Next Tuesday January 25 at 9 p.m. EST, President Obama will deliver his 2011 State of the Union Address, which will be streamed live at WhiteHouse.gov and on the major television networks. Today, Steve Grove announced a YouTube interview with President Obama next Thursday, January 27, with questions coming from the online audience. The deadline for questions is Wednesday, January 25 at midnight EST.
Once again, YouTube is taking questions using Google Moderator, which allows people to vote questions up and down. Before anyone jumps and calls this “Obama 2.0,” the president sat down for a similar live interview with Grove in the White House last year, and used a similar mechanism for an online town hall in 2009. The Google Moderator instance for last year’s YouTube interview on the CitizenTube channel received over 11,600 questions and over 660,000 votes. While the number of questions submitted the last time around suggest the odds aren’t terrific for the average citizen to see a question asked, it’s worth noting that a good pertinent question about the economy, energy, healthcare or foreign policy could be voted up for the president’s consideration (along with the persistent questions about legalizing marijuana.)
For a look back at last year’s YouTube interview, including a sense of how Grove pulls from the public’s questions. watch the video below.
Erik Paulson published an excellent new series on Gov 2.0 in Madison, Wisconsin today:
The citizens of Madison are a fairly tech-savvy bunch, but when it comes to technology in the civic space, we’re not as far out it the lead as we should be. I’d like us to change that, and join the list of cities developing applications as part of a Gov 2.0 movement. This is a brief introduction, and what follows below is a three-part set of posts.
Part I focuses on some of what Gov 2.0 is, and uses Madison Metro as an example. Part II looks at how Madison is doing with Gov 2.0, and what we can be doing better. Part III looks at some specific Gov 2.0 systems that we could be building.
All three articles are excellent, and include several kind nods towards this blog and to Code for America and Civic Commons, two of the civic innovations organizations to watch in 2011.You’ll find thoughts on citizens as sensors, urban data, civic development, government as a platform, a “neighborhood API,”improving libraries, adding fibre, legislation tracking and more. Highly recommended.
The social web can be a powerful tool for communication, sharing and remembrance. The Internet would be a neutral tool that could be used for organizing, enlightenment and commerce, or repression, propaganda and crime. Which will it be? In 2011, the safest bet is both. Today, that truth was self-evident in the United States, as a nation remembered Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. online. Over the past week, however, the Internet and its social layer has been given a starring role in the recent events in Tunisia that may be overblown.
In a word, no. At least, not on those terms. “No one I spoke to in Tunis today mentioned twitter, facebook or wikileaks. It’s all about unemployment, corruption, oppression,” tweeted Ben Wedeman, reporting for CNN from on the ground in Tunisia. Dan Murphy minced no words in his piece in the Christian Science Monitor rebutting the Wikileaks revolution meme that Wikileaks itself spread. “The Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia is being driven by flesh and blood and conditions on the ground, not because WikiLeaks ‘revealed’ to Tunisians the real face of a government they’d lived with their whole lives,” wrotes Murphy.
“Any attempt to credit a massive political shift to a single factor — technological, economic, or otherwise — is simply untrue,” wrote Zuckerman in Foreign Policy. “Tunisians took to the streets due to decades of frustration, not in reaction to a WikiLeaks cable, a denial-of-service attack, or a Facebook update.”
On amplifying voices:
For users of social media, the protests in Iran were an inescapable, global story. Tunisia, by contrast, hasn’t seen nearly the attention or support from the online community.
The irony is that social media likely played a significant role in the events that have unfolded in the past month in Tunisia, and that the revolution appears far more likely to lead to lasting political change. Ben Ali’s government tightly controlled all forms of media, on and offline. Reporters were prevented from traveling to cover protests in Sidi Bouzid, and the reports from official media characterized events as either vandalism or terrorism. Tunisians got an alternative picture from Facebook, which remained uncensored through the protests, and they communicated events to the rest of the world by posting videos to YouTube and Dailymotion. As unrest spread from Sidi Bouzid to Sfax, from Hammamet and ultimately to Tunis, Tunisians documented events on Facebook. As others followed their updates, it’s likely that news of demonstrations in other parts of the country disseminated online helped others conclude that it was time to take to the streets. And the videos and accounts published to social media sites offered an ongoing picture of the protests to those around the world savvy enough to be paying attention. – Ethan Zuckerman, Foreign Policy
Here’s a reader that provides more perspectives on the Internet in the past week’s events in Africa.
Al Jazeera on the role of social media in the Tunisian uprising:
“In contemporary systems of political communication, citizens turn to the Internet as a source of news and information in times of political crisis. It is not only that online social networking services are influential as a communications media; rather, they are now also a fundamental infrastructure for social movements. And the Internet globalizes local struggles.
Information and communication technologies are the infrastructure for transposing democratic ideals from community to community. They support the process of learning new approaches to political representation, of testing new organizational strategies, and of cognitively extending the possibilities and prospects for political transformation from one context to another.
But it would be a mistake to tie any theory of social change to a particular piece of software.”-Philip Howard
Technology clearly played a role in amplifying the voices of Tunisian citizens. The question is how much of a role, given the reality. Using social networks, SMS and online video, they could be heard by on another and the rest of the world (along with, one can assume, government agents.)
Did Twitter matter?
The reality is that Twitter is an information-distribution network, not that different from the telephone or email or text messaging, except that it is real-time and massively distributed — in the sense that a message posted by a Tunisian blogger can be re-published thousands of times and transmitted halfway around the world in the blink of an eye. That is a very powerful thing, in part because the more rapidly the news is distributed, the more it can create a sense of momentum, helping a revolution to “go viral,” as marketing types like to say. Tufekci noted that Twitter can “strengthen communities prior to unrest by allowing a parallel public(ish) sphere that is harder to censor.”
