Category Archives: open government

ExpertLabs: The future of open government is citizen-focused

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On Monday, the White House asked for ideas on the National Plan for open government in the Open Government Partnership. (For background on the initiative, read this digest on Open Government Partnership analysis for context.) Specifically, the White House asked for feedback on ideas related to two of the key challenges from the OGP: improving public services and increasing public integrity.

  • How can regulations.gov, one of the primary mechanisms for government transparency and public participation, be made more useful to the public rulemaking process?
  • OMB is beginning the process of reviewing and potentially updating its Federal Web Policy. What policy updates should be included in this revision to make Federal websites more user-friendly and pertinent to the needs of the public?
  • How can we build on the success of Data.Gov and encourage the use of democratized data to build new consumer-oriented products and services?

Today, Clay Johnson offered the White House a deep set of recommendations for open government in response to the three questions it posed, including better ways to use open data, social media, improving regulations, public comment, and the developer community better. If you’re interested in open government, it’s a must-read.

We believe the future of open government is citizen focused — to be open to engagement on the terms that citizens are used to in the venues they’re accustomed to.

The growth of social media since the delivery of the initial open government directive, and its adoption by agencies’ communications departments requires the next step: for social media to also be used in giving citizens a voice in regulatory decisions. We believe the future of open government is about discoverability. Moving data or regulations from print publications to the online world results in a net loss if there are less people viewing them. Government should work hard to make sure that all publicly available information is discoverable by search engines, and via social media.

We believe that the future of open government is through the engagement of open source communities, and that agencies should begin to open up to their participation. Government treats lawyers as experts in the field of law, why not treat developers as experts in the field of processing data? Take the next step and participate with them directly, rather than through independent vessels.

– Clay Johnson (@cjoh), Recommendations for Open Government

For more on the decision to use email in the consultation, read Tiago Peixoto’s post on Google Plus.

Pew: Search and email are nearly universal among adult Internet users

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The results of a new survey from the Pew Internet and Life Project will come as no surprise to most: Internet users: search and email top the list of the things people do online. These two activities have been the most popular since Pew first started tracking online behavior over the last decade. The advent of broadband, mobile devices and social media has not changed that dynamic, though it’s a safe bet that adults under 30 are sending quite a lot of Facemail, IMs and tweets these days too.

That said, Pew did identify a difference. “The most significant change over that time is that both activities have become more habitual,” writes Kristen Purcell. “Today, roughly six in ten online adults engage in each of these activities on a typical day; in 2002, 49% of online adults used email each day, while just 29% used a search engine daily.”

Search and email demographics

According to Pew’s numbers, search is most popular among adult internet users aged age 18-29, 96% of whom use search engines to find information online.

There’s also some evidence of a continuing digital divide based upon education and race. According to Pew, online adults, college-educated, and those in the highest income categories are more likely than others to use email.

“These demographic differences are considerably more pronounced when one looks at email use on a typical day,” writes Purcell. “Moreover, while overall email use is comparable across white, African-American and Hispanic online adults, internet use on any given day is not. White online adults are significantly more likely than both African-American and Hispanic online adults to be email users on a typical day (63% v. 48% v. 53%, respectively).”

This new survey and its findings should be read in the context of last year’s report that citizens are turning to Internet for government data, policy and services and considering in the context of the ongoing federal .gov website review.

If open government is to be citizen-centric, it will clearly need to be search-centric. That means ensuring that government websites are available in search and evaluating how search-centric redesigns at Utah.gov perform over time.

These results also suggest that as exciting as the integration of social media into government may be, officials tasked with public engagement and consultation shouldn’t neglect using email to communicate with citizens, along with Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube and the other apps available to them. The difference in demographics usage of social media and email, however, does highlight that social media offers an important complementary channel to reach mobile citizens that access the Internet primarily through their mobile phones.

Jennifer Pahlka: Do more than leave or speak up. Make open government work better.

