Posts filed under 'gov 2.0'
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September 24th, 2008, 11:02am
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The Sunlight Foundation recently launched PublicMarkup.org–a site that provides a simple, blog-like interface for soliciting feedback on legislation being considered in Congress. The legislative issue of the day, of course, is the proposed $700 billion bailout of the financial sector and there appears to be an active community currently debating the Senator Dodd’s legislation online.
Having already launched a number of innovative projects that are increasing the transparency of the US government (including MapLight and Congresspedia) the Sunlight Foundation foundation believes it can help increase participation in the legislative process by providing a forum where all legislation proposals can be subject to open public review in real-time.
Some will argue that the legislative process in the US already invites input through a variety of channels. As our collaborator Beth Noveck notes in a forthcoming report for nGenera (not yet published, but watch this space):
Corporations participate through lobbyists and notice-and-comment rulemaking. NGOs funnel information to government through think tanks and their white papers and publications. Interest groups lobby and enlist their members to respond—usually with postcards and email—in rulemaking and legislative policymaking.
The problem is that the traditional “notice and comment” process tends to favor an entrenched machinery of lobbyists that represent well-connected and often deep-pocketed interests. How many ordinary citizens are even aware of the “notice and comment” periods and how many of those citizens will find the time and resoucres to make formal submissions? I’m guessing that the answer is very few.
So what is different about the more open and collaborative process that the Sunlight Foundation aspires to create with PublicMarkup.org?
One, it provides a neutral forum in which to debate policy issues. Two, by collecting legislation, summaries, resources and commentary in a single linkable location, it makes participation in the legislative process more accessible to citizens. Three, PublicMarkup.org could conceivably evolve into a more robust platform for wiki-drafting, complete with tools for collectively filtering, rating and analyzing evidence, discussion forums for deliberation, and a wiki for drafting recommendations. Finally, by establishing a granular division of tasks (e.g., adding links, tagging and rating content, posting comments in a forum, drafting and editing recommendations, etc.), a collaborative process helps ensure that citizens with a limited amount of time can still make meaningful contributions to the process.
It’s the group dynamics that ultimately set this new collaborative approach apart from the traditional processes for rulemaking. In a conventional rulemaking process, atomized and often competitive groups submit comments that they hope will influence the legislative outcome. There is no incentive to compromise and there is often no dialogue whatsoever among the interest groups. When the period for comments is closed, it’s then up to a small group of public officials to sort through the commentary and reach a decision.
With a collaborative process, some of the burden of collecting, sorting, analyzing and drafting shifts to the public, leaving public officials in a position to steer and referree the process. An opportunity space opens up for deliberation, reflection and perhaps even compromise among multiple stakeholders.
Here’s how Noveck put it in her forhcoming report:
In a collaborative government, public participation is not pro forma. Though the recommendations made by private citizens are not binding, they are taken as serious contributions to the decision-making process. At the same time, collaboration assumes that stakeholders are qualified to make useful contributions to the subject- or industry-specific work of the agency. As such, a government agency that solicits public feedback employs a system to evaluate the input of the self-selecting private citizen. Only it is not the government agency that initially evaluates public feedback. Initially, ratings and recommendations remain in the hands of private citizens. Their recommendations are vetted by groups ancillary to the government agency. These groups comprise the very individuals who have volunteered their expertise in the first place. This alleviates some of the burden that participation outside of organizational boundaries creates for government officials.
Will PublicMarkup.org attract a critical mass of participants? And, will members of the US Congress actually pay attention? It seems unlikley that the latter will happen this time, but if the site evolves into a vital hub for policy debates with a diverse group of participants, then politicians will ignore forums like PublicMarkup at their peril.
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September 23rd, 2008, 05:33pm
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On Friday last week I was at the National Defense University’s Government 2.0 symposium talking about the opportunities web 2.0 creates to transform the way governments deliver services, organize their workforces and create policy. The event was a celebration of the Information Resource Management College’s 20th anniversary and IRM director Bob Childs tells me that it was the largest event in the institution’s history. My biggest surprise was not that so many people showed up, but that Alvin and Heidi Toffler were escorted into the room just as we were about to take center stage — talk about being in the presence of giants!
The event was keynoted by Dave Weinberger (author of Everything is Miscellaneous and Small Pieces Loosely Joined and co-author of the infamous Cluetrain Manifesto). Having followed his work for some time, it was great to finally see him live.
