Rialtas.net - Government 2.0

From Federaltimes.com article By Elise Castelli

 This Federal Times Article describes how the US EPA, in trying to better share information with the public, industry, the media and its own employees, took an ‘unusual’ tack: It set up a Web site and asked for ideas from those who rely on EPA’s data in their work and lives.

“A lot of issues we deal with are global in nature and require collaboration,” EPA’s chief information officer, Molly O’Neill, said in an interview. “We need to figure out how to use these [Web] tools to be more transparent and collaborative.”

 

With the public demanding more and faster access to government information, “we need to change that model a little bit and get back to rebooting the public square,” said DiGiammarino, who spoke at a Web 2.0 conference June 3. This is a challenge for leaders because “when you think of government, you don’t necessarily think of speed, agility, reach and efficiency,” which is what the Web 2.0 world demands, he said.

Using discussion boards and e-mails, EPA’s new social Web site, called National Dialogue on Access to Environmental Information, has pulled comments from across government and the country to help O’Neill as she fashions a new information-sharing policy.

Since O’Neill came on board last year, EPA has embarked on four such projects that integrate blogs, wikis, discussion boards and other social networking Web tools, which are collectively referred to as Web 2.0, into EPA’s business.

“The technology is not complicated, it’s just a different way of doing business. And getting people to do business in a different way is culture change and that’s a challenge,” O’Neill said.

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A recent CWD Corporation (US) Survey has found that over 40% of corporate IT decision makers across both government and corporate sectors have rolled out some Web 2.0 tools in their organisations,it also reveals that more than half of them may be hesitant to use such applications, with 31% worrying that Web 2.0 will be used for personal instead of work use and 28% concerned about information security and 27% worried about potential time-wasting.

“Organizations are recognizing the clear advantages of Web 2.0, even though there has been some hesitation among IT decision makers to adopt these tools,” said CDW Vice President Mark Gambill, the company’s executive responsible for market insights. “With the increased use of Web 2.0 functions like social networking and blogging as business tools, corporations are starting to re-evaluate tried and true ways of communicating.”

According to CDW, Web 2.0 has gained momentum in some places. Fifty-three percent of IT decision makers across all sectors believe that Web 2.0 applications will substantially improve employee performance in the next five years. Web 2.0 is also seen as important in attracting and retaining the next generation of workers, with 68 percent and 61 percent of corporate and government IT decision makers, respectively, agreeing with that sentiment.

Additionally, the adoption curve for Web 2.0 applications currently has a trickle-down pattern. While 67 percent of large businesses have already implemented some form of Web 2.0 applications or tools, IT decision makers in medium-sized businesses fall slightly behind with 53 percent currently using Web 2.0. Only 27 percent of small businesses and 30 percent of government organizations have adopted Web 2.0.

More…

Article in Federal Computer Week By Michael Hardy  Published on April 14, 2008 http://www.fcw.com/online/news/152241-1.html

Cambridge, Maryland recently played host to a panel discussion involving the United States, the U.K., New Zealand and Canada (at the Interagency Resources Management Conference) , countries that it should be apparent from reading this blog, are all leading the way in the adoption of new technologies in improving government and enabling e-democracy.

From the FCW article

“It is Government 2.0, not ‘Web 2.0,’” said John Sullivan, the United Kingdom’s chief information officer, at the conference

The reason to make the distinction, is that the collection of tools that people think of as being part of the Web 2.0 family are tools, he said. Government 2.0 is a business approach revolving around the idea of opening the workings of government more directly to citizen involvement and input. How a government organization accomplishes that might or might not involve Web 2.0 technologies, he said.

All of the countries involved in the discussion have taken significant steps. In the U.K., citizens have the right to petition the prime minister’s office on any issue, Suffolk said. Now they can do it online. In New Zealand, the government created a wiki so that citizens could offer their opinions on the rewriting of a longstanding law, said Laurence Millar, New Zealand’s CIO.

The wiki drew much larger response than earlier efforts to solicit comments on social networks Facebook and MySpace, he added. The ability to build directly on what others have said seemed to make the difference.

Karen Evans, administrator of e-government and information technology at the Office of Management and Budget, said the overriding goal of Government 2.0 should be “taking government back to the citizens.”

However, there remain some difficult issues, Millar said. One is the trend toward incivility among Internet posters. Shielded by the anonymity of an alias, some people choose to launch profane personal attacks rather than contribute to reasoned debate.

