It’s all part of the Open Government Directive mandated by the Office of Management and Budget, in a memo dated December 8, 2009. The Directive is a direct result of the work begun by the White House, under the auspices of an Open Government Initiative, in the early days of the Obama Administration. (We’re pleased, by the way, that Beth Noveck, a collaborator with Don and the Wikinomics team in recent years, has had such an important role leading the Initiative from inside the White House…congratulations Beth!)

I encourage you to read the Directive. It’s the antithesis of the kinds of 1,000-page government documents that get joked about on the late night TV programs. Instead, it is eleven pages long and has clear, unequivocal language such as “The three principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration form the cornerstone of an open government.”

So, what can you expect in two to three weeks? Well, the first deadline in the directive actually already passed last week. To wit: “Within 45 days, each agency shall identify and publish online in an open format at least three high-value data sets and register those data sets via Data.gov. These must be data sets not previously available online or in a downloadable format.” We discussed Data.gov and some of the terrific work going on in open source development of apps to tap into those rich data sets in my multi-part review of the inaugural O’Reilly Gov 2.0 Summit last year.

But, what you can expect by early February is that each agency will have created an “Open Government Webpage” to serve as its gateway for agency activities related to the Open Government Directive. This is the place where each agency will provide information about its plans and solicit and receive input about its future. For the solicitation of citizen input, expect an already well-tested web 2.0 tool, like Ideascale, to power the process.

We’ll provide more updates in the coming weeks.  And, keep an eye on our partner website, The Collaboration Project, at the National Academy, for insightful policy updates on open government progress as well.  But, in the meantime, get in there and make your voice heard!

This week I’ve had the pleasure of attending a very well executed Government 2.0 Summit held in Washington D.C. I was pleasantly surprised to find many ‘kindred spirits’ at the conference and additional examples that signal the rise New Public-Private Ecosystem.

Tim O’Reilly, whose firm conducted the conference, opened with a keynote that argued that the twin developments of open data and the power of shared platforms had the capacity to revolutionize government. He noted that platforms such as Google, eBay, Amazon, Craigslist and Apple’s iPhone App Store were successful because they harnessed user contributions to create enormous collective value – value way beyond what they could do alone. He then went on to argue that this same logic could be applied to the role of government services. He argued that the government needed to begin to think of itself as a platform. He pointed to how the investments made by the U.S. Department of Defense in globally positioned satellites (GPS) spurred others to develop applications, products and services, and spawned an entire industry.

Over 40 noteworthy examples of the government as a platform were seen at the conference. Here are some of the highlights:

• NASA’s Spacebook – “Lessons Learned from NASA’s Enterprise Social Network,” (Emma Antunes) that supports internal and external cross-fertilization of ideas and innovation at the juncture of different scientific disciplines.
• TSA’s IdeaFactory – “Transportation Security Administration’s IdeaFactory: Social Media and Securing America,” (Tina Cariola) that harnesses front line TSA employee’s ideas for innovation and continuous improvement at the TSA.
• Citizen budget input in Santa Cruz – “City of Santa Cruz Offers Blueprint for Solving CA Budget Crisis with Social Media,” (Peter Koht) was used to deal with radical budget cuts in municipal services and reallocate resources.
• State of Utah – “Utah Department of Public Safety Media Portal,” (Jeff Nigbur) – a shared portal that coordinates safety information, enables collaboration with private media organizations, and saves money for the State of Utah.
• Data and Platforms – “GeoEnabling Gov 2.0″ (Jack Dangermond) – GIS wizard, pioneer and founder of ESRI, illustrated how open data sources with powerful GIS tools and government platforms can enable “on-the-fly” mashups to support situational awareness and crisis situations in realtime, like the recent Station Wildfire in Los Angeles.

