(r)evolution

URLy Progress

 The stimulus bill is the first piece of legislation to include a URL where the public can track the spending.

Facts Make a Comeback

What's will be the biggest, most immediate impact of having a president who gets science and technology? He's interested in making decisions based on empirical data (A.K.A. facts) -- a radical departure from the past eight years.

Next will be policy, e.g. energy, health care IT, education, broadband.

Online participation and transparency will have a real impact too, but it will take time.

Evolution Can Also Be Dangerous

Presumably, after eight years on hold, evolution was legalized on January 21 and resumed its advance. But as encouraging as it is to see support for science resume, the road ahead is not without risk. We're not just talking about the tussling over stem-cell research; synthetic biology is at the point where researchers will be able to essentially create life from scratch. Nanotechnology has vast potential, but if mishandled can also be extremely dangerous. The future of science could benefit from some intelligent design.

No You Can't

The Washington Post had a classic story last week about new White House staffers arriving to find PCs with six-year-old operating systems instead of the MacBooks wielded on the campaign, as well as bans on facebook, YouTube, Twitter that left them friendless and speechless. A young staffer told me about the huge analog phone with presidential seal and huge raft of pre-programmed buttons on her desk in the West Wing.
"Did one button say 'Moscow"?
"No, I don't have that phone."
Antiquated technology's not the only obstacle. Wired has the best story I've seen about the security, legal and regulatory obstacles to open and connected government; makes it sound as hard as closing Gitmo. But hey, Obama says he is going to do that within a year, and I think we'll see some fairly significant developments in government transparency, efficiency and participation between now and then.
Will Obama return government to a virtual town hall? No, and judging by the discipline of his campaign and early days in office, he doesn't want to. But does he want people to feel that they are genuinely being heard and can make a difference -- you bet, because it could make him one of the most powerful executives ever.
As for the young staffers, they should just be grateful no one upgraded the White House PCs to Windows Vista.

The TIGR Team Speaks -- On YouTube, Naturally

The Transition, Innovation and Government Reform team posted this video on YouTube outlining their vision for what technology can do for government: Using data to help people understand their world -- and to drive economic activity; Delivering services more efficiently -- and more cheaply; Embracing cloud computing. Watch:       
Okay, all this won't be easy to implement, but government is so far behind the private sector that it's tapping pent-up forces that will bring some kind of change.

Good Multimedia I (Mostly) Missed in 2008

Regina McCombs highlights on Poynter.org a host of excellent multimedia projects that flew under the radar in 2008 amid all the election coverage.

Roanoke.com's Age of Uncertainty is a solid model. Several stories, several elements, from video to maps to interactives that prompt personal involvment. All organized here on a blog, but most pieces were published separately as they were completed, and each can be syndicated.

This could be a solid platform for advocacy journalism as well; just make sure that syndication includes large networks, add some call-to-action elements, and it can be a powerful, flexible package.

Obama 2.0 Will Be "Organizing for America"

So what's next for The List? Can Obama use the 13 million email addresses garnered during the campaign to push through his progressive agenda?

He is clearly going to try, even if the organizational details are still being debated. The basic strategy appears to be:

• Match online mobilization with organizers on the ground
• Encourage volunteering to keep the most dedicated members of the list active
• Mobilize activists for advocacy on national issues such as health care reform

Even with prohibitions on mixing governance and politics, this outside movement can have an impact by doing issues advocacy that aligns with the administration's agenda. Its biggest challenge may be internal -- as the DNC jockeys for a piece of the action, a campaign whose success was rooted in the radically flat, data-driven structure of the Internet could be subsumed, split or slowed.

UPDATE 12:08 pm

Obama just announced in a video on his website that the activist/volunteer organization is going to be called "Organizing for America."

Issues mentioned:

• Economic crisis
• War in Iraq
• Health care
• Energy

Signs of the Times

Several stories this month on the dire financial condition of the New York Times company, complete with speculation that Gray Lady could be forced to drop its print edition. We're not there yet, but Michael Hirschorn of The Atlantic makes a good point about the impact of the collapse of mainstream journalism.

Internet purists may maintain that the Web will throw up a new pro-am class of citizen journalists to fill the void, but for now, at least, there’s no online substitute for institutions that can marshal years of well-developed sourcing and reporting experience—not to mention the resources to, say, send journalists leapfrogging between Mumbai and Islamabad to decode the complexities of the India-Pakistan conflict.

I won't shed any tears for the demise of big-brand access journalism, and quality blogs such as Talking Points Memo and technology-driven transparency groups such as Sunlight Foundation may be able to fill much of the void left by the collapse of conventional reporting in the U.S. The disappearance of foreign coverage is more disturbing, however. Take Anthony Shadid's piece in the Washington Post about the emergence of a new Iraqi warlord as a result of the invasion. It tells you what few intelligence reports and fewer policy experts can: how power is actually flowing on the ground, irrespective of the ideology in Washington or Baghdad.

