Vivas Kumar and Robyn Moscowitz, worked to identify solutions, develop strategy, and prepare software prototypes for adoption by City of Houston offices.This report details the overarching framework that spurred our interest in bringing software engineering and information management talent to the City's problem set. With budgetary pressures continuing, there is a need for the City to better utilize its information resources and to migrate to more lean, nimble mechanisms that can locate, develop, and integrate the information services it needs. The days of seeking large, highly customized, platform-based information technology (IT) provided at high cost are over for America's large cities because the costs are unsustainable. Some answers will be provided by the proprietary IT market, but others will require unorthodox collaborations between small teams of software developers and government, with the end result being grassroots technical entrepreneurship.Beyond our philosophical model-what some are calling "open-source government"-we cover here the major programs undertaken in the summer program, as well as recommendations for future work conducted by Rice University in collaboration with the City. Three major initiatives were undertaken: (1) the development of a wiki platform to capture institutional knowledge; (2) identification of a solution to an email archive and retention issue; and (3) the development of a mobile computing prototype to replace the largely paper-based process currently in place in the Neighborhood Protection Corps. While we do not offer complete solutions to the City's information problems, we have undertaken efforts that might help city planners to think differently about how those challenges might be addressed. This concept is open-source computer software in which, through strong and capable governance, individuals collaborate on projects of utility to a reasonably wide audience and make it available to any who want it. While this open source collaboration baffles economists (as explained in Yochai Benkler's "Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm"), the movement has been responsible for the development of most of the software code that makes the Internet work. Our question centers on how the process of a municipality becomes encoded in software as technology makes its way into the business processes of government. We ask: How can pub...