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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.
Web 2 government?
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Hot air, buzz words, no substance
I fail to see any substantive difference from what is going on now. Besides, since it looks like convicted felon Ted Stevens might actually lose the election (good work Alaskans - now we're one for 4), the tubes are right out.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
If by accessible, you mean dumbing down the work of government to cartoon-form, with nothing more than a series of 5-second sound-bites, then good luck. But that's not government in action, it's a soap-opera.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
What we need is a cloud computing government on a morph best-of-breed solutions platform to exploit efficient initiatives to envisioneer synergistic opportunistic public-private partnership solutions to national and global issues.
Let's for a joint public-private-faith based coalition to design a mutual framework and pray that it works.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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.
It would be nice if the government would start open sourcing all software projects developed within or for the government. It should be possible to cut development cost (states ultimately share the source code of some of their projects) and the projects payed by the people would be for the people.
Wikis for pending legislation.
Only members of congress ( or their staff ) can make changes, but anyone can add a comment to any change. Use a moderation system like on /. to hide frivolous comments and to ensure that insightful comments rise to the top.
Use an issue tracker for existing legislation. Have a problem with a law? File a bug. It may be marked as trivial or may get fast tracked as a patch. Either way you know it's status and can organize to get that status changed if enough people agree with you.
Use RSS feeds to distribute Congressional hearing notes, comittee transcripts, and legislative votes.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Digg will replace Congress (ie people will Digg up the laws they like, bury the ones they don't)
Flickr will replace National Parks (who needs to go outdoors when you can see it... from your computer!)
Google will replace the CDC and provide health care (just Google your symptoms)
Twitter will replace the USPS (do you really need private letters?)
This is really simple: provide data feeds to the public -- from various government collection sources.
End of story. We don't need the government to spend months, or years even, building websites which dumb data down for us. Give us the raw data feeds and let us create mashups, interactive content and let people make their own judgment based on it. Sure, some sites might need heavy design (such as educational loan repayment sites, etc).
A prime example of this data feed is something like DC's http://data.octo.dc.gov/
And what can people do with that? Well, something like this:
Drunken sailor map
The only problem I had with Obama was his vague speeches (hope, blah blah change etc) it seemed to say nice sounding things but not give any detail (lots of room for being weaselly letter on).
change.gov seemed 48 hours after Obama was elected to have (under the title agenda) a detailed policy list. This however disappeared quite quickly. Another site however seems to have all his policy details but is by a group called Obama for America, who are they, please post if you have any detail.
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
Hopefully Government 2.0 will be designed better than Twitter, but still have all the nice rounded edges and glass buttons!
"Ubuntu" -- an African word, meaning "Slackware is too hard for me". - stolen from Dan C alt.os.linux.slackware
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.
For too long the public policy of the US has been weighed and measured in three second clips cherry picked by the media to push their own agenda. Presidents have given addresses, but unless you block out the time to listen to the whole message at the time it was given then the republication and further dissemination were prohibited by copyright. What was left were tiny snippets chosen, perhaps to educate and inform but more often chosen to catch attention and spark a fire for pundits to fan into a heated argument between commercials. This doesn't serve the intent of the policy makers at all, and does nothing to improve public policy.
There is an opportunity here for the President Elect to circumvent the established media and get his message out in a way that preserves the whole message and conveys more substance than can be carried by a sound bite. This is a risk - policies as a whole can be unloved - but at least people will discuss them as whole policies and not be as swayed by a single implementation detail.
Getting more public information into the hands of the people is also a good thing. The government of the US collects, stores and transmits huge volumes of information. They pay for research, they study trends, they map and photograph, illustrate and write code and generate a lot of other content. Putting more of this online in open formats is a great way to allow the people to share in the progress and become more informed if they choose. It's also an opportunity for the people to take advantage of the information to cross-correlate, rethink and discover what gems might be in the tailings of this information mine, since publications of the US government generally aren't covered by copyright. This could promote a great deal of progress.