One of my favorite sessions was a panel on “Creating an Effective Platform,” with John Markoff (New York Times), Vinton Cerf (Google), Jack Dorsey (Twitter) and Tim Sparapani (Facebook). Markoff started off the session by distinguishing between “platforms of liberation,” and “platforms of control,” suggesting that platforms of liberation lead to creativity and innovation whereas platforms of control tend to limit creativity, stifle innovation and by implication in the worst case, be used to enslave or oppress. All the panel members reiterated that effective platforms (aka liberating platforms) have the ability to enlist broad voluntary participation. Cerf noted that a combination of design requirements from the Department of Defense for connectivity among all of their assets mixed with the values of the academic community fostered an open, cooperative architecture for the Internet. Dorsey, the creator of Twitter, noted that the concept of a utility, like the electricity grid or the Internet was his inspiration for Twitter – a reliable platform that can be used by others to build new capabilities. Sparapani noted that while Facebook has over 250 million members, it is also important to note that Facebook’s architecture also enlists and supports over a million independent developers that add value to the Facebook platform every day.

At the highest levels of the Obama administration the United States, with the appointments of Vivek Kundra as the first CIO of the United States and Aneesh Chopra as the U.S. CTO, is developing policy frameworks (e.g. The Open Government Directive) and new tools (e.g. data.gov and The Federal IT Dashboard) that will support collaborative platforms and open data. Both Mr. Kundra (see here) and Mr. Chopra (see here) provided additional information on these efforts at the conference.

So the story continues and I believe the mindshare is growing. Policy makers, practitioners and thought leaders are rising to the idea that a globally interconnected world affords new opportunities to reshape government. Open data unleashes the creative potential of citizens and private enterprise to create new services, software applications, and insights that the government cannot do by itself. The shear numbers tell the story. Millions of citizens and hundreds of thousands of companies of all sizes uniting to independently create value and enhance the common good. The proprietary ownership or licensing of that data to a few (Gov 1.0) seriously limits the power of the New Public Private Ecosystem. Now not all government data should be open and privacy must be safeguarded to be sure. Nonetheless, the vast proportion of government data falls under the non-private category.

The same logic applies to collaborative platforms. In contrast to open data, however, collaborative platforms require investment and development. As we further explore the New Public-Private Ecosystem, policy makers, entrepreneurs, and the market will need to work out where it is best for the public sector to invest and where the private sector should invest. The dividing line is not clear. Only 10 years ago, one would not expect Twitter to emerge from the private sector; utilities were the province of governments. But the good news is that democracies, republics, and open societies have the natural open forums to debate and collaborate to find the answer. Closed societies force themselves into a comparative disadvantage on the world scene – they only harness a small proportion of their collective creative spirit. We are not likely to see the New Public-Private Ecosystems and its benefits emerge in those nations.

This is a new age of collaboration and the train has left the station. Distinctions between less government or more government are the realm of old categories and thinking. Government may well get smaller – a happy thought for citizens. Howeverit will get smaller, not through fewer services, but rather through the power of collaborative platforms, open data, and the New Public-Private Ecosystem, and in the final analysis, private citizens will have more services and a play a greater role in the development and delivery of those services. Everyone can win: the dedicated public servant, the engaged citizen, the investor, and the company.

Failed systems. Constructs designed by humans that have faltered at some point in the process. Some might say education is the next to witness this.

Tom Brown, CEO of IDEO, questions the current economic model in North America:

I have been thinking quite a bit recently about the failure of the economy and whether we want it to recover to its pre-bust state. As I listened to the arguments for various stimulus packages, the main justification for distributing hundreds of billions of dollars seemed mostly to involve getting us to spend more by consuming more. As a short term fix this may be okay, but wasn’t it just such an unsustainable approach to growth and consumption that got us into trouble in the first place? Can we really expect to spend our way out of this downturn and somehow magically create a post-crisis economy that is sustainable?

You mean throwing money at a problem won’t solve it if the model has an inherent flaw? How do we redesign society on a macro level? How does one magically create a post crisis economy?

There is the concept of a participatory government, whereby citizens play a direct role in designing/monitoring/enforcing the rules that govern economic activity. Gong Szeto, designer and creator of YOUROWNDEMOCRACY, believes that we should redesign government as a computational platform:

Today’s technology allows for innovative online collaboration, networking, transactional, and information visualization. Integrated together in a coherent set of solutions for the citizens of democracy, it is now possible to conceive of a single-platform which is an independent non-partisan party whose sole mandate is to harness the power of these technologies into an accessible framework that will allow citizens the ability to stay informed about complex issues and to register their votes in favor or in opposition to processes in government. Transparency will lead to a stronger, more active and informed citizenry and more accountable government.

