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
While the technology and political establishment is reeling off reactions to the Federal Communication’s net neutrality vote to approve the first federal rules on Internet traffic will mean for net neutrality, one thing at least is clear: the FCC has launched an Open Internet Apps Challenge on Challenge.gov.
The contest is reasonably straightforward, at least as a proposal; challenge developers to create applications that test networks that inform consumers about broadband Internet connections. Specifically:
The Open Internet Challenge is designed to encourage the development of creative, innovative and functional Internet software tools for fixed or mobile broadband that provide users with real-time data about their Internet connection and, when aggregated, can show Internet-wide patterns and trends.
Apps that can detect, aggregate and analyze such information might be of use to both the agency and consumers alike, in terms of making policy or consumption decisions:
The Open Internet Challenge seeks to encourage the development of creative, innovative and functional applications that provide users with information about the extent to which their fixed or mobile broadband Internet services are consistent with open Internet principles. These software tools could, for example, detect whether a broadband provider is interfering with DNS responses, application packet headers, or content.
These applications should also collect anonoymized data that is useful for network research and analysis that enables the discovery of patterns and trends in Internet openness.
One popular platform for Internet software tools is Measurement Lab (M-Lab), which “is an open, distributed server platform for researchers to deploy Internet measurement tools.” Those interested in running their software tools on the M-Lab platform should contact the M-Lab steering committee, which coordinates research on the M-Lab platform.
The commission is also soliciting research as part of the challenge:
In addition to measurement tools, this challenge also seeks research papers that analyze relevant Internet openness measurement techniques, approaches, and data. The Challenge is designed to encourage and reward the creation of novel, innovative and useful research. The research must be new or recent and directly involve open Internet principles. For example such research may illuminate how widely fixed and mobile networks observe the FCC’s open Internet principles or how advanced network services can be provided in a way that adheres to the spirit of the open Internet. Such research papers need to have been peer-reviewed by a recognized scientific conference or journal and must have been published since January 2007. (Dissertations, white papers and technical reports are not acceptable, but may be referenced for further details within the paper.) Research on Internet openness can improve policy making and advance Internet transparency, which helps to sustain a healthy Internet.
Will it take off? Another challenge, so to speak, might be the incentives. The winners will earn a free (up $500/person in travel expenses) trip to FCC headquarters in Washington, DC, where they’ll go to an FCC Chairman’s reception, present their work to the Commission, receive plaque and “have their apps and research featured on the FCC’s website and social media outlets.”
It’s also not clear how the development community will feel about the FCC after today’s hearing on somewhat controversial net neutrality rules, for which a public document still hasn’t been published online. Geeks and government have converged at the FCC before. If this challenge is going to take off, they’ll need to do a lot of outreach to encourage the development community to participate, which in turn will likely also mean exactly what the new open Internet principles will mean in practice. Stay tuned.
One of the risks and rewards for the use of Web 2.0 that came up in the July hearing on “government 2.0” technology in the House of Representatives had nothing to do with privacy, secrecy, security or embarrassment. Instead, it was a decidedly more prosaic concern, and one that is no surprise to anyone familiar with governmental institutions: record keeping. And no, this is not another story about how the Library of Congress is archiving the world’s tweets.
IBM’s Business of Government Center has released a new report on social media (PDF) records management, focusing on some best practices for harried federal employees faced with rapidly expanding troves of tweets, Facebook status updates, blog posts or wikis. For those keeping track, 22 of 24 agencies now, at the minimum, have a Facebook presence.
If you’re interested in the evolution of social media in government, a lot of what’s in here won’t be new to you. If not, the report provides a useful framework for why using social media presents headaches for federal records keeping and quite a few best practices and suggestions for mitigating them. As the preamble to the report allows, “this report does not solve the many challenges it identifies. However, it serves as a useful guide for federal managers attempting to use social media to engage citizens while meeting the statutory requirement to preserve historical records for future generations.”
If you’re still wondering what social media is at this point in 2010, Dr. Patricia Franks, the author of the report and a professor at San Jose State University in California, considers exactly that, with judicious references to experts. She offers a number of definitions and then provides her own summary: “‘social media’ encompasses a number of emerging technologies that facilitate interaction between individuals and groups both inside and outside an organization. The best return on an agency’s investment of resources in social media is realized when the goal of the social media initiative is clearly identified and clearly related to the agency’s core mission.”
And that last point is particularly interesting, and frames where much of the federal government stands at the end of 2010 well. The observation was preceded by an apt observation sourced by “insiders”: that the Obama administration’s Open Government Directive created a “Wild West” atmosphere around social media. In that content “eager individuals, embracing the freedom to innovate, moved quickly to use social media both within their departments and agencies and with the outside world. Early government enthusiasts of social media endeavored to establish a presence without first identifying a goal. Only recently have those responsible for social media initiatives begun to ask what needs to be accomplished before selecting the appropriate tool for the task.”
Some new media directors and communication staff have been aligning tools with mission for some time. Others have simply set up the accounts and then pushed updates to them. From what this correspondent hears around Washington, that “Wild West” is getting civilized, with this report representing the latest push to absorb social media into the business of government, replete with established policies, procedures and, yes, reporting standards.
“It’s not OK just to check a box and set up a Facebook page anymore,” said Cammie Croft, director of new media a the Department of Energy, last week at a forum on citizen engagement. “You have to have an idea for what you want to accomplish.” That reflects what Booz Allen social media strategist Steve Radick wrote last month, when he observed that the “new media director position is a means to an end.”
Speaking at the same event, Jack Holt, senior strategist for emerging media at the Department of Defense, reflected on how federal social media use has evolved from “no way, no how” to “accepted procedure” to “standard operating procedure.”
“These are not new tools we need to learn how to use,” he said. “It’s a new environment in which we need to live.”
As the year comes to an end, in other words, the federal government is learning how to live in the same new media world its citizens are grappling with comprehending, where “We the People” has newfound resonance. Yet again, we’re all in it together.
For more on the report, Brian Kalish has a full writeup of social media and agency records management over at NextGov.
What does open government need to break through the awareness barrier? A new study of federal government transparency efforts released by NextGov and ForeSeeResults gave all entities in the survey low marks in court of public opinion. Here’s the executive summary:
“Nearly two years after a memorandum to the federal government calling for ambitious and sweeping open government initiatives, many are wondering if the goals of openness, democratic participation, and collaboration have taken root and, if so, how successful the efforts have been.
ForeSee Results, in partnership with Nextgov, designed a comprehensive survey to assess how citizens grade four government entities (the government overall, the White House, Congress, and federal agencies and departments) in terms of Open Government Initiative (OGI) principles like transparency and trust. The goals of the research were:
• To get a baseline, quantifiable measurement of citizen trust and perceptions of transparency against which future measurements can be benchmarked
• To compare key citizen-facing government entities
There were four key findings in the study:
To get a sense of what the online community thought about the study, I fired up Twitter and collected the feedback I received after asking a few questions using Storify, a social media curation tool.
http://storify.com/digiphile/public-transparency-ratings-for-the-federal-govern.js
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