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How To Build a Web 2.0 Government?
UltraAyla writes "With the announcement that President-Elect Obama will record his weekly address as a YouTube video to be posted at Change.gov, questions arise as to how an Internet-fueled candidacy based in part on a platform of government openness can begin to use technology to make government transparent. Aside from popular Slashdot policies, such as Net Neutrality, how do you think government (either in the United States or elsewhere) can best utilize technology to engage the public and make government more transparent and accessible?"
Reader Rick Zeman points out a related New York Times story about how Obama will have to give up some of his communications gadgets because of the Presidential Records Act. Despite that, he apparently hopes to be the first US president to have a laptop on his desk in the Oval Office.
I didn't realize, until reading this article, that law is what forced the presidents to remain unwired. I just always assumed they were out of touch with the technological curve.
Still, that makes the president the only American citizen completely immune to spam, phishing, and those annoying e-mails laden with photos of dogs dressed up like superheroes.
That's some pretty hearty executive privilege.
But the laws aren't actually made there, either, except in a few rare cases. The laws are written by lobbyists and decided upon in behind the scenes deals; the committee meetings usually just ratify the deals already made. And in those rare cases, the committee meets in closed session.
You mean one that values appearance over substance, is full of malware and bugs, crashes a lot, and isn't even compatible with itself? That's the usual kind. We've already got one. Worldwide, we've got hundreds.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
to add a little comm theory to your point...
technology doesn't fundamentally change communication (whether it be words, pictures, video, or audio). It may change the style and method of delivery (the 'channel' and 'code') but the content of what is being communicated does not change.
'web 2.0' is a nothing term. some try to pin it down with a technical definition that is usually along the lines of 'web pages that automatically refresh' or somesuch, but the fact is, its usage is so broad that any effort to make it a useful, defined term is pointless. once marketing people and Time magazine got ahold of it, it was finished...
Obama's administration is going to re-open the channels of communication between the exec. branch and the populace. They will do so using all technology CURRENTLY AVAILABLE including YouTube and Facebook. FDR did the same thing with his fireside chats.
Obama isn't doing anything particularly novel...but having an executive who actually communicates effectively with his constituents IS going to be very different from what we've had!
Thank you Dave Raggett
I've always heard it called 'television news'.
You live and learn. At least, you live.
How about we include people under the CTO office that are specialized in data visualization. Very dry, tedious data can be made both more accessible and more interesting if we had a few people in the government who knew how to make useful graphics. For example, a graphic illustrating the size of "earmarks" in government vs. the size of the 850 billion dollar bailout we just passed, the Iraq war, or just about any other pick-your-favorite-wasteful-spending demon, would have very quickly ended discussion about the earmarks and focused it on the various more gruesome ways we have our budgetary thumbs up our asses.
Similarly, I think visualizations of the length of some bills being passed would draw attention very quickly to which ones were being buried under a pile of dangerous and unrelated riders, and which ones were too complex to be useful.
And I'm not particularly creative - someone with access to the raw data feed and experience in this field could make visualizations that actually informed the public about what's going on.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
nobody is interested because 99% of it is BS anyway. Do you think listening to Bush's radio address will actually make you more informed about facts or about inane talking points that'll be repeated by news shows as "news" anyway? Give the public actual information and I think you'll find them more interested
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
Right now we don't have a "real" democracy in the same way the ancient Greeks practiced it... the U.S. has a representative democracy where we elect a few people to make all of our decisions for us. I don't think this is a bad idea considering the scalability issues. However, the Web 2.0 age could allow people to have more direct input and metrics in the decisions they really care about, and not just give up their choice to whatever their elected representative feels on that one particular issue.
The easiest way to give the control back to the people would be to give them some control over how their taxes are allocated. Right now, we pay a certain percentage of our income in taxes, and the government decides how much to budget for each department. Wouldn't it be great if you could actually "earmark" your tax dollars? Don't want to support the war in Iraq? Want a certain percentage of your taxes to go support the Dept. of Education or NASA space exploration instead? This would be a great way of directly measuring people's priorities, and give people the sense that the work they do to make money does not go towards what they consider "waste".
Right now, we sort of have an indirect way of controlling where our tax money goes... you can make tax-deductible contributions to certain charities, or at best you can feed up to $2500 or so to a Political Action Committee to lobby your elected representatives for you. Both of those methods strike me as rather inefficient.