A Finalist in the 2009 Buckminster Fuller Challenge, YOUROWNDEMOCRACY is a web-based application geared to empower citizens of any democracy in the world to directly engage one another and their elected leaders on important issues on local, state, and national levels. Its goals:

•    empower collective action through citizen action
•    integrate with public citizens for immediate feedback.

You can read more about Gong’s proposal here. The concept applies today’s social networking, multimedia, and financial markets technologies to create a collaborative infrastructure that records and displays a population’s real-time sentiments. This data is measured and visualized for everyone as part of a continuous feedback loop.

I can appreciate that the idea makes issues digestible and actionable. Provided citizens are engaged, YOUROWNDEMOCRACY fosters a culture of transparency, openness and innovation. Transparency can even be a regulatory solution whereby connected citizens can act as monitors within the system. In the same breath though, transparency also means privacy issues.  Network and security issues could threaten public safety.  Data mining (especially on such a remarkable scale) and identity theft are not two phrases anyone enjoys hearing in the same sentence. With an accessible central repository of citizen data, the right data in the wrong hands could potentially be very harmful.

Scalability comes into play. Can the complete scope and needs of the people be adequately addressed using such a system? Do we have the physical resources required to support such an infrastructure. Twitter, an exemplary use of social media being used to track political events such as the post-election riots in Iran, has become a victim of its own success. It has experienced massive scaling problems due to the amount of page views per second.

There is also the daunting task of defining the parameters of the system. Should the system mimic the current infrastructure or does the change in methodology alter the system itself? Szeto’s approach is that of an independent non-partisan party whose sole mandate is to harness the power of these technologies into an accessible framework. This idea alters the current multiple party system of politics to that of a direct democracy. A changing model of governance also means a change in distribution of labour within government. Who is responsible for framing the questions asked – the government or the people? Careful understanding and use of verbiage in law is paramount. Ballot initiatives, a costly method of doing politics, have been considered to be the reason for paralysis of the political process in California and have been deemed the ‘crack cocaine’ of democracy by the Economist. Ironically enough, the original intention of ballot initiatives was to empower citizens at a grassroots level.

Accessibility is yet another concern. PM Stephen Harper recently announced the government’s intention to improve broadband internet access to rural Canada. Although this is a step in the right direction, it illustrates the point that not all citizens of Canada have equal access to broadband technologies. Those unfamiliar with the technology may not be as inclined to use it as well.

Will this design have longevity? With technology constantly evolving, would the current system, and therefore the political system (depending on mutual exclusivity of the two) be able to stand the test of time due to technological obsolescence? Would interest fade? The law of diminishing utility could mean that citizens could simply get bored of using the system and participation could simply diminish over time.

Are people truly ready, willing, and able to govern themselves?

Last week I had the opportunity to attend the Open Government and Innovations Conference in Washington, DC. The two-day conference was a fantastic opportunity to hear some of the leaders in open government thinking, including:

• Aneesh Chopra, Federal CTO – “The Innovation Imperative“
• Vivek Kundra, Federal CIO – “Town Hall Meeting – The IT Dashboard“
• Dave Weinberger, Harvard Law and Cluetrain Manifesto – “Transparency as a Virtue“
• Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media – “Government as a Platform“

(If you’re interested, those talks are available via Adobe Connect here. Click on the linked headshot of the speaker you’d like to watch.)

I sat in on some great panel sessions as well:

• Openness, Information Sharing, and the Use of New Media in DoD
• Case Studies in Citizenship Engagement
• Transforming Citizen Engagement with Congress
• Embracing a Collaborative Culture

It was also great to connect with some of the participants and speakers through the conference’s live Tweet grid. If you’re interested in more links and insight, just search the hashtag #OGI on Twitter.

Throughout the conference I picked up on a few core themes that seemed to run through all the sessions. While the official themes were Government to Government, Government to Business and Government to Citizens, the following seemed to be the three focal points for moving forward with open government initiatives.

