In general, connecting more citizens with their legislators and create more resources for Congress to understand where their constituents and tech community stands on proposed legislation is a good thing. Last year’s Congressional hearings on the Stop Online Piracy Act … Continue reading
Today, I hosted a Twitter chat with the Voting Information Project. They partner with states to provide official election data that developers can use to create free, open source tools for voters.
I’ve embedded a storify of our conversation below, along with a video explaining more about what they do. Of special note: VIP is partnering with Mobile Commons to let registered voters know where to vote. Just txt “where” or “donde” to 877-877.
http://storify.com/digiphile/a-chat-with-votinginfo-on-voting-elections-and-tec.js[View the story “A chat with @VotingInfo on voting, elections and tech” on Storify]
As significant as the revisions to San Francisco’s open data policy may prove to be, city officials and civic startups alike emphasize that it’s people are fundamental to sustained improvements in governance and city life.
“Open data would not exist without our community,” said Jay Nath, the city’s first chief innovation officer, this Monday at the Hatchery.
San Francisco’s approach to open innovation in the public sector — what businesses might describe as crowdsourcing, you might think of as citizensourcing for cities — involves a digital mix of hackathons, public engagement and a renewed focus on the city’s dynamic tech community, including the San Francisco Citizens Initiative for Technology and Innovation, or SF.citi.
Cities have been asking their residents how government could work better for some time, of course — and residents have been telling city governments how they could work better for much longer than that. New technologies, however, have created new horizons for participatory platforms to engage citizens, including mobile apps and social media.
Open data and civic coders also represent a “new class of civic engagement focused on solving issues, not just sharing problems,” argues Nath. “We have dozens and dozens of apps in San Francisco. I think it’s such a rich community. We haven’t awarded prizes. It’s really about sustainability and creating community. We’ve six or seven events and more than 10,000 hours of civic engagement.”
San Francisco’s dedicated citizensourcing platform is called “ImproveSF.” The initiative had its genesis as an internal effort to allow employees to make government better, said Walton. The ideas that come out of both, he said, are typically about budget savings.
The explosion of social media in the past few years has created new challenges for San Francisco to take public comments digitally on Facebook or Twitter that officials haven’t fully surmounted yet.
“We don’t try to answer and have end-to-end dialog,” said Jon Walton, San Francisco’s CIO, in an interview earlier this year. Part of that choice is driven by the city’s staffing constraints.
“What’s important is that we store, archive and make comments available to policy makers so that they can see what the public input is,” he said.
Many priorities are generated by citizen ideas submitted digitally, emphasized Walton, which then can be put on a ballot that residents then vote on and become policy by public mandate.
“How do you get a more robust conversation going on with the public?” asked Walton. “In local government, what we’re trying to do is form better decisions on where we spend time and money. That means learning about other ideas and facilitating conversations.”
He pointed to the deployment of free public Wi-Fi this year as an example of how online public comments can help shape city decisions. “We had limited funds for the project,” he said. “Just $80,000. What can you do with that?”
Walton said that one of the first things they thought about doing was putting up a website to ask the public to suggest where the hotspots should be.
The city is taking that feedback into account as it plans future wifi deployments:
Completed sites
Sites in progress
Walton said they’re working with the mayor’s office to make the next generation of ImproveSF more public-facing.
“How do we take the same idea and expose it to the public?” he asked. “Any new ‘town hall’ should really involve the public in asking what the business of government should be? Where should sacrifices and investments be made? There’s so much energy around the annual ballot process. People haven’t really talked about expanding that. The thing that we’re focusing on is to make decision-making more interactive.”
At least some of San Francisco’s focus has gone into mobile development.
“If you look at the new social media app, we’re answering the question of ‘how do we make public meetings available to people on handhelds and tablets’?” said Walton.
“The next generation will focus on how do they not just watch a meeting but see it live, text in questions and have a dialog with policy makers about priorities, live, instead of coming in in person.”
Last week, the Library of Congress launched Congress.gov in beta, its vision of the next generation of THOMAS, the online repository of the nation’s legislative data. The site features a “most viewed bills” list that lets visitors to the site see at a glance what laws or proposals are gathering interest the site.
