Tag Archives: technology

Data Localization is the Answer. What Was the Question?

There is Both New Infrastructure and a Genuine Problem

First, some context. Any conversation about data, data localization and/or digital sovereignty has to contend with how and where data is stored. This quickly gets you to a topic I’m deeply interested in: the cloud. I recently presented to Europe’s finance ministers (the memo I wrote for them is published on the Eurogroup’s website) and I first sought to impress on them that “the cloud” is 21st-century infrastructure in exactly the way water systems, railways, electricity and telecoms were essential infrastructures in previous centuries.

The cloud – which at a minimum is the provisioning of storage and compute at scale – is now critical to any modern economy. It is a core input into services ranging from food delivery to government benefits to banking. Happily, most people get this, and it is a reason why concern over who controls data has become so important.

Whose Data are we Talking About?

There’s a second question hiding inside the “data localization” question. When a government says “our data must be localized,” which data does it mean? Its own — the tax records, health files and registries it holds in trust for citizens? Or the data generated by the entire economy — every bank, hospital, startup and grocery chain?

These are radically different problems. The first is, in many ways, a government procurement question. This is in part because states carry a special custodial duty. Citizens cannot opt out of giving the state their data. But it is also a function of the fact that states are expected to be actors of last resort, capable of functioning under even the most brutal circumstances – such as a state of war.

The second is industrial policy. Requiring the whole economy to localize means repricing compute and storage for every firm in the country. Most localization debates slide between “the government’s data” and “the nation’s data” without noticing they have changed the subject. For this piece, let’s assume we are just talking about government data, but you can easily expand this to the whole economy and see how the implications and tradeoffs become more daunting.

What is the Threat Model?

To return to our title, if data localization is the solution, what is the problem? Here policy makers would benefit from a little threat modeling, to understand what the threats (and potentially opportunities) data localization is seeking to answer.

At present there is a threat that many policy makers have in mind. In most European and OECD countries (and beyond), many people, when pressed, land on the same answer: lawful access (or unlawful access, depending on your point of view). Specifically, they are worried about the CLOUD Act, the 2018 US law that lets American authorities compel US providers (like AWS, Azure or Google Cloud) to hand over data stored on servers they manage, regardless of where they are located around the world. Somewhat related, people also worry about a denial of access, whereby, via legal means, a government might be denied access to its own data.

I too find the CLOUD Act deeply, deeply problematic, and an excellent reason why one should think carefully about becoming reliant on US (or Chinese) cloud providers. But it isn’t the only threat to a government’s data. Here, for example, is a fuller list:

Lawful (or unlawful) access remains a threat. And there are others:

Access denial: not someone reading your data, but someone simply turning the servers off, or severing connectivity to them, because they can.
Cyber attack: an actor stealing or ransomwaring your data.
Data colonialism: an actor exporting data outside your jurisdiction to be exploited by foreign firm(s).
Lack of capacity: an inability to use or protect your own data.
Competitiveness: when storing, managing and accessing your data is simply more expensive than in other jurisdictions, leaving you at a competitive disadvantage.
Act of God: Your ability to access your data (particularly if stored in a single location or region) is at risk from a natural disaster.

Any one of these can compromise data integrity or security – which would suggest it is core to discussions about “data sovereignty” – but almost none of these figure in the political discourse. Everyone focuses on the lawful access and access denial problem. (To be fair, I find most engineers and business people are thinking about all these threats; it’s mostly policy people zeroing in on the first two.) But if you start to think about various possible threats, solutions become trickier as each threat points in a different direction.

Where does data actually live?

Once you’ve wrapped your head around the numerous ways the universe might conspire to destroy your data, you have to reconcile that with the options you have to store your data. There are several and one can somewhat imperfectly align them along an axis of “foreign controlled” to “locally controlled.”

At one end you have your classic hyperscaler model, a US firm offering almost limitless storage, with high redundancy (as well as a range of other platform services) all subject to the CLOUD Act, with your data primarily stored in a data centre in Virginia. At the other end, a government-owned data centre you nominally control entirely (we could debate the provenance of the technology inside it, but set that aside). In between sit a range of actors we rarely bother to distinguish: a firm headquartered in your country that hosts your data in a datacentre located abroad; a hyperscaler’s local data centre on your soil (but still subject to the CLOUD Act!); a domestic joint venture running on licensed foreign technology; a domestic firm hosting domestically. Very different rules apply to each.

In addition, what is foreign controlled and locally controlled has little alignment with data localization. Indeed the localization debate flattens them into “local good, foreign bad” which, depending on your threat model, may have profound, and not necessarily positive implications for your data’s security or sovereignty.

To make this more obvious you can run the aforementioned threats against this spectrum of options. This is where it gets uncomfortable.

Lawful access: localization doesn’t help

Start with the threat everyone cares about. The CLOUD Act applies to data sitting in Ireland, or the UK, or Montreal on an American hyperscaler exactly as much as it applies to data sitting in Virginia. The Act follows the company, not the geography. Moving your data into a hyperscaler’s local data centre — the single most popular “sovereignty” measure on offer (and one whole procurement frameworks are built around!) — does not address this threat.

This is one reason why governments are being persuaded to invest in their own “local” or “national” clouds. Sovereignty is derived from ownership (which, as we’ve seen, it may not be) and comes with its own tradeoffs…

What actually helps against lawful access is holding your own encryption keys, or using a provider genuinely outside the requesting state’s jurisdiction — and each of those brings its own trade-offs from elsewhere on the list.

Cyber attack: you might be safer on the hyperscaler

Against a serious state-backed attacker, where do you want your data? The honest answer is awkward: probably on the platform with the largest, best-resourced defensive security team on earth. If you’re a middle power government, or a large, successful private company, do you trust your state agencies to out-defend firms whose security teams and budgets dwarf your own? If your “A” team is protecting national secrets, who’s left to protect more mundane things like social benefits or the DMV? If you’re concerned about attacks from North Korea, Russia or China — states with sophisticated capabilities – this analysis becomes even more awkward. Localizing your data onto weaker domestic infrastructure can make this threat worse.

Access denial: ownership beats location — sometimes

Access denial is the threat I think deserves far more attention than it gets. Forget reading your data; someone with control over your infrastructure can simply deny you access to it. Maybe via legal process, or… not. They could just turn the power off or sever a key network cable.

