Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, says it is. In fact, the publisher is hosting a conference in Washington, DC next week where tech luminaries will begin discussing how best technology can play a role in government. This doesn’t necessarily mean incorporating Web 2.0 into daily business, it’s envisioning government as a platform, he argued.

“If there’s one thing we learn from the technology industry, it’s that every big winner has been a platform company: someone whose success has enabled others, who’ve built on their work and multiplied its impact,” O’Reilly argued in a guest post on TechCrunch. “In each case, the platform provider raised the bar, and created opportunities for others to exploit.”

O’Reilly points to data.gov as an example  of this thinking. With people now having easier access to the multitude of government data that is floating around out there, this data can now be to good use.

Certainly, I can agree with O’Reilly’s thought process here. As he also argues, too often we just pay our taxes and expect services back. So participating in government is limited to kibbitzing when we don’t get what we expect. I think adopting a platform strategy is another way to get citizens involved.

Free from the grind which is the governance of the country, we as citizens have the time to think of new ways of using the mounds of valuable data out there that the government is producing. As data.gov shows, there is plenty of it out there waiting for somebody to take advantage of it.

I think the works of JFK ring true in this instance: “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” Let’s look away from what we can get out of the vending machine and instead look what we could fill that vending machine with.

As we all know, in some cases private industry can do things better than government can. I think technology is one of those areas. Lets put our heads together and see what we can come up with, eh?