Alon Peled

Hebrew University of Jerusalem | HUJI · Department of Political Science

This paper develops and tests a theoretical model, which proposes to examine cities’ commitment to the concept of open government data (OGD) according to three typical levels. Level 1, Way of Life, indicates high commitment to OGD; Level 2, On the Fence, represents either a low or erratic commitment; Level 3, Lip Service, refers to either scarce or...

This paper develops and tests a theoretical model, which assesses the commitment of cities to the concept of open government data (OGD), according to three levels. Level 1, ‘Way of life,’ reflects a high commitment to OGD; Level 2, ‘On the Fence,’ represents either a low or erratic commitment to OGD; Level 3, ‘Lip Service,’ refers to either scarce...

Since 2009 governments worldwide have been developing Open Government Data (OGD) programs. Our paper examines the ways in which public agencies in the two leading OGD countries, the US and the UK, have released information assets to promote public sector accountability. Theoretically and empirically, we discuss the vision and execution of the OGD p...

As part of endorsing the open government data movement in many parts of the world, governments have worked to increase openness in actions where information technologies play a major role. Releasing public data was perceived by many governments and officials as a fundamental element to achieve transparency and accountability. Many studies have crit...

The chapter illustrates the severity of public sector information sharing failures with five tragic events where information sharing failure was decisive: the Challenger Space Shuttle explosion; the 9/11 terror attacks; Hurricane Katrina; the 2010 Haiti earthquake; and the 2011 Fukushima nuclear power plant accident. The chapter defines public agen...

The chapter acknowledges that information assets are a precious resource for government agencies and maps existing data trade patterns in the US public sector. US agencies trade in three types of information products (primary data, secondary information products, and information services) using four data trade payment mechanisms. Examples of public...

The chapter explains the concept of a contested commodity - a good whose insertion into the marketplace raises ethical debate. Public data is a contested commodity because agencies hold sensitive information about citizens that may not be suited to trade. The histories of the commoditization of thirty contested commodities reveal four lessons for t...

The chapter examines the three key approaches to improve public sector information sharing that dominate both literature and legislation: coerce, consent, and coax. A case study of the coerce-approach Homeland Security Information Network (HSIN) program shows this approach’s limitations. Three coax-approach case studies illustrate this approach’s s...

Chapter seven addresses four political and ethical dilemmas associated with the implementation of a Public Sector Information Exchange (PSIE). (1) The democracy challenge presents a trade-off between public data as a public good that cannot be traded, and efficient sharing of government information that furthers democratic ideals of transparency, a...

The chapter explains the concept of a Public Sector Information Exchange (PSIE). It then presents a detailed case study of a supply-chain PSIE model: the Australian CrimTrac program that was established to streamline information sharing among Australian police organizations. The chapter then explores the potential for an exchange PSIE model to be i...

See: http://scholars.huji.ac.il/traversingdigitalbabel 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. W...

Government Accountability Office reports and secondary sources reveal that the U.S. Congress has employed three distinct legislative approaches to address the federal counterterrorism information-sharing impasse: coerce, consent, and coax. One main example illustrates each approach: the Homeland Security Information Network project exemplifies the...

Open Data (OD) programs have become popular. OD proponents argue that OD programs are necessary to reinvigorate participatory democracy and active citizenship. However, the debate between proponents and critics of these programs relies on anecdotal data. The paper describes a methodological innovation (dubbed "The Public Sector Information Exchange...

Open Data (OD) pinned agencies on the horns of a transparency dilemma: Surrender valuable datasets to comply with new OD policy, or resist freeing valuable data and face criticism from the public, the media, and politicians. Agencies have developed creative data release strategies to confront this dilemma. Public administration scholars cannot affo...

Efficient interagency information sharing is critical to the execution of functions in the transparent state, and yet agencies persistently fail to share information. In the United States, members of the Hurricane Katrina (29 August 2005) investigation committee wrote that the American government remains the largest purchaser of information technol...

Since 2009, eighty-one countries subscribed to President Obama’s Open Government program including its dominant Open Data (OD) component. Do OD 2.0 plans address the problems detected during the first generation of this program (2010-2012)? If not, how can these plans be improved? The article is a review of the main lines of criticism of the origin...

Since 2009, eighty-one countries subscribed to President Obama's Open Government program including its dominant Open Data (OD) component. Do Open Data 2.0 plans address the problems detected during the first generation of this program (2010-2012)? If not, how can these plans be improved? The article is a review of the main lines of criticism of the...