The government can start small... giving people control over a small percentage of their taxes and gradually increase it as the new balance of power is worked out. Also, maybe they could limit it to a fixed amount per capita, so the people who pay lots of tax don't get a disproportionate amount of control.
Anyway, I'd like to have more control over where my tax dollars go, and increase competitiveness within the government organizations to show that they put the money to good use.
Think of it like source code. Have I personally read the kernel code? Nope. Have other people? Yes. Did I gain a benefit from that? Yes.
Not everyone has to be able to sit through every committee meeting. But all it takes is one person pointing out the interesting point for everyone to tune in to.
Yeah. Whatever. If the government cannot explain to us what the hell is causing this economic crisis in terms we understand, what makes you think they understand it either? If they cannot explain it to us, who will? The media?
The government should be *forced* to making things easy for us to understand. For if it is *not* easy to understand, it makes corruption easy.
"Dumbing data down for us" is the exact reason we live in a republic, not a straight democracy. We elect our representatives hoping they can distill complex issues down to forms we can manage. Each of us lack the time to fully understand every single issue facing our country.
done.
Done like dinner, you mean.
I don't know that I've ever seen a more (inadvertantly) astute summary of the 'small government' argument. Using rm as a tool to remove the operating system that makes its own existence and purpose possible is directly analogous to the argument that we should use government to shrink itself.
Logically, it can only end in disaster. The moment government cedes its ability to operate in a particular area (and in this example, it's /bin), it ceases to be effective.
We all know that the libertarian approach wants simply to reduce waste and reduce the government 'footprint'. BUT... that's not practicable. As we've seen from all of the small-government proponents who took office, the effect is the inverse to what voters intended - deregulation becomes license for special interests (most often corporate leaders) to run rampant in pursuit of short-term interests. And that is precisely what regulation was supposed to avoid.
And still, government grows.
It grows because those very same interests who laud deregulation in some areas actually want and require regulation in others - again, to protect their own short-term interests.
The issue of what role government should play and the question of what constitutes (heh) an appropriate size are critically important to a healthy democracy, and in that sense, libertarianism provides a healthy, skeptical check on the desire of some to govern everything, all the time. But the discussion has to begin with the premise that some regulation and legislation must exist in order to protect the long-term health of the government and the people.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
The proper analogy is that the original government was like Unix
Wrong still. The original platform was formed by committee, with compromises over features, scope and departmental subsystems roles (i.e. state's rights). It was based on compromises and feature creep. 10 new features, called the bill of rights, were added at the last minute when some user balked at adopting the platform as not user friendly enough. Since original deployment, the platform has been modified an number of times with features being officially added and removed. Other features have been extended, added or deprecated in often creative ways by super users (often referred to as "presidents" or SCOTUS). See previously mentioned bill of rights. There has been a growing tendency for the super user to have root access without sharing the password other power users, even though the original program called for decentralization of roles.
HTH
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Wrong still. The original platform was formed by committee, with compromises over features, scope and departmental subsystems roles (i.e. state's rights). It was based on compromises and feature creep.
You think Unix wasn't? Unix had plenty of compromises and plenty of modifications over the years to fix various things that weren't done right at the beginning. But at it's core, it had the right *philosophy*, which was what was guiding and influencing the features that were added.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
You are in for a crushing disappointment (unless you are a True Believer). While Obama does not appear to be a moron himself there will be plenty in his administration.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Obama releases his speech on a proprietary format. If this really were the era of Change and Hope, we wouldn't have to still be sneaking around behind YouToob's Flash (and it's Adobe Minders) to snarf down the actual video content.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
This is a place where I'm torn. I'm pretty cynical about the ability of anybody who's capable of being elected president to enact real change. I'm not a fan of the economic vision of the Left, though I'm fond of their social vision. I've considered myself a Republican since Carter - I joined the army to survive the effects of his economic policies. I've never been a fan of the Right's desire to intrude on the individual's domain though. Although I generally prefer a divided and ineffective government, in times of crisis a unity of purpose can be helpful.
I see some good signs in Obama. Maybe I'm starting to open up to the idea that he might have some good stuff. I certainly don't envy him the job he's got before him. We shall see whether he requites himself well in the issue in TFA as well as others. I do think that if he will do well, he will not seek to follow in the footsteps of anybody else. The environment today is different that it was in FDR's day, and while some of FDR's policies helped us through a difficult time Obama hasn't got that much time. FDR was elected to four terms in office and Obama won't be.
Whether he's good or bad, we've got some hard times before us.
Help stamp out iliturcy.