Rialtas.net - Government 2.0

Jeff Jarvis (BuzzMachine) is currently working on a book - WWGD? - What Would Google Do? in which he says he is reverse-engineering Google, taking the lessons and rules he finds in their singular success in the internet economy and applying them to other companies, industries, and institutions.

On his blog he sets out some of the ideas he has been playing with  for reaction, improvement, and argument, here are some excerpts:

* Abolish the Freedom of Information Act. Turn it inside-out. Why should we be asking for information about and from our government? The government should have to ask to keep things from us. Government information — every act of government on our behalf — should be free by default. We must insist on an aggressive ethic of openness. The exceptions should be rare: the personal business of citizens, national security, ongoing criminal investigations and court cases (while they are ongoing), and little else….

…* Government officials and agencies should blog. This ethic of openness should go beyond official documents and files. Openness should be part of the work habit of government officials and conversation with constituents should be an ethic of government. The open blog is merely a tool and a symbol for this — and a more efficient tool, I’ll add, than individual letters and phone calls. Hillary Clinton has said she wants agencies to blog…

…* Webcast government. The government should put C-SPAN out of business by videoing itself. Obama has said he wants to webcast agency meetings. I say the same should be the case for Congressional meetings and, yes, court sessions, including Supreme Court hearings. I’ve suggested that radio stations and newspapers should get citizens to record and podcast all their local government meetings….

…* Start GovernmentStorm.  If Dell and now Starbucks can do it, government should. These storms, powered by Salesforce.com, enable customers to make suggestions and then to vote and comment on others’ suggestions. In general, good ideas attract votes and conversations and bad ideas die on the vine. One sees trends emerge in the discussion: Starbucks should see that its greatest problem with customers now is not the smell of its sandwiches but the length of its lines. One also sees an incredible generosity from customers; they will spend their time telling companies what they want to buy and how to improve — and only a foolish company would not listen. We’ll surely do the same for our government. Indeed, the more we feel an ownership of our government — the more we can have a role, the more responsive it is to our wishes, needs, and ideas — the better, right?…

…* Personal political pages. I believe the ethic of openness will spread across society. The press demands that government be transparent, then so must the press be — and this applies to individual journalists. Likewise, as citizens demand transparency, so will they become more transparent. Ethics work both in two directions.

We are already seeing more personal transparency in society. We see it in Facebook and blogs and other social media, where people — particularly young people — realize that they have to open up something of themselves to find others who share their interests and where identity is made up more and more of what we create and what we make public. Just like Flickr, we are starting to default to publicness. Privacy is often put forth as the issue online but, as Facebook has learned a few times now, the real issue is not privacy but control of our information. …

Please Read the full post here…

If you want to be notified the next time I write something, you can subscribe to my RSS feed.Thanks for reading.