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In the face of existential challenges that test the national character of the United States of America, including long wars abroad and high unemployment at home, citizens may be tempted to tune out or voice their displeasure. With the growth of the open government movement, people now have another option: take the future of government into their own hands and try to make it work better. Today, Jennifer Pahlka, the founder of Code for America, highlighted why she believes the time for that choice has come. (If you’re following the open government movement, you’ve likely come across the work of Code for America, whose fellows have been trying to help cities work better across the country.)

…in the past twenty years, a solid chunk of American society has subscribed to the notion that the Internet was the new frontier, and a limitless one at that, and so the disgruntled could simply draw their own map, create their own circles, and be done with it. And it’s the Millennials who have brought us back down to earth and reminded us that the lesson of the Internet is that shared endeavor has value, that pooling resources is a good idea, and that government is the way we do things together that we can’t do individually. Which is why Millennials are the most pro-government generation in decades, however disgusted they would be by the debt ceiling brinksmanship, if they looked up from their laptops and smart phones long enough to notice. They are tapping into another innately American tradition, one of fundamental optimism, invention, and practicality. They’ve never met a system they couldn’t participate in, hack, mash-up, add value to or improve. And government is already meeting their expectations, providing data, enabling the creation of apps, and slowly adopting the tools of the Internet to make it easier for us to do the important work of governing ourselves together. – Jennifer Pahlka, founder of Code for America, “Exit or Voice? How About Neither?“

For more on this front, watch Pahlka’s talk from the Future of Web Apps Conference, where she makes the case that civic startups are the next disruption.

Jennifer Pahlka – The Next Disruption: Government from Code for America on Vimeo.

Apps for the Environment: Can developers and government talk? [WEBINAR]

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Over the past two years, entrepreneurs, developers and government agencies have collaboratively explored the power of open data to improve health or transit data as open government fuel for economic growth. Now, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is looking to do the same with an Apps for the Environment challenge.

This Thursday at 4 PM EST, the EPA is hosting a webinar for developers to hear more from the community about what the government can do to make data more usable by developers. (Heads up, government folks: Socrata’s open data study found progress but a long road ahead, with clear need for improvement: only 30 percent of developers surveyed said that government data was available, and of that, 50 percent was unusable.)

I look forward to moderating the EPA webinar (register here) on Thursday. Listeners can expect to hear more about collaborative innovation in open government, crowdsourcing and challenges, and the sustainability of apps contests before we open up the discussion with Jeremy Carbaugh of Sunlight Labs and Michaela Hackner of ForumOne, the developers of DataMasher, the winner of Apps for America2.

If you’re interested in a different kind of public service through code, please tune in.

How should whistleblowing work in the age of transparency?

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Transparency movements have gone global. Open government, however, depends in part upon the ability of public servants and corporate insiders to blow the whistle on fraud, corruption or other conduct that is not in the interest of citizens or stakeholders. In the context of Wikileaks, the role of whistleblowing has taken on new meaning and scope in this age of transparency. Despite President Obama’s open government commitments, his administration has aggressively pursued whistleblowers over the past two and a half years.

It is in that context that the Advisory Committee on Transparency for the Transparency Caucus in the U.S. Congress hosted a public discussion on July 29, 2011 on the challenges federal whistleblowers face. Video of the hearing, provided courtesy of the Sunlight Foundation, is embedded below.

The panelists included:

  • Angela Canterbury, Director of Public Policy, Project on Government Oversight
  • Carolyn Lerner, Special Counsel, U.S. Office of Special Counsel
  • Christian Sanchez, Border Patrol Agent, Customs & Border Protection, Department of Homeland Security
  • Daniel Schuman, Moderator, Policy Counsel, the Sunlight Foundation
  • Micah Sifry, Co-founder and editor of the Personal Democracy Forum; author of WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency; Sunlight Foundation sr. technology advisor

People interested in government transparency will find it of considerable interest.

Even if the White House’s commitment to transparency is questioned, open government continues to grow globally, with new tools for transparency coming online every month.

Think Different About Hacking?

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The words “hacker” and activity of “hacking” have been receiving a great deal of attention over the past few years, in the wake of data breaches, Wikileaks, the Anonymous and LulzSec groups, and now the “Shady Rat” cyberespionage revelations. Given that it’s being reported as the biggest hacking attack ever, the attention is merited.