So was what happened in Tunisia a Twitter revolution? Not any more than what happened in Poland in 1989 was a telephone revolution. But the reality of modern media is that Twitter and Facebook and other social-media tools can be incredibly useful for spreading the news about revolutions — because it gives everyone a voice, as founder Ev Williams has pointed out — and that can help them expand and ultimately achieve some kind of effect. Whether that means the world will see more revolutions, or simply revolutions that happen more quickly or are better reported, remains to be seen.”-Mathew Ingram, GigaOm
Tunisia’s Twitter revolution?
“Many have attributed the wave of protests to the rise of the internet and social media in a country notorious for its censorship but Foreign Policy blogger Marc Lynch says it’s not that simple. He says the internet, social media and satellite channels like Al Jazeera have collectively transformed the information landscape in the Arab world.”-On the Media
Car malgré l’immense respect que j’ai pour ce qu’a réussi à accomplir le peuple tunisien, et les twitterers qui ont rejoint leur cause, il convient de dire que l’engouement des twitterers pour la révolution Tunisienne est resté, somme toute, trés modeste.
Ainsi, au plus fort de la crise, le tryptique Tunisie+Tunisia+tunez n’a atteint que 100 tweets par minutes. On m’objectera que ce trypique ne permet pas de mesurer le nombre de tweets réels parlant des événements tunisiens. C’est tout à fait vrai, mais cela reste un indicateur, et en comparaison le dyptique (equateur + ecuador) dépassait lui les 400 tweets/minutes lors de la tentative de coup d’etat en Equateur du 30 septembre dernier… Qui s’en souvient?
Autre indicateur intéressant, le mot Tunisie (en français), est resté égal à Tunisia (en anglais) et superieur à Tunez (en espagnol) avec constance jusqu’aux 2 derniers jours, les courbes des différents mots clefs épousant par ailleurs exactement le même tracé. Ceci nous permet de conclure 2 choses:
Les twitterers impliqués appartenaient globalement aux mêmes fuseaux horaires. En réalité, la révolution tunisiennes a été essentiellement suivie, commentée et retweetée en Europe et au Moyen-orient.
Les événements ont sans doute fait le plein des voix francophones intéréssées par l’actualité internationale, celles-ci restant, n’en doutant pas, bien modestes à l’echelle de Twitter. Mais, les grandes communautés de Twitterers hispanophones et anglophones d’Amerique du Nord et du Sud, ainsi que celles des pays asiatiques anglophones sont elles, en proportion, restées trés en marge de l’actualité Tunisienne. (je ne possède pas de données concernant les autres communautés linguistiques notamment japonaise, russe, etc…)
Et à cela il y a me semble-t-il une explication qui va au delà des facteurs géographiques ou historiques: la trés faible et pour le moins tardive implication les medias US et UK qui, sur Twitter, sont eux, les véritables catalyseurs, et c’est un fait constant, des discussions touchant à l’actualité internationale.”-Quelle Twitter revolution en Tunisie?
Clay Shirky commented on the role of technology in Tunisia:
“…you quote Zeynep asking “was the French Revolution a printing press revolution?” To which the answer is _of course_ the French Revolution was a press revolution; it was unimaginable without the press.
“Prototypically, this type of press can be observed in times of revolution, when the journals of the tiniest political groupings and associations mushroom–in Paris in the year 1789 every marginally prominent politician formed his club, and every other founded his journal; between February and May alone 450 clubs and over 200 journals sprang up.” (Habermas, _Structural transformation of the public sphere_)
So Tunisia was no more a media revolution than the French Revolution was, but no less either. And though Twitter has become the short-hand for the changed media environment in Tunisia, my vote goes to mobile phones and Al Jazeera as the monikers for the media that made the most difference.
Weighting the variables, though, are details, in my view, compared to the much larger change in the conversation taking place.
No one believes social media _causes_ otherwise complacent citizens to become angry enough to take to the streets. It’s a convenient straw man for the skeptics, because, as an obviously ridiculous narrative, it’s easy to refute.
And the effect of a new medium on society is so full of feedback loops there is no way to prize apart those effects while they are happening, and prizing them apart afterwards takes decades and consumes academic careers.
The argument about the effect of social media centers on something much less causal and much more contributory: the idea that social media helps angry people achieve shared awareness about how many other people are angry, and helps those people take action. AJ contributed more to the first half of that equation, mobile phones to the second, FB more the first, Twitter more the second, and so on.
In Tunis, this effect clearly played a role. How and how much will be debated for years, but its importance seems obvious, just as the importance of newly cheap printing presses fueled political organization in France. But even the people pointing out that calling this a Twitter Revolution is simplistic and insulting are alway saying social media had an effect. Luke Allnut’s widely circulated piece, “Can We Please Stop Talking About Twitter Revolutions” says:
“First off, it looks like social media did have an important role to play here. An estimated 18 percent of Tunisia’s population is on Facebook and, left unblocked by the government, it was a place where many Tunisians shared updates pertaining to the protests. As Ethan Zuckerman has pointed out, the video-sharing sites Dailymotion and YouTube were also important. And with a paucity of on-the-ground media coverage, Twitter excelled as a medium in getting the message out, in driving mainstream media coverage, and in connecting activists on the ground with multipliers in the West.”
“Twitter Revolution” is a headline, a label that compresses and distorts wildly, but arguing over whether we should use or drop the phrase (I think its dreadful, and never use it) is a lot less important than the underlying clarity the events in Tunis provide: no one thinks social media is the source of the anger, some people think social media was one of the things that helped convert that anger to action (Allnutt, Zuckerman, me), some people think that social media has little or no effect (Morosov and Gladwell, most famously). And from my point of view, that latter belief has become harder to support.
“-Clay Shirky, commenting on GigaOm
Shirky posted a correction as well:
Evgeny has pointed out to me in mail that I have wrongly lumped his views in with Malcolm Gladwell’s, which I’d like to retract.