1. Despite the hurdles, collaboration is possible

You may be familiar with the memorandum President Obama issued in January to all heads of departments and agencies in the Federal Government. Aneesh Chopra highlighted this in his opening address, crediting the memo with enforcing the ‘three pillars of open government’: transparency, participatory and collaborative. Since that memorandum, new government collaboration projects have surfaced and already-existing projects have enjoyed being in the spotlight of case studies and media writeups.

One great example is the Transportation Security Authority’s (TSA) ‘Idea Factory’, which is also featured in the White House Open Government Innovations Gallery. The Idea Factory, boasting the slogan “Innovate. Collaborate. Succeed”, is a two year old project connecting some 50,000 geographically dispersed employees across countries. Tina Cariola, the Idea Factory’s Program Manager, said the TSA needed a way to tap the knowledge of all of their employees across the organization. She had clear guidelines: the site had to be up and running within only a few weeks and was to be designed as more than just an online suggestion box.

The result was a dynamic community allowing employees to interact and collaborate with each other around ideas. What’s really interesting is the fact that the Idea Factory was originally rolled out as an innovation program, yet the community has turned into a powerful tool for employee engagement and communication. TSA management is actually using the Idea Factory as a way to monitor the workforce ‘pulse’, providing insight and awareness of key trends among employees.

Currently, the Idea Factory is seeing around 300 ideas submitted per month, and after community and management review, 1-2 of those are being implemented.

Tina’s tips:
-Establish cross-functional teams when originally establishing your collaboration strategy and reviewing user generated ideas (lawyers, IT, management, HR)
-Publicly recognize key contributors and leaders within the community. This could mean award ceremonies as well as involving that individual as ideas are selected to advance to the next stage of development.

Cases like these demonstrated for the audience that despite the oft-cited security and IP risks, collaboration within, and even across, government departments is possible. In many instances, government employees’ experience in dealing with sensitive information was seen as a real asset when making the shift to a culture of collaboration.

2. Open innovation on a continual basis

Perhaps my favourite part of the conference was hearing about departments opening up and making considerable efforts in the areas of citizen and business engagement. By governments building an effective platform for participation, sharing information and inviting participants to build off of that, communities can be established where innovation can come from anywhere at anytime, RFP issued or not. Aneesh Chopra presented the platform idea via a “Menu of Open Government Tools”, empowering others to develop their own initiatives in a cost-effective manner:

A shining example here is the Department of Defense website DefenseSolutions.gov:

“A portal through which innovative companies, entrepreneurs, and research organizations can offer potential solutions to the Department of Defense. This portal, and the team behind it, are designed to encourage companies that have never considered doing business with DoD to participate.”

Aneesh Chopra also outlined the open dialog initiative wherein the White House invited citizens to draft policy recommendations for a Presidential Directive. Using well known collaborative tools such as IdeaScale and MixedInk, the three stage process produced thousands of votes and comments and can still be seen at each individual phase here:

1. Brainstorming
2. Discussion
3. Drafting Recommendations

For me, this marked the transition from a mindset of closed, project-based, incremental innovation to a government prepared to take good ideas from anywhere. As Aneesh pointed out, “Great ideas get funding, regardless of the rules“.

3. The need to provide compelling experiences

Last, but not least, I felt a real sense of urgency for government agencies to rethink their interactions with participants; the need to provide compelling experiences. This includes with other agencies, government employees, businesses and citizens.

Tammy’s talked about the power of great experiences before. As the idea of government as a platform takes off, I think this becomes even more crucial. Talent, customers, processes and selected information reside outside of the traditional boundaries of the organization. How people interact with the platform out ‘there’ is what’s important. Why should they engage? What’s the reward of doing so?

Part of this comes in presenting information in a consistent, clear, interactive and useful way. The IT Dashboard, as presented by Vivek Kundra, was a great case study here. The searchable and customizable dashboard is so compelling it has attracted more than 30 million visitors since it was launched…on June 30! It’s been effective, too. One presenter spoke of a case where nearly 45 projects were halted at once when someone interacting with the data raised some red flags about cost management.