Government agencies at all levels are more and more making their services - information, permitting, licensing, and so on - accessible over the Internet. This makes interacting with government much easier and less prone to error. It makes government more accessible to the handicapped and the poor. The Internet doesn't "close", so people can interact with the government at times of day that are available to them. Accelerating this trend would be a good thing, but we need to be aware of a potential issue: if the Internet is a face of government, then access to that interaction must be preserved and protected. If the Internet becomes the road to City Hall then local broadband monopolies cannot continue to be the gatekeepers, choosing which region is deserving of bandwidth and which is not.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
If the majority vote was the sole decider on every issue, with "advisers" giving people suggestions as to how they should vote, you will end up with heavily bribed advisers (moreso than congresscritters and other government drones), a constant barrage of campaigns with similar content to John McCains "Obama wants to give kindergartners comprehensive sex education" ad or the funny face net neutrality ad, and people voting for issues because they don't like to leave blanks on ballots. Or, in short, the current system, only slower, more corrupt, and less competent.
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.
I was the lead developer at the Rhode Island Secretary of state for several years. The administration I came in under was very pro-technology and allowed the IT department to explore Open Source, web services, REST APIs, RSS Feeds, etc. The later administration was very technology leary, felt that the IT department had too much power, and refused to provide real leadership. All the hard work that made the department a leader in technology and openness evaporated in period of months.
The Open Source technologies were done away with, the developers and system guys all left, and the IT department collapsed.
It is now all outsourced with no plans to expand their offerings, and have had to scale back on existing services.
I loved it till I hated it.
-CF
WTF? Change.gov doesn't have an rss/atom feed? ..or am I blind?
~/ One man's opinions is a lifetime of pain.
Mr Obama will also be the first President to have a "SWF" button on his desktop so when he is killing time on games like Paper Physics or Line rider, he can immediately switch over to some spreadsheet looking thing when the Chief of Staff comes in to make sure he is still working.
Ahhh slacking off with style.
Diana Owen, who leads the American Studies program at Georgetown University, said presidents were not advised to use e-mail because of security risks and fear that messages could be intercepted.
"They could come up with some bulletproof way of protecting his e-mail and digital correspondence, but anything can be hacked," said Ms. Owen, who has studied how presidents communicate in the Internet era. "The nature of the president's job is that others can use e-mail for him."
What's wrong with PGP? Surely they could bring a consultant in from the NSA or something to advise in this. I have a hard time believing that I can send secure emails and yet they aren't able to do so presidential level.
I'm sure we can all think up grand ideas, but I'd be surprised if we even get the basic things done. Here's my basic list.
1. Open data formats and default to information accss. A simple example is transit. All transit services should be REQUIRED to support google's open route/scheduling format. Similarly, instead of having to request that information, it should be provided by default (published at some accessible location). The same should be done for statistics, census data... Now it might be wise to use institutions like the IEEE to decide on an open standard of mulitple ones exist or something along those lines.
2. Make it easy for people to donate for specific causes. THis could be a preapproved list of charities or causes that would be accessible for donation from a government maintained website.
3. Enforce security practices. This might include trampling a bit on the private sector. However, we have safety regulations for other products. Why not information security regulation. Things like mandating chip cards or pin numbers on cards... Perhaps some data center regulations...
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.
Why aim so low? We have the technology (almost) to let anybody vote on any bill put before the Government. Of course most people wouldn't vote on most issues, as they are often quite inane - at least judging by the UK Parliament. To stop minority interests taking over then, you allow (indeed, enforce) that everybody votes on every issue - but to stop it becoming overwhelming, allow people to delegate their vote to arbitrary other people.
By default then everybodies vote would be delegated to their elected representative, unless they chose to vote themselves. But I could easily set up a more complex scheme, in which my accountant votes for me on matters of tax, I handle technology related votes myself and my representative takes all the rest.
This is actual direct democracy, with the only remaining problem being inability to directly submit legislation from any citizen. There are truly some scalability and social/educational issues with that, but it's what we should aim for.
Go here and read the comments. This is why it would be unwise to allow everyone to vote on the issues.
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill
In reply, I would point to http://smart-city.re-configure.org/ a chapter in the book Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace. People will become more interested in participating when it becomes more exciting to be part of the process and can see the results of their participation.
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.
No, not Linux, but his laptop is a Mac, so he is running a form of Unix, at least.
I'm surprised it hasn't been mentioned so far!
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.