Malcolm seems to have taken a “Bah, humbug” approach to social media, stretching Tom Slee’s ‘slacktivism’ critique (Facebook shout-outs for overthrowing SLORC won’t free Burma) to encompass all uses of social media. Where I went wrong was in imputing Malcolm’s “social media is politically inert” view to Evgeny as well, when he believes something considerably more complex.
Here’s my precis of Evgeny’s thesis: although the internet and mobile phones _can_ lead to things like improved ability to mobilize, those improvements will not necessarily lead to a net increase in political freedom. The governments threatened by increasingly synchronized populations can still avail themselves of Evgeny’s troika of surveillance, propaganda, and censorship, thus retaining or even strengthening their hold on the populace. (Rebecca Mackinnon makes a similar argument in her work on networked authoritarianism.)
This a subtler view than the one I hastily attributed to Evgeny. He and I still disagree, but our disagreement is only slightly affected by the Jasmine Revolution, as it is only a data point for the larger question of the net effect on all the world’s countries.
Shirky wrote more about the political power of social media in Foreign Affairs (sub. required) written before Tunisia broke upon the wider wold consciousness.
More from a “technosociology” viewpoint:
I find it hard to believe that the ability to disseminate news, videos, tidbits, information, links, outside messages that easily, transparently and without censorship reached one in five persons (and thus their immediate social networks) within a country that otherwise suffered from heavy censorship was without a significant impact. (More background here on the particulars of the general political situation in Tunisia). To say that social-media was a key part of the revolution does not necessarily mean that people used GPS-enabled phones to coordinate demonstrations; that is simplistic and misses the point in which social media shapes the environment in general. What it means is that the people acted in a world where they had more means of expressing themselves to each other and the world, being more assured that their plight would not be buried by the deep pit of censorship, and a little more confidence that their extended families, their neighbors, their fellow citizens were similarly fed up, as poignantly expressed by the slogan taken up by the protestors: “Yezzi Fock! Enough!”-Zeynep Tufecki
On “rebooting” Tunisia:
What happened this week has nothing to do with previous Twitter-revolutions (sorry Iran), and is more about Facebook than Twitter anyway. Social media was not just a tool to communicate and coordinate action, it was a tool to create worldwide support in little time. From a retweet to an Anonymous LOIC attack, a blog post or a translation, millions have shown their support and took action.” –Fabrice Epelboin, ReadWriteWeb
Of “cyberactivists” and a dictator:
As during Iran’s Green Revolution, the primary function of social media has been to get around the government’s iron grip on information flows. International media can pull the information from sites like Àli’s, then broadcasts it back into Tunisia via satellite TV, a process in which Al Jazeera in particular has played a critical role. Social media, along with SMS and traditional word-of-mouth, has also been an important tool to coordinate the grassroots protests which don’t really have any leaders yet. There is no political party or unifying figure behind the demonstrations, which were going on for almost a month before people outside the country started to take note.-Mike Giglio, Newsweek
A view on the role of social media from within Tunisia:
Wikileaks played a major role in fueling the anger / determination of Tunisians. However, the Wikileaks reports only put further light on what we already knew. They confirmed our doubts and detailed the different events.
Twitter and Facebook played a very important role in our revolution, and I am confident that if we were not using social media we wouldn’t have accomplished our goals.
Social media empowered our communication infrastructure.
It countered the traditional media, the propaganda machine of our government. It allowed us to detect patterns that one would not notice if left alone, such as noticing that all the presidential police cars are rented (rented cars in tunisia have blue license plates). Social media fostered crowdwisdom, by sharing thoughts, feedbacks, and opinions. And finally on the battle field, we even used in the final hours of our government to share snipers’ positions.
Then, the final demonstration was an event on facebook that everybody shared.
And now we are using it to find the militias, and share their positions. There are volunteers working on developing web 2.0 applications to place events on maps. – Youssef Gaigi, Tunisian blogger
A “Human Revolution?”
But to call this a “Twitter revolution” or even a “WikiLeaks revolution” demonstrates that we haven’t learned anything from past experiences in Moldova and Iran. Evgeny Morozov’s question–”Would this revolution have happened if there were no Facebook and Twitter?”–says it all. And in this case, yes, I–like most Tunisians to whom I’ve posed this question–believe that this would have happened without the Internet.
The real question, then, is would the rest of us have heard about it without the Internet? Would the State Department have gotten involved early on (remember, their first public comment was in respect to Tunisian Net freedom)? Would Al Jazeera–without offices on the ground–have been able to report on the unfolding story as they did? Most importantly, would any of that have mattered?
Social media may have had some tangential effect on organization within Tunisia; I think it’s too soon to say. No doubt, SMS and e-mail (not to be mistaken with social media) helped Tunisians keep in touch during, before, and after protests, but no one’s hyping those–e-mails and texts simply aren’t as fascinating to the public as tweets. In fact, assuming SMS and e-mail did play a role in organizing (and again, I don’t doubt they did — Tunisian’s Internet penetration rate may be only 33%, but its mobile penetration rate is closer to 85%), then we ought to be asking what it is about social media that is unappealing for organization? Could it be the sheer publicness of it, the inherent risks of posting one’s location for the world to see? Given the mass phishing of Facebook accounts, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if Facebook were seen as risky (Gmail accounts were also hacked, however, which undoubtedly led some to view digital communications in general as risky).”-Jillian C. York, Cantabridgian blogger
In my view, success in the 21st Century depends on effective governance. A free and vibrant press plays an important role around the world in the development of civil society and accountable governments. As a general rule, the freer the press, the more transparent and more democratic the government is likely to be. In the context of this seminar, Media and Politics, think of the places around the world recently where existing governments are clearly guilty of substantial election fraud, fraud that either skewed the results to a significant degree, or stole elections outright. This involves the election in Iran in June 2009, where the government harassed the traditional media as they covered the election and the fraud that was evident, as well as the opposition that very effectively used social media during the campaign, and has refused to be silenced to the present day.
