“If you read only one blog in the Gov 2.0 space, you should read eaves.ca” – Tim O’Reilly.
My interview with David Eaves on open government and open data at today’s Gov 2.0 Summit is a reminder why my publisher would offer that ringing endorsement. We talked about the risks and rewards of open data, the state of Gov 2.0 in Canada and the progress of “We government” up across the border. Eaves also revealed that Canadians love Facebook, though perhaps not as much as hockey.
How will regulations and laws that address the new challenges of online privacy evolve? What are the tradeoffs between societal benefit and individual rights? How should the opportunities inherent in data mining be balanced with harm-based standards? What are the responsibilities of governments, businesses and citizens to protect privacy?
Yesterday at the Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington, my interview with Jules Polonetsky covered all of those topics and more. Polonestsky is the Co-chair and Director of the Future of Privacy Forum, a think tank seeking to improve the state of online privacy by advancing responsible data practices. His writing and research can be found at Futureofprivacy.org.
Last month, I interviewed Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior about technology, gov 2.0 and open government. In the excerpt below, we talk about some lessons for the public sector from her experience in the business of technology, particularly around distributed collaboration using video conferencing. “The power of video is that it really allows us to extend the abstract notions of text-based technology and replaces that with much more human way of communicating,” said Warrior. “It’s more natural.”
Warrior, who went to Russia this past winter on a State Department “TechDel,” leveraged telepresence to collaborate with her fellow travelers after they dispersed. She’ll be talking more about more about similar lessons from the private sector in her conversation with Tim O’Reilly at the Gov 2.0 Summit next week. I’ll be posting more excerpts from our interview at Radar on Monday.
Last month, I interviewed Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior about technology, gov 2.0 and open government. In the excerpt below, we talk about technology and business in Russia. Warrior traveled to Russia this past winter on a TechDel with the State Department, looking for connections through digital diplomacy.
I’m very much looking forward to her conversation with Tim O’Reilly at the Gov 2.0 Summit on private sector lessons that translate to the public sector next week. I’ll be posting more excerpts from our interview at Radar on Monday.
Last month, I interviewed Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior about technology, gov 2.0 and open government. In the excerpt below, we talked about on the use of telepresence in government – over telepresence – and the opportunities around teleworking.
I’m very much looking forward to her conversation with Tim O’Reilly at the Gov 2.0 Summit on private sector lessons that translate to the public sector next week. I’ll be posting more excerpts from our interview on Monday.
We also talked about the role of technology in natural disasters. An excerpt from that conversation is embedded below:
What Warrior and I didn’t discuss then, with respect to the floods in Pakistan, is the CrisisCommons Marathon Weekend that begins today. It’s an international effort that spans the globe, from Canada to London to Bangkok to Sydney, leveraging the distributed efforts of concerned citizens and technology to provide aid in the massive disaster. For more information – and to help – consult the links below:
We will be working to assist our friends and partner organizations: OpenStreetMap, Sahana and Crowdmap (Ushahidi). Each individual city may also be working on tasks listed on the CrisisCommons wiki for pkfloods.
We’ll be working in a number of countries and timezones with staggered over three days. CrisisCamps in Canada and CrisisCamp Virtual will start on the evening of Friday, September 3, 2010. This is the same start time for CrisisCamp Sydney where the time will be Saturday, September 4, 2010 : 08:00 AEST. As we collaborate work across North America, we will run overnight and link to the CrisisCamp London team. The Canadian and Uk teams finish on Saturday, September 4, 2010 while the Sydney team will continue throughout Sunday, September 5, 2010.
Register for the Sydney, Australia CrisisCamp: Saturday, September 4, 2010: 08:00 AEST
Join CrisisCamp Bangkok for Saturday, September 4, 2010
Register for the Toronto, Canada CrisisCamp: Friday, September 3, 2010: 18:00 ET
Join Silicon Valley on Friday, September 3, 2010 5-10pm Pacific Time at 650 Castro, Mountain View
Register for the London, UK CrisisCamp: Saturday, September 4,2010: 10am GMT
Join us virtually:
According to a March 2010 survey of state chief information officers by NASCIO , Grant Thornton and Tech America, public IT executives in the United States are looking seriously at investing in the cloud and green IT. 50% of the 40 CIOs, IT resource management officials and OMB representatives surveyed planned to invest in cloud computing. Additionally, some two thirds of those surveyed are using social media. The report is embedded below.
2010 Tech America Federal CIO Survey Final Reporthttp://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/doc_player.swf?doc=2010techamericaciosurveyreportfinal-100330103736-phpapp01&stripped_title=2010-tech-america-federal-cio-survey-final-report
[Hat Tip: Governing People]
Can social media, open government and an API lead to a better pill identification system? What about a collaborative effort between Big Pharma and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that could result in pictures of medications on labels for the first time?