Here the spectrum behaves differently. Physical denial is possible for anything hosted outside your borders — including by a domestically-owned firm operating internationally. Legal denial can reach even a foreign-owned entity that happens to sit on your soil: if the parent company is ordered to stop serving you, the local data centre goes dark just the same. Only the bottom of the spectrum — genuinely domestic operations — offers much protection.

Localization can help here… with caveats. A domestic operation still depends on hardware, software and services that are not indigenous to your country. You may have traded a low risk of someone flipping the off-switch for an elevated cyber risk and the slow grind of a degraded service. But of all the threats on this list, access denial is the one localization most clearly addresses.

Attack and act of god: the safest place may not be your country

Remember the Ukrainian in the room at Bellagio, the one person least sold on localization? They were the ones presenting. It was a talk I still think about: photo after photo of bombed-out Ukrainian data centres. When your threat model includes missiles, “keep the data at home” reads very differently. Data localization isn’t necessarily the best defence against hostile acts. Ukraine has become a significant adopter of US hyperscalers. They are not alone. Estonia drew this lesson a decade earlier and implemented its data embassies, placing core data abroad on purpose to ensure continuity of service in the event of a hostile kinetic attack.

Data localization can also carry risks and tradeoffs. Last September, South Korea’s National Information Resources Service — the government’s own data centre in Daejeon — experienced a fire. Six hundred and forty-seven government services went down. Ninety-six systems were destroyed outright, including G-Drive, the government’s internal file store: roughly 858 terabytes of working documents, gone. There was… no backup. Last time I searched, it was still unrecoverable. This wasn’t an attack. It was infrastructure, in one place, and that one place burned.

The hard reality is, depending on your threat model, the safest place for your data may not be in your country. My home of Canada has the luxury of being enormous — an act of God is unlikely to take out data centres in Vancouver and Montreal simultaneously (if it does, I suspect we collectively, as a planet, have bigger problems). But many countries don’t have that luxury. If you’re Belgium or an island nation, I’m not sure you do. As mentioned above, Estonians have decided, explicitly, that they don’t. An Estonian “data embassy” in Luxembourg (and possibly elsewhere) stores sovereign Estonian data abroad, precisely because it’s safest there.

Data colonization: it’s about who collects, not where it sits

One more, because it exposes the frame’s deepest flaw. If your worry is the extraction of your data’s economic value — data colonialism, industrial loss — then where the data is stored is only part of the issue. Equally important is who collects it. A foreign application harvesting your citizens’ data will do so regardless of which data centre it rents. Does a domestic company that collects the data, then chooses to store it abroad, raise bigger questions than a foreign company storing your data locally?

Every Choice is a Trade-Off

To really drive this home I created an illustrative matrix of these trade-offs. The ratings would likely differ from country to country, but it gives one a sense of the terrain. There is no row that is all green. There never will be. And that is my point. Data localization is a solution to a very specific threat model… an important one, but a specific one. And the notion that you should spend billions or more to create a national champion to solve for that problem is… a trade-off in its own right that, even executed well, may carry significant risks and downsides.

So the first conclusion of the talk: data localization is not a strategy. It is a tactic that addresses some threats, may sometimes be effective for the headline threat, and actively worsens others. If someone is leading with localization, the serious response is: against which threat? Until that question has an answer, it’s hard to balance risk and reward, costs and options.

Moving from Sovereignty to Optionality

So what would a more successful strategy for achieving “sovereignty” look like? First and foremost, it means not starting with a solution but with a threat model — and being honest about the tradeoffs in addressing each threat. As we’ve just seen, that exercise rarely lands on a single answer.

I think it also lies in creating optionality, both domestically and internationally. This is what I’ve argued for in The Path to a Sovereign Tech Stack is Via a Commodified Tech Stack. The core thesis being that standardizing storage at the cloud level, and then, ideally, platform-as-a-service functions, would bring portability, competition and federative options to the cloud layer – including, critically, around data storage.

Focusing on choice and interoperability creates a range of more interesting options than focusing on “sovereignty” since, as I previously mentioned, that conjures up unhelpful notions that conflate territoriality and ownership with control and security. Mike Bracken and I first suggested agency was a more helpful term in our Lisbon Council piece on Europe’s Digital Strategy. Mike’s gone on to write some additional good thoughts, but here is one of my favourite parts of that original piece:

Which brings us to a deeper concern: the framing of digital sovereignty itself.

We understand the instinct. In a world where digital infrastructure is often foreign-owned and opaque, wanting more control is natural. But sovereignty, if defined as owning every layer of a technological stack, can quickly become counterproductive. It leads to balkanized systems, limited interoperability and a retrenchment from global cooperation. The incentives for creative development disappear. Competition and innovation subside.

Instead, we should be aiming for digital resilience and interoperability.

Summary Advice

If you’ve read this far, here is the version to carry into your next meeting.

Data localization is an answer waiting for a question. Before adopting it, name your threat model. If the threat is the CLOUD Act, localization does not help you — the law follows the company, not the geography. If the threat is a state-backed cyber attack, localization may hurt you. If the threat is access denial, it helps — read the fine print on ownership. If the threat is fire, flood or missiles, the safest place for your data may be another country entirely; ask Estonia, or ask South Korea, which kept its data sovereign, domestic, in one building, and lost 858 terabytes of it in an afternoon.

If you carry only three questions out of this post, make them these.

Whose data? A rule that is prudent stewardship for a tax agency becomes an economy-wide tax when applied to every firm in the country.

Against which threat? Localization genuinely helps with some threats, does little for the headline one, and makes others worse. Name the threat, and the right storage model usually names itself.

Can you leave? Sovereignty that depends on any single provider’s goodwill — foreign or domestic — isn’t sovereignty. The durable kind comes from being able to move. That’s the commoditized stack argument, and it’s the subject of my next post.

The Chatham House conversation was held under a mix of rules; nothing here draws on anything said in the room — this is the argument I brought in. Related: Parting Clouds (with Curtis McCord, for the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project), The Path to a Sovereign Tech Stack is via a Commoditized Tech Stack (Tech Policy Press), and NATO’s Digital Back End Could Fall Apart Without Change (Foreign Policy). If you’re working on any of this elsewhere in the world, I’d like to compare notes.