Dictatorships understand the power of the media, where in Burma, the ruling junta held an election in November for which it refused to allow Aung San Suu Kyi to participate, nor allowed outside media to cover. The result was a kind of election laundering, where the existing military government attempted to use the election to transform itself into a civilian government. But it lacks the legitimacy that only civil society, backed by a vibrant press, can bestow. Unfortunately there is no shortage of present-day examples, from Cote d’Ivoire to Belarus, where the media continues to document the actions of repressive governments that in one case refuses to accept the results of an election that it did not expect to lose, and in the other has literally jailed every opposition figure that dared run against Europe’s last dictator.
The former Yugoslavia is my best example of a case where the investment in independent media helped to transform a country and we hope over time a region, contributing to the dynamic that led to the end of the rule of Slobodan Milosevic, and his transfer to The Hague where he died in prison while facing charges for crimes against humanity. We also know that the media can be used to incite ethnic violence, as we saw tragically in the 1990s in Rwanda. We continue to have concerns regarding state-controlled, particularly in the Middle East, that continue to foment religious tension across the region.
No one is a greater advocate for a vibrant independent and responsible press, committed to the promotion of freedom of expression and development of a true global civil society, than the United States. Every day, we express concern about the plight of journalists (or bloggers) around the world who are intimidated, jailed or even killed by governments that are afraid of their people, and afraid of the empowerment that comes with the free flow of information within a civil society.
Most recently, we did so in the context of Tunisia, which has hacked social media accounts while claiming to protect their citizens from the incitement of violence. But in doing so, we feel the government is unduly restricting the ability of its people to peacefully assemble and express their views in order to influence government policies. These are universal principles that we continue to support. And we practice what we preach. Just look at our own country and cable television. We don’t silence dissidents. We make them television news analysts. -P.J. Crowley, U.S. State Department
And thoughts from one of the toughest critics of State’s “Internet freedom” policy, Evgeny Morozov:
Anyone who has seen reports about Tunisia’s “WikiLeaks Revolution” would know that those accounts mostly focus on the role that the cable revelations about Tunisia played in enticing the protests (this is an account I don’t agree with, if it’s not yet obvious). To suggest that a term like a “WikiLeaks Revolution” does not also celebrate – perhaps, implicitly – the factors most commonly associated with the Internet (its resilience against censorship, its spirit of mutual collaboration, etc) would be extremely disingenuous. When people say that events in Tunisia were a “WikILeaks Revolution”, they are consciously or subconsciously cheering the fact that there is this former-hacker guy Assange who used the Internet to do the unthinkable. If this is not what is celebrated by the term “WikiLeaks Revolution”, then it doesn’t have any meaning at all.
WikiLeaks, alas, is not “social media” – so it doesn’t meet Clay’s rigid definition. But if you broaden the terms of the debate to the Internet proper – and those are the terms that are most interesting to me – you are bound to notice that there are plenty of pundits and analysts celebrating the power of the Internet to politicize future protesters – not only to help them organize. This, by the way, is the same argument that was used by plenty of neocons in the wake of the Soviet collapse: it was assumed that the Western radio informed Soviet citizens about the superior value of Western goods – and the Soviets eventually rebelled. Apologies for self-promotion, but anyone who thinks these are not real intellectual narratives being pimped in Washington DC should take a look at my book, where they are extensively documented (including in the 70-page bibliography!)” -Evgeny Morozov, The Net Effect, Foreign Affairs
(As it happens, this correspondent is reading it this month. He’s also headed to the State of the Net later this morning, where the events above were the subject of discussion.)
Q: Tunisians were using Twitter for logistics, from warning of sniper locations, to calling for blood donation at hospitals, to organizing protests. Does this mark a new era in Twitter use, where people use it to navigate danger and save lives under tumultuous circumstances?
ZT: Twitter is a very good tool for using in emergencies thanks to its short message format, multi-platform access, and the ability to use cell phones. This was also shown during the Haitian earthquake, Tuscon shootings, etc. So, yes, social media in general, and Twitter in particular, are now woven into the fabric of our responses to tumultuous circumstances.
NW: There was a report on a French TV station called TF1, where a Tunisian man said, ‘Twitter a sauve mon vie,’ which means, ‘Twitter saved my life.’ What happened was that at one point the presidential guard went on a rampage. The man said he was about to leave his house, but he saw masked, armed gunmen. He went online and tweeted, and asked for help. People saw this in Tunisia, and started calling the army’s emergency lines, reporting his exact location. The army showed up immediately and arrested these people. This is the power of social media.
JY: It does seem like a new thing, it’s not something that I had seen before. But I saw more [logistical information] being shared on facebook, behind closed doors using private messaging. I had one friend who sent a message to a group of people to stay away from a specific neighbourhood in Tunis because of snipers. Another person sent out a message saying, ‘I’m going to be [at a particular place] this afternoon, and I should be back online by 10:30 p.m..’ That way, if that person is not back online by 10:30 p.m., somebody is going to be concerned. I saw a lot of that happening.
“There’s no such thing as a Twitter revolution,” says Jared Cohen of Google Ideas, Google’s new think tank — and that’s coming from someone who once served as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s principal advisor on what the State Department calls its “Internet Freedom Agenda.” In 2009, Cohen telephoned the managers of Twitter and persuaded them to delay a maintenance break so Iranian protesters — who filled the streets of Tehran at the time — wouldn’t lose their access.