The most viewed bills there, however, may not match up to the most popular bills elsewhere online. POPVOX**, a civic startup that is trying to bring the voice of the People into Congress, has posted the top 50 bills on its site for the 112th Congress, in terms of activity.
That the top bill is the Stop Online Piracy Act — and that the PROTECT IP Act is also in the top 5 — is unlikely to be a surprise to observers. The other bills at the top of the list — HR3035 Mobile Informational Call Act, HR2306 Ending Federal Marijuana Prohibition Act and S3240 Agriculture Reform, Food, and Jobs Act – may be more unfamiliar to many people. The complete list is in the infographic below, including whether POPVOX’s userbase supported or opposed them.
Marci Harris, the co-founder and CEO of POPVOX, wrote in via email to note that, as the 112th Congress comes to a close, the sequestration issue is starting to pop.
**DISCLAIMER: Tim O’Reilly, my publisher, provided angel funding for POPVOX last year. He calls it “a kind of Google Analytics service for politics, bringing visibility and actionable insight to both Congressional staffers and advocacy organizations.”
Last October, New York Times elections developer Derek Willis was worried about what we don’t know about elections:
While campaigns have a public presence that is mostly recorded and observed, the stuff that goes on behind the scenes is so much more sophisticated than it has been. In 2008 we were fascinated by the Obama campaign’s use of iPhones for data collection; now we’re entering an age where campaigns don’t just collect information by hand, but harvest it and learn from it. An “information arms race,” as GOP consultant Alex Gage puts it.
For most news organizations, the standard approach to campaign coverage is tantamount to bringing a knife to a gun fight. How many data scientists work for news organizations? We are falling behind, and we risk not being able to explain to our readers and users how their representatives get elected or defeated.
Writing for the New York Times today, Slate columnist Sasha Issenberg revisited that theme, arguing that campaign reporters are behind the curve in understanding, analyzing or being able to capably replicate what political campaigns are now doing with data. Whether you’re new to the reality of the role of big data in this campaign or fascinated by it, a recent online conference on the data-driven politics of 2012 will be of interest. I’ve embedded it below:
Issenberg’s post has stirred online debate amongst journalists, academics and at least one open government technologist. I’ve embedded a storify of them below.
http://storify.com/digiphile/should-newspapers-adopt-data-science-to-cover-poli.js[View the story “Should newspapers adopt data science to cover political campaigns?” on Storify]
Two years ago, I wondered whether “social voting” on Foursquare would increase voter participation.
That experiment is about to be writ much larger. In a release today, first reported (as far as I can tell) by Mike Allen in Politico Playbook, CNN and Facebook announced that they will be partnering on a “I’m Voting” Facebook app that will display commitments to vote on timelines, newsfeeds and the “real-time ticker” in Facebook.
“Each campaign cycle brings new technologies that enhance the way that important connections between citizens and their elected representatives are made. Though the mediums have changed, the critical linkages between candidates and voters remain,” said Joel Kaplan, Facebook Vice President-U.S. Public Policy, in a prepared statement. “Innovations like Facebook can help transform this informational experience into a social one for the American people.”
“By allowing citizens to connect in an authentic and meaningful way with presidential candidates and discuss critical issues facing the country, we hope more voters than ever will get involved with issues that matter most to them,” said Joe Lockhart, Facebook Vice President Corporate Communications, in a prepared statement. “Facebook is pleased to partner with CNN on this uniquely participatory experience.”
“We fundamentally changed the way people consume live event coverage, setting a record for the most-watched live video event in Internet history, when we teamed up with Facebook for the 2009 Inauguration of President Obama,” said KC Estenson, SVP CNN Digital, in a prepared statement. “By again harnessing the power of the Facebook platform and coupling it with the best of our journalism, we will redefine how people engage in the democratic process and advance the way a news organization covers a national election.”
“This partnership doubles down on CNN’s mission to provide the most engaging coverage of the 2012 election season,” said Sam Feist, CNN Washington bureau chief, in a prepared statement. “CNN’s unparalleled political reporting combined with Facebook’s social connectivity will empower more American voters in this critical election season.”
There’s also a larger question about the effect of these technologies on society: Will social networks encouraging people to share their voting behavior lead to more engagement throughout the year? After all, people are citizens 365 days a year, not just every two years on election day. Will “social citizenship” play a role in Election 2012?