I served on a panel, along with David Wennergren (DoD deputy Chief Information Officer) Bruce Klein (Cisco, US public sector) and Mike Bradshaw (Google, federal sector). Several bloggers have already produced excellent reports on the symposium (see here and here) so I won’t reinvent the wheel, but I will emphasive one point.
Government 2.0 is about much more than blogs, wikis and social networking. It’s about how the government sources expertise and how it orchestrates capability. It’s about marshalling the collective intelligence of society to address big issues like climate change and fiscal reform. It’s also about delivering services like education, health care and social security benefits more effectively by treating citizens as co-innovators rather than passive, inert consumers.
Social media has a role to play. But the hard problems relate to the people and institutions. A complex machinery of government has grown organically over the past century with multiple levels of government, hundreds of agencies, and overlapping lines of accountability. The complexity makes it difficult to implement reforms and change in the public sector is almost always slow and incremental.
Don’t get me wrong. There are a number of exciting web 2.0 projects in government (we’ve blogged about most of not all of them — check our Gov 2.0 tag). But the tendency is to sometimes assume that if an agency has a wiki, then it’s well on the road to Government 2.0. I guess the message I wanted to leave people with is that we have a long hard road left to travel.
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September 9th, 2008, 08:41am
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On the heels of the interesting conversation generated by Anthony’s post regarding Patient Opinion and it’s interaction with the National Health Service, I thought I’d point to an interesting article by the UK-based National Computing Council on Web 2.0 deployment for local government. Like Anthony, they wonder why many of the most innovative citizen-centric activities happen outside of government, noting innovative examples such as MySociety.org and LGSearch as being at the leading edge of what can be provided to, and crowdsourced with citizens. That said, they also point to a variety of Web 2.0 esque applications being developed by local councils, and while most are rather simple, their final guidelines on the integration and use of tWeb 2.0 tools are is spot-on. See below:
UK National Computing Council guidelines for Web 2.0 deployment
- Don’t think about Web 2.0 or e-government as being just about technology. It is about saving time and making life easier and more efficient for citizens.
- Make sure you are resourced to cope. No point setting up a blog that encourages comments if you can’t respond to each comment.
- Carefully plan your strategy if using blogs. Read More »
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September 5th, 2008, 09:15am
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The set up at Krems here in Austria is very professional with a great cast of speakers. After my keynote I did a panel with Secretary Andreas Schieder, the State Secretary for Civil Service and Administrative reform. We talked about government 2.0 and how wikinomics has implications for other institutions in society like education. Austria is doing some interesting things and he really gets it. In one example he did a comparison of the internal intranet and the public web site for his ministry and found that the information was pretty much identical. Conclusion — we need to be more open, but we default to opacity.
An addition:
Here at the Talk of the Future Conference in Krems Austria, I was delighted to meet Bret Swanson, a Senior Fellow and Director, at the Center for Global Innovation. He has some mind boggling data in the growth of bandwidth requirements for the internet. Consider this - a single Cisco Telepresence uses as much bandwidth as the entire internet of 1990.
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September 3rd, 2008, 06:38pm
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Choice is a foreign concept in most health care systems around the world. Sick patients are advised on the appropriate course of treatment by their doctor, referred to a specialist where appropriate and then handed a appointment time — choice rarely enters into the process. Broadly speaking, the assumption is that patients are not sufficiently informed to make reasonable choices about their health care, so there is little point even offering choice. In fact, choice could lead to confusion and poor choices could give rise to unintended consequences and even fatalities.
As Paul Hodgkin, a Sheffield-based GP in the UK observes in his blog on patientopinion.org.uk “All health care systems are bedeviled by the problem that sick ill people make poor shoppers. Patients are consistently disadvantaged by having less knowledge, less power and more vulnerability than other players in the health care system.” These asymmetries of information and power, says Hodgkin, are the reason why markets are such a poor way to deliver health care.
Hodgkin rightly points out that some of these asymmetries have been lessened by the explosion of health care information on the Web. It’s increasingly common for patients to walk into their doctor’s office clutching an armful of printouts from the Web. And doctors sometimes candidly admit the need to frequently refresh their knowledge of particular illnesses, simply to keep up with their patients! Read More »
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September 3rd, 2008, 09:12am
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This guest blog is by Steve Ressler, founder of GovLoop.com, a social network connecting the government community. Mr. Ressler is also a contributor to the nGenera Gov 2.0: Wikinomics, Government, and Democracy project and the co-founder of Young Government Leaders, a professional organization of more than 2,000 government employees. Ressler has published articles on generational issues and Web 2.0 in various publications including The Public Manager and presented on these topics at a range of venues including Harvard’s Kennedy School and Brookings Institute.