“You can get some fairly vicious comments made,” he said. “We’re seeing maturity on some sites, but we’re still seeing a lot of the infantile invective that bedevils us.”

FCW Article

Interagency Resources Management Conference

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…

Some interesting speculation on ‘Politics 2.0′ from Mike Farmer  On the Bonzai Real Estate Blog…

Imagine thousands of citizens vying for elected positions using blogs, social networks, websites that reveal all their qualifications, vetted by connected users across the country interacting with the candidates on a daily basis. It would be beautiful chaos, democracy in action, a true Greek ideal of citizen participation with our twist of representation in a Constitutionally limited government. It seems improbable but not impossible. One thing is for sure, the candidate who gets connected first and uses political 2.0 tools will have a definite advantage. The candidate who “gets it” will differientiate himself/herself in a new way that people will embrace.

Link

Very interesting article by Florence Olsen (FCW) on the District of Columbia’s adoption of Web 2.o technologies. I have excerpted some highlights here but please read the full article

Link to the original article

The District of Columbia’s 33-year-old chief technology officer, Vivek Kundra, wants to bring government procurement into the world of wikis and YouTube videos

The test case is fairly straightforward. The city needs a vendor to build a 100,000- square-foot evidence warehouse for the police department, so as always, it issued a request for bids. But then it gets more interesting.

The city also created a wiki to host the solicitation documents. Along with the request for bids, the wiki has an interactive question-and-answer section and a link to complete video coverage of a presolicitation conference for potential bidders. The video link takes bidders to social-networking Web site YouTube…

..Kundra belongs to an emerging generation of government leaders who want to make government more transparent and are comfortable with a collaborative management style. Policy experts say that solutions to major national and global challenges cannot be found without collaboration among federal, state, local, nonprofit and private organizations…

…Should other CTOs and chief information officers worry about Web 2.0 and the increasing irrelevance of traditional government bureaucracies? The answer depends on how leaders respond to those trends, said Frank DiGiammarino, vice president of strategic initiatives at the National Academy of Public Administration.

“I cannot conceive of a single traditional government function that won’t be affected,” said Lena Trudeau,NAPA’s program area director for strategic initiatives.

…NAPA’s initiative will create a community of government leaders at all levels to share new collaborative approaches to governing.

The Environmental Protection Agency is a founding member; the Office of Management and Budget and CIO Council are also involved.

…Public policy experts at NAPA and Government Futures view Web 2.0 technologies as necessary, though not sufficient, for solving some of those national and international problems. And they agree that CIOs should not be afraid of the interactive Web, which includes technologies such as wikis, blogs and social-networking sites such as YouTube.

“There’s no controlling it, and if you’re spending all your time and energy trying to control it and centralize it, you’ve already lost,” Trudeau said.

NAPA officials want the Collaboration Project to be a proving ground for using the interactive W eb for innovative approaches to governing. The project will try to answer questions that government leaders should be asking, DiGiammarino said….

…By bringing together leaders who are experimenting with the interactive Web, NAPA can accelerate its adoption among other government leaders, DiGiammarino said. “We think that leaders who aren’t looking at this are missing out and are not leading.” …

New Paradigm’s (a Toronto think tank) leaders see four converging trends with the potential to transform government as we know it.

• The availability of Web 2.0 technologies as a platform for institutional collaboration.
• The coming of age of the Net generation, the first generation to grow up using digital technology.
• The nearly universal use of social-networking sites by college-age students.
• An organizational revolution based on collaboration that extends beyond traditional organization boundaries…

…Washington’s chief technology officer said CTOs and CIOs should play a leading role in the transformation of government. “Part of a leader’s job is to find an innovative path,” Kundra said.

Traditional CIOs will think they must establish a new security policy and a new governance body to oversee their agency’s use of interactive Web technologies. “We did the opposite,” Kundra said. “We asked, ‘Which policies need to be changed to enable this?’”

Link to the original article

Excerpt From the editorial of the New York Star Gazette 16th March 2008

The power of public access has moved from using persistence and shoe leather to your fingertips and computer mouse. The transition is a long way from complete, but online databases, record keeping and search capabilities have the potential to open government records — owned by you the taxpayer — to anyone with a computer who wants to see them.
Public access best built around more online connections
The Internet can put records at the tips of taxpayers’ fingers, but only if officials have the will to do so.

