Category Archives: event

Live from the Newseum: Jobs and the Economy of the Future

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In February of 2011, the effects of the The Atlantic has released a special report on jobs and the economy. This morning, the report and the prospects for growth will be discussed at a digital town hall on at the Newseum, “Jobs and the Economy of the Future.

Guests include:

  • Timothy Geithner, Secretary of the Treasury
  • Julius Genachowski, Chairman, FCC
  • Sen. Orrin Hatch
  • Jon Huntsman, US Ambassador to China
  • Gov. Bob McDonnell, Virginia
  • Brian Deese, Deputy Director, NEC

    The event’s digital component includes a livestream and a new instance of Microsoft’s Town Hall platform for collecting feedback from the online audience. There is also an active backchannel on Twitter aggregated at the #USFutureEconomy hashtag:

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    The Atlantic will be liveblogging the event as well.

    • White House CTO takes questions on innovation strategy on Twitter

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    US chief technology officer Aneesh Chopra took questions about the White House’s new innovation strategy on Twitter. Following is a report of the conversation between Chopra and the online audience. http://storify.com/digiphile/white-house-cto-aneesh-chopra-takes-questions-on-i.js

    The importance of being earnest about big data

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    We are deluged in big data. We have become more adept, however, at collecting it than in making sense of it. The companies, individuals and governments that become the most adept at data analysis are doing more than find the signal in the noise: they are creating a strategic capability. Why?

    “After Eisenhower, you couldn’t win an election without radio.

    After JFK, you couldn’t win an election without television.

    After Obama, you couldn’t win an election without social networking.

    I predict that in 2012, you won’t be able to win an election without big data.”

    –Alistair Croll, founder of bitcurrent.

    In November 2012, we’ll know if his prediction came true.

    All this week, I’ll be reporting from Santa Clara at the so-called “data Woodstock” that is the Strata Conference. Croll is its co-chair. You can tune in to the O’Reilly Media livestream for the conference keynotes.

    For some perspective on big data and analytics in government, watch IBM’s Dave McQueeney at last year’s Gov 2.0 Summit:

    Or watch how Hans Rosling makes big data dance in this TED Talk:

    http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf

    For #AskObama on YouTube, a RT is a vote on Google Moderator

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    Designing digital democracy is hard. The structures and conventions that have evolved for deliberative democracy, as messy as it can be offline, don’t transfer perfectly into machine code. Many different companies, civic entrepreneurs, nonprofits and public servants are working to create better online forums for discussion that make better use of technology. This morning, New York City’s new chief digital officer, Rachel Sterne, asked how NYC could use technology to serve citizens. In 2011, the White House is using an unprecedented mix of Web 2.0 platforms at its new State of the Union page for tonight’s speech, integrating graphs and other elements to the WhiteHouse.gov livestream.

    Tonight, a new alpha feature in Google Moderator is adding some social signals to help identify the questions that citizens want President Obama to answer in his YouTube interview on Thursday night. Every tweet with an #askObama hashtag will be added to the Google Moderator instance at YouTube.com/AskObama. And every retweet of an #AskObama tweet will count as vote in the Moderator instance. (For the uninitiated, a retweet on Twitter is when a user reshares another user’s tweet. To count as a vote on Moderator, the retweet has to be a “native RT,” not the older manual version where text is copied.)

    It’s a simple tweak but it’s one that could make the tool more useful for people who wish to crowdsource questions. “There’s a lot of experimentation going on with Gov 2.0,” said Ginny Hunt, product manager for Google Moderator. “There’s a lot of people on all sides trying to figure out how to involve people in a more useful, participatory, exciting way.”

    Hunt looks at Moderator as a way to aggregate and rank answers from many different places across the Web. “We don’t see Moderator as a Q&A platform in quite the same way that you might look at Yahoo Answers or Quora,” she said. “We see it as a way to have an ongoing conversation with constituents in a way that’s efficiently organized. That’s why it fits so naturally with YouTube, because there’s a very clear connection with engaging content.”

    Hunt emphasized that what people will see on Moderator tonight “is really alpha” and isn’t available on the standard module on YouTube. “It’s a small step in the evolution of social engagement,” she said. “The more we can simplify the process for government and partners, the better. What you’ll see with Twitter tonight is just the first step. Tweets will get integrated into Moderator with your Twitter identity. It’s just a tiptoe into how we can aggregate ideas in a smarter way and is highly experimental, which is why it’s in Google Labs.”