Cohen does think technology has a major impact on incipient revolutionary movements: “It’s an accelerant,” he said. Social media make it easier for grass-roots dissidents to find each other, identify potential leaders, share information and connect with the outside world. But in the end, he noted, “a successful revolution still requires people to go into the streets and risk their lives.”-Doyle McManus, L.A. Times
McManus shared a further, highly relevant observation in that column: “An old-fashioned lesson for revolutionaries: It’s nice to have Twitter, but it’s even nicer to have the army on your side.
“The first conflict with the old RCD-ists,” Mr. Amamou, 33, told his 10,000 Twitter followers from the closed-door cabinet meeting, along with the rest of the fly-on-the-wall details reported above. “I like the minister of Justice,” he wrote on Twitter a few days later. “I am going to wear a tie just to please him.”
In the week since Mr. Ben Ali’s flight, Mr. Amamou has become a symbol inside the cabinet of the revolution’s roots in the online world of Twitter and Facebook. Before the advent of such networks, local outbursts of unrest here were quickly crushed. This time, the revolt flashed across the country as protesters shared video of their own demonstrations. Grainy cellphone images of a clash with the police in one town egged on the next.
Now Mr. Amamou’s idiosyncratic commentary on Twitter is telling the still-evolving story of the revolution’s early days and providing an important source of information about the new administration’s plans.
His news bulletins have included advance word that the prime minister would resign from his party, and that the education minister planned to reopen the schools. After four new ministers resigned Tuesday in protest of the continued role of the R.C.D., the French initials for the Constitutional Democratic Rally, Mr. Amamou wrote that the government planned to seek their return instead of replacing them.
Crowley’s Saturday post about Tunisia was just the latest in a series aimed at encouraging calm and reform in the country. “The people of Tunisia have spoken,” he wrote on Thursday. “The interim government must create a genuine transition to democracy. The United States will help.”
Both Crowley and Ross dispute that the revolution in Tunisia was fomented by either WikiLeaks revelations of U.S. assessments of rampant corruption, which was already well known, or social media. But, they said Twitter, Facebook and other forms of social media played an important role in how the revolt played out.
“Dramatic change is happening in Tunisia,” Crowley told the AP. But “real social deprivations, including the lack of political and economic opportunity combined with obvious corruption, are the real underlying causes. . Social media served as an accelerant.”
“Connection technologies succeeded where mainstream media was blocked or slow to identify and report news,” said Ross. “Tools like Twitter can stand-in where traditional media is blocked by an authoritarian regime from reporting. At times like this, the ability of P.J. Crowley to communicate with people through Twitter is very important.”
“We are not utopian about technology,” he said. “We understand that it just a tool. However, if you want to be relevant in 2011, you need to understand how to harness the power of technology.” -Matthew Lee, Washington Post
If you have thoughts, comments or other data which would further inform readers, please leave them in the comments, drop me an email or find me on Twitter.
As I reported for the O’Reilly Radar yesterday, when the House chose Drupal as the preferred web content management system for House.gov, it made the “People’s House” one of the largest government institutions to move to the open source web content management platform.
The House.gov platform is moving to Drupal but House.gov itself is not on Drupal quite yet. That will probably happen in the next several months, according to Dan Weiser, communications director of the Office of the Chief Administrative Officer in the United States House of Representatives.
In the meantime, the incoming Congressmen and Congresswomen do appear to have adopted Drupal as the platform for their official websites. For instance, Congresswoman Colleen Hanabusa‘s site, below, uses one of several templates on the Drupal platform. Notably, each of the new sites includes default modules for the leaders in the respective verticals in the social media world: Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.
Some questions remain about the cost and choices that representatives have as they choose their online Web presences. As NextGov reported today, while House websites can move to the open source platform – they don’t have to do so.
Given the context of citizens turning to the Internet for government information, data and services in increasing numbers, however, a well-designed Congressional website with clear connections to the various digital outposts has moved from a “nice to have” to a “must have” in the eyes of the digitally connected. (For citizens on the other side of the digital divide, the House switchboards are still available via phone call at (202) 224-3121 or TTY: (202) 225-1904).
If that’s a given, then the question is then why Drupal is now the preferred web hosting environment for the House. On that count, “Drupal was chosen because it is open source and widely accepted, therefore allows Members to leverage a large community of programmers which gives them more choices and innovation,” wrote Weiser in an email. “It should also be noted that Members still will have the option to use other platforms.”
Weiser told NextGov that, because, Drupal developers are in every member’s district, “that hopefully means expanded choice and more innovation for our members.”
The current content management system limits the choice of site programmer as well as innovation, said Dan Weiser, communications director for the chief administrative officer, in an e-mail. Drupal, which uses a common framework and code that can be customized, will allow members to leverage a large community of programmers, providing more opportunities for innovation, he added.
The House expects to save some money with the transition to Drupal, since the chief administrative officer will manage the infrastructure and members pay vendors only for development time, Weiser said.
The inclusion of social media is also no longer a novelty in the beginning of 2011. “We expected there would be interest by the incoming freshmen to have social media on their sites; it just seemed natural to offer the option,” wrote Weiser.
[Disclosure: One of the vendors involved in the House’s Drupal effort is Acquia. O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures is an investor in Acquia.]
Today, C-SPAN’s Facebook page will host streaming video coverage of Wednesday’s special U.S. House session on the Tucson shootings. The livestream will start at 10 AM ET, when the House will consider a resolution on the shootings. The session is also … Continue reading →
Digital Capital Week is coming back to the United States Capital on November 4th, 2011. In a livestream today, the organizers of the inaugural 2010 event announced the data and opened the gates for DC Week registration and ideas for … Continue reading →
What’s happening today is an “open data” movement, said O’Reilly. “That’s what’s going to build the next platform.” As he’s said before, he thinks we’re now in an interesting platform stage where “the Internet is the operating system.” As early adopters of the new Google Chrome netbooks, a material metaphor for that notion is now online.
