I spoke with New York City deputy Mayor Steven Goldsmith (@s_goldsmith) about citizensourcing smarter government in New York City earlier this year. The following interview with CSPAN is worth watching for those interested in further insight into his perspective on urban governance in the 21st century.
Category Archives: video
First Ignite Smithsonian spreads enlightened ideas from the “nation’s attic”
Today in Washington, Ignite Smithsonian is bringing innovative ideas about museums, design, art, technology and culture to life. As with every Ignite, each speaker had 5 minutes and 20 slides to communicate his or her message.
Ignite Smithsonian is being streamed live online from the stage of the National Museum of the American Indian this morning from 10 AM EST to 12 PM EST.
“It is the responsibility of museum as stewards of memory to help citizens think critically,” said Neal Stimler in the first talk
The archive is embedded below.
http://www.ustream.tv/flash/viewer.swf
The Ignite format has been earning more interest in Washington and government in general over the past year or so. Last May, the State Department hosted a Haiti tech meetup that Brady Forrest helped to host “Ignite style.”
Here’s the lineup for this morning
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- Phillip Auerswald: Creating a Place for the Future
Phillip is an entrepreneurship enthusiast and aspiring innovation insurgent. Associate Professor, School of Public Policy, George Mason University; Associate, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University; Co-Founder and Co-Editor, Innovations journal (MIT Press). Follow @auerswald on Twitter. - Brett Bobley: Digging into Data Challenge
Brett is Chief Information Officer for the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and is also the Director of the agency’s Office of Digital Humanities (ODH). Follow @brettbobley on Twitter. - Katie Filbert and Sarah Stierch: Be GLAMorous: Join WikiProject GLAM/SI
Katie and Sarah are long-time Wikipedians. Follow @filbertkm and @Sarah_Stierch on Twitter. - Vanessa Fox
Vanessa is a Google alumni, author of Marketing in the Age of Google, Entrepreneur In Residence for Ignition Partners, founder of Nine By Blue. Follow @vanessafox on Twitter. - Elissa Frankle: Citizen History: Making History with the Masses
Elissa is an education consultant at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Follow @museums365 on Twitter. - Tim Hart: Cultural Data Sculpting
Tim is the Director of Information, Multimedia and Technology at Museum Victoria, Australia. Follow @timh01 on Twitter. - David Hart: The Cleveland Dilemma, Or How To Stop Making Things People Don’t Want
David works in the Digital Media Department at MoMA, producing content for exhibitions and programs. Follow @senorcorazon on Twitter. - Carmen Iannacone: Hello, I’m a knowledge worker
Carmen is the Chief Technology Officer at the Smithsonian Institution. Follow @SI_CTO on Twitter. - Clay Johnson
Clay is a polycareerist: Founder of Blue State Digital, former Director of Sunlight Labs, government transparency and open data activist, Founder of Big Window Labs, Director of Engagement for ExpertLabs, and current author at infovegan.com. Follow @cjoh on Twitter - Martin Kalfatovic: ebooks for everybody
Martin is a featherless bipedal librarian attempting to avoid extinction. Habitat: Smithsonian Institution Libraries. Follow @udcmrk on Twitter. - Steve Midgley: Learning Registry: free to be you and me
Steve is the Deputy Director for Education Technology at the US Dept of Education, Education Director, FCC., Principal Mixrun. Program officer, Stupski Foundation. VP Engineering LoopNet. Grad school drop out. Follow @stevemidgley on Twitter. - Kevin Novak: The New White Space
Kevin is the Vice President of Integrated Web Strategy and Technology for the American Institute of Architects, Co-chair of the W3C Electronic Government workgroup, Chair of the National Research Council/National Academies Panel on Communicating and Disseminating Engineering and Scientific Data for the National Science Foundation, former chair of the Internet in Developing Countries Task Force under the .MOBI Foundation, former Director of Web Services at the Library of Congress. Follow @NovakKevin on Twitter - Fiona Rigby: Making New Zealand Content Easier to Find, Share, Use
Fiona is the Content Manager at DigitalNZ. Follow @nzfi on Twitter. - Margriet Schavemaker: The Museum as InnovatAR
Margriet is an art historian, philosopher and media specialist. She’s the Head of Collections and Research at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Follow @marschave on Twitter. - Camilla SDO: Camilla – The Who & Why!
Camilla is the mission mascot for the NASA Solar Dynamics Array. Follow @Camilla_SD on Twitter. - Simon Sherrin: Giving everyone a bite of the Apple
Simon is the Technical Manager for the Victorian Cultural Network, Australia. Follow @thesherrin on Twitter. - Koven Smith: What’s the Point of a Museum Website?