As journalism professor Adam Penenberg highlighted last month in Fast Company, however, the term hacking and hacker are frequently misused in the mainstream, and it’s nearly always used with a negative connotation.

Maybe it’s time to revisit that interpretation, or at least broaden it. I’ve been a fan of Lifehacker since its launch, after all.

Earlier today, Kara Swisher reported that Randi Zuckerberg is leaving Facebook to start a new social media firm. In her resignation letter to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and communications head Elliot Schrage, Zuckerberg wrote that “I am thankful for the strong mentorship, guidance, and support, which is empowering me to follow my dreams and show that you don’t have to be an engineer to be a hacker.”

New York Times social media reporter Jennifer Preston highlighted that line from Zuckerberg’s letter on Twitter and, when asked if she believes it to be true, tweeted “sure.”

An hour ago, I wasn’t convinced. Great hackers have historically been venerated for legendary technical skills and creative approaches to solving problems, as writer Steven Levy chronicled in his canonical book of the same name, “Hackers.” Do you have to be a doctor to be a surgeon? Or a lawyer to practice law? Being a hacker does imply something specific in terms of your ability, if not credentials, as you can read in the Jargon File. In the programming community, hacking can be a technical term of art.

There’s also more to “hacking” than lawbreaking, despite today’s headlines.

Around the globe, there’s now a genuine movement of civic hacking afoot, which adds to the etymology of hacking “efforts that put technology, and particularly Internet technology, to work solving the problems of civic life,” as Nick Judd writes at techPresident. “Civic hacktivists” (also known as favorably called “civic developers) now gather together around the globe. Code for America is inspiring a new generation of civic coders.

Even with reasons to support hackathons, the negative connotation of “hacking” lingers. As the New York Times reported, when New York City chief digital officer Rachel Sterne proposed hosting a hackathon to generate ideas for redesigning NYC.gov, “she had to explain to colleagues that it would not pose a security threat.”

Think different

That said, it may be time to think more broadly about the term “hacking” itself. Matt Lira, director of new media for House of Representatives Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VI), agreed with Preston, suggesting that Thomas Jefferson, JFK and the GratefulDead were all hackers. Can hacker be a metaphor applied to government, rhetoric or music?

“I believe that is how the phrase was intended, or at least what it means to me,” tweeted Lira. “People who do things their own way.” He shared one of the iconic Apple commercials from the company’s turnaround in the late 1990s, after Steve Jobs returned, by way of interpretation:

To echo the final words of the ad, hackers could be described as “the people who are crazy enough to change the world are the ones who do.” On that count, I’ve now met many people who are hacking on open government since I became the Gov 2.0 correspondent for O’Reilly Media, both from the inside and outside of the system.

With support, luck and a lot of effort, maybe more modern day hackers will be “just crazy enough” to make the government work better.

Aspen Institute FOCAS’s on open government [LIVESTREAM]

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Today in Colorado, the Aspen Institute is continuing its week long Forum on Communications and Society. You can learn more about the FOCAS 2011 here; it’s the sort of high level gathering of leaders from public sector, private industry and academy you expect to see at the Aspen Institute. If you’d like to tune in, there’s a livestream available, embedded below.

Watch live streaming video from aspeninstitute at livestream.com

You can follow the backchannel on Twitter at the #focas11 hashtag:

//

Below, I’ve embedded Harvard professor Archon (@arfung) Fung’s presentation on innovations in e-democracy and archived videos from the conference.