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It’s official - Gov 2.0 is here to stay. From nGenera’s Gov 2.0: Wikinomics, Government, and Democracy project, NAPA’s Collaboration Project, and Mashable’s recent Gov 2.0 column, a lot has been written on the potential power of web 2.0 technologies in government. Government agencies across numerous jurisdictions have begun focusing on how Web 2.0 technologies can help foster workplace collaboration and innovation. Organizations such as the U.S. Department of State, U.S. Transportation Security Agency, and National Resources Canada have implemented organizational wikis to provide a central point for ideas and discussion.
But while government organizations have begun to focus on fostering workplace collaboration from the inside, a new type of collaboration is developing outside the formal reach of government agencies. As part of the Gov 2.0: Wikinomics, Government, and Democracy research series, I recently completed a paper entitled “Net-Gen Networks: How Agencies Can Leverage Outside Innovation Internally.” In this analysis, I document the rise of informal networks in the government sector built around Web 2.0 applications as a means of facilitating collaboration, idea sharing and innovation both within and across agency lines. Whether via social networks like Facebook, wikis, or blogs, these networks have created new authoritative resources for employees without the input or control of their superiors.
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August 26th, 2008, 10:23am
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Building on Will’s posts about Obama using text messaging to announce his running mate (which I thought was brilliant), there is a great video on the BBC web site documenting how democracy has become digitized. It’s 10 minutes, but I highly recommend you take a peek.
Web 2.0 and the tools made available have changed the face of American politics. Not only are campaigns finding new ways to reach out to citizens, they’re also finding ways to engage them to become active participants and volunteers. Some people may argue that the ‘old people’ (so to speak), are the ones that vote; but for this election, Obama has mobilized the largest demographic – the children of the baby boom. And coincidentally, many of them are now coming of age and have the power to make a difference. The numbers speak for themselves. As Don Tapscott wrote in a previous post – During the Iowa preliminary, Obama had won by a landslide in millennial votes. His 28,000 vs. Clinton’s 5,400 and Edwards’ 6,900.
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August 15th, 2008, 05:12pm
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Welcome back to another edition of the Wikinomics Roundup! This time around, we’re going to do a two week roundup, where I capture in brief, some of the thoughts, discoveries, and discussions that graced the blog throughout that period. There’s some great material so take a look!
In case you missed it, you can catch last week’s roundup HERE. Friendly reminder: the Wikinomics Roundup has a nice new home on the left side of the page, under Regular Features.
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August 14th, 2008, 10:35am
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One rainy day earlier this summer, nGenera’s Gov 2.0 Program Director, Dan Herman, locked three summer interns in a room (Ben and Jude, and I) and asked us to think about what life - and government - would be like ten years from now. One of the results was the following short story about a day in the life of a man named Donald, in the year 2018. Hope you enjoy.
7:00 AM. The alarm rang, and Donald pressed the confirm button to silence it. His bedroom monitor switched on and began playing his morning video feeds.
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August 11th, 2008, 09:16am
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I got an email a few weeks back from a freelancer who wanted some information related to government 2.0, notably how do you measure it’s value, success or progress, i.e. show me the metrics.
His take, “all theory and fanfare” with no real substance.
Read More »
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August 4th, 2008, 09:52am
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Don’t ask me how it happened. I was just planning to check my email last night, but for some reason I ended up on the United Nations website. I spent a couple hours searching through the information. It was amazing how much it contains. Dan Herman actually wrote a blog post about it a few months back.
The website is filled with research papers, news, and reports highlighting what innovative governments, businesses, and educators can do to empower the people. It also breaks them down into a variety of case studies like Debate Europe where European citizens can share their opinions, concerns and ideas on the future of the European Union. The French National Commission of Public Debate (CNDP) has an innovative site that allows citizens to debate on infrastructure projects in France. Chunceon, Korea citizens have direct web access to the Mayor’s office to submit ideas and then receive feedback on them. Seeing case studies like these can really help allowing people to interpret and to better understand the opportunities available to their countries, states, provinces, and small towns. They even have some of our own Anthony Williams’ stuff in there. Read More »
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July 21st, 2008, 10:06pm
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Welcome back to another edition of the Wikinomics Roundup: Week in Review! Over the next few minutes I will try and capture in brief, some of the thoughts, discoveries, and discussions that graced the blog throughout the past week.
In case you missed it, you can catch last week’s roundup HERE.