Koven is a composer, drummer, and Director of Technology at the Denver Art Museum. Follow @5easypieces on Twitter. - Neal Stimler: Renewing American Democracy Through Museums & Digital Culture
Neal is the Associate Coordinator of Images in The Image Library at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Follow @nealstimler on Twitter. - Kate Theimer: How I Got Over My Hatred of "Archive" as a Verb, and Other Stories of Words and Evolutions
Kate is the author of “Web 2.0 Tools and Strategies for Archives and Local History Collections” and the ArchivesNext blog. Former National Archives and Smithsonian Institution employee. Follow @archivesnext on Twitter. - Jasper Visser: A look at the wondrous world of automatic vending machines through the eyes of a museum professional
Jasper is the project manager for new technology and media projects at the Museum of National History of the Netherlands. Follow @jaspervisser on Twitter.
Enjoy! You can follow the backchannel for the event at #IgniteSmithsonian on Twitter.
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Videos from the Web were interspersed with the speakers, like “Trade School.”
Or a flash mob doing the Hammer Dance.
As its Star Trek videos launch, Social Security tries to connect with younger citizens
Patty Duke and Mr. Sulu (aka, George Takei) want you to boldly go where you may never have gone before: SocialSecurity.gov. (At least if you’re under 65.)The short, commercial length spots make no bones about Takai’s time on Star Trek, so to speak, and are laced with references to the iconic television series.
In another, Takei and Duke encourage viewers to “Go Direct” to get direct deposits of monthly social security checks. (No way to beam those over, Scotty?) While the new slate of videos, Social Security is making an effort to connect with older Americans through the aging icons of 20th Century pop culture. As my colleague Luke Fretwell put it, Social Security has gone Star Trek.
If the spots help an increasingly digital cohort of senior citizens to learn about SocialSecurity.gov and relevant benefits, the cornball humor might have been worth the investment.
On the same day that the Star Trek videos launched however, the Social Security Administration also posted the full version of a webinar for young people wondering. The webinar, below, is the first official communications from the agency the contains information about the future of the program for young workers.
To say that there’s a contrast in styles between the two communication efforts is an understatement. The care with which the agency has had to take in communicating about an uncertain future, as opposed to trying to raise awareness of an improved website, is notable. This more recent example of how Social Security operates in the Gov 2.0 era drives how just how difficult operating in the new media environment will be for many agencies.
Will Social Security get social media? Hard to say. They’re trying. The @SocialSecurity Twitter wasn’t able to attract the attention of Takei or produce much engagement. Facebook produced slightly better results, but no obvious spike in awareness or viewership of the webinar.
If you have any thoughts on their success, failure or what they could or should be doing better, the comments are open.
John Wonderlich on the aspirations and limitations of open data initiatives
New abilities given to citizens and open government watchdogs through the lens of technology means sunlight can be applied to government transparency in powerful ways. This past weekend, John Wonderlich, policy director for the Sunlight Foundation, spoke about open data and transparency at the slashroots ./roots/DEV in Jamaica. His keynote is embedded below.
./roots/Dev Conference 2011 – Keynote Day 2 Pt 1/2 from slashroots on Vimeo.
Beth Noveck on connecting the academy to open government R&D
Earlier this week, the White House convened an open government research and development summit at the National Archives. Columbia statistics professor Victoria Stodden captures some key themes from it at her blog, including smart disclosure of government data and open government at the VA. Stodden also documented the framing questions that federal CTO Aneesh Chopra asked for help answered from the academic community:
1. big data: how strengthen capacity to understand massive data?
2. new products: what constitutes high value data?
3. open platforms: what are the policy implications of enabling 3rd party apps?
4. international collaboration: what models translate to strengthen democracy internationally?
5. digital norms: what works and what doesn’t work in public engagement?
In the video below, former White House deputy CTO for open government, Beth Noveck, reflected on what the outcomes and results from the open government R&D summit at the end of the second day. If you’re interested in a report from one of the organizers, you’d be hard pressed to do any better.
The end of the beginning for open government?
The open government R&D summit has since come under criticism from one of its attendees, Expert Labs’ director of engagement Clay Johnson, for being formulaic, “self congratulatory” and not tackling the hard problems that face the country. He challenged the community to do better:
These events need to solicit public feedback from communities and organizations and we need to start telling the stories of Citizen X asked for Y to happen, we thought about it, produced it and the outcome was Z. This isn’t to say that these events aren’t helpful. It’s good to get the open government crowd together in the same room every once and awhile. But knowing the talents and brilliant minds in the room, and the energy that’s been put behind the Open Government Directive, I know we’re not tackling the problems that we could.
Noveck responded to his critique in a comment where she observed that “Hackathons don’t substitute for inviting researchers — who have never been addressed — to start studying what’s working and what’s not in order to free up people like you (and I hope me, too) to innovate and try great new experiments and to inform our work. But it’s not enough to have just the academics without the practitioners and vice versa.”