Cloud Is a Competitiveness Question — A Note to Europe’s Finance Ministers

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Picture of the head table during the Eurogroup meeting. Kyriakos Pierrakakis is talking on the left hand side, David Eaves is listening on the right hand side, in between them sit two members of the Eurogroup secretariate — Kyriakos Pierrakakis opening up the session on Tech Sovereignty at the Eurogroup

The Commoditized Stack

Over the past year or so I’ve been developing an argument around confronting concentration and dependency at the cloud level of the technology stack: that at best digital sovereignty is a poor frame for this conversation, at worst it suggests pathways that are neither sustainable nor desirable. As Mike Bracken and I outlined in The Service Gap, the real goal should be agency, not sovereignty (Mike expanded on this in this excellent piece). Owning every layer of the technology stack isn’t possible, even for America. And creating a “sovereign stack” carries real short and long-term costs. We should be focused on reshaping the cloud market — storage, compute, and platform services — to behave like a utility: interoperable, substitutable, and something every country, state, company, or individual can draw on. The path to agency, or sovereignty, or whatever term you prefer, is via commoditization.

It’s worth being clear why this matters so much. Cloud is now an input into almost all economic activity and nearly every government service. Like water in the 18th century, rail in the 19th, electricity and telecommunications in the 20th, compute is the utility of the 21st century: the substrate everything runs on. That’s part of what makes it so sovereignty-sensitive. But it’s also why getting it wrong is so costly: a cloud layer that’s less efficient, more expensive, and cannot scale or interoperate internationally doesn’t raise one bill, it quietly taxes the whole economy, for decades.

Much of the energy in capitals right now goes into ownership — national champions, sovereign clouds, public money to build domestic capacity. This is certainly the focus of the Commission’s recent tech sovereignty strategy (the more they say it isn’t about buying European, the less I believe them). I’m not opposed to this. Europe, Brazil, Canada — pretty much everyone — may have very good reasons to build capacity. My point is only about priority: building domestic capacity is a legitimate choice, but building a utility rather than a new “stack” is the more important one. A domestic champion that’s just as hard to switch away from may protect you from a kill switch, but it won’t help your businesses scale internationally and will serve as a tax on your domestic market.

I’ve made versions of this case in a few places lately. Most recently, Curtis McCord and I wrote Parting Clouds: Creating a Competitive Marketplace for Compute for the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project. It found that three US firms hold 85% of Canada’s cloud market, and warned that standing up domestic providers risks trapping Canadians in “maplewashed dependencies” unless those providers are required to be interoperable. This built on an earlier piece I wrote in Tech Policy Press – The Path to a Sovereign Tech Stack is Via a Commodified Tech Stack – which laid out the underlying logic and historical parallels. And last week I made the case in a piece in Foreign Policy magazine that this strategy is particularly effective for a group like NATO (more on that later).

David Eaves presenting to the Eurogroup in Luxembourg — Presenting to the Eurogroup

Visiting the Eurogroup

Most exciting is that last week I had the chance to put this argument to the Eurogroup — where finance ministers of the euro area meet to coordinate and debate policy — directly. During their meeting I ran a session with the ministers on digital sovereignty, with a short memo I’d written to frame the discussion. You can read the memo here. I left impressed by the questions, the curiosity, and the engagement I received from the ministers. The one thing I wanted to impress upon the ministers was that despite its “digital” label, the issue of digital infrastructure is core to discussions of economic growth and efficiency. It deserves their attention. On this, I think I got their attention.

I was then lucky enough to be able to join the group for dinner, which centered around some Q&A with Jean-Claude Juncker, the former President of the European Commission and the Eurogroup’s first permanent president.

A Thank You

My thanks to Kyriakos Pierrakakis for the invitation. I’ve been lucky to know him through the significant role he’s played in Greece’s digital transformation journey and his amazing work as Digital Minister. I’m grateful he thought this argument worth a hearing.

P.S. A small thing I’m also proud of: all the pieces I’ve written and linked to above can now be found by clicking the “publications” link in the menu above. It takes you to the newly built library.eaves.ca.

2025 Year in Review: Work and Impact

1. Continued Growth of the DPI Map

Our DPI Map has become a go-to resource in the field:

Now used by multiple Multilateral Development Banks, research teams, and the DPI Safeguards assessment process
Forms the core of our State of DPI 2025 Report, which we formally launch this week
Maps digital public infrastructure deployments across 210 countries

2. Economics of Digital Public Infrastructure

Diane Coyle (Cambridge University) and I working with Beatriz Vasconcellos, and Sumedha Deshmukh co-authored our report on The Economics of Shared Digital Infrastructure.

This work has led to:

Sustained engagement with the World Bank, UK Treasury, and the Dominican Republic about how they fund digital infrastructure projects
Adoption of our methodology by the G20 Digital Economy Working Group
Potential to unlock billions in funding and reshape spending to be much more effective

This is deep, nerdy policy work – but it has real potential for impact.

3. The Largest Randomized Control Trial on Digital Government Skills?

We’re mid-process running what we believe is the largest randomized control trial on digital-era skills for public servants:

I trained 10 Brazilian experts on how to deliver our digital government course (DPI662 at HKS, Digital Government at IIPP)
Those trainers have just finished training a first cohort of ~500 public servants
We’ll now run some tests to see if this training impacts the effectiveness of this first cohort vis-a-vis a second cohort who will be trained later this year

It’s been an absolute delight collaborating with Christian Schuster (Blavatnik, Oxford), Maria Alexandra Cunha (FGV), and Kim Mikkelsen (Roskilde University) on this work.

Also grateful to UKRI for funding this work!

The Brazilian trainers during our Train the Trainer session in Brasilia — Our Amazing Brazilian Trainers during our Train the Trainer program in Brazilia

4. New Case Studies & Publications

We published a lot this year. Some highlights below of what I think might be of interest:

Teaching Case Studies:

These are great if you are teaching a digital government course… All free to download and use! Also just great reads for those interested in learning about what is happening around the world in digital government.

Scaling Digital Infrastructure in a Siloed State – On the design and financing of the UK Governments Notify project, and a great example of product thinking in government
The DigiLocker Story: How India is Digitising Its Documents – On the scaling and challenges of building India’s digital credentials project (which puts most countries to shame)
Building Trust in Sharing Data – How the US Department of Transportation built supply chain resilience through a data trust
India’s National Urban Governance Platform – An effort to build shared software for 100,000+ cities

Articles & Commentary:

Lawfare: “Learning From the Legacy of 18F” (with Hillary Hartley) – plus a podcast interview with Kevin Frazier (HKS 2022)
Tech Policy: “The Path to a Sovereign Tech Stack is Via a Commodified Tech Stack” – I’m particularly proud of this piece
Foreign Policy: “AI’s Efficiency Wars Have Begun” (with Sarosh Nagar, IIPP 2024)
Lisbon Council: “The Service Gap: Europe’s International Digital Strategy 2025” (with Mike Bracken and Michelle Wronski)
Tech Policy: “Digital Public Infrastructure is the New Global Tech Bet—But Everyone’s Betting on Something Different” (with Beatriz Vasconcellos, HKS 2021)

We also have a peer-reviewed papers coming out in January, and a few more teed up for later in the year – stay tuned!