Despite the legal right to most documents in New York state, there remains a disturbing attitude among some government agencies that public information is what they say it is. Either out of ignorance or arrogance, there are too many officials who believe the dispersal of public information is at their discretion.

That kind of attitude is wrong, especially when considering the principle repeated by Robert Freeman, executive director of the New York Committee on Open Government. All documents are presumed public unless officials can show that they fall into designated categories that allow the information to be withheld, Freeman says. We like that theory: public unless proven otherwise. More and more local government officials understand that and willingly provide public information even without the need for Freedom of Information requests, which can be time-consuming and totally unnecessary for information that is readily available.

With the ease of the Internet connecting the public to government, officials have seen the power of posting databases online that formerly would have been kept in bulky books tucked in a shelf in some office. Instead, anyone, whether the media or the public, can now access various records that open up government and actually take the burden off public employees by reducing paperwork and disruptive walk-in traffic.

Read more here… http://www.star-gazette.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080316/OPINION01/803160341/1004

The Washington Post Reported yesterday on how recently, president Bush challenged Congress to cut the number and cost of earmarks by half. (Earmarks are controversial, set-asides, that members of Congress place into annual spending bills for favoured constituents.)

The Office of Management and Budget, has embraced Wikipedia as a model, hosting an online place where federal officials can swap information and ideas outside of traditional organisational or informational boundaries.

After hearing the president’s challenge last year, the budget officials knew that the White House would need a tally of the pet spending projects that Congress had inserted into the federal budget if they were to measure progress toward the president’s goal. With the wiki, federal agencies compiled a database of 13,496 earmarks in 10 weeks. In the old days, it would have taken six months to get the information to the OMB…

..the wiki permits budget officials to work in real time with one another, rather than sort through e-mail chains wending through the government. It allows officials to hold online meetings when time is short or bad weather makes in-person meetings difficult to schedule. It is open around the clock, so federal budget officials may post comments from home at night or on weekends…

… Karen Evans, who oversees government-wide technology policy at the OMB, views wikis as a way to provide an opportunity “where everybody gets a say” that then leads to “a very informed decision” by officials.

Too often, the government takes three years or longer to reach agreement on a solution to a problem, but the problem will have grown or changed in the meantime, Evans said. “How timely is that?” she asked. “Are you addressing the same issue you started out with?”

Today, with the Internet, “technology people can deliver solutions and capabilities really fast, while people are still focused on the problem,” she said.

Link

By: Heather Havenstein, Computerworld (U.S. online)(02-26-2007)

The U.S. Department of Defense’s lead intelligence agency is using wikis, blogs, RSS feeds and enterprise “mashups” to help its analysts collaborate better when sifting through data used to support military operations.

The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) is seeing “mushrooming” use of these various Web 2.0 technologies that are becoming critical to accomplishing missions that require intelligence sharing among analysts, said Lewis Shepherd, chief of DIA’s Requirements and Research Group at the Pentagon.

The tools are helping DIA meet the directives set by the 9/11 Commission and other entities for intelligence agencies to “improve and deepen our collaborative work processes,” he said.

DIA first launched a wiki it dubbed Intellipedia in 2004 on the Defense Department’s Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System (JWICS), a top-secret network that links all the government’s intelligence agencies.

“The collaboration potential of the social software side is really being thoroughly vetted and is now rapidly being adopted,” Shepherd said. “Across agencies, wikis and blogs are becoming as ubiquitous as e-mail in terms of information sharing.”

Link 

Late last year the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs on held a hearing enlitled E-Government 2.0: Improving Innovation, Collaboration, and Access.

Invited to speak at the hearing were Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and the non profit charity the Wikimedia foundation, and John Lewis Needham, Manager of Public Sector Content Partnerships with Google.

Jimmy Wales,  spoke about his vision in building Wikipedia. The original vision statement for Wikipedia was for all to imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.

He related how open, collaborative media, like wikis enable more efficient gathering and dissemination of useful information. Although it may be counterintuitive that opening up a wiki project leads to a more useful compendium of information, that is what the experience has been with Wikipedia, and Wales believe that this can be the experience for government agencies and operations as well.

The First Amendment plays an important role in this project, as do traditional American ideals of individual responsibility. Under US law, everyone writing in Wikipedia takes responsibility for his or her own actions, just as is true everyone speaking in any public forum. The maintainer of this forum, the Wikimedia Foundation, has set down some fundamental codes of conduct, including but not limited to what Constitutional scholars call “time, place, and manner” restrictions, and I have personally imposed policies which strive toward respect for others, quality writing, and the citing of sources.

