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.”…

read full post…

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….

All of the presentations were very interesting and will all be online shortly. I will update you on their availability and provide a full report on the event in a subsequent post as soon as the remaining presentations go online.

In the meantime here is the presentation I gave on
‘Working with Web 2.0 (Social Software in the Workplace)’

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Blinkered public sector thinking that blames sites such as Facebook for office time wasting is stunting the take up of web 2.0 in government, according to an association for IT professionals.

“Laggards” in local government are doggedly resisting user generated content, blogging, mash-ups and social networking on council websites, according to the Web 2.0: what it is and why it matters report by public sector IT body Socitm.

It warns CIOs, comms managers and councillors to allow the public to shape their communities through forums and to engage with community websites and blogs or risk being branded “Luddite”….

…Almost 80 per cent said concerns about time wasting was preventing greater use of social networking and wider web 2.0 adoption, with less than half letting staff use social networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo and only just over half allowing employees to use business social networking site LinkedIn.

The report says: “With one or two exceptions…those who are laggards find it very difficult to shake off that mantle.

“More importantly, the defensive approach amongst teams and a culture of maintaining the status quo that seems to go with it is difficult to shift.

“The only choice is whether to be in the vanguard, pursuing an exciting path of controlled experiment and learning, or to be dragged along as a reluctant follower with a Luddite reputation in the eyes of your community.”

Read entire article on Silcon.com

 From RRW

If you were interviewing someone for a position with your company and they admitted that they didn’t know anything about the new trends and innovations taking place in their field, what would you think? Likely, what you would think is “next candidate, please.” In today’s business world, job-seekers are expected to stay current with the happenings taking place in their area of interest. There was a time when those happenings were very much job-specific and anything having to do with technology fell squarely on the shoulders of I.T. That time has passed. Web 2.0 technologies lifted the veil of mystery surrounding computing technology and made it accessible to everyone. Today, if you’re not staying current with Web 2.0 technologies’ impact on business, then you’re just not staying current. Period.

Web 2.0 Is Everywhere
No matter which department you’re in, Web 2.0 technologies have had an impact. If you’ve been ignoring their prevalence and adoption, you’re at risk of falling behind in your career and your business is at risk of losing ground to its competitors who are tuned into this trend.

Read full article

IBM announced new technology to secure “mashups,” web applications that pull information from multiple sources, such as Web sites, enterprise databases or emails, to create one unified view. Mashups are attractive for business use, as they allow non-technical users to gain insight on complex situations in minutes, but as with all Web-based initiatives, security has been a concern.IBM is helping businesses realize the value of these situational applications without all the risk, through a new technology created by IBM researchers, codenamed “SMash.” Short for secure mashup, this technology allows information from different sources to talk to each other, but keeps them separate so malicious code cannot creep into enterprise systems.

In order to give consumer and business users the opportunity to take advantage of mashup technology, IBM is contributing the SMash technology to the OpenAjax Alliance. The OpenAjax Alliance is an organization of vendors, open source projects and companies using Ajax that are dedicated to the successful adoption of open and interoperable Ajax-based Web technologies. A founding member of the OpenAjax Alliance, IBM continues to work with the industry to create standards that will support innovation and wide-spread adoption of Web 2.0 technologies.

“Web 2.0 is fundamentally about empowering people, and has created a societal shift in the way we organize, access and use information,” said Rod Smith, IBM Fellow & Vice President. “Security concerns can’t be a complete inhibitor or clients lose out on the immense benefit mashups bring. The same way you wouldn’t buy a car and then later decide to have the seatbelts or airbags installed, as an industry we’ve learned how to build security into business operations from the ground up instead of tacking it on after the fact.”

Read more on http://java.sys-con.com/read/518524.htm

David outlines the possibilities more transparent government offers to the public and to business and gives some very good examples of several US agencies that have opened their data to the public using well documented APIs

He also outlines some possible concerns that government organisations may have in regard to opening up their datasets:

Concerns
There are a lot of concerns that can and should be addressed before a transparent government project is launched. Fortunately, there are sound solutions to most of them.

* Concern: Amateurs will just confuse issues
Response: As Jon Udell says, “Those who don’t cite data will be laughed at. Those who do cite data but interpret it incorrectly will be corrected. Those who do great work will develop reputations that are discoverable and measurable.”
* Concern: will violate privacy
Response: there is already a lot of personal information available on the web as well as data theft and inadvertent disclosure by government agencies. This issue must be addressed on a comprehensive basis, and shouldn’t be given as the justification for denying transparent government.
* Concern: releasing and combining bad data will compound problems
Response: No justification! Bad data must be cleaned up under any circumstances.

And offers some advice on how this process could perhaps begin…

Test transparent government behind firewall first
I realize this whole concept of releasing data to the general public is downright scary to many in government!

So here’s a great way to ease into transparent government: apply the same strategy behind the firewall first.

After all, your own employees may be struggling with incompatible data bases, may need to reach across agency “silos” to see if there might be synergies between programs, or they may need to see if plotting various data bases geographically might illustrate hotspots where intervention should be concentrated.

Just as with public transparent government projects: employees from outside a given agency may be able to provide new insights simply because of their differing life experiences and insights.

Also, as more young workers, who have never known life without the Web, join governmental workforces, they’ll naturally ask why tools they’ve used can’t be used in government. This can empower them and tap their expertise.

Experimenting with transparent government on the inside lets you:

* learn more about approach
* encourage inter-agency cooperation
* clean up data
* create your own data visualizations and information mashups before going public.

When launching a behind-the-firewall data visualization site, you need to have the same components as with a public site:

* clean up your data, and establish common formats for feeds: XML, RSS, and AJAX.
* create a single web site for the project, that will allow you to include the feeds, show how the process works, and then aggregate all of the mashups and visualizations that result
* encourage users to create and use tags, so that the projects can be clustered and searched.

Read the full speech here…

The Irish government has dipped a toe into the free data market, making a group of datasets for boreholes around the country available online so that professional users – in particular those engaging in major construction or infrastructure planning – will be able to visualise subterranean structures.

The Irish data (which can be viewed using an interactive viewer)  are not yet in the sort of form that could be used to build mashups, by connecting to an online web interface that could be queried by someone building, say, a Google, Yahoo! or Live Maps interface. At present, navigating to the borehole locations is a slow process that requires clicking on more and more detailed map views, or searching for known sites or towns.

But in principle it is widening the availability of data to anyone on the net, including Ireland’s citizens, which must be useful – and the possibility of a web API (applications programming interface) that would let people build their own mashups by querying the GSI’s servers in real time must exist.

Link to full Guardian article

Link to OSI Borehole website