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The Preamble to the United States Constitution translated into binary code.

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see also

Code For America To Help Cities Modernize IT (Information Week)

http://codeforamerica.org/

http://www.rialtas.net/blog/2010/02/01/code-for-america/

The guidance makes it easier for agencies to use social media and requires steps to ensure better rule-making and spending transparency.

By J. Nicholas Hoover  InformationWeek

April 7, 2010 01:33 PM

Even as federal agencies release their plans for complying with the Obama administration’s open government requirements, the administration announced additional open government guidance Wednesday.

In a series of memos, the White House provided agencies with new rules and guidance on social media, regulatory information, spending data, and compliance with the Paperwork Reduction Act, a regulation observers had seen as holding back government transparency.

The Paperwork Reduction Act requires agencies to seek public comment and request clearance from the Office of Management and Budget before requesting most types of information from the public — a process that many agencies and observers find burdensome in the era of instant feedback via social media.

In order to free agencies from these procedures, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs issued a memo from OIRA administrator Cass Sunstein that clarifies that the PRA does not apply to many uses of social media.

For example, OIRA notes that the PRA doesn’t apply to online suggestion boxes and some types of other generally non-specific feedback requests, crowdsourcing applications, e-mail lists, and RSS feeds; online ratings and rankings; and Web site elements that enable users to share content. It also doesn’t cover anything that could be considered an “interactive meeting tool,” including Webinars, blogs, discussion boards, chat sessions, social networks, and most uses of wikis.

Agencies are also free to create user profiles, so long as they only request an e-mail address, username, password, and/or a general location when having the user sign up.

Still, the PRA processes will continue to cover a number of online activities, such as Web polls and satisfaction surveys, contests requiring structured responses, and Web sites collecting demographic information about their visitors.

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Code for America is a new website aiming to help city governments become more transparent, connected and efficient by connecting the talents of cutting-edge web developers with people who deliver city services and want to embrace the transformative power of the web to achieve more impact with less money.   Inspired in part by Teach for America, CFA works with city officials and leading web development talent to identify and then develop web solutions that can then be shared and rolled out more broadly to cities across America.

Working with city managers, Code for America plans to help to identify projects that can benefit from web-based solutions.  Code for America recruits both the development teams and the participating cities through competitive application processes.  Once identified and funded, each city project is connected with a web development team that can further scope the project, develop an action plan, and deliver an appropriate solution over an 11-month development cycle.  Throughout the development cycle, CFA mentors, trains, and coordinates the teams and facilitates their relationships with their city management clients.

The applications that Code for America fellows build fit a certain model:  1) They are web applications – think Facebook, Yelp, Zillow, or Picnik; 2) They will enable cities to connect with their constituents in ways that reduce administrative costs and engage citizens more effectively; 3)  They support the move toward transparency and collaboration; 4) and finally, they are shareable – which means that an application built for one city can be used by any other city.

Fundamentally, it’s all about helping American cities use web technology to do a better job of providing services to citizens.

If any Irish technologists are interested in starting something similar over here please contact me.

From OpenSource.com

What problems can we solve? How would it affect the way we learn? Work? Run our governments?

We want to shine a light on the places where the open source way is multiplying ideas and effort, even beyond technology. We believe that opensource.com will be a gathering place for many of the open source stories we’d like to share–through articles, audio, web presentations, video, or open discussion.

The term open source began as a way to describe software source code and the collaborative model for how it’s developed. Red Hat used this model for developing technology and built a business model around open source and its principles: Openness. Transparency. Collaboration. Diversity. Rapid prototyping.

The open source way is more than a development model; it defines the characteristics of a culture. Red Hat and other open source thought leaders want to show you where open source is headed next. Tell you how to get involved. Help you apply it to your life and the world around you.

The open source way is about possibility.

Open source presents a new way to solve old problems. To share ideas and effort.

The open source way opens doors.

Open source offers a new perspective. Open, not closed. Collaboration, not isolation.

The open source way multiplies.

Knowledge. Effort. Inspiration. Creativity. Innovation. The impact is exponential.

And it’s already happening:

CHANGING OUR SOCIETY…

The open source way thrives on broad collaboration and shared effort. Wikipedia is one of the world’s most extensive collections of information. Its rapid, exponential growth arose from a very different model and philosophy from the traditional encyclopedia. Anyone can contribute, and entries are subject to peer review.

CHANGING HOW WE WORK…

Two key characteristics of the open source way are transparency and accountability. With natural and organic foods market Whole Foods, they pass accountability to the employees that can most directly impact their individual areas throughout each store. Wages, staffing decisions, even choosing what items to stock–these activities are all done in the open.

CHANGING OUR GOVERNMENT…

US President Barack Obama came to office with the promise of change. His campaign encouraged participation, and his administration has pledged to create a new environment of openness and participation in government.

CHANGING HOW WE LEARN…

Education is all about an exchange of knowledge. MIT took the lead in sharing knowledge and chose to try and change the world in the process. They make the materials used in the teaching of almost all of its undergraduate and graduate subjects available on the web, free of charge, to any user in the world. With nearly 1,800 courses available, MIT OpenCourseWare is delivering on the promise of open sharing of knowledge.

visit site..

The Perfect Citizen

The role of the citizen in creating a new Ireland is an important one. What foundations, skills and moral attributes should the perfect citizen have?…

…Perhaps its time to look at what was once viewed as the old-fashioned notion of citizenship. What is the perfect citizen? What foundations, skills and moral attributes should they have to ensure that we create a more sustainable form of success. What should we do to create such citizens and what can we learn from others?

Commentators are all agreed on one thing – the overarching role of education. There is also a broad consensus on the idea that to build these solid foundations, we need to start as early as possible in the education system.