    Part of that process is in making the Google Moderator API available to developers. For instance, Google Moderator powers 10 Questions, which the Personal Democracy Forum relaunched in an effort to reboot citizen to candidate engagement.

    “We’ve now used the API to kick of something called YouTube World View, which will be a monthly interview with a world leader,” said Hunt. “You can use the API to plug into anything you want to socialize to allow ranking. We made it open because we expect people to be more innovative than we can anticipate in terms of easily crowdsourcing within a community.”

    The content from a Moderator series can also be exported as comma-separated values (CSV) files, which allows developers and designers to take the information and do analysis with the raw data.

    There are many challenges in creating platforms for civic discourse, including building in incentives for participation, mitigating identity or privacy issues, addressing vocal minorities overwhelming the system, or ensuring systems scale under heavy traffic. (On that last count, Google’s servers have had little trouble keeping up the load: the Google Moderator instance for last year’s YouTube interview on the CitizenTube channel received over 11,600 questions and over 660,000 votes.)

    Even as the role of the Internet as a platform for collective action is growing, however, the technical challenges of getting this right include numerous design, community and cultural challenges. The ways that connection technologies can be turned to governance, versus campaigning, will become increasingly critical as more people go online. Many of the social platforms that are in current use give their users substantial ability to personalize what information or conversations they receive.

    Clay Shirky, speaking at this year’s State of the Internet Conference, said that government and technologists have systematically undersigned social spaces where hard choices are addressed. “We have, thanks to James Madison, lots of well designed systems to do that [offline]” he said. “We don’t have as many online. The tendency to rant or opt out prevents the kind of bargaining or horsetrading that’s important.”

    The Google Moderator team has made an effort to address some of those issues. “We’ve tried to address that by giving everyone a way to let their voices be heard and to weigh in on the process. Ideally, a small, loud, organized group wouldn’t block the virtual room for others,” said Hunt. “The online systems haven’t caught up to the checks and balances that exist in an in-person town hall. Sometimes, they can be more disruptive. We’re still figuring that out. We do care that people have fair space to have their voice heard.”

    Hunt posits that when you ask community about not just what they want to say but what they care about, you’ll get more useful results. “We’re not just inviting people here to post something. We’re asking them to contribute and then vote on something they care about. Freedom of speech in a representative democracy can be messy but that’s part of the process that makes it what it is. The challenge is getting closer to giving people who are busy, with a lot on their minds, a way to get involved.”

    The real time Web needs to become the right time Web for most of those citizens to find it relevant in their everyday lives, as it did today when a new geolocation app launched that connected trained citizens with heart attack victims. People need actionable intelligence. Geeks hacking smarter government to make asking questions and gathering feedback simpler can and will make a difference. “If we can make it simpler for folks to plug in, that’s a good thing for everyone,” said Hunt. For those that want to #askObama a question about his plans for 2011, that Moderator instance closes at midnight on Wednesday.

    New iPhone app connects trained citizens to others in cardiac distress

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    In 2011, there needs to be a better way to empower citizens trained in CPR to receive alerts about nearby cardiac arrest victims with geolocated maps and the location of electronic defribrillators to help them.

    Now, there’s an app for that too: firedepartment.mobi. The new new geolocation app connects citizen first responders to heart attack victims in San Ramon. FireDepartment can be downloaded directly from iTunes.

    Today the San Ramon Valley Fire Protection District (SRVFPD) in California launched a iPhone app that will dispatch trained citizens to help others in cardiac emergencies. This new application is the latest evolution of the role of citizens as sensors, where resources and information are connected to those who need it most in the moment. This FireDepartment app is also an important example of Gov 2.0, where a forward looking organization created a platform for citizens to help each another in crises and planned to make the underlying code available for civic developers to improve on. Given context and information, trained citizens in San Ramone will now be able to do more than alert authorities and share information: they can act to save lives. Here’s a demo of the app:

    iPhone Demo from Fire Department on Vimeo.

    Adriel Hampton called FireDepartment the perfect blend of technology, government and volunteers. Can an everyday citizen become a hero? As Joe Hackman observed, “Today it just got a lot easier.”