By making all this data available for mashups and other innovative services, everyday people are allowed a view into government with far more relevance on their personal lives than, say, just tables of data. And when people are compelled to take action, change happens (e.g. 45 projects get halted because of poor contractor performance). A few weeks ago I posted an interview I did with Zappos about engaging potential talent. The same principles apply here when engaging the public. Compelling comes in the form of personal, emotional, and/or relationship-based interactions.

David Weinberger labels this human touch as ‘the spiritual lure of the Web’, in the The Cluetrain Manifesto:

This fervid desire for the Web bespeaks a longing so intense that it can only be understood as spiritual. A longing indicates that something is missing in our lives. What is missing is the sound of the human voice.

The spiritual lure of the Web is the promise of the return of voice.

Citizens and business are beginning to engage with government in interesting ways because of new expectations of a two way exchange of information and learning. New social tools are combining with changing mindsets on openness and collaboration and are starting to demonstrate the real power of that ‘return of voice’ in the form of effective citizen and business engagement.

From its first few weeks in office, the new administration has emphasized the need for innovation in the public sector and called for dramatically more productive, equitable and transparent services. Fortunately, new social technologies and emerging models of mass collaboration provide a rich new set of possibilities for designing and delivering the functions of governments with greater creativity, efficiency and effectiveness than ever before. Drawing on lighthouse examples in the U.S. and abroad, Wikinomics co-author Anthony D. Williams will illustrate how the knowledge, ingenuity and skills of a diverse talent pool can help reshape how governments provide homeland security, health care, education and countless other public services.

So what did they do? They took matters into their own hands and auctioned the funds to the highest bidders -  other municipalities who had projects ready to go paid them cash for the rights to the MTA funds (in one case just $.61 on the dollar). The city selling the MTA funds would then be able to take the cash and use it for anything it liked.

Three interesting things about the situation stand out:

• First, the swaps/marketplace itself is quite innovative/creative. An interesting case in optimizing results in a grass roots way. Grade: A-
• Second, the low prices paid for the funds suggest that, in some cases, stimulus dollars are being weilded very inefficiently  (A $.61 price suggests a 39% inefficiency) Grade: C
• Third, the MTA appears to have put the brakes on these swaps. Maybe because of the publicity they generated? Who knows. But cities must now build (invent?) a case for their use, or risk losing them altogether. This seems to create the wrong message and set of incentives. Grade: D 

Some of the issues that challenge today’s regulators include the sclerotic pace of rulemaking, increasing international interdependency, the lack of transparency in industry and government, the corrosive influence of “junk science” and money and an insufficient capacity for oversight.

After dismantling or circumscribing centralized regulatory agencies in the 1980s and 1990s, I think many governments will find they are ill equipped to deal with these challenges. In most sectors, deregulation was a cue for regulated industries to start designing and enforcing their own regulations. Decentralized rulemaking was intended to help make regulation more responsive to the needs of industries that were evolving quickly and becoming increasingly global in scope. Governments were to be the “regulators of last resort”—stepping in only after self-regulation was deemed to have failed. But in practice most instances of pure self-regulation have deficiencies and governments (for the most part) have proven unable or unwilling to take swift action when market failures became evident.

The upshot: without transparency, oversight and accountability, self-regulation is clearly inadequate. At the same time, the speed, interdependency and complexity of today’s world makes a return to centralized rulemaking and enforcement increasingly implausible. All this makes me think that the kinds of organizational innovations that make the Linux community, twitter and wikipedia remarkable could help regulators address some their challenges.

The big opportunity initially may be to foster greater citizen or stakeholder participation in monitoring and enforcing regulations that already exist. Naturalists and recreational users could be enlisted to help document abuses on public lands, just as individuals and organizations around the world are able to bring human rights abuses to global attention using new channels like YouTube or Winess’s Hub.

But citizens and other stakeholders could also help design and promulgate new rules, particularly where there are gaps in existing legislation. The consumer advocacy movements that currently police the social and environmental performance of industry are a good example. More governments could eventually sanction initiatives like these, while insisting on mandatory corporate sustainability reporting and other forms of transparency would bolster the efforts of citizen monitors.