What role does politics play in the emerging Big Data domain? The paper argues that Big Data political power struggles surface at three distinct levels of analysis: the social sciences, the information state, and bureaucratic politics. At the social sciences level of analysis, Big Data threatens to divide social scientists into antagonistic methodo...

How can agencies imbued with centuries-old public sector ethos jointly create a successful commerce-oriented enterprise with a thrift-focused organizational identity? How do successful political entrepreneurs overcome the concern that agencies will free-ride in the process of founding a new inter-organizational institution in an emergent technologi...

Why and how do state organizations develop the impetus to negotiate and create an inter-state institution to improve cooperation in a new domain? This paper argues that minor monetary incentives can nudge state organizations to work more closely together to create a new institution in a new issue-domain. Over time, these incentives thicken the bond...

Since 2009, eighty-one countries subscribed to President Obama’s Open Government program including its dominant Open Data (OD) component. Do Open Data 2.0 plans address the problems detected during the first generation of this program (2010-2012)? If not, how can these plans be improved? The paper is the first-ever review of the main lines of criti...

Since his first election in late 2008, President Obama has launched a blitzkrieg campaign to advance the Open Data Program (www.data.gov). This program dictates that government agencies release data on the Web, free of charge, in a readable format. The Open Data program claims that citizens will then download datasets and develop effective applicat...

The paper employs three case studies of three separate computer projects to illustrate how information sharing among public sector agencies can be incentivized. The United States Department of Homeland Security's Homeland Security Information System (HSIN) project demonstrates that bureaucratic politics must take primacy over technology, to ensure...

Electronic information sharing failures haunt the public sectors of many countries. Over the past decade, several countries introduced interesting new marketplace-oriented programs to incentivize public sector organizations to improve information exchange. Critics level three challenges against these programs: (1) they undermine the ideal of active...

President Obama's inaugural flagship Open Data program emphasizes the values of transparency, participation, and collaboration in governmental work. The Open Data performance data analysis, published here for the first time, proposes that most federal agencies have adopted a passive-aggressive attitude toward this program by appearing to cooperate...

Discuss four theoretical approaches (political, archeological, utopian and managerial) that address the research question but fail to offer solutions to improve electronic information sharing. Next, the paper proposes a fifth marketplace approach which suggests that federal data is a contested commodity (i.e., a commodity whose insertion into the m...

At the end of November 2010, an Israeli ministerial committee headed by Minister Michael Eytan decided to adopt the American "Open Data" model (www.data.gov). This model dictates that all public sector entities must publish online (via a central governmental Internet site) high-value non-classified data sets in order to increase transparency, parti...

Can we develop an ethical and transparent system which will incentivize self-centered Federal agencies to expand electronic information sharing? I provide data to demonstrate the Obama Administration's Open Data program (designed to address this question) had failed. I argue that Open Data architects failed because they did not understand the inher...

How can we incentivize public agencies to share electronic information effectively? I first argue that the Obama Administration's Web 2.0 methodology of addressing this question (http://www.data.gov) will fail because (1) Federal agencies will not willingly surrender precious information assets that are the source of their political power; (2) valu...

How can we incentivize managers of public agencies to share electronic information more effectively? The dominant political, managerial and archeological theories of public computing fail to address this question. President Obama's recent "Open Data" initiative also fails to address this question. The paper therefore first re-defines the public sec...

How can we incentivize public agencies to share information more effectively? The dominant political, managerial and archeological theories of public computing fail to address this question. The article therefore first re-defines the public sector as the sector that holds the legitimate monopoly on the process of producing, updating, and disseminat...

Federal computer projects frequently fail because federal organizations are mandated to follow an erroneous Enterprise Architecture (EA) metaphor. The article promotes an alternative metaphor that highlights the principles of incremental evolution, learning, exploration and slow adaptation, experimentation, and minimal architecture. To advance this...

How does an administrative reform develop its own unique style, and how important is this style in determining the reform's legacy? This article argues that sometimes the manner in which an administrative reform is implemented is as important as the reform's initial goals or official agenda. To illustrate the argument, the article compares two refo...

Large public organizations that adopted computers in the early 1960s ever since have been accumulating “electronic mounds” consisting of layers upon layers of computer systems, data cemeteries, and software-inscribed, special case rules. These electronic mounds acquire a life of their own and are responsible for huge amounts of new electronic red t...