You can listen to the audio of Tim O’Reilly (my publisher) or download the MP3. Video may be available. later. Editor’s Note: O’Reilly Media is a supporter of Code for America and its founder, Tim O’Reilly, sits on its board.
The notion of “government as a platform,” which Tim has been speaking about for years now, is founded in his understanding of how technology companies have historically grown and flourished. Many of the anecdotes and historical underpinning of Gov 2.0 are in the webcast, “What is Gov 2.0?” in the side bar of this blog.
Here are a couple of key points from today:
Lesson 1: Platforms spread when they are ubiquitous and barriers to entry are low Lesson 2: Create an architecture of participation, like Unix. Lesson 3: Small pieces, loosely joined, which drove the growth of the World Wide Web. Lesson 4: Don’t (just) build websites, build Web services.
There’s a lot more in there that builds upon Tim’s platform paradigm for government. Give it a listen and, if you find some other insights that particularly strike you or apply to how you think about how government can leverage the power of platforms, please share it in the comments.
If the notion that data and simplicity can build the government platform sound familiar, it should: Tim talked with the first United States chief technology officer, Aneesh Chopra, about how these ideas apply to government last year:
Building on that, if you have a moment, head on over to the White House “ExpertNet” wiki and share your thoughts on how the federal government should be designing democracy, specifically with respect to creating an open governnemt platform for citizen consultation.
Beth Simone Noveck, director of the White House Open Government Initiative, and U.S. deputy chief technology officer, will return to academia as a professor of law at New York Law School on January 15th 2010.
Noveck is the author of “Wiki Government,” where she wrote about using social networking technology to connect people to policymakers.
People in the open government community began to thank her for her service today. “We’re lucky to have brilliant & dedicated leaders (& working moms!) like Beth Noveck serving our country. Thx, Beth & good luck!” tweeted Twitter’s Katie Stanton, a former colleague at the White House.
“Thanking Beth Noveck for 2 years of @OpenGov public service,” tweeted open government godfatherCarl Malamud. “Good luck on next gig, great job.”
UPDATEOn January 11, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation awarded Noveck a grant “to apply her expertise to developing a multi-year interdisciplinary research agenda to gauge the impact of digital networks on institutions,” including how society can use technology to strengthen democratic culture.
“The Foundation’s interest in public sector innovation as a potential longer term area for focused investment is testament to Beth’s success—through her research, writing, and public service—at putting the topic of 21st century democracy on the national agenda,” said Dean and President Richard A. Matasar. “We are delighted to have her back.”
According to the MacArthur Foundation, Noveck is now working with colleagues both inside and outside of government on the design for “IOPedia,” a platform for mashing up and visualizing public corporate accountability data and tracking the evolution of organizations.
“I am proud to have helped fulfill the president’s historic commitment to promoting an open and innovative government—one that uses openness and collaboration as core elements of governance and policy making,” Noveck said in a statemnt. “I look forward to working with students and the wider open government community to continue my research and advocacy to promote the adoption of public sector innovations.”
Blackberrys, cell phones and communications devices are tagged with post-its during a briefing on Afghanistan and Pakistan in the Cabinet Room of the White House, March 26, 2009. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
The upcoming release of the final version of the White House “National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace” highlights three key trends that face the world in 2011: online identity, privacy and security. Governments need ways to empower citizens to identify themselves online to realize both aspirational goals for citizen-to-government interaction and secure basic interactions for commercial purposes.
Earlier today, Stanford hosted an event today where U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and White House cybersecurity coordinator Howard Schmidt talked about the Obama administration’s efforts to improve online security and privacy at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR). Here’s the NSTIC fact sheet the administration posted last year.
“As we look at the innovation engine that drives many of the things we’re doing, what does it mean to sit there as we’ve come together today,” asked Schmidt, “bringing these things together to overcome some of these risks associated with the technology we’ve deployed over the past 20 some odd years?”
The administration took public feedback on the document at NSTIC IdeaScale, which is now closed. (For a screenshot, see the story on IdeaScale on MSNBC.com.) “Every day at the end of the day. I would go back and read some of those comments,” said Schmidt today. “Some of them quite honestly were pretty silly. Other of them were very insight full and gave us some good thoughts about how can we do this right? How can we create a document that really does those things the secretary mentioned such as privacy enhancing but also giving us better trust?”
Today, at Stanford University, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and I were pleased to announce that the Commerce Department will host a National Program Office (NPO) in support of the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC). As I’ve written previously, the NSTIC fulfills one of the action items in theCyberspace Policy Review (pdf) and is a key building block in our efforts to secure cyberspace.
This holiday season, consumers spent a record $30.81 billion in online retail spending, an increase of 13 percent over the same period the previous year. This striking growth outshines even the notable 3.3-5.5 percent overall increase in holiday spending this past year. While clearly a positive sign for our economy, losses from online fraud and identity theft eat away at these gains, not to mention the harm that identity crime causes directly to millions of victims. We have a major problem in cyberspace, because when we are online we do not really know if people, businesses, and organizations are who they say they are. Moreover, we now have to remember dozens of user names and passwords. This multiplicity is so inconvenient that most people re-use their passwords for different accounts, which gives the criminal who compromises their password the “keys to the kingdom.”
We need a cyber world that enables people to validate their identities securely, but with minimal disclosure of information when they’re doing sensitive transactions (like banking) – and lets them stay anonymous when they’re not (like blogging). We need a vibrant marketplace that provides people with choices among multiple accredited identity providers – both private and public – and choices among multiple credentials. For example, imagine that a student could get a digital credential from her cell phone provider and another one from her university and use either of them to log-in to her bank, her e-mail, her social networking site, and so on, all without having to remember dozens of passwords. Such a marketplace will ensure that no single credential or centralized database can emerge. In this world, we can cut losses from fraud and identity theft, as well as cut costs for businesses and government by reducing inefficient identification procedures. We can put in-person services online without security trade-offs, thereby providing greater convenience for everyone.