Hillary, Kevin and I on the Lawfare Podcast

5. Talks & Engagement Around the World

Some presentations I’m particularly excited to be invited to give this year included:

G20 Digital Economy Working Group in South Africa
IMF Fiscal Forum Japan meeting in Tokyo
Multiple sessions at the Digital Public Infrastructure Summit in Cape Town, South Africa
Presentation to the Canadian Senate in Ottawa
Women in GovTech (hosted by GovStack, a German-Estonian government-funded project)
FestiBO Bites in Bogotá (thank you Angela María Reyes, HKS 2016!)

6. Advisory Roles & Other Work

Joined the CTO Advisory for the Coleridge Initiative (where I get to work with Rich Ferguson, HKS 2016)
Joined the Aim For Scale Technical Panel (which has me crossing paths regularly with Imara Salas, HKS 2021)
Significant grant renewal with Gates Foundation to continue much of this work
For COP30, we published A Bottom-Up Approach to Building a Climate Resilience Stack – on the technologies that could underpin climate monitoring and adaptation with Beatriz Vasconcellos (HKS 2021) and Liam Orme (IIPP 2024).

Personal Update: Iceland Adventures

The big personal adventure this year was an 8-day hike through Iceland with my eldest son Alec, my co-founder Luke, and his family. We hiked the Laugavegur and Fimmvörðuháls Trails back-to-back.

Absolutely stunning landscapes, challenging terrain, and wonderful company. I’ve been lucky to have a life filled with meaningful, challenging journeys, surrounded by great people. I don’t take enough time off, and this was a ton of fun. It was also a powerful reminder of how blessed I am to be able to work and play with people I care about – whether hiking trails or reforming government systems.

Former Students: Alumni Office Hours and Our Digital Government Working Group

Eternal Office Hours: Every year I do about 30-50 calls with former students, sometimes its career advice, sometimes it’s on their new startup (were a LOT of those in 2025), some are collaborations, other times it’s just to catch up. Please feel free to use this link to book in

Digital Government Working group: If you work in the digital government and have something to share (a problem or success) we’d love to host you in our ongoing online seminar with my current researchers and students. For example, Jake Boyd (HKS 2023) presented his work on Open Source Protocols for Elections in December.

Please email me if you have work you want to share!

Hope everyone had a great 2025 and wishing you a successful 2026. The world has never been more in need of good people, working on the right problems, with the best intentions. I hope you are one of them and that our paths get to cross.

New Zealand: The World’s Lab for Progressive Tech Legislation?

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Cross posted with TechPresident.

One of the nice advantage of having a large world with lots of diverse states is the range of experiments it offers us. Countries (or regions within them) can try out ideas, and if they work, others can copy them!

For example, in the world of drug policy, Portugal effectively decriminalized virtually all drugs. The result has been dramatic. And much of it positive. Some of the changes include a decline in both HIV diagnoses amongst drug users by 17% and drug use among adolescents (13-15 yrs). For those interested you can read more about this in a fantastic report by the Cato Institute written by Glenn Greenwald back in 2009 before he started exposing the unconstitutional and dangerous activities of the NSA. Now some 15 years later there have been increasing demands to decriminalize and even legalize drugs, especially in Latin America. But even the United States is changing, with both the states of Washington and Colorado opting to legalize marijuana. The lessons of Portugal have helped make the case, not by penetrating the public’s imagination per se, but by showing policy elites that decriminalization not only works but it saves lives and saves money. Little Portugal may one day be remembered for changing the world.

I wonder if we might see a similar paper written about New Zealand ten years from now about technology policy. It may be that a number of Kiwis will counter the arguments in this post by exposing all the reasons why I’m wrong (which I’d welcome!) but at a glance, New Zealand would probably be the place I’d send a public servant or politician wanting to know more about how to do technology policy right.

So why is that?

First, for those who missed it, this summer New Zealand banned software patents. This is a stunning and entirely sensible accomplishment. Software patents, and the legal morass and drag on innovation they create, are an enormous problem. The idea that Amazon can patent “1-click” (e.g. the idea that you pre-store someone’s credit card information so they can buy an item with a single click) is, well, a joke. This is a grand innovation that should be protected for years?

And yet, I can’t think of single other OECD member country that is likely to pass similar legislation. This means that it will be up to New Zealand to show that the software world will survive just fine without patents and the economy will not suddenly explode into flames. I also struggle to think of an OECD country where one of the most significant industry groups – the Institute of IT Professionals appeared – would not only both support such a measure but help push its passage:

The nearly unanimous passage of the Bill was also greeted by Institute of IT Professionals (IITP) chief executive Paul Matthews, who congratulated [Commerce Minister] Foss for listening to the IT industry and ensuring that software patents were excluded.

Did I mention that the bill passed almost unanimously?

Second, New Zealanders are further up the learning curve around the dangerous willingness their government – and foreign governments – have for illegally surveilling them online.

The arrest of Kim Dotcom over MegaUpload has sparked some investigations into how closely the country’s police and intelligence services follow the law. (For an excellent timeline of the Kim Dotcom saga, check out this link). This is because Kim Dotcom was illegally spied on by New Zealand’s intelligence services and police force, at the behest of the United States, which is now seeking to extradite him. The arrest and subsequent fall out has piqued public interest and lead to investigations including the Kitteridge report (PDF) which revealed that “as many as 88 individuals have been unlawfully spied on” by the country’s Government Communications Security Bureau.

I wonder if the Snowden documents and subsequent furor probably surprised New Zealanders less than many of their counterparts in other countries since it was less a bombshell than another data point on a trend line.

I don’t want to overplay the impact of the Kim Dotcom scandal. It has not, as far as I can tell, lead to a complete overhaul of the rules that govern intelligence gathering and online security. That said, I suspect, it has created a political climate that amy be more (healthily) distrustful of government intelligence services and the intelligence services of the United States. As a result, it is likely that politicians have been more sensitive to this matter for a year or two longer than elsewhere and that public servants are more accustomed at policies through the lens of its impact on rights and privacy of citizens than in many other countries.