Justin Grimes, a Ph.D student who has been engaged in research in this space, was reflective after reading Johnson’s critique. “In the past few years, I’ve seen far more open gov events geared towards citizens, [developers], & industry than toward academics,” he tweeted. “Open gov is a new topic in academia; few people even know it’s out there; lot of potential there but we need more outreach. [The] purpose was to get more academics involved in conversation. Basically, government saying ‘Hey, look at our problems. Do research. Help us.'”
Johnson spoke with me earlier this year about what else he sees as the key trends of Gov 2.0 and open government, including transparency as infrastructure, smarter citizenship and better platforms. Given the focus he has put on doing, vs researching or, say, “blogging about it,” it will be interesting to see what comes out of Johnson and Expert Labs next.
Todd Park on unleashing the power of open data to improve health
What if open health data were to be harnessed to spur better healthcare decisions and catalyze the extension or creation of new businesses? That potential future exists now, in the present. Todd Park, chief technology officer of the Department of Heath and Human Services, has been working to unlock innovation through open health data for over a year now. On many levels, the effort is the best story in federal open data. Park tells it himself in the video below, recorded yesterday at the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia.
Over at e-patients.net, Pew Internet researcher Susannah Fox asked how community organizations can tap into the health data and development trend that Park has been working hard to ignite. She shared several resources (including a few from this correspondent) and highlighted the teams who competed in a health developer challenge tour that culminated at the recent Health 2.0 conference.
Check out this article about HealthData.gov including footage of Park talking about the “health data eco-system” at the code-a-thon (and actually, the video also features local health hacker Alan Viars sitting there at the right).
Here are 3 blog posts about last year’s event, including mine:
Making Health Data Sing (Even If It’s A Familiar Song)
Community Health Data Initiative: vast amounts of health data, freed for innovators to mash up!
Making community health information as useful as weather data: Open health data from Health and Human Services is driving more than 20 new apps.
The next big event in this space on June 9 at the NIH. If you’re interested in what’s next for open health data, track this event closely.
Micah Sifry on “Wikileaks and the Age of Transparency”
The emergence of Wikileaks as a global player in technology-fueled transparency was one of the biggest stories of 2010. Micah Sifry, co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum and editor of techPresident, used Wikileaks as a peg to explore the new information ecosystem in his excellent new book, “Wikileaks and the Age of Transparency.” Last night in Washington, Sifry spoke about why he wrote the book and offered some cogent reflections about how transparency has gone global. Video of his talk is embedded below.
Few people have as rich an understanding of the intersection of technology and politics than Sifry. I’m looking forward to reading my new copy of the book immensely and, of course, to following his chronicling of the age of transparency in realtime at @mlsif.
Vint Cerf talks to the CFR about Internet freedom and foreign policy
In a new video interview from the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Google’s Internet evangelist, Vint Cerf talks with CFR’s Hagit Bachrach about the future of the Internet and what that could mean for international development and foreign policy. He spoke about the importance of an “Internet without borders” last year.
Earlier in the month, Cerf spoke with USAID’s Alex O. Dehgan about technology as a tool for foreign policy, discussing the ability of science and information technology to connect political leaders, diplomats and innovators around the globe.
Last year, Cerf made it clear that he believed that governments shouldn’t control the Web, at least with respect to the governance of ICANN, the organization that has responsibility for the Internet domain system. In the wake of the Internet shutdown in Egypt and ongoing online censorship around the globe, that perspective has gained more prominence.
The US CIO goes to the white board to describe good government
Earlier this week, United States CIO Vivek Kundra turned to the White House whiteboard to talk about sunshine, savings and service. If you’re unfamiliar with Kundra, he’s the man who has proposed and now is entrusted with implementing sweeping federal IT reform. One of the tools he’s been applying to the task is the so-called IT dashboard, which helps the White House Office of Management and Budget, where he serves to track IT spending. He claims to have reduced federal IT spending by some $3 billion dollars over the past two years with increased tracking and scrutiny.The federal CIO explains more about the results from that work, below.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/all/modules/swftools/shared/flash_media_player/player5x2.swf
UPDATE: As open data consultant Dan Morgan pointed out, however, the Government Accountability Office reported that while OMB has made improvements to its dashboard, “further work is needed by agencies and OMB to ensure data accuracy.”
…inaccuracies can be attributed to weaknesses in how agencies report data to the Dashboard, such as providing erroneous data submissions, as well as limitations in how OMB calculates the ratings. Until the selected agencies and OMB resolve these issues, ratings will continue to often be inaccurate and may not reflect current program performance. GAO is recommending that selected agencies take steps to improve the accuracy and reliability of Dashboard information and OMB improve how it rates investments relative to current performance and schedule variance. Agencies generally concurred with the recommendations; OMB did not concur with the first recommendation but concurred with the second. GAO maintains that until OMB implements both, performance may continue to be inaccurately represented on the Dashboard.
One question left unanswered: Is /good the new /open? Decide for yourself at the new “Good Government” section at WhiteHouse.gov.
E Pluribus Unum 