This is the world envisioned in the NSTIC. We call it the Identity Ecosystem. We will be working to finalize the NSTIC in the coming months, but that is only the beginning of the process. I’m excited to be working with Secretary Locke. The Commerce Department is perfectly suited to work with the private sector to implement the NSTIC. In addition, there are other departments and agencies with strategic roles to play as well. Above all though, we look to the leadership of the private sector. Therein lies the key to success. Now is the time to move forward with our shared vision of a better, more secure cyberspace.
Why NSTIC Matters
The policy that the United States government makes towards the Internet has the potential to affect every person online in 2011, as advocates know, so how this is carried out bears close watching. The Center for Democracy and Technology filed key comments on NSTIC last year, including a key issue: “We alerted the Commerce Department to our concern about NSTIC’s current focus on the use of government credentials for private transactions: A pervasive government-run online authentication scheme is incompatible with fundamental American values,” wrote Heather West regarding the cybersecurity policy proposal.
The issue is at once simple and enormously complex, as Jim Dempsey from the Center for Democracy and Technology highlighted today. Government needs a better online identity infrastructure to improve IT security, online privacy, and support ecommerce but can’t create it itself, said Dempsey, outlining the key tension present. Dempsey advocated for a solution for online identity that lies within a broader trust framework and that is codified within a baseline federal consumer privacy law.
Some of the answers to the immense challenge of securing online privacy and identity won’t be technical or legislative at all. They lie in improving the digital literacy of for online citizens. That very human reality was highlighted after the massive Gawker database breach last year, when the number of weak passwords used online became clear. Schmidt highlighted the root caused of passwords today:
The reason most people do that is because we have to worry about remembering so many different passwords and then there’s so many layers of complexity and, complexity that we have to worry about, we have different time frame. We replace them every 30-day, 60 days, 90 days and it becomes really cumbersome. And recent survey found that 46% of the people surveyed never ever have changed their passwords and 71% use the same password with over and over and over again. From reading an on-line blog to doing sensitive financial transactions.
Others answers may be founded in creating online trust frameworks, which were a key initiative in 2010 for the federal government. Multifactor authentication, where more than one forms of identity are used in transactions, will be part of that vision. Schmidt described, loosely, what that might look like.
I go to a store. I go to a grocery store in some cases. I do some level of proofing, whatever I want to wind up doing, whether it’s the lowest level or the highest level to get an online identity stored on a token. A digital identity. Whether it’s on a USB drive or whether it’s on a smart card, I have the ability to do something beyond what I’m doing now. I go to log-in to these accounts. I use the USB device, I use a smart card. I use a one time password on my mobile device that no longer puts me in a position where I’ve been in the past where I can wind up making one small mistake and paying for it for years. But then I also get the log-in to my web mail account. That credential is passed on as well. So I have the ability to do these things seamlessly without all the baggage and overhead that goes with it. But then here comes the true test – this web mail – this phishing e-mail – comes in, and working together between the token and my digital identity and the browser, it stops me from doing things that are going to be harmful. And I had the ability to control that. I have the ability to set this up. And then it keeps me from becoming a victim of fraud.
That combination of physical tokens that interface with commercial and communications infrastructure to authenticate a consumer or online user are one vision of an identity ecosystem. Given the commercial needs of the moment, it should not be a surprise that the Department of Commerce is a key player. Secretary Locke offered perspective on the challenges that face the nation in 2011. [Full unedited transcript]
Let’s flash forward to today to 2011. Nowadays the world does an estimated $10 trillion of business online. Nearly every transaction you can think of is being done over the Internet. Consumers paying their utility bills, even from smartphones. People downloading music, movies and books online. Companies from the smallest local store to bed and breakfasts, to multinational corporations, ordering goods, paying vendors, selling to customers, all around the world. All over the Internet. E-commerce sales for the third quarter of 2010 were estimated at over $41 billion, up almost 14% over last year. And early reports indicate that the recent holiday buying season saw similar growth with year over year sales up by over 13%.
But despite these ongoing successes, the reality that the Internet still faces something of a trust issue. And it will not retch its full potential until users and consumers feel more secure than they do today when they go on-line. The threats on the Internet seem to be proliferating just as fast as the opportunities. Data breaches, malware, ID theft and spam are just some of the most commonly known invasions of a user’s privacy and security. And people are worried about their personal information going out and parents, like me, are worried about unwarranted sexually explicit material coming in before their children. And the landscape is getting more complex as dedicated hackers undertake persistent targeted attacks and develop ever more sophisticated frauds.
The approach that Locke outlined will apparently be housed within the Department of Commerce, a choice that is likely relevant to the scale and growth of e-commerce online:
The end game of course, is to create an identity ecosystem where individuals and organizations can complete online transactions with greater confidence, putting greater trust in the online identities of each other, and greater trust in the infrastructure that the transactions run over. Let’s be clear, we’re not talking about a national ID card. We’re talking about a government controlled system. But what we are talking about is enhancing online security and privacy, and reducing, and perhaps even eliminating, the need to memorize a dozen password through the creation and use of more trusted digital identities. To accomplish this, we’re going to need your help. And we need the private sector’s expertise and involvement in designing, building and implementing this identity ecosystem. To succeed we’ll also need a national program office at the Department of Commerce focused on implementing our trusted identities strategy.