Read More »
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July 18th, 2008, 01:58pm
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Courtesy my Facebook feed and District of Columbia CTO Vivek Kundra here’s a fantastic example of a government agency actively trying to stimulate new ideas and innovation. Yesterday Kundra’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO) released data representing more than 84,000 3D buildings for inclusion in Google Earths’ Cities in 3D program.
The release is meant to allow citizens, whether development experts or simply concerned city dwellers, a greater role in conversations and plans about the city’s future. Want to propose a new development? These 3D images should go a long way in allowing all parties a better, and simpler, platform upon which to build.
Over at the Google Earth blog, Barney Krucoff, the GIS Manager for OCTO, highlights why they released the data. I’ve cut the highlights of his remarks - visit the LatLong blog for the full version:
1. It is the right thing to do. Fundamentally, the District Government believes that data created with public funds should be available to the public. Read More »
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July 15th, 2008, 02:38pm
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An article on CNN.com explains the growing trend of web 2.0 usage in Congress. Leading the way is Rep. John Culberson of Texas. He uses twitter.com, qik.com, and utterz.com to reach his constituents. Culberson’s goal is to “Shine sunlight in every dark corner of the Congress, to make the Congress and the government as transparent as humanly possible.” Culberson isn’t alone. Many members of congress and politicians from all areas of the government have been utilizing the amazing networking potential of web 2.0 applications. I’m sure you have all seen or at least heard of McCain and Obama’s use of Youtube for the presidential election. Use of web 2.0 sites has allowed politicians to communicate more effectively with their constituents. Online videos and blogs have proven far more effective and cost efficient than billboards and bumper stickers.
The growing use of web 2.0 has also led to a growing concern by many. The House Franking Commission, which regulates the uses of taxpayers’ money for communicating with constituents, has considered restricting use of sites like youtube and qik. The concern of inappropriate usage of taxpayers’ money is legitimate, but I for one think that we need more transparency in the government. Web 2.0 sites provide a very cost efficient means of creating this transparency through increased communication.
Culberson is on the right track and I hope the Franking Commission doesn’t thwart his positive efforts. In response to this concern Culberson said, “They will not stop me. They can no more regulate the Internet than they can regulate the wind.”
I don’t know if his gunslinger mentality is right… but I like it
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July 14th, 2008, 05:22pm
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The folks at the Prometheus Institute* recently ran a great post on “if the US Government were run by Apple…”
It’s pretty humorous (and either slightly sad given what doesn’t happen despite the available tools or slightly scary to think that Steve Jobs may be planning a coup).
My favourites:
- There would be a three hour wait to get the latest $5 bill. It would also feature a web 2.0 gradient.
- Instead of a Social Security number, all newborns would receive a free MobileMe account.
- The cabinet would add the Department for Ergonomic Design, including a new position called theSecretary of Feng Shui. The office would debate the merits of using Arial versus Helvetica on street signs. Additionally, the Lincoln Bedroom would be upgraded with a mini rock waterfall and tiny Bonsai trees.
- Steve Jobs’ face would inexplicably appear next to Roosevelt’s on Mt. Rushmore.
- “In God We Trust” would be changed to “Getting Things Done”.
I thought I’d take it one step further and theorize what would happen “if the United Nations were run by Google.”
- The Chinese and Russians would withdraw their vetoes against sanctions on Zimbabwe after Googling “Mugabe” ….
- The Millennium Development Goals would get crowdsourced.
- The Kyoto Protocol would be restructured with targets for member nations tied to the number of servers each country possesses.
- The Russians would attempt to buy Google with oil money.
- The Security Council would fail to come to agreement on “Don’t be evil” and would instead adopt “Google first, Act later.”
*Authors’ note: The Promethean Institute is a libertarian public policy think tank based in Orange County, California. I am neither libertarian nor Californian and by virtue of being Canadian, less good looking but definitely more in-touch with my socialist side.
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July 14th, 2008, 12:31am
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Whether you’re a regular reader, or just pop in occasionally, it’s not always easy to keep up with our Wikinomics blog content. With this in mind, we have created the Wikinomics Roundup: Week in Review, to try and capture in brief, some of the thoughts, discoveries, and discussions that graced the blog from the past week.
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July 11th, 2008, 12:01pm
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FreeGovernment.org, launched on July 4, is one of a growing number of online, direct democracy communities that allow users to vote on bills, draft their own legislation, and engage in debate. While these communities present an opportunity to make government more accessible and responsive to citizens, they have failed to earn any influence over politicians.