The rapidly growing governmental IT outsourcing trend raises different questions: Who, inside bureaucracy, governs computer systems after outsourcing? Which actors gain or lose political clout when the government begins to aggressively outsource its IT operations? How does IT outsourcing change the relationships among bureaucrats, consultants, and...

Develops a “politics-first” theoretical framework to explain why, how, and when innovative IT projects are implemented successfully in public organizations. Explains how individuals who share a technological interest find each other in issue-networks. Describes why and how the interests of technologists, bureaucrats, and politicians converge to a p...

The Internet is a double-edged sword that can work to promote different, and sometimes conflicting, causes in the Middle East. It can open up economies yet at the same time increase the socio-economic gap between the knowledgeable few and the impoverished many. It can disburse free information and simultaneously provide governments with new powerfu...

Can the new information and communication technologies (ICTs) such as the Internet change the power relationships within a bureaucracy? The dominant centralization approach argues that the existing power elite manipulates computers to perpetuate and augment its power. Although not a coherent school of thought, other scholars suggest that technology...

Besieged by the distance learning revolution, many senior university and college administrators are asking: How can traditional classroom teaching be modified in order to keep pace with the rapidly evolving high tech marketplace for higher education? The Faculty of Social Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel launched a three-year...

This article argues that effective linguistic policies in multiethnic militaries do not evolve by themselves. Rather, they require both political pressure on the military to reform its language policy and the willingness of the military to learn from the experience of other militaries. It also provides new evidence to explain how a new quality clas...

Social scientists have argued recently that the theory and findings of the new sciences (quantum mechanics, chaos theory, and new evolutionary biology) corroborate the essences of liberal democracy. Specifically, scholars have argued that the new sciences’ principle of self‐organization is closely associated with the idea of individual liberty. Thi...

Besieged by the distance learning revolution, many senior university and college administrators are asking: how can traditional classroom teaching be modified in order to keep pace with the rapidly evolving high-tech marketplace for higher education? The Faculty of Social Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel launched a three-year...

Argues that leaders with extensive backgrounds in organizational politics are more likely than technology-focused leaders to complete their information technology projects successfully. Describes how successful technological leaders in the public sector manage their projects, mainly upwards and outwards, and tailor their technical visions to the da...

Can we import the high-performance team theory developed in the private sector into the public sector in order to improve the success rates of information technology (IT) projects? This article proposes that public organizations can create effective workgroups (weaker than the private sector’s high-performance teams but stronger than the weak commi...

Using Israel as a case study, the article argues that politics rather than technology accounts for the inefficient and wasteful state of technology in the public sector in countries where one finds ample endogenous first‐class high tech manpower. In such countries, the article further argues, Information Technology (IT) systems are built and used i...

Develops four political models of public information technology (IT) projects based on how bureaucrats employ their technical knowledge and how vendors manipulate their political status. Politics of outsourcing; Reality of public IT projects; Variety of political roles assumed by vendors. Abstract. A growing number of public organizations outsource...

Focuses on the speculated impact of Internet on the politics of Middle Eastern countries. Geographical scope of the Internet impact; Benefits of the Internet; Role of the Internet in the economic development of the region.

Lay summary: The article proposes that social scientists missed a valuable research opportunity to approach the Y2K bug as an area for social science study. The article demonstrates that studying public reactions to and national policy regarding Y2K holds rich potential for social science research. It explicates four areas where social science and...

Lay summary: Social scientists have applied new science concepts (from quantum mechanics, chaos theory and new evolutionary biology) to political theory, in particular arguing that the principle of self-organization reflects the dynamics of liberal democracy. The article argues that this view is inaccurate and damaging. The self organizing principl...

ates that use military conscription and whose ethnic minorities have relatives in hostile countries face a "Trojan horse" dilemma: the state demands military service but mistrusts the loyalty of subjugated community members. Some armies brutalize ethnic recruits; others simply reject them. Alon Peled compares the experiences of Malay-Muslim soldier...

Minority groups in Central Asia, the Baltic republics, Eastern Europe, and Africa find themselves entrapped between their loyalty to their new states and their cultural and blood-ties with kin across the border in a potential enemy country. This ethnic dilemma is complicated by the enactment of conscription in many of these new states (for example,...

Reports that South Africa needs an apolitical and racially integrated military and police force that supports the new democratic government. Differences between the current government and the African National Congress over the issue; Concerns about the effects of the country's division between whites and blacks; Police brutality.