For more context, look back to Schmidt’s introduction of the NSTIC at the WhiteHouse.gov blog last year:
Cyberspace has become an indispensable component of everyday life for all Americans. We have all witnessed how the application and use of this technology has increased exponentially over the years. Cyberspace includes the networks in our homes, businesses, schools, and our Nation’s critical infrastructure. It is where we exchange information, buy and sell products and services, and enable many other types of transactions across a wide range of sectors. But not all components of this technology have kept up with the pace of growth. Privacy and security require greater emphasis moving forward; and because of this, the technology that has brought many benefits to our society and has empowered us to do so much — has also empowered those who are driven to cause harm.
Today, I am pleased to announce the latest step in moving our Nation forward in securing our cyberspace with the release of the draft National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC). This first draft of NSTIC was developed in collaboration with key government agencies, business leaders and privacy advocates. What has emerged is a blueprint to reduce cybersecurity vulnerabilities and improve online privacy protections through the use of trusted digital identities.
The NSTIC, which is in response to one of the near term action items in the President’s Cyberspace Policy Review, calls for the creation of an online environment, or an Identity Ecosystem as we refer to it in the strategy, where individuals and organizations can complete online transactions with confidence, trusting the identities of each other and the identities of the infrastructure that the transaction runs on. For example, no longer should individuals have to remember an ever-expanding and potentially insecure list of usernames and passwords to login into various online services. Through the strategy we seek to enable a future where individuals can voluntarily choose to obtain a secure, interoperable, and privacy-enhancing credential (e.g., a smart identity card, a digital certificate on their cell phone, etc) from a variety of service providers – both public and private – to authenticate themselves online for different types of transactions (e.g., online banking, accessing electronic health records, sending email, etc.). Another key concept in the strategy is that the Identity Ecosystem is user-centric – that means you, as a user, will be able to have more control of the private information you use to authenticate yourself on-line, and generally will not have to reveal more than is necessary to do so.
This is all wonky stuff that may seem a bit dry to some readers, but it’s important. The intertwined issues of identify, security and online privacy are increasingly relevant to every citizens as more commerce, education, communication and elements of everyday life move onto the Internet and mobile infrastructure. This strategy is central to how the United States government will work with industry, nonprofits, citizens and other states to improve the status quo. On that count, Bob Gourley, CTO of Crucial Point, commented extensively on the NSTIC at CTOVision.
It won’t be easy. Supporting the creation of identity infrastructure and improvements to online privacy in the private sector has the potential to make the Internet more secure and convenient for users and consumers but could have unintended consequences if not carefully pursued. There’s a lot at stake. As the Stanford event organizers highlighted, “e-commerce worldwide is estimated at $10 trillion of business online annually.”
Wired’s Ryan Singel highlighted a key issue for the White House plan for online identity, perhaps even the fundamental one in today’s online identity landscape: Facebook.
Philip Kaplan, the outspoken founder of Blippy, AdBrite and Fucked Company, added a Silicon Valley developer voice to event’s panel, arguing that any system has to be simple to implement, so that developers working in their living room making a website can concentrate on building new features, not worrying about security.
The closest thing to that currently is Facebook Connect, which lets you use your Facebook credentials to login you in around the net and on mobile apps..
“I can put in one line of JavaScript and I have a login system,” Kaplan said. “But that doesn’t I’m not going to pay my taxes using Facebook Connect.”
Which is another way of it might be as dangerous for a single company to be the world’s online ID vault as it would for the government to handle that task.
And right now, with Facebook at 600 million users and $50 billion in valuation, that future seems much more likely than a standards-based, interoperative system built by geeks at the behest of the feds.
Whether an online trust framework can be a viable alternative to Facebook’s play to be the identity provider online is a first-order question, and one that deserved examination. Kudos to Singel for putting the event in that context.
Weekend Reading: The most recent version of the NSTIC follows. Look for more reporting, both here or at another outlet, once the final version is released.
As Nat Torkington put it this morning at O’Reilly Radar, “people who consider tech trends without considering social trends are betting on the atom bomb without considering the Summer of Love.” Torkington was annotating a link to 2011 predictions and prognostications at venture capitalist Fred Wilson’s blog which center on the following presentation that Paul Kedrosky sent him from JWT, a marketing agency.
JWT’s thirteenth prediction will be of particular interest to readers of this blog: “Brazil as E-Leader.”
This digitally savvy, economically vibrant country will prove to be an e-leader. Social media is more popular here than in developed markets, and Brazil has the highest Twitter penetration (23 percent, as of October ComScore figures). PC penetration has reached 32 percent, and many Internet cafes further broaden access. Mobile subscriptions have 86% penetration. Already Brazil is ahead in electronic democracy (with innovations like online town halls and crowd-sourced legislative consulting), and its 2010 census was paperless, conducted electronically.
There are many other themes that will matter to the Gov 2.0 world in 2011 in there, including smart infrastructure investment, scanning everything, home energy monitors, and mHealth. Heck, seemingly mobile everything. Of course, as Mike Loukelides pointed out in his own watchlist of 2011 themes to track, “you don’t get any points for predicting ‘Mobile is going to be big in 2011.'” He thinks that Hadoop, real-time data, the rise of the GPU, the return of P2P, social ubiquity and a new definition for privacy will all play important roles in 2011. Good bets.
JWT does get points for this set of trends, however, and that prediction about e-democracy in Brazil strikes me as apt. Last year at the International Open Government Data Conference, I met Cristiano Ferri Faria, project manager in e-democracy and legislative intelligence at the Brazilian House of Representatives. Faria talked about his work on e-Democracia, a major electronic lawmaking program in Brazil since 2008. As the 112th United States House of Representatives goes back to work today, there are definitely a few things its legislators, aides and staffers might learn from far south of the border. You can download his presentation as a PDF from Data.gov or view it below, with an added bonus: reflections on open government data in New Zealand and Australia.
One caution: Faria concluded that “this kind of practice is too complex” and that e-Democracia “needs a long-term approach.”
Today, Tim O’Reilly spoke about the power of platforms to the 
Noveck is the author of “
E Pluribus Unum 