In 2010, Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley said yes. As has often been the case (Dodgeball, anyone?), Crowley may well have been ahead of his time.
“One of the things that we’re finding is that when people send their Foursquare checkins out to Twitter and to Facebook, it can drive behaviors,” said Crowley in 2010. “If I check into a coffee shop all the time, my friends are going to be like, hey, I want to go to that coffee shop. We’re thinking the same thing could happen en masse if you start checking into these polling stations, if you start broadcasting that you voted, it may encourage other friends to go out there and do something.”
The early evidence, at least from healthcare in 2010, was that social sharing can lead to more awareness and promote health. Whether civic health improves, at least as measured in voter participation, is another matter. How you voted used to be a question that each registered citizen could choose to keep to him or herself. In 2012 and the age of social media, that social norm may be shifting.
One clear winner in Election 2012, however, will almost certainly be Facebook, which will be collecting a lot of data about users that participate in this app and associated surveys — and that data will be of great interest to political scientists and future campaigns alike.
“Since both CNN and [Facebook] are commercial entities, and since data collection/tracking practices in these apps are increasingly invasive, I am curious to see how these developments impact the evolution of the currently outdated US privacy regime,” commented Vivian Tero, an IDC analyst focused on governance, risk and compliance.
UPDATE: The Poynter Institute picked up this story and connected it in a tweet with a recent AdWeek interview with CNN digital senior vice president and general manager KC Estenson on “CNN’s digital power play.
Estenson, whose network has been suffering from lower ratings of late, notes that online, CNN is now “regularly getting 60 million unique users,” with an “average 20 million minutes a month across the platforms” and CNN Digital generating 110 million video streams per month.
That kind of traffic could power a lot of Likes.
Full release by Facebook on U.S. Politics over on Facebook.
This post has been updated as more information became available, via Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes.
If you think that search trends, Google News mentions and YouTube video views offer insight into the selection of a vice presidential nominee, Google Trends has you covered with a new VEEP Stakes” dashboard. Below, I’ve embedded the data around the candidates that the Washington Post has deemed most likely to be chosen by former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney to round out the top of the Republican ticket this fall. (Due to the limited width of this blog template, you can’t see Virginia governor Bob McConnell or Puerto Rico governor Luis Fortuno on the far right.)
Here’s how the Google Politics and Elections team introduced the dashboard in an update on Google Plus:
The summer before a Presidential election typically brings unending speculation about potential Vice Presidential picks. Veepstakes, as the process has commonly been referred to since 1988, has become a favorite topic of discussion among journalists and politicos.
We are excited to partner with +Washington Post’s +Chris Cillizza and The Fix to launch our first Veepstakes Trends Dashboard to track the buzz around GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s potential VP pick. The Veepstakes dashboard allows you to take the web’s real-time political pulse by comparing potential VP candidates’ YouTube video views, search traffic, and Google News mentions. You can even drill down and check out which potential nominee has been searched the most over the the last day, week or month.
While this is an interesting use of Google data, I find it of limited use in guessing who the Romney campaign will choose. The InTrade prediction for the 2012 Republican VP nominee ranked probabilities offer a much better instant insight into where the smart money from the collective wisdom of observers is pooled (Senator Rob Portman (R-OH) currently leads, at 21%) or, for that matter, Nate Silver’s statistical analyses of the vice presidential nominee’s effect on the race. All that being said, there’s a great deal of interest in who the next potential VP of the United States might be — and this data from Google reflect that wave. Make of it what you will.
Last month, I traveled to Moldova to speak at a “smart society” summit hosted by the Moldovan national e-government center and the World Bank. I talked about what I’ve been seeing and reporting on around the world and some broad principles for “smart government.” It was one of the first keynote talks I’ve ever given and, from what I gather, it went well: the Moldovan government asked me to give a reprise to their cabinet and prime minister the next day.
I’ve embedded the entirety of the morning session above, including my talk (which is about half an hour long). I was preceded by professor Beth Noveck, the former deputy CTO for open government at The White House. If you watch the entire program, you’ll hear from:
Without planning on it, I managed to deliver a one-liner that morning that’s worth rephrasing and reiterating here: Smart government should not just serve citizens with smartphones.
I look forward to your thoughts and comments, for those of you who make it through the whole keynote.
E Pluribus Unum 