Session II, Part 1

Watch live streaming video from aspeninstitute at livestream.com

Session II, Part 2

Watch live streaming video from aspeninstitute at livestream.com

Following Twitter and Facebook, White House experiments with LinkedIn for questions

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Over the course of the last year, the White House has experimented with each of the leading social media platforms to solicit questions and host conversations around events. This week in Silicon Valley, the nation could watch online to see if a LinkedIn forum could generate useful results. The White House Council on Jobs and Effectiveness hosted a session on job creation that featured questions submitted from LinkedIn. Archived video from the forum is embedded below, with an updated discussion at the end of the post.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/all/modules/swftools/shared/flash_media_player/player5x2.swf

Federal CTO Aneesh Chopra wrote more about this Palo Alto jobs session at the White House blog:

I’ll be joining Jobs Council Members Steve Case, John Doerr, Sheryl Sandberg, as well as Netflix CEO Reed Hastings on a panel moderated by the Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine Chris Anderson. The panel will focus on issues that impact entrepreneurs and high growth businesses, as well the importance of innovation, entrepreneurship and high growth companies to our economy. During the Session, Council members will respond to questions and comments from people across the country submitted via LinkedIn and Facebook.

Add your voice to the dialogue by sending us your questions and comments:

  • Right now, you can post your questions and comments on the White House LinkedIn group. Here’s what we’re looking for:
    • What questions do you have for Steve Case, John Doerr, Reed Hastings and Sheryl Sandberg about accelerating growth and job creation for innovative companies?
    • What policy recommendations would you want them to consider for their report to the President?
    • What are some of the obstacles you’re facing with regard to your workforce and finding talent?
    • What have you found to be successful practices in hiring and managing your workforce
  • Watch live on Tuesday, August 2nd at 1:00 p.m. ET/ 10:00 a.m PT on www.whitehouse.gov/live

More platforms, more questions?

The event comes with some context. In January, AskObama was on YouTube. In April, President Obama talked with Mark Zuckerbeg in what one could call the first “Facehall.” In July, Jack Dorsey moderated the first Twitter @Townhall.

Given that LinkedIn is focused on professional social networking, it’s not unreasonable to look there for questions on job creation. Whether tapping into that network works any better for soliciting questions or moderating them then ideation tools like Google Moderator, IdeaScale or UserVoice is unclear, given that the forums are not expressly designed for that purpose.

New social media platforms have emerged over the past year, of course. As the White House continues to experiment with social media, perhaps we’ll find out if Quora does politics at the White House — Congressional leaders like Paul Ryan are already there — or if the communications team tries a Google Plus Hangout, as Newt Gingrich tried earlier this summer. Given the interest that White House staff expressed in the latter platform during the White House tweetup at the recent (real life) presidential town hall at the University of Maryland, keep your eyes open.

UPDATE: Chris Anderson did a creditable job pulling from the questions on LinkedIn. After listening to them posed at the forum, however, it’s not at all clear to me that using a LinkedIn group was the ideal way to enable a distributed audience to submit questions. There are many platforms that have been built specifically for ideation that might make more sense to apply. Still, as a first experiment, this produced a series of questions for the moderator to pose that might not otherwise have been posed.

The WhiteHouse blog post on the forum of tech leaders included a statement from Chopra about three clarifications to existing immigration policies that can enable entrepreneurs to start companies here:

“First, we’re clarifying what it means to declare entrepreneurship in the national interest. Second, in an H1B visa, typically temporary in nature, the question is: Can you come in as an immigrant founder? If there’s a way to demonstrate that there’s a separation between your role as founder and that role as employee, you have the ability to pursue that existing avenue. Third, we have a category that exists called the EB5 visa for immigrant investors. If you’re willing to invest 1 million dollars in the United States and create 10 new jobs you have the authority to come in under this condition. But it’s a complicated process and we only use half the alloted slots. So we’re streamlining the process and making this more attractive for folks who want to create jobs in industries for the future”

 

New York City looks to an open government hackathon to redesign NYC.gov

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This week, Luke Fretwell suggested that “instead of building apps, civic hackathons should focus on redesigning websites, then turning them over to gov.” Today in New York City, the first day of the Revinvent NYC.gov hackathon started work on just that. (NYC had been working on this open government event long before Fretwell’s suggestion, but the confluence is worth noting.)

Tomorrow, the world will see what prototypes the Big Apple’s civic developers have co-created today, armed with NYC government demographic information and NYC.gov Web analytics.