It is counter-intuitive to some that an open discussion with virtually no top-down command-and-control structures can generate a high quality encyclopedia. Nevertheless, it does.

Now, given that Wikipedia is a public enterprise, open to the entire public for collaboration and contribution, you may be wondering how wikis or the Wikimedia model may be useful to government. First of all, I want to note generally that there are other ways in which a wiki can be set up usefully, including setups that don’t involve opening the wiki to the general public. You can control access, but a wiki might be useful to an agency that wants to facilitate sharing information up and down the hierarchy (increased vertical sharing). And controlled-access wikis could be used to set up inter-agency information sharing as well (increased horizontal sharing).

The main point here is no requirement of necessity for the tool of a wiki to be open to the general public in order for it to be useful.

Wales then went on to give the Committee a quick overview of the concepts behind a wiki

Wales’ wikipedia primer:

The most basic idea of a wiki is “a website that can be easily edited by the readers” but modern wikis contain simple yet powerful features that allow for the users to control and improve the quality of the work.

Wikis maintain a history of prior versions of articles. Every version of every article is stored in the database. Wikis also provide a simple means to compare any two versions. These two simple ideas combined mean that users can quickly revert back to a prior version if a new change is not satisfactory, and users can also monitor the work of others by quickly comparing to a recent version. This tends to cause the quality of the work to improve over time, since any bad changes do not live very long.

Additionally, wikis can provide fine-grained control over who is able to access or edit various kinds of information, thus facilitating the possibility of inter-agency information sharing and collaboration.

Wikipedia represents the power of a wiki open to the general public, but I believe the same wiki technology that powers Wikipedia is also being widely adopted inside many enterprises, and I’ll note here in passing a couple of examples of this innovative use, one in private enterprise and one in the U.S. government.

This brings us back to what might be called The Lesson of Wikipedia — that an open platform, allowing many stakeholders to participate, can facilitate information sharing in an extremely cost-efficient manner, and it can take advantage of a wider range of knowledgeable people than traditional information-sharing processes do.

Good democratic governments strive to be responsive to the citizen’s needs In order to do so, it is important that governments use technology wisely to communicate with the public, and also to allow the public to communicate with the government.

Electronic communications are rapidly developing, and innovations such a wiki point the way towards the kind of balance between openness and control that can make for successful outcomes.

John Lewis Needham, is the Manager of Public Sector Content Partnerships at Google. In that capacity, he leads Google’s efforts to build public-private partnerships with government agencies in the U.S. and internationally. In his testimony he introduced the idea that Goverment agencies should use Google’s new site maps technology in order to ensure that all relevant online information published by government agencies can be found and indexed by the Google Search engine.

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. The work that I focus on at Google is critical to this mission because few bodies of information are as important to Internet users as the broad, deep, and authoritative data provided by government.Making publicly available government information more accessible and useful to citizens not only helps deliver to Internet users the government information they need, but it also enables the government to provide services more efficiently and effectively to taxpayers, and it makes our democracy more transparent, accountable, and relevant to its citizens.

In 2005, Google introduced a technical standard that helps to ensure the accessibility of information on a web site.

This standard is called the Sitemap Protocol. It provides a mechanism for a web site owner to produce a list – or map – of all web pages on a site and systematically communicate this information or “Sitemap” to search engines.

When a federal agency places a Sitemap file on its web site, search engines can readily identify the location of all pages on the site, including database records lying behind a search form. Using this sitemap, search engines are more likely to index and make the information that the agency’s web site provides visible to citizens.

In the Web 2.0 world, where more and more citizens are using blogs, wikis, online mapping, video sharing services, and social networking sites to communicate and collaborate with each other, there will be even more demand for government to bring information to citizens where they are through these new platforms. This information will also help serve as a core component of the user-generated content that is driving the deeper engagement of Americans with each other, and with our democracy, through the Web.

The full content of both testimonies in addition to the testimonies of the other panel members:
Karen S. Evans, Administrator, Office of Electronic Government and Information Technology , Office of Management and Budget
Ari Schwartz , Deputy Director , Center for Democracy and Technology

Are available online here:
http://www.senate.gov/~govt-aff/index.cfm?Fuseaction=Hearings.Detail&HearingID=513