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    Debating the meaning of WikiLeaks, the Internet and Democracy

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    On January 21st, a panel at the Churchill Club in San Jose, California debated the meaning of WikiLeaks and its broader impact to the Internet and democracy.

    The issue of how Wikileaks relates to open government, Internet freedom, free speech and the use of technology in government is going to continue to be hotly debated in 2011. This conversation lays out some of the core issues, from the perspective of media analysts, the academy, technologists and, crucially, a man who was at the heart of the release of one of the most important releases of classified government information in the history of the United States.

    It’s worth a watch.

    The panel was moderated by Paul Jay, CEO and Senior Editor, The Real News Network, and included the following speakers:

    • Daniel Ellsberg, Former State and Defense Dept. Official prosecuted for releasing the Pentagon Papers
    • Clay Shirky, Independent Internet Professional; Adjunct Professor, Interactive Telecommunications Program, New York University
    • Neville Roy Singham, Founder and Chairman, ThoughtWorks
    • Peter Thiel, Technology entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist
    • Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Law and Professor of Computer Science, Harvard University; Co-founder, Berkman Center for Internet & Society

    Pew: Disability or illness hinders many Americans from using the Internet

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    President Barack Obama talks with, from left, Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., James Sensenbrenner, R-Wisc., Cheryl Sensenbrenner, James Langevin, D-R.I., and Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, in the Oval Office, July 26, 2010, prior to an event on the South Lawn commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

    President Barack Obama talks with, from left, Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., James Sensenbrenner, R-Wisc., Cheryl Sensenbrenner, James Langevin, D-R.I., and Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, in the Oval Office, July 26, 2010, prior to an event on the South Lawn commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

    A new report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project includes the sobering figure that potentially hundreds of thousands of Americans live with disabilities or illness that makes it harder or impossible for them to use the Internet. According to Pew, some two percent of American adults are unable to fully make use of one of the greatest platforms for collective action in history. ‘

    The survey was based on a national survey of 3,001 U.S. adults in September 2010. Here are three other data points to consider:

    • 27% of American adults live with a disability that interferes with activities of daily living.
    • 54% of adults living with a disability use the internet, compared with 81% of adults who report none of the disabilities listed in the survey.
    • 41% of adults living with a disability have broadband at home, compared with 69% of those without a disability.

    “This is a correlation that we observed, not causation,” said Susannah Fox (@SusannahFox), associate director at the Pew Internet & American Life Project. “We don’t know that it’s the disability that’s causing that difference, but we do know that it’s not just lower levels of education or income, or age, all of which tend to depress Internet access rates. It’s something else.”

    This research should be considered in the context of an ongoing matter before the Department of Justice (DoJ): the modernization of the Americans with Disabilities Act. When the Act was first passed, the DoJ stated in the preamble to the original 1991 ADA regulations that those regulations should be interpreted to keep pace with developing technologies. (28 CFR part 36, app. B.)

    Needless to say, the Internet has come a long way since 1991. The power of technology and equality came into sharp focus this year on the 20th anniversary of the ADA. Iif the United States government intends to go forward with creating online open government platforms for all the people, accessibility and access issues are part of that picture. The country will need ability maps and to consider how to balance the accessibility needs of all Americans as more civic engagement goes digital. Disability advocates agree that transparency without accessibility would be a poor version of Gov 2.0.

    “The reality is that so much of what’s happening today in the world is online,” said Fox. “There’s a real difference between a someone in their 70s who doesn’t want to add the Internet to their life and someone in their 20s who can’t go online because of a disability.”

    When the ADA was passed, Congress contemplated that the Department of Justice would apply the statute in a manner that evolved over time, and delegated authority to the Attorney General  of the United States to put forward regulations to carry out the Act´s broad mandate. How the Department of Justice does so is still a matter for debate.  The DoJ is considering extending the enforcement of the ADA to include websites operated by more entities, including the following list of 12 categories of “places of public accommodation” covered by the ADA from ADA.gov.