Finally, (and this is somewhat related to the first point) New Zealand has, from what I can tell, a remarkably strong open source community. I’m not sure why this is the case, but suspect that people like Nat Torkington – and open source and open data advocate in New Zealand – and others like him play a role in it. More interestingly, this community has had influence across the political spectrum. The centre left labour party deserves much of the credit for the patent reform while the centre-right New Zealand National Party has embraced both open data. The country was among the first to embrace open source as a viable option when procuring software and in 2003 the government developed an official open source policy to help clear the path for greater use of open source software. This contrasts sharply with my experience in Canada where, as late as 2008, open source was still seen by many government officials as a dangerous (some might say cancerous?) option that needed to be banned and/or killed.

All this is to say that in both the public (e.g. civil society and the private sector) and within government there is greater expertise around thinking about open source solutions and so an ability to ask different questions about intellectual property and definitions of the public good. While I recognize that this exists in many countries now, it has existed longer in New Zealand than in most, which suggests that it enjoys greater acceptance in senior ranks and there is greater experience in thinking about and engaging these perspectives.

I share all this for two reasons:

First, I would keep my eye on New Zealand. This is clearly a place where something is happening in a way that may not be possible in other OECD countries. The small size of its economy (and so relative lack of importance to the major proprietary software vendors) combined with a sufficient policy agreement both among the public and elites enables the country to overcome both internal and external lobbying and pressure that would likely sink similar initiatives elsewhere. And while New Zealand’s influence may be limited, don’t underestimate the power of example. Portugal also has limited influence, but its example has helped show the world that the US -ed narrative on the “war on drugs” can be countered. In many ways this is often how it has to happen. Innovation, particularly in policy, often comes from the margins.

Second, if a policy maker, public servant or politician comes to me and asks me who to talk to around digital policy, I increasingly find myself looking at New Zealand as the place that is the most compelling. I have similar advice for PhD students. Indeed, if what I’m arguing is true, we need research to describe, better than I have, the conditions that lead to this outcome as well as the impact these policies are having on the economy, government and society. Sadly, I have no names to give to those I suggest this idea to, but I figure they’ll find someone in the government to talk to, since, as a bonus to all this, I’ve always found New Zealanders to be exceedingly friendly.

So keep an eye on New Zealand, it could be the place where some of the most progressive technology policies first get experimented with. It would be a shame if no one noticed.

(Again If some New Zealanders want to tell me I’m wrong, please do. Obviously, you know your country better than I do).

What Traffic Lights Say About the Future of Regulation

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I have a piece up on TechPresident about some crazy regulations that took place in Florida that put citizens at greater risk all so the state and local governments can make more money.

Here’s a chunk:

In effect, what the state of Florida is saying is that a $20 million increase in revenue is worth an increase in risk of property damage, injury and death as a result of increased accidents. Based onnational statistics, there are likely about 62 deaths and 5,580 injuries caused by red light running in Florida each year. If shorter yellow lights increased that rate by 10 percent (far less than predicted by the USDOT) that could mean an additional 6 deaths and 560 injuries. Essentially the state will raise a measly extra $35,000 for each injury or death its regulations help to cause, and possibly far less.

What the Quantified Self Movement Says and Tech and Gender

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Over the past year or two I’ve been to a couple of unconferences sessions about how people are increasingly measuring different parts of their lives: how far they run, how they sleep, what they eat, etc… As some readers may be aware, these efforts are often referred to as part of the “Quantified Self Movement.” For those readers less aware (and curious), you can watch Wired Magazine editor and quantified movement originator Gary Wolf give a brief overview in this 6 minute TED talk.

All of this sounds very geeky I’m sure. And as a general data geek and avid fitbit user I am – I suppose – part of the quantified self movement myself.

Reflecting on these (few) experiences with the movement, I find it interesting that almost every session I’ve been to has been almost entirely populated by men. I’m open to the possibility that I’ve simply been to the wrong conferences or the wrong sessions, but I’m not sure that is the case. Even looking at the quantified self Wikipedia page, virtually all the gadgets referred to deal with fitness and sleep. Obviously these are not things that men exclusively care about, but they are notable because of what is absent.

Humans have, of course, probably been quantifying themselves for as long as we’ve been around. But when I think of a group of people that have been engaged in quantifying themselves in a meaningful way,for well over a millennia,it is women.

More specifically, it is women measuring their menstrual cycles. I mean as important as losing a few pounds or getting a good nights sleep may be (and it is important to me), I’m pretty sure the stakes are much lower than preventing, or trying to get, pregnancy (now that’s a life changing event!). Indeed, given that it is hard to imagine most men having any pressing needs to measure much about their bodies on a regular basis a thousand years ago, it think it would be safe to argue that women were societies first quantified selfers.

And yet I don’t think I’ve ever seen this activity discussed, looked to as a model, or engaged in by the quantified self movement. Lauren Bacon has a great post on her own experience measuring her menstrual cycle as part of her quantified self but it is pretty rare to see women adopt that language. Given that women have been measuring their periods for years, and that there is likely a strong oral and written history to look into around this, I’d think this was a line of research or inquiry that the movement would be interested at looking into. Doubly so since it would give us a window into what a community of quantified selfers looks like, especially when its activities have been more normalized (as during some parts of our history) and marginalized (during other parts).

This all feels like a lost opportunity, and the kind of thing that happens when there are too many men and not enough women in a conversation. You want to talk about the consequences of not having women in tech – this strikes me as a great example. A rich and important history is not (sufficiently) reflected in the conversation and so important lessons and practices are potentially missed.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe women have been part of the quantified self movement from the beginning and that this is not a larger reflection of the challenges we face when the ratio of men and women in an industry is out of whack. But my sense is that this is actually a very nice, and potentially wonderfully quantifiable, case study around the issues of women in tech.

The End of the World: The State vs. the Internet

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Last weekend at FooCamp, I co-hosted a session titled “The End of the World: Will the Internet Destroy the State, or Will the State Destroy the Internet?” What follows are the ideas I opened with during my intro to the session and some additional thoughts I’ve had and that others shared during the conversation. To avoid some confusion, I’d also like to clarify a) I don’t claim that these questions have never been raised before, I mostly hope that this framing can generate useful thought and debate; and b) that I don’t believe these are the only two or three possible outcomes; it was just a interesting way of framing some poles so as to generate good conversation.