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From e-Government to e-Governance – Using new technologies to strengthen relationships with citizens

Accenture, has just published a report, From e-Government to e-Governance, recommending ways in which Goverment might enahnce its services to the public.

A key recommendation in the report is for public sector organisations not to build everything from scratch themselves, but to capitalise on the popularity of outside websites, including ones set up for social networking and communities.

According to the report “These sites present public managers with a range of opportunities for soliciting real-time citizen feedback, engaging constituents and improving accessibility to government information,”

Using external websites is a cost effective and very quick way to interact with the public, however the report does concede that there are some signifigant risks,such as the danger that public sector organisations will not be able to control the content.

However it is a shame that public sector organisations are reluctant to see negative comments and content posted on websites; the report focuses on the need for public sector organisations to encourage opinions: “Front-office employees should value customer feedback and view it as an essential means of gaining insights that will help them improve the customer experience and overall service delivery.”

Download the report (2.5 mb .pdf)

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Noveck is the deputy director for Open Government within the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House. Her efforts stem from President Barack Obama’s memo issued on the first day of his administration calling for more transparency in government. But promoting transparency is proving harder than it seems…

…”We see examples of civic participation, but it’s divorced from government itself,” she said. “We see example of how government responds to complaints…but they don’t engage people in the process, nor do they track progress.”

In other words, the marriage of social networks and government has been pretty much a one-way street so far. Lots of “noise” coming in, but very little in the way of collaborative solutions, based on citizen participation, coming out….

…She spoke forcefully about how collaborative efforts have the benefit of generating new solutions and ideas that would never be found by a single person, and that networks of problem solvers can mobilize action. Most importantly, she said “collaborative innovations drive performance.”…

…But she recognizes that government’s current approach to developing feedback mechanisms via social networks aren’t well managed in terms of converting citizen input into outcomes….

…The charge towards Gov 2.0 is in danger of falling off the tracks if done incorrectly.

Noveck believes it can be done correctly and that CIOs must play a major role in helping their government embrace social networks for outcomes. Here are my (somewhat raw) notes from her multi-point principles on creating greater transparency without all the noise:

* Ask the right questions.
* Ask the right people: make sure to create opp for the right people to participate. (examples: CityScan, Peer to Patent)
* Design process for desired end: Do you want a Wiki style or a Digg-style design for collaboration?
* Design for groups. When you engage people as individuals you get individual responses. Instead create processes that use the wisdom of the crowd. Use the community to moderate, thereby increases efficacy of democracy.
* Use the screen: Mashups that create meaningful and powerful. Make data real and show people they are part of the process.
* Roles and tasks.  If we show people what the job is we want them to do, you can get people to self select (rather than toss up any idea for consideration).
* Reputation: there are tools for ranking ideas up and down. They help manage large scale influxes of information. These tools can turn feedback into something manageable.
* Make policies rather than websites. Example: Getting feedback from employees.  TSA has one. State Dept has one. Have to create some kind of feedback loop, otherwise it goes to waste. Need a process to manage feedback. Obama campaign had policy networks in moderated listservs. You need to channel expertise so it can be used and useful.
* Pilot new ideas. NASA’s XPRIZE program; Get people to submit innovation that exceeds the cost for the prize. Another example is Kundra’s “Apps for democracy” project.
* Focus on Outcomes: don’t spend too much time measuring the inputs. Need to focus on what to achieve.  You have to rethink transparency and collaboration to what end. What does better performance actually mean?

In closing Noveck said that it’s up to public CIOs to bring their perspective to this unfolding process. “We need common platforms,” she said. “We need CIOs to use their bully pulpit to push innovation to overcome resistance to experimentation while keeping in mind [public sector] obligations. We need to…champion the people are successful and innovative in engaging citizens.”…

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In a revolutionary move, Obama’s administration is set to utilise next generation web technologies to bring an unprecedented level of transparency to government. In this case it will shed light on how the roughly US $800 billion dollar economic stimulus will be spent. The recently launched recovery.gov website (powered by nothing other then Drupal) brought with it the promise that citizens would be able to view where the money was going and how it was going to be spent.

To enable the citizen masher to do their wizardry, the administration will be opening up a veritable candy store of goodies: Semantic Web, RDF, Linked Data, SPARQL, RDFa, SIOC, ATOM, RESTful APIs, JSON, Widgets, Wikis, XForms, P2P Networks. Wow. They only forgot the lions and tigers and bears oh my… This is an unbelievable stack of technology. I didn’t think the government even knew what an RSS feed was …

…Crowdsourcing

Soon every citizen activist will have at their disposal intelligent data on everything related to the money trail and this will be combined with the best of Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 mashup tools. Imagine the possibilities… Just look at what Adrian Holovaty did with ChicagoCrime to get an idea of what can be done when data is combined in unique ways. Read original post

http://www.recovery.gov/

From the Recovery.gov website:

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is an unprecedented effort to jumpstart our economy, create or save millions of jobs, and put a down payment on addressing long-neglected challenges so our country can thrive in the 21st century. The Recovery and Reinvestment Act is an extraordinary response to a crisis unlike any since the Great Depression. With much at stake, the Act provides for unprecedented levels of transparency and accountability so that you will be able to know how, when, and where your tax dollars are being spent. Spearheaded by a new Recovery Board, this Act contains built-in measures to root out waste, inefficiency, and unnecessary spending. This website, Recovery.gov, will be the main vehicle to provide each and every citizen with the ability to monitor the progress of the recovery.

It would be great to see the Irish Government following the example of Obama’s administration, trust and transparency really help when asking people to pull together in order to get through tough times….