The technological foundation – including RFID, satellite imagery, cheap personal video recorders and other Internet-connected devices – already exists to distribute the power and authority for designing and enforcing regulations to a broader network of participants. And I think that in the right niches and within certain communities of interest there is ample desire on the part of citizens to play a role in enforcing the rules they care about. I’m not sure that same enthusiasm exists within government and industry, which is why my preliminary research suggests that most new forms of participatory regulation are emerging completely outside traditional regulatory bodies.

I’ll be following up this post with a series of nascent examples. If participatory regulation is of interest to you or if you know of other examples, I would love to hear about it.

When President Obama announced last month that he’ll ask ordinary Americans to help him change America, it didn’t take long for the influencers inside the Washington beltway to ring the alarm: What happens if ordinary Americans actually come up with some new ideas to run government? Will things get out of control? Will they become bullies who will force Obama and Congressional lawmakers to bend to their will?

To me, they sound a lot like the traditional marketers who are worried that they’re losing control over their brand. Both marketers and lawmakers are struggling to adjust to a digital world where consumers and voters now have powerful tools to talk back, and even influence the brand or the policy. So let me give the Washington lawmakers the same message I have delivered to the marketers: Let go. You can’t control everything. The genie has slipped out of the bottle and she’s not coming back. And I think this is a really good thing…

Read the full post here and then join the discussion.

The full report is worth reading if these issues interest you at all. It’s in beta stage for the next 10 days, so your comments could help shape the future of digital governance in the UK.

Government 2.0 Camp is the unconference about using social media tools and Web 2.0 technologies to create a more effective, efficient and collaborative U.S. government on all levels (local, state, and federal).

Government 2.0 Camp will bring together the leading thinkers from government, academia and industry to share Government 2.0 initiatives that are already in process and collaborate about how to leverage social media tools and Web 2.0 technologies to create a more collaborate, efficient and effective government — Government 2.0.

Government 2.0 Camp is the inaugural event of Government 2.0 Club, a newly-launched national organization that creates opportunities for government, academia and industry to share ideas and solutions for leveraging social media tools and Web 2.0 technologies to create a more collaborate, efficient and effective government.

1. Mass collaboration could change virtually every aspect of government: From the way we deliver services like education and health care to the way we develop policy and engage citizens in democratic decision-making to the way we recruit new talent into government agencies and orchestrate capability in the public service.

2. Toronto has an enormous talent pool with more than 4 million residents in the GTA. That’s a lot of brainpower to apply to the challenges that face this city. Could we make the city the most vibrant, progressive and dynamic urban space on the planet? Yes, but we’ve got much work to do to harness this latent potential. That’s why this summit was a good start.

3. Web 2.0 has enormous promise at all levels of government, but the local applications have the greatest potential to make a real difference in how citizens interact with government. The services offered by local government and the kind of decisions taken in the council chambers impact people’s lives very directly. They shape the quality of the urban experience in Toronto and the evolution of its many neighborhoods. The irony is that engagement at the local level of government is typically low, in large part because the existing consultation mechanisms are slow and cumbersome and exclude the vast majority who may not have time to show up to a council session or a town hall meeting. Web 2.0 can make decision-making around issues such as transportation and urban planning more transparent, and that transparency can bolster our ability to scrutinize our local officials (see They Work For Us). With greater transparency comes greater input, with intuitive online tools for information gathering, brainstorming, and collaborative filtering making the process of contributing less onerous and more productive. The City’s facebook consultation on the Jarvis St. streetscape improvement project (demo’s this morning) is a good start.

4. There is an emerging consensus that one of the best ways to enable government 2.0 innovation is for government to embrace the kind of platform openness that has driven the success of entities like Wikipedia, flickr and Amazon. In other words, government should open up their data and online service applications to enable any individual or third party with the skills and inclination to develop new service innovations. The rationale is simple. Government can’t anticipate how citizens’ needs may change or all of the creative ways in which services could be delivered in the future. So by providing an open platform for innovation they can leverage the talents and insights of a much broader community of co-innovators. Indeed, it’s probably fair to assume that citizens, non-profits and businesses—being generally unconstrained by rigid internal brueaucracies and strict accountabilities—will innovate around the data far faster and more freely than government can. Apps for Democracy in DC and “Show Us a Better Way” are showing us the way forward.

