I'm a civil engineer by training, but don't ask me to build your house or a road in front of your house. I'm a systems guy. I sleep, eat and drink data to make optimal decisions and to prevent bad things from happening especially in transportation/railway areas. The Economist this week has an article about open data in the U.S. On May 9th Barack Obama ordered that all data created or collected by America’s federal government must be made available free to the public, unless this would violate privacy, confidentiality or security. This is huge. This will open up crowd-sourcing opportunities to solve some real problems like traffic congestion, pollution, crime prevention etc. How is this relevant to Malaysia? Open data, open book is a good approach to improve transparency (BTW, it seems that corruption has been identified as the root cause for the so-called Chinese or urban tsunamis?). It could also help to make and support fact-based policy and decision making like investment in MRT and GST implementation.
Another interesting article in the Economist this week is on private-run public services. This is not privatization. In essence, at the same or lower cost a government appoint a private entity to provide the same public services at higher efficiency and quality. The aim is to give taxpayers value for money. I hope PEMANDU pays attention to this concept for their Government Transformation Programme (GTP).
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