They’re using a combination of digital and analog tools, including blackboards, projection screens, laptops and Post-Its. You can track the progress of the hackathon over at the NYC Digital Tumblr.

The formula here seems to be: Reserve space, provide coffee, bagels, electricity and Internet access and use the power of modern social networking, publishing tools and the New York City Mayor’s to convene the community.

If New Yorkers end up with a rethought, redesigned and relaunched NYC.gov, maybe other cities will try out that formula themselves.

For more on New York’s effort to become the nation’s premier digital city, learn more about how the Big Apple is thinking about architecting a city as a platform and citizensourcing smaller government.

[Photo credit: Colin Raney]

NASA launches new open government site with open source tools

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In one of the first posts on NASA’s newly relaunched open government blog, open government analyst Ali Llewellyn writes more about why adopting open government is important now, with a nod to Tim O’Reilly’s essay on “government as a platform.”

…OpenGov is not just data transparency or technology use. “Open government is an innovative strategy for changing how government works,” Beth Noveck, the original director of the White House Open Government Initiative, explains. “By using network technology to connect the public to government and to one another informed by open data, an open government asks for help with solving problems. The end result is more effective institutions and more robust democracy.”

From the beginning, democracy was supposed to be participatory. Thomas Jefferson noted in a letter how he envisioned a government where “every man…feels that he is a participator in the government of affairs, not merely at an election one day in the year, but every day.”

In the service of that vision, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration continues to extend its journey into the open government stratosphere with the launch of a redesigned open.nasa.gov. The new site complements nasa.gov/open – but doesn’t replace it. (The /open sites that exist on federal .gov websites are a direct result of the Open Goverment Directive issued by the White House Office of Management and Budget in 2009.)

The new NASA open government is a beautiful departure from standard NASA websites. In fact, it’s a lovely move away from the Web design citizens encounter at most of the thousands of federal .gov sites. In part, that’s because the new NASA open government site is built upon General Service Agency-approved technologies and the same open source platforms ( like WordPress) that you’ll find at top-notch blogs like BoingBoing. (Or Govfresh). All due credit to Nick Skytland, Chris Gerty and Sean Herron for their hard work coding and designing the site as well. Skytland, who now heads up open government at NASA, wrote in to share his vision for the site and make a request:

After months of development and many discussions, we are very excited to announce the official public launch of open.nasa.gov. The site is a collaborative platform for the open government community at NASA to share success stories and projects related OpenGov from around the agency. The content on this site is written by NASA employees and contractors (just the core OpenGov team right now). We will be highlighting the ways that transparency, participation, and collaboration are being embraced by NASA policy, technology, and culture, and the future that becomes possible because of that commitment. We would love your feedback on the site. Please let us know if you have any issues with the site so we can fix them. The site works on most browsers, but we are still working out issues with Internet Explorer.”

Aside from WordPress, the technology behind open.nasa.gov includes:
Techs used:

  • A WordPress theme by Landau Reece called Protean 1.0
  • MySQL
  • Apache
  • The Disqus commenting system
  • The UserVoice feedback collection tool

As I reported yesterday, NASA’s open government story now includes supplying the innovation behind OpenStack and Nebula. That said, while the technology behind the new NASA open government site and other initiatives is important to recognize, it has to be valued in terms of its ability to both host conversations and feature the people behind it. As NASA’s open government story evolves, cultural changes will be important to track, along with any technical milestones driven by open source or efficiencies driven by tightening budgets.

A note on FOIA

One of the interesting decisions that British Columbia’s government made in its adoption of open government was its decision to separate good government data, associated with transparency and accountability, from open government data, associated with innovation and co-creation.

NASA’s open government site makes no such distinction, with the link to Freedom of Information Act requests buried down at the bottom of the open data page. NASA’s open government plan includes aspirational goals of further reducing its FOIA backlog and creating a “single, Web-based system for handling all FOIA requests across the 13 NASA locations.” If the agency can do as well with that system as it has with the design, communication and coding embodied this new site, its open government team will be able to celebrate more good government achievement alongside its explorations into citizen science, random hacks of kindness, education and open data.