5. The City of Toronto’s website needs a major overhaul. Rather than a static portal for disseminating information to residents and visitors, we need a dynamic platform for citizen engagement and service innovation, using the kind of approach described above. One thing is clear from this meeting: the web 2.0 commmunity in Toronto would gladly get this done quickly — just give them access to the underlying data and services. In other cases, the city could simply piggy back on what the community has already provided, much the way local councils in the UK leverage fixmystreet.com, an application developed by a non-profit called mysociety. As of today, 200,000 people have written to their MP for the first time using mysociety’s tools, over 8,000 potholes and other broken things have been fixed, nearly 9,000,000 signatures have been left on petitions to the Prime Minister. No need for government to reinvent the wheel.

6. More than a better website, we need a new form of participatory urbanism that gives citizens a major role in addressing some of our most pressing challenges–e.g., how do we reduce the city’s carbon footprint, improve local transport, and ensure the city remains an attractive destination for investment and job creation. We need a city-wide talent marketplace and solution exchange where problems citizens can converge around these issues. This participatory urbanism project has become one of my latest favorites.

7. None of this needs to be prohibitively expensive. Technology is the easy part – it’s relatively cheap, quick to install and easy to use. The tough challenges are about changing people, processes and culture in the way things are done in the city’s administration. It will take a combination of grassroots wiki communities growing organically (with enthusiastic participants that demonstrate the benefits) and strong leadership from the mayor and other officials to create an environment where innovation can flourish.

8. Finally there’s a wealth of pathbreaking projects to draw inspiration from. This blog is a good source. Be sure to check out The Collaboration Project, run by my friends at the National Academy of Public Administration.

Feel free to suggest other sources or add your observations about the meeting!

Well he doesn’t seem to be utilizing any of the web 2.0 tools that he had in the campaign.

His Twitter account has gone quite stale over the last 6 days, just like what happened with Hillary Clinton and John Edwards. Do you think he’ll update it? Did he ever actually update it? It looks just like an RSS feed of events that he was broadcasting live from.

Also… the blog on Change.gov looks like a mechanism for glorified press releases.

So, no signs thus far that he’s going to use any of the grass roots community building Web 2.0 tools that he used in the campaign to actually reach out and touch the American people during his presidency.

Justin makes a good point. Now that the campaign is over it would all too easy to figure that the job of engaging the public is over until election time rolls around again in 2012. But it’s also a bit early to rush to judgment so let’s give Obama a few more weeks to get settled.

In this new post I’d like to emphasize the importance of reaching outside the traditional boundaries of government institutions to leverage the skills, knowledge and resources that civic and private sector organizations can contribute to the design and delivery of public services.

Here’s the rationale: In our increasingly networked world, issues and problems easily and quickly spill outside the organizational and even geographic boundaries of governmental institutions. While collaboration technologies have evolved at an incredible rate, the application of these technologies to assist governments in dealing with problems is completely dependent on institutional and organizational learning that is proceeding at a snail’s pace.

So we’ve argued that there’s a growing imperative to seize the new function-rich infrastructure of the Web 2.0 to open-up the government’s approach to public policy-making and service delivery. Rather than have agencies manage everything in-house, public services could be provided by any combination of public agencies, the private sector, a community group, or citizens, using the Web as a mechanism for collaboration, innovation and engagement. And, rather than treat citizens as inert consumers, recipients of government services and benefits could become prosumers – shaping the policy and the structures of program, benefits and services for their individual needs. This in turn will lead to better outcomes that better map onto the needs and behaviors of the people that use them.

As my colleague Maryantonett Flumian put it, “The big question is, what roles and responsibilities will government, citizens, not-for-profits and business assume in a society where knowledge is everywhere, where hierarchies are anachronisms, and where “the state” is no longer king of the jungle, but part of an ecosystem energized by mass collaboration?”