Introduction

A while back, I thought I saw a tweet from Evgeny Morozov that said something to the effect: “You don’t just go from printing press to Renaissance to iPad; there are revolutions and wars in between you can’t ignore.” Since I can’t find the tweet, maybe he didn’t say it or I imagined it… but it sparked a line of thinking.

Technology and Change

Most often, when people think of the printing press, they think of its impact on the Catholic Church – about how it enabled Martin Luther’s complaints to go viral and how the localization of the Bible cut out the need of ~~the middle man~~ the priest to connect and engage with God. But if the printing press undermined the Catholic Church, it had the opposite impact on the state. To be fair, heads of state took a beating (see French Revolution et al.), but the state itself was nimbler and made good use of the technology. Indeed, it is worth noting that the modern notion of the nation state was not conceivable without the printing press. The press transformed the state – scaling up its capacity to demand ~~control over~~ loyalty from citizens and mobilize resources which, in turn, had an impact on how states related (and fought) with one another.

In his seminal book Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson outlined how the printing press allowed the state to standardize language and history. In other words, someone growing up in Marseilles 100 years before the printing press probably had a very different sense of history and spoke a markedly different dialect of French than someone living in Paris during the same period. But the printing press (and more specifically, those who controlled it) allowed a dominant discourse to emerge (in this case, likely the Parisian one). Think standardized dictionaries, school textbooks and curricula, to say nothing of history and entertainment. This caused people who might never have met to share a common ~~imagined~~ history, language and discourse. Do not underestimate the impact this had on people’s identity. As this wonderful quote from the book states: “Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.” In other words, states could now fully dispense with feudal middle managers and harness the power of larger swaths of population directly – a population that might never actually meet, but could nonetheless feel connected to one another. The printing press thus helped create the modern nation state by providing a form of tribalism at scale: what we now call nationalism. This was, in turn, an important ingredient for the wars that dominated the late 19th and early 20th century – think World War I and World War II. This isn’t to say without the printing press, you don’t get war – we know that isn’t true – but the type of total war between 20th century nation states does have a direct line to the printing press.

So yes, the techno-utopian world of: printing press -> Renaissance -> iPad is not particularly accurate.

What you do get is: printing press -> Renaissance -> state evolution -> destabilization of international order -> significant bloodshed -> re-stabilization of international system -> iPad.

I raise all this because if this is the impact the printing press had on the state, it begs a new question: What will be the impact of the internet on the state? Will the internet be a technology the state can harness to extract more loyalty from its citizens… or will the internet destroy the imagined communities that make the state possible, replaced by a more nimble, disruptive organization better able to survive the internet era?

Some Scenarios

Note: again, these scenarios aren’t absolutes or the only possibilities, they are designed to raise questions and provoke thinking.

The State Destroys the Internet

One possibility is that the state is as adaptive as capitalism. I’m always amazed at how capitalism has evolved over the centuries. From mercantilism to free market to social market to state capitalism, as a meme it readily adapts to new environments. One possibility is that the state is the same – sufficiently flexible to adapt to new conditions. Consequently, one can imagine that the state grabs sufficient control of the internet to turn it into a tool that at best enhances – and at worst, doesn’t threaten – citizens’ connection to it. Iran, with its attempt to build a state-managed internal network that will allow it to closely monitor its citizens’ every move, is a scary example of the former. China – with its great firewall – may be an example of the latter. But one not need pick on non-western states.

And a networked world will provide states – especially democratic ones – with lots of reasons to seize greater control of their citizens’ lives. From organized crime, to terrorism, to identity theft, governments find lots of reasons to monitor their citizens. This is to say nothing of advanced persistent threats which create a state of continual online warfare – or sort of modern day ~~phoney~~ phishy war – between China, the United States, Iran and others. This may be the ultimate justification.

Indeed, as a result of these threats, the United States already has an extensive system for using the internet to monitor its own citizens and even my own country – Canada – tried to pass a law last year to significantly ramp up the monitoring of citizens online. The UK, of course, has just proposed a law whose monitoring provisions would make any authoritarian government squeal with glee. And just last week we found out that the UK government is preparing to cut a blank check for internet service providers to pay for installing the monitoring systems to record what its citizens do online.

Have no doubts, this is about the state trying to ensure the internet serves – or at least doesn’t threaten – its interests.

This is sadly, the easiest future to imagine since it conforms with the world we already know – one where states are ascendant. However, this future represents, in many ways, a linear projection of the future – and our world, especially our networked world, rarely behaves in a linear fashion. So we should be careful about confusing familiarity with probability.

The Internet Destroys the State

Another possibility is that the internet undermines our connection with the state. Online we become increasingly engaged with epistemic communities – be it social, like someone’s World of Warcraft guild, or professional, such as an association with a scientific community. Meanwhile, in the physical world, local communities – possibly at the regional level – become ascendant. In both cases, regulations and rules created by the state feel increasingly like an impediment to conducting our day to day lives, commerce and broader goals. Frustration flares, and increasingly someone in Florida feels less and less connection with someone in Washington state – and the common sense of identity, the imagined community, created by the state begins to erode.

This is, of course, hard for many people to imagine – especially Americans. But for many people in the world – including Canadians – the unity of the state is not a carefree assumption. There have been three referenda on breaking up Canada in my lifetime. More to the point, this process probably wouldn’t start in places where the state is strongest (such as in North America); rather, it would start in places where it is weakest. Think Somalia, Egypt (at the moment) or Belgium (which has basically functioned for two years without a government and no one seemed to really notice). Maybe this isn’t a world with no state – but lots of little states (which I think breaks with our mold of what we imagine the state to be to a certain degree) or maybe some new organizing mechanism, one which leverages local community identities, but can co-exist with a network of diffused but important transnational identities. Or maybe the organizing unit gets bigger, so that greater resources can be called upon to manage ne,w network-based threats.

I, like most people find this world harder to imagine. This is because so many of our assumptions suddenly disappear. If not the state, then what? Who or what protects and manages the internet infrastructure? What about other types of threats – corporate interests, organized and cyber-crime, etc.? This is true paradigm-shifting stuff (apologies for use of the word,) and frankly, I still find myself too stuck in my Newtonian world and the rules make it hard to imagine or even know what quantum mechanics will be like. Again, I want to separate imagining the future with its probability. The two are not always connected, and this is why thinking about this future, as uncomfortable and alienating as it may be, is probably an important exercise.