To change that, Free Government plans on electing the politicians. The community, which is also a political party, is looking for candidates to run in the 2008 US Congressional election. If elected, these politicians will be contractually obligated to vote according to the results of an online poll of constituents (for their vote to count, users will have to first be confirmed as registered voters).
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July 7th, 2008, 04:12pm
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What did people say about us this week?
- Andrew Jones of the Tall Skinny Kiwi talks about how the Wikinomics ideas of transparency, generosity, and trust relates to the Bible and Christian ideals.
- As mentioned in the comments of last week, a relatively new website, Swirrl, has posted a review of Wikinomics.“Swirrl is like a wiki, but better.”
- The State Sunshine and Open Records blog criticizes “Show us a Better Way”, a new website sponsored by the British Government, but reconsiders the statement after hearing this site is the brainchild of the U.K.’s Minister for the Cabinet Office. The website invites users/citizens to post ideas for new government services.
- Wikinomics and how mass collaboration will fundamentally change learning was one of the topics at the recent NECC 2008 conference.
- Brendan Dunphy’s Innovation Blog debates the Wikinomics Report Card on General Motors. He argues that closed innovation is better when the current market solution is not sufficient.
- Paula Thornton of the Fast Forward Blog talks about Don Tapscott’s economic tsunami in reference to the User Revolution and the Age of Aquarius.
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July 4th, 2008, 10:20am
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He’s mobilized youth to previously unprecedented levels, shattered fund-raising records with an Internet-enabled army of small-dollar donors, and made many impassioned calls for sweeping changes in Washington. But can Obama really transform the cynical, self-interested, and frequently factious nature of politics, while bringing new levels of transparency and participation to the process?
Three recent articles in the NYTimes cast some doubt on Obama’s ability to can adequately distance himself and his campaign from the worst elements of big-money politics , let alone change the broader equation.
The first article describes Obama’s about face on Bush’s domestic wiretapping scandal. After denouncing the wiretapping program during his primary campaign, Obama is now supporting legislation granting legal immunity to telecommunications companies that cooperated with the Bush administration to eavesdrop on citizens without warrants. Critics see it as evidence that Obama is now making the same Washington-style compromises that he campaigned vehemently against. Supporters, meanwhile, are asking themselves what happened to the “change we can believe in.” In fact, some 16,000 supporters have organized a protest on Obama’s own homepage, asking him to revisit his stance on FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act)–evidence, at least, that when it comes to providing an open forum for debate and dissent, Obama has lived up to his principles.
The second article discusses Obama’s decision to bypass public financing for the general election and thus free himself to seek out more lucrative sources of private funding. The decision marks another reversal of policy and is perhaps a further indication that Obama is having a hard time resisting the intoxicating lure of big-money politics as the realities of Washington set in.
The Obama campaign cites the record sums raised from a broad base of small-dollar donors as justification for the decision. But campaign finance experts see it as evidence that Obama is gearing up to embark on a spree of pricey fund-raising events across the country–events that will tap the resources of the large, deep-pocketed donors who have traditionally supported the Democratic party. It turns out that as the intensity of the primaries died off, so too did the long tail of political contributions.
The third article concerns Obama’s recent ambivalence over the withdrawal of troops from Iraq after visiting with commanders on the ground. Having initially promised to withdraw troops within 16 months of taking office, his timetable now seems a great deal more flexible. His steadfast opposition to the war has been a central component of his candidacy, so supporters are naturally suspicious of what appears to be yet another retreat from his principles.
What does it all mean?
For optimists, Obama still represents America’s best hope in over a generation to elect a candidate with the vision and willpower to usher in a more transparent, inclusive and participatory breed of politics. For cynics, his campaign antics are at best naive and at worst disingenuous. Naive if he really believes that as president he can do much reverse the long historical trend that has seen organized interest groups hold increasing sway over the political process and disingenuous for selling false hope while knowing all-too-well that the Washington’s political machinery will not be easily or quickly dismantled.
Which camp are you in? Are you optimistic about the prospects for change or are you cynical? Are Obama’s recent compromises ultimately pragmatic and justifiable, or do they represent a bretayal of the political principles that he has championed?
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July 2nd, 2008, 03:03pm
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Tech companies have long suffered from patent trolls: companies that bulk-buy cheap, unused patents from bankrupt companies, wait until someone becomes successful at doing something similar, and then launch a frivolous infringement suit that gets settled out of court. Well now the big tech companies are teaming up to fight back. Verizon, Google, Cisco, HP, Ericsson, and others have formed Allied Security Trust (AST): a venture that will buy-up patents that members might be interested in using down-the-road.
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