    (1) An inn, hotel, motel, or other place of lodging, except for an establishment located within a building that contains not more than five rooms for rent or hire and that is actually occupied by the proprietor of the establishment as the residence of the proprietor;
    (2) A restaurant, bar, or other establishment serving food or drink;
    (3) A motion picture house, theater, concert hall, stadium, or other place of exhibition or entertainment;
    (4) An auditorium, convention center, lecture hall, or other place of public gathering;
    (5) A bakery, grocery store, clothing store, hardware store, shopping center, or other sales or rental establishment;
    (6) A laundromat, dry-cleaner, bank, barber shop, beauty shop, travel service, shoe repair service, funeral parlor, gas station, office of an accountant or lawyer, pharmacy, insurance office, professional office of a health care provider, hospital, or other service establishment;
    (7) A terminal, depot, or other station used for specified public transportation;
    (8) A museum, library, gallery, or other place of public display or collection;
    (9) A park, zoo, amusement park, or other place of recreation;
    (10) A nursery, elementary, secondary, undergraduate, or postgraduate private school, or other place of education;
    (11) A day care center, senior citizen center, homeless shelter, food bank, adoption agency, or other social service center establishment; and
    (12) A gymnasium, health spa, bowling alley, golf course, or other place of exercise or recreation.

    The public comment period for the Department of Justice’s notice of rulemaking regarding this extension will end on Monday, January 24th. The questions being contemplated by the DoJ are straightforward and yet potentially significant, with respect to their effects upon businesses: Do they operate a website? If so, does that website also have to be accessible?

    The considerations and trade offs involved in answering those questions are complex but important. For people for whom accessibility is more than a “nice to have” feature, however, those answers will be meaningful.

    “It’s not just the group today that’s having trouble going online,” said Fox, ” it’s about how the conversation today contributes towards building towards the future.”

    POSTSCRIPT: Audrey Watters, a staff writer at ReadWriteWeb, referenced this article in her post, “Pew Internet Study Points to Challenges Americans with Disabilities Have with Internet Access.” One of her readers, John Mill, replied to Watters on Twitter: “Thanks for posting that. This inspires me as I’m applying for an internship and need to talk about greatest challenge faced by students with disabilities and how I might do something about it.”

    Mill said that “many things have actually gone backward” with regards to Web accessibility. “Facebook, for one. Probs with Captcha for another.” When reached for further comment, he tweeted more about the challenge of navigating the social Web as a blind man:

    I’d say the single biggest issue is the rate of change on websites and in software apps. Our screen-readers are constantly playing catch-up, and soon as they do another update is released that breaks things! With regards to social networking, FB is difficult also, as they change regularly. New Twitter is all but [unusable], but enterprising blind devs have created a software program called Qwitter client, found at www.qwitter-client.net. Those are a few of my thoughts. Apparently I could write a book!

    According to Mill, the new version of Twitter, set to be rolled out to all users this year, “causes screen-readers to become sluggish and unresponsive. Also hard to find where to write the new tweets.” With respect to Facebook, “I can’t really access the main site, largely because I’m not sure where anything is!” tweeted Mills. “The mobile site works well enough, for the most part. All those games and such are out, but I mostly use it to update statuses and message friends and family.”

    President Obama to take questions on YouTube after State of the Union

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    Next Tuesday January 25 at 9 p.m. EST, President Obama will deliver his 2011 State of the Union Address, which will be streamed live at WhiteHouse.gov and on the major television networks. Today, Steve Grove announced a YouTube interview with President Obama next Thursday, January 27, with questions coming from the online audience. The deadline for questions is Wednesday, January 25 at midnight EST.

    Once again, YouTube is taking questions using Google Moderator, which allows people to vote questions up and down. Before anyone jumps and calls this “Obama 2.0,” the president sat down for a similar live interview with Grove in the White House last year, and used a similar mechanism for an online town hall in 2009. The Google Moderator instance for last year’s YouTube interview on the CitizenTube channel received over 11,600 questions and over 660,000 votes. While the number of questions submitted the last time around suggest the odds aren’t terrific for the average citizen to see a question asked, it’s worth noting that a good pertinent question about the economy, energy, healthcare or foreign policy could be voted up for the president’s consideration (along with the persistent questions about legalizing marijuana.)

    For a look back at last year’s YouTube interview, including a sense of how Grove pulls from the public’s questions. watch the video below.

    Fuel for debate at the State of the Net: The Social Side of the Internet

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    A new survey by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and Life Project sheds new light on the social side of the Internet.The results offer new insight into the differences between the connected and the disconnected. The survey found that: 75% … Continue reading →