McWorld – The Internet Rewards the Corporation

One of the big assumptions I often find about people who write/talk about the internet is that it almost always assumes that the individual is the fundamental unit of analysis. There are good reasons for this – using social media, an individual’s capacity to be disruptive has generally increased. And, as Clay Shirky has outlined, the need for coordinating institutions and managers has greatly diminished. Indeed, Shirky’s blog post on the collapse of complex business models is (in addition to being a wonderful piece) a fantastic description of how a disruptive technology can undermine the capacity of larger complex players in a system and benefit smaller, simpler stakeholders. Of course, the smaller stakeholder in our system may not be the individual – it may be an actor that is smaller, nimbler than the state, that can foster an imagined community, and can adopt various forms of marshaling resources for self-organization to hierarchical management. Maybe it is the corporation.

During the conversation at FooCamp, Tim O’Reilly pressed this point with great effect. It could be that the corporation is actually the entity best positioned to adapt to the internet age. Small enough to leverage networks, big enough to generate a community that is actually loyal and engaged.

Indeed, it is easy to imagine a feedback loop that accelerates the ascendance of the corporation. If our imagined communities of nation states cannot withstand a world of multiple narratives and so become weaker, corporations would benefit not just from a greater capacity to adapt, but the great counterbalance to their power – state regulation and borders – might simultaneously erode. A world where more and more power – through information, money and human capital – gets concentrated in corporations is not hard to imagine. Indeed there are many who believe this is already our world. Of course, if the places (generally government bodies) where corporate conflicts – particularly those across sectors – cannot be mediated peacefully then corporations may turn much more aggressive. The need to be bigger, to marshal more resources, to have a security division to defend corporate interests, could lead to a growth in corporations as entities we barely imagine today. It’s a scary future, but not one that hasn’t been imagined several times in SciFi novels, and not one I would put beyond the realm of imagination.

The End of the World

The larger point of all this is that new technologies do change the way we imagine our communities. A second and third order impact of the printing press was its critical role in creating the modern nation-state. The bigger question is, what will be the second and third order impacts of the internet – on our communities (real and imagined), our identity and where power gets concentrated?

As different as the outcomes above are, they share one important thing in common. None represent the status quo. In each case, the nature of the state, and its relationship with citizens, shifts. Consequently, I find it hard to imagine a future where the internet does not continue to put a real strain on how we organize ourselves, and in turn the systems we have built to manage this organization. Consequently, it is not hard to imagine that as more and more of those institutions – including potentially the state itself – come under strain, it could very likely push systems – like the international state system – that are presently stable into a place of instability. It is worth noting that after the printing press, one of the first real nation states – France – wreaked havoc on Europe for almost a half century, using its enhanced resources to conquer pretty much everyone in its path.

While I am fascinated by technology and believe it can be harnessed to do good, I like to think that I am not – as Evgeny labels them – a techno-utopian. We need to remember that, looking back on our history, the second and third order effects of some technologies can be highly destabilizing, which carries with it real risks of generating significant bloodshed and conflict. Hence the title of this blog post and the FooCamp session: The End of the World.

This is not a call for a renewed Luddite manifesto. Quite the opposite – we are on a treadmill we cannot get off. Our technologies have improved our lives, but they also create new problems that, very often social innovations and other technologies will be needed to solve. Rather, I want to raise this because I believe it to be important that still more people – particularly those in the valley and other technology hubs (and not just military strategists) – be thinking critically about what the potential second and third order effects of the internet, the web and the tools they are creating, so that they can contribute to the thinking around potential technological, social and institutional responses that could hopefully mitigate against the worst outcomes.

I hope this helps prompt further thinking and discussion.

Control Your Content: Why SurveyMonkey Should Add a "Download Your Answers" Button

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Let me start by saying, I really like SurveyMonkey.

By this I mean, I like SurveyMonkey specifically, but I also like online surveys in general. They are easy to ignore if I’m uninterested in the topic but – when the topic is relevant – it is a great, simple service that allows me to share feedback, comments and opinions with whomever wants to solicit them.

Increasingly however, I find people and organizations are putting up more demanding surveys – surveys that necessitate thoughtful, and even occasionally long form, responses.

Take for example the Canadian Government. It used an online survey tool during its consultation on open government and open data. The experience was pretty good. Rather than a clunky government website, there was a relatively easy form to fill out. Better still, since the form was long, it was wonderful that you could save your answers and come back to it later! This mattered since some of the form’s questions prompted me to write lengthy (and hopefully) insightful responses.

But therein lies the rub. In the jargon of the social media world I was “creating content.” This wasn’t just about clicking boxes. I was writing. And surprisingly many of my answers were causing me to develop new ideas. I was excited! I wanted to take the content I had created and turn it into a blog post.

Sadly, most survey tools make it very, very hard for you to capture the content you’ve created. It feels like it would be relatively easy to have a “download my answers” button at the end of a survey. I mean, if I’ve taken 10-120 minutes to complete a survey or public consultation shouldn’t we make it easy for me to keep a record of my responses? Instead, I’ve got to copy and paste the questions, and my answers, into a text document as I go. And of course, I’d better decide that I want to do that before I start since some survey tools don’t allow you to go back and see previous answers.

I ultimately did convert my answers into a blog post (you can see it here), but there was about 20 minutes of cutting, pasting, figuring things out, and reformatting. And there was some content (like Semantic Differential questions – where you rate statements) which were simply to hard to replicate.

There are, of course, other uses too. I had a similar experience last week after being invited to complete a survey posted by the Open Government Partnership Steering Committee on its Independent Reporting Mechanism. About half way through filling it out some colleagues suggested we compare answers to better understand one another’s advice. A download your answer tool would have convert a 15 minute into a 10 second task. All to access content I created.

I’m not claiming this is the be all, end all of online survey features, but it is the kind of simple thing that I survey company can do that will cause some users to really fall in love with the service. To its credit SurveyMonkey was at least willing to acknowledge the feedback – just what you’d hope for from a company that specializes in soliciting opinion online! With luck, maybe the idea will go somewhere.

Lessons from Michigan's "Innovation Fund" for Government Software

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So it was with great interest that several weeks ago a reader emailed me this news article coming out of Michigan. Turns out the state recently approved a $2.5 million dollar innovation fund that will be dispersed in $100,000 to $300,000 chunks to fund about 10 projects. As Government Technology reports:

The $2.5 million innovation fund was approved by the state Legislature in Michigan’s 2012 budget. The fund was made formal this week in a directive from Gov. Rick Snyder. The fund will be overseen by a five-person board that includes Michigan Department of Technology, Management and Budget (DTMB) Director John Nixon and state CIO David Behen.