As David Hale’s interview in my most recent article at Mashable showed, the power of social media, open data and innovation led to a better healthcare platform at the National Library of Medicine:
Every year, poison control centers get more than one million calls for pill identification. Each one of those calls costs nearly $50. Social software is helping biomedical researchers collaborate on better ways of identifying drugs. “Pillbox is a digital platform for communities to solve challenges related to pharmaceutical identification and reference,” says David Hale, the program manager. The National Library of Medicine’s mission is to gather, curate and distribute the world’s biomedical information, said Hale.
Pillbox is an open government initiative from the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Food and Drug Administration that could transform how pharmaceuticals are labeled in the future. The interactive web application currently allows visitors to rapidly identify unknown solid medications, like tablets or capsules, based upon their shape, color and other markings. Pillbox remains a research and development project, so users should not be making clinical decisions just yet. Right now there are over 1,000 images of prescription drugs in the system, with many more to come in the next few months.
In the video below, Hale demonstrates the platform:
Hale will share more about new updates to Pillbox and how the healthcare community and developers partnering to restructure federal drug label data at the Gov 2.0 Summit next week in Washington on September 8th.
His last presentation, “Open Gov Ninja 101,” is embedded below:
Earlier today, my newest Radar post explained what to expect as FCC.gov is poised for an overdue overhaul featured FCC managing director Steven VanRoekel on participation and building platforms. For the full perspective on what’s next in “FCC 2.0,” check out Radar. Our video interview is embedded below.
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski and Managing Director Steven VanRoekel will discuss their experiences turning FCC.gov into a 21st-century consumer resource at the Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington, D.C. (Sept. 7-8). Request an invitation.
http://www.viddler.com/simple/dbed5110/
Earlier this summer, the Knight Foundation convened a panel of experts on open source and open government at the 2010 Future of News and Civic Media Conference at MIT to consider whether open data can be used to fuel positive social change. If you missed the event or video when it was first posted, it’s well worth your time.
From the Knight Blog:
Ellen Miller, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, Laurel Ruma, editor at O’Reilly Media, and Nick Grossman, director of Civic Works at OpenPlans, each gave a brief speech and answered topical questions. Although each speaker expressed different ideas about how to foster civic engagement and social change, their strategies all revolved around a similar theme: transparency. The speakers agreed that social change can be fostered by increasing the amount of quality data available and correspondence between residents and their governments.
Miller will be presenting an Open Government Scorecard at the Gov 2.0 Summit next week. It’s a good bet that John Wonderlich’s post on the White House leading practice winners might serve as a preview of her comments.
Yesterday, I reported on how the United States federal government plans to approach crowdsourcing national challenges with the new Challenge.gov at ReadWriteWeb. As I wrote there, Challenge.gov is the latest effort in the evolution of collaborative innovation in open government.
Should the approach succeed, challenges and contests have the potential to leverage the collective expertise of citizens, just as apps contests have been used to drive innovation in D.C. and beyond.
In the interview below, Bev Godwin and Brandon Kessler explain what Challenge.gov is and what it might do. Kessler is the founder of ChallengePost, the platform that Challenge.gov is built upon.
I interviewed Godwin and Kessler in August, when senior government officials and private sector enjoyed a preview of Challenge.gov at the Newseum at the second annual Fedscoop forum on reducing the cost of government. The following excerpts from their panels offer more insight into how challenges work, how they’ve been used in the private sector and what results citizens might anticipate as this approach to open government moves forward.
Kessler defines a challenge.
Bev Godwin discusses the importance and value of challenges to the government.
Brandon Kessler discusses the results he has seen from challenges.
Michael Donovan, Chief Technologist, Strategic Capabilities, HP, explains how he would classify different types of challenges.
Dean Halstead, collaboration architect at Microsoft, discusses how he would classify different types of challenges.
Dr. Jeffrey Davis, director of space life sciences at NASA, talks about the return on investment shown by some of the challenges he has run or been involved with.
Dr. Jeffrey Davis explores the characteristics of a good challenge.
Dean Halstead explains how Microsoft leverages challenges.
Michael Donovan explains how HP leverages challenges.
Challenge.gov “is the next form of citizen engagement, beyond participation to co-creation,” said Godwin at the Newseum. Many questions remain about how the effort will be received. Will citizens show up? Will challenges see participation from industry leaders and the innovators in the private sector? Will intellectual property rights be clearly and fairly addressed up front and afterwards, in a sustainable way? Will Congress pass legislation enshrining this approach to open government?
The answers to most of those questions, in other words, will often not be driven by legal or technological challenges. Instead, the results will have to be used to drive acquisition, civic empowerment or even more data-driven policy. Opening the doors of government to innovation will not be easy. Whether these efforts can spur the evolution of a more efficient, innovative government in the 21st Century may be the most difficult challenge to win of all.
E Pluribus Unum 