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.

Read Full article

I came across a blog entry (in Federal Computer Week) in the US covering another example of a wiki being  used as part of a public consultative process. Officials from the US Environmental Protection Agency used a wiki to consult with citizens in Puget Sound. The ‘Puget Sound Information Challenge’ wiki was launched at a conference last November and participants were asked to contribute information that could help groups working to clean up Puget Sound.

In the two days that the Web page was up during the 2007 Environmental Information Symposium, the Web 2.0 application experienced over  18,000 page views, and 175 entries with everything from documents to feedback on decision support systems and a significant volume of e-mail. EPA also offered a phone number that people could call, but officials say they never got a phone call.
Link

We are now looking at Evan Miller’s Google Map Extension for Mediawiki as a solution for the mapping element of the public consultation project. Essentially we want visitors to be able to mark a point on a map and add a comment, this extension is pretty close to what we need, however at the moment it requires users to copy and paste co-ordinates, we are looking at ways to work around this.

We would also like to keep the new co-ordinates in a specific database table rather than in the general wiki article. There is a modification of Evan Miller’s extension here that seems to address this , I will implement and test this on our Intranet tomorrow.

We had our second meeting regarding our public consultation process and it is confirmed that we are planning to use MediaWiki as the basis for a public wiki seeking feedback from the public on a development plan. My demo wiki is up and running on our Intranet and staff will be invited to ‘explore’ and contribute to the test wiki on Monday next.

I also demonstrated some ‘tag cloud‘ images to the plan’s authors showing the top 100 words used in a previous plan and they really liked the visualisation and hope to inlcude something similar for the new plan on the wiki , in addition to perhaps using it on the cover of the printed plan. As we get a little more advanced in this process I will put up some screenshots and additional information.

I have also been in contact with the New Zealand Policing staff responsible for their own public wiki and have received some useful guidelines from them around moderation and configuration etc. They used PM wiki for their project.

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

The Director of Public Prosecutions has published a discussion paper on the DPP website. He is asking the public to provide feedback on the current policy of the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions not to give reasons either to victims or to the public generally when a decision is made not to prosecute or to withdraw a prosecution.

From the DPP website:

The purpose of this discussion paper is to examine It is hoped that the discussion paper will stimulate debate and, in particular, responses are invited to the following questions:

• Should the current policy be changed?
• If so, should reasons be given only to those with a direct interest, the victims of crime or their relations?
• Should reasons also be given to the public at large?
• If reasons are given, should they be general or detailed?
• Should they be given in all cases, or only in certain categories of serious cases? If so, which?
• How can reasons be given without encroaching on the constitutional right to one’s good name and the presumption of innocence?
• Should the communication of reasons attract legal privilege?
• How should cases where a reason cannot be given without injustice be dealt with?
• By whom and by what means should reasons be communicated?

That this document is published on the web and the public consulted in this matter is a good thing and I am glad to see it. However the response to the 77 page discussion paper is invited by email (to reasons.project@dppireland.ie) or by letter. I think this is a lost opportunity to utilise some Web 2.0 technologies to interact and collaborate with the public in this new decision making process. The benefits of inviting participation using a wiki for example could have fostered not only feedback usefully related to individual sections of the discussion document, but could have also allowed for individual engaged citizens to discuss issues with each other in addition to any submission they might have made directly to the DPP.

There are  similarities in intent to this invitation to the public to shape this specific DPP policy, with the New Zealand Governments own Police Act Policy Review wiki, which invited public feedback over a wider range of issues. It would be nice to see future consultations of this type also providing some additional mechanisms for the public to provide input and feedback.

The Wiki project is proceeding , I installed MediaWiki on an internal weberver today and found it straightforward to get configured and up and running. We are currently entering some test content before we ask for some input from our staff.

In addition to our public wiki ,we also intend to include an interactive mapping element to our public consultation process (see yesterday’s post).

To this end a GIS expert colleague of mine suggested we might use some of the information provided in this Google Blog as a kick-off point. We do already provide some online custom interactive mapping applications, however what we want here is a simple easy to use system to gather input from the public.

From the Google Blog:

In this crazy Web 2.0 world, it’s all about one thing: the user. It’s about what the user wants from your site, and what the user can contribute to your site. That’s particularly true about map sites - the world is a big complicated place full of users who are experts on the 10 mile radius around them. That’s part of the reason why maps.google.com added user-created maps, geocode editing, and local business reviews this year. Now, the question pulsing through your mind is probably: “How can I get in on some of this user-contributed action??” Good news, we have an answer!

Our latest article, “Creating a User-Contributed Map with PHP and Google Spreadsheets” describes what’s necessary to set up a shared Community Map application. The article takes you through the steps of registering a user, logging in a user, letting users add map places, and creating the map. The article uses Google Spreadsheets for a pseudo-database and the PHP client library to perform HTTP operations, giving you the advantage of a nice frontend for database editing/viewing (spreadsheets.google.com) and a database that’s not dependent on a particular hosting provider.

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

 I came across this article published in the Guardian on 14th June last year and thought it was worth linking to here.

Whitehall has taken a first step towards a Government 2.0 with a report that urges a greater official involvement with the grassroots web, says Michael Cross

Imagine Government 2.0. Wisdom no longer flows from officialdom to the population, but is co-created with citizens. Civil servants contribute openly to Facebook groups on controversies of the day. Government websites have wiki areas where people can exchange tips about filing tax returns or claiming benefits. Databases of restaurant inspections, tide tables and postcodes are available for all to see and re-use in mashups of geography, time or events. Before launching a new online public service, the government checks to see whether a user community is already doing it better. In short, government learns to let go of the web.    Link