Instead we get Joe the Plumber as war correspondent, in case we needed any more evidence that journalism is going down the drain.

When the Opposite of Progress is Congress

Let's be honest: As much as this Democratic-controlled Congress was swept in on the mandate for change, they can't be as big and bold as a president who doesn't run for re-election for four years. And what's more, Congress hasn't been the source of big ideas and change since Newt Gingrich's Republican Revolution fizzled sometime in the late 20th Century. So bold progressive change in the next four years is most likely to be led by the executive branch.

Still, it takes congressional cooperation. Up to now, White House legislative affairs has been a fairly gentlemanly (or gentlewomanly), based on the art of persuasion. But now, there's The List. With 10 million to 13 million email addresses from the campaign, Obama's political operation is capable of mobilizing 15,000-20,000 people in many congressional districts. My prediction is that the persuasion will be gentle at first, but will use interactive tools such as surveys to drive a point home: "87% of your constituents support health care reform."

A game-changer? Maybe not, but often constituents can exert more pressure on a congress person than a president.

 

Best Thing Since Sliced Bread

The transition team sent around this email today:

Subject: "Citizen's Briefing Book"
 
Hey all, we just rolled out one last new tool for change.gov for the final week. We wanted to compile a kind of "briefing book" that we could give to Obama to kind of reflect in a coherent document the kinds of ideas that have been bouncing around change.gov and the intertubes, and we ended up with something a lot like change.org's ideas tool (we've been in touch with them, they've been great). The function is just to have folks submit, vote, and comment on ideas that we'll be compiling for the briefing book for Obama, and he'll definitely be reading it.

http://citizensbriefingbook.change.gov/Home

 

 Not a big advance from the SEIU's now-defunct "sinceslicedbread.com" ideas website; there's no technology magic trick to sort the wheat from the chaff. But if the recipients take the input seriously, they can find a way to make it matter.

Is eGovernment Really Going to Happen?

It's natural to ask, because open government has a history of failing expectations. Bureaucratic inertia. Politicians who turn cool on transparency once they hold power. Security concerns. Rules that make it devilishly difficult to adopt common tech practices in the public sector.

This time, though, there is such a convergence of forces that I'm betting on fundamental change. The biggest, of course, is a tech-savvy president who has promised transparent, connected and responsive government. But there are others:

• Society's expectation of interactivity. When even clumsy Comcast can build a pretty good customer-service website, then people are not going to be satisfied if they can't do business with their government online;
• An internal constituency. The individuals who make up the Federal Web Managers Roundtable are a very talented bunch who have been struggling to drag their agencies into the 20th century;
• Effective external pressure. Good groups have been working for years tracking money and politics and arguing for transparent government, but the Sunlight Foundation has had a huge impact in just two years by making grants quickly and effectively to groups that use technology to make government data comprehensible. They are taking advantage of another trend: The standardization of data, using XML, which makes it much easier to connect databases; 
• Technology that's past the tipping point. A wealth of powerful communications and collaboration tools now take next to no technical expertise to use, removing a natural control point. That shifts the onus to management to explain why not to use them;

Of course, how fast and effectively this change comes about depends on the leadership the new administration brings to it; Obama needs to keep his promise of appointing a CTO with real power. Culturally, it is going to be uphill in Washington, where "most people don't know a server from a waiter," in the words of Sunlight's Ellen Miller.

Katherine Seelye provided a nice overview of the potential and challenges facing egovernment in this New York Times article, which includes a few instructive examples of egov forays in Europe.

Communication Goes Both Ways

EGovernment has to be divided into two parts: transparency and communication. Communication has to be two-way; the Obama campaign got some grief when comments weren't open at first when he broadcast a weekly address on YouTube. Of course, when comments were enabled, they were of limited value ("I love Obame He sexy too").

Good egov communication will not only invite input, but be serious about letting that input affect policy, which will in turn encourage more people to participate online. Republican strategist Mindy Finn made a good point at New America's "Wiki White House" event: every appeal for input should eventually be followed by a report to participants on how their input affected the result.             

       

Transparency and Tech Culture

On a reductive level, increased transparency will open the door to more data-driven decision-making, as well as healthy external scrutiny of government spending and operations. But I'm hopeful that the belated embrace of technology will help introduce the flat, flexible, data-driven culture of the best Silicon Valley companies to the halls of power.

Okay, it's never going happen completely. Government is by nature hierarchical and secretive. Some areas, like security and intelligence, are going to remain off-limits. But some business culture innovations of the past 15 years are too good to keep shutting out. Like managers who welcome metrics and use them to adjust course, rather than going into CYA mode. Managers who make sure their teams have clear direction and make room for the (often young) staff closest to the customer room to innovate and improve. And relatively flat, flexible structures that allow temporary teams to assemble around priorities.