Take education, health care and social security, for example. In most public sector “marketplaces” governments maintain a monopoly on service provision and most services are delivered one-size-fits-all. Even in the shift to e-government, many agencies have largely replicated physical world distribution systems on the Web, thus ignoring one of the most powerful implications of the Internet—the ability to create new forms of value by focusing on and transforming core competencies while creating partnerships for non-core activities. By assembling networks of citizens, private firms, non-profit organizations and other agencies on a Web-based platform, governments can offer greater innovation, choice and variety to citizens. In some areas, it could be advantageous to go one step further by offering citizens a basket of services and providers to “purchase” with their tax dollars and many other possible business models that emphasize choice in service venues, providers and options.

We haven’t see too many great examples of this in government, but the British National Health Service (NHS) recently respond to public demand for choice in health care by implementing what it describes as a “dramatic expansion in patient choice.” The introduction of free choice means, among other things, that patients referred to see a specialist are themselves able to choose where they are treated from any hospital that meets NHS standards (whether publicly or privately operated). Patient choice, in turn, introduces an element of competition that should encourage poor facilities to improve as patients seek out practitioners in the best hospitals.

Obama has called for more creative delivery strategies for public services and emphasized the importance of choice in education and health care. Give us your thoughts: Where else could choice make a difference and how could the Obama administration use the Web to enable a more collaborative and user-driven approach to service delivery?

It’s called FiveThirtyEight.com – the Five Thiry Eight stands for the number of electors in the Electoral College.

I’m a big believer in numbers and the use of statistical analyses and simulations to achieve the most objective view possible – and the writers of FiveThirtyEight Nate Silver and Sean Quinn do just that.

This blog is a perfect illustration of the benefits of Web 2.0. Now, citizens have access to data and for those who are intersted and capable in doing so, they can use the data to develop and objective assessment. They know exactly where the information is coming from, how it’s being used and the best part – they can share it with the world.

In the spirit of transparency and to prove that their blog provides a well-informed, trust-worthy view the authors offer full disclosure; providing their names, explaining their day jobs, even going as far as stating who they support. However, the key is that they also disclose, as clearly as possible, their methodology for the results on their page.

Here is the process overview on their FAQ page:

Process Overview

The basic process for computing our Presidential projections consists of six steps:

1. Polling Average: Aggregate polling data, and weight it according to our reliability scores.

2. Trend Adjustment: Adjust the polling data for current trends.

3. Regression: Analyze demographic data in each state by means of regression analysis.

4. Snapshot: Combine the polling data with the regression analysis to produce an electoral snapshot. This is our estimate of what would happen if the election were held today.

5. Projection: Translate the snapshot into a projection of what will happen in November, by allocating out undecided voters and applying a discount to current polling leads based on historical trends.

6. Simulation: Simulate our results 10,000 times based on the results of the projection to account for the uncertainty in our estimates. The end result is a robust probabilistic assessment of what will happen in each state as well as in the nation as a whole.

I encourage you all to go take a look and determine for yourselves how accurate these predictions are. I know this is a blog I’ll be visiting daily.

Now, Digg is bringing their version of democracy to the US Elections with ‘Digg the Candidates’.  Click through to read more about this new section of Digg, to see Barack Obama’s Digg profile, and what candidates are achieving by joining Digg.

Presidential candidates were invited to join Digg and have been interacting with the Digg community like every other member. They post stories, they Digg stories, they favourite stories and the driving factor behind their ‘Digg the Candidate’ standings is the number of friends they have accumulated. And by they, I mean the candidates campaign team.

Apparently, Ron Paul has been a Digg member since February and Obama since May, long before this site feature was available – so they do have a head-start on all other candidates. As of now, Ron Paul leads the pack with ~3300 friends. Surprisingly, Hillary is a no show thus far, but her profile is reportedly in the works. She has been great at adopting Web 2.0 best practices. Her campaign website is essentially a social network of supporters where individuals can even create and manage their own online fundraising campaign for Hillary.

This is a great example of a Web 2.0 strategy being implemented in the election. With Digg creating this outlet for their members, the candidates that choose to get involved (most if not all it seems), are effectively engaging and communicating to males of the Net Generation who predominantly browse Digg. You can learn a lot by viewing the stories someone chooses to Digg. Go ahead and befriend your favourite candidate.