There are lessons in this for other governments thinking about how to spur greater innovation in government while also reducing the cost of software.

First up: the idea of an innovation fund – particularly one that is designed to support software that works for multiple governments – is a laudable one. As I’ve written before, many governments overpay for software. I shudder to think of how many towns and counties in Michigan alone are paying to have the exact same software developed for them independently. Rather than writing the same piece of software over and over again for each town, getting a single version that is usable by 80% (or heck, even just 25%) of cities and counties would be a big win. We have to find a way to get governments innovating faster, and getting them back in the driver’s seat on the software they need (as opposed to adapting stuff made for private companies) would be a fantastic start.

Going from this vision – of getting something that works in multiple cities – to reality, is not easy. Read the Executive Directive more closely. What’s particularly interesting (from my reading) is the flexibility of the program:

In addition to the Innovation Fund and Investment Board, the plan may include a full range of public, private, and non-profit collaborative innovation strategies, including resource sharing…

There is good news and bad news here.

The bad news is that all this money could end up as loans to mom and pop software shops that serve a single city or jurisdiction, because they were never designed from the beginning to be usable across multiple jurisdictions. In other words, the innovation fund could go to fund a bunch of vendors who already exist and who, at best, do okay, or at worse, do mediocre work and, in either case, will never be disruptive and blow up the marketplace with something that is both radically helpful and radically low cost.

What makes me particularly nervous about the directive is that there is no reference to open source license. If a government is going to directly fund the development of software, I think it should be open source; otherwise, taxpayers are acting as venture capitalists to develop software that they are also going to pay licenses to use. In other words, they’re absorbing the risk of a VC in order to have the limited rights of being a client; that doesn’t seem right. An open source requirement would be the surest way to ensure an ROI on the program’s money. It assures that Michigan governments that want access to what gets developed can get use it at the lowest possible cost. (To be clear, I’ve no problem with private vendors – I am one – but their software can be closed because they (should) be absorbing the risk of developing it themselves. If the government is giving out grants to develop software for government use, the resulting software should be licensed open.)

Which brings us to the good. My interest in the line of the executive directive cited above was piqued by the reference to public and non-profit “collaborative innovation strategies.” I read that and I immediately think of one of my favourite organizations: Kuali.

Many readers have heard me talk about Kuali, an organization in which a group of universities collectively set the specs for a piece of software they all need and then share in the costs of developing it. I’m a big believer that this model could work for local and even state level governments. This is particularly true for the enterprise management software packages (like financial management), for which cities usually buy over-engineered, feature rich bloatware from organizations like SAP. The savings in all this could be significant, particularly for the middle-sized cities for whom this type of software is overkill.

My real hope is that this is the goal of this fund – to help provide some seed capital to start 10 Kuali-like projects. Indeed, I have no idea if the governor and his CIO’s staff have heard of or talked to the Kuali team before signing this directive, but if they haven’t, they should now. (Note: It’s only a 5 hour drive from the capital, Lansing, Michigan to the home of Kuali in Bloomington, Indiana).

So, if you are a state, provincial or national government and you are thinking about replicating Michigan’s directive – what should you do? Here’s my advice:

Require that all the code created by any projects you fund be open source. This doesn’t mean anyone can control the specs – that can still reside in the hands of a small group of players, but it does mean that a variety of companies can get involved in implementation so that there is still competition and innovation. This was the genius of Kuali – in the space of a few months, 10 different companies emerged that serviced Kuali software – in other words, the universities created an entire industry niche that served them and their specific needs exclusively. Genius.
Only fund projects that have at least 3 jurisdictions signed up. Very few enterprise open source projects start off with a single entity. Normally they are spec’ed out with several players involved. This is because if just one player is driving the development, they will rationally always choose to take shortcuts that will work for them, but cut down on the likelihood the software will work for others. If, from the beginning, you have to balance lots of different needs, you end up architecting your solution to be flexible enough to work in a diverse range of environments. You need that if your software is going to work for several different governments.
Don’t provide the funds, provide matching funds. One way to ensure governments have skin in the game and will actually help develop software is to make them help pay for the development. If a city or government agency is devoting $100,000 towards helping develop a software solution, you’d better believe they are going to try to make it work. If the State of Michigan is paying for something that may work, maybe they’ll contribute and be helpful, or maybe they’ll sit back and see what happens. Ensure they do the former and not the latter – make sure the other parties have skin in the game.
Don’t just provide funds for development – provide funds to set up the organization that will coordinate the various participating governments and companies, set out the specs, and project manage the development. Again, to understand what that is like – just fork Kuali’s governance and institutional structure.
Ignore government agencies or jurisdictions that believe they are a special unique flower. One of the geniuses of Kuali is that they abstracted the process/workflow layer. That way universities could quickly and easily customize the software so that it worked for how their university does its thing. This was possible not because the universities recognized they were each a unique and special flower but because they recognized that for many areas (like library or financial management) their needs are virtually identical. Find partners that look for similarities, not those who are busy trying to argue they are different.

There is of course more, but I’ll stop there. I’m excited for Michigan. This innovation fund has real promise. I just hope that it gets used to be disruptive, and not to simply fund a few slow and steady (and stodgy) software incumbents that aren’t going to shake up the market and help change the way we do government procurement. We don’t need to spend $2.5 million to get software that is marginally better (or not even). Governments already spend billions every year for that. If we are going to spend a few million to innovate, let’s do it to be truly disruptive.

Beautiful Maps – Open Street Map in Water Colours

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You know, really never know what the web is going to throw at you next. The great people over at Stamen Design (if you’ve never heard of Stamen you are really missing out – they are probably the best data visualization company I know) have created a watercolor version of Open Street Maps.

Why?

Because they can.

It’s a wonderful example of how you, with the web, you can build on what others have done. Pictured below my home town of Vancouver – I suggest zooming out a little as the city really comes into focus when you can see more of its geography.

Some Bonus Awesomeness Facts about all this Stamen goodness:

Stamen has a number of Creative Commons licensed map templates that you can use here (and links to GitHub repos)
Stamen housed Code for America in its early days. So they don’t just make cool stuff. The pitch in and help out with cool stuff too.
Former Code for America fellow Michael Evans works there now.