Craig Newmark: “It’s bigger than us and it feels pretty good.” Craig says he likes calling if grassroots democracy. Policy wonks, nerds, and pragmatists working together. Craig says we should be talking about “nonks” (= nerds + wonks). He salutes the first “nerd administration.”

Craig introduces Vivek Kundra (chief information officer) and Macon Phillips (White House new media director). Vivek makes an announcement. “The federal gov’t spends $70B on info tech” but the initiatives freqwuently fail. E.g., the Census’ ridiculous handheld that has failed, so now we’re back to using paper. [ACK!] Vivek announces the IT Dashboard it.usaspending.gov. It builds on data.gov. It shows provides real-time visibility into your tax dollars. You can share the data, embed it, drill down into it, show you the phto fo the CIO responsible, contact her or him directly, provide feedback, look at the perfomance metrics viewed against theactual performance, who the contractors are. You can get the data itself in mashable form, and you can provide any set of data you pull together as an RSS feed.

He shows tools for comparing and spotting trends; it’s a little like WolframAlpha for gov’t data. “We’re launching a platform that will allow us to tap into some of the best ideas and best thinking.” “We look forward to iterating on this. We’ve launched it in beta.”

[This is the type of big, visible success the CIO needs. Fantastic. He gets, and deserves, a standing ovation.]

Macon Phillips begins by thanking the audience for its work. He asks for more feedback on the White House’s Web 2.0 projects.

Q: [esther dyson] How are you going to aggregate the feedback?
VK: It goes to the relevant CIOs and to me. Macon and I are looking at how we can use media to amplify it and getting it directly to the people making decisions.

Q: IS there a danger in hiring tech people to make tech policy?
VK: The fed gov’t is made up of 4M people and 10,000 systems. It’s great to have access to some of the brightest minds in tech policy. Those who are coming to serve in the interest of their country is extremely people. The percentage of people from the tech industry is a small percentage.
MO: We’re bringing in people who can help us with processes, help us make gov’t more transparent.

Q: 18K computer educators are meeting now, discussing how to teach students to do data mashups, etc. Are you trying to figure out a way to allow educators and students to work with your data?
VK: Yes, students can now solve actual problems. But it’s not just teachers and students. Think about the explosion of research when the genome was made public. Also, when GIS data was made public. We’re building platformsWe’re looking at X-prizes to stimulate innovation.

Q: Tying in Stimulus and bailout funds?
VK: Yes. GAO data is already showing up. It took us 1.5 months to get to 100,000 feeds. We decided to launch with just a few so we could get feedback on what we’re doing.

Q: Is the new office of cybersecurity going to be exempt from transparency?
VK: No. They need internal data sharing, and I’m working with them on transparency.

VK: You want into in open formats, in as raw a form as possible. In its raw format, peole have the ability to slice and dice, and to innovate.

Q: What are the limits of transparency?
VK: We don’t want to harm national security. And we want gov’t officials to feel secure in their internal discussions.

Q: [andrew rasiej] Redefining “public” accesibility of documents as “searchable and accessible online”?
VK: As a principle, that makes a lot of sense. I want to caution on the reality, though. There are over 10,000 systems. The data lives in COBOL-based systems we have to get people out of retirement to help us. Petabytes of data. So, there’s an economic question in making those investments in going back through. So, looking forward we want to make sure the spirit of that definition of “public” is honored… [Tags: transparency e-gov e-government everything_is_miscellaneous egov ]

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Clay Johnson of the Sunlight Foundation and David Almacy (Edelman’s public affairs VP and former Director of Internet Operations, White House) are talking about government and engagement.

Clay says he’s a product guy who likes building things. Coming out of the Dean campaign, he co-founded Blue State Digital. When asked why Obama was successful online, he says he replies “Because Howard Dean had bad lawyers.” He could just build stuff there without consulting lawyers. Now, when they try to apply this stuff to governing, the lawyers are involved, and creativity is coming to a screeching halt, Clay says. But, he says, there’s another way: Publishing data. Data.gov aggregates data from the executive branch. Lots of businesses have been built using gov’t data, and this will be a seed bed.

Clay says that Twitter is as important to a political campaign as email. “I’m willing to go on record that in 2012 Twitter will be a bigger fund-raiser for campaigns than email.” Obama raised 80% of his funds through email. E.g., Tim O’Reilly has 200,000 subscribers.

He talks about Apps for America, a contest for apps that do useful things with open data. The new round has people working with the data at data.gov.

Q: [me] How can we encourage the gov’t and others to produce data in open formats?
Clay: I’m more focused on just getting the data out. I don’t care about the format. We should tell them just to do it in plain text, if that’ll get it out faster. Once the gov’t starts pumping it out we can have the debate about which standards.

[Tags: politics e-gov egov e-government transparency ]

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Elizabeth Losh of UC Irvine is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk called “From the Crowd to the Cloud: Social Media and the Obama Administration.” She looks at “institutions as digital content creators.”

She begins by pointing to a Congressional hearing in which someone unknowingly referred to some footage from Battlefield 2, in which you can play on either side, as proof that Jihadists are recruiting on the Net.

In the 2008 election, McCain had a series of rhetorical disasters when using social media, Liz says. McCainSpace, she says, was “an unmitigated disaster.” She also points to the mashups done with greenscreen videos of McCain. The Obama campaign, on the other hand, used social media well. It used low bandwidth interactivity effectively (e.g., online tax calculator). And third parties injected memes.

So, how much change has happened now that Obama is president?

It’s not all that difference. She compares 4parents.gov, an abstinence site put up by the Bush administration. The Obama administration has kept it pretty much the same, except that some of the conversation starters have been slightly modified. Ready.gov/kids has moved from featuring mountain lions as the guardians of children (an odd choice, says Liz) to Muppets. The Bush admin did some health initiatives using SecondLife, she points out.

How much privacy? Whitehouse.gov uses YouTube.com and has responded to concerns about the privacy implications. When you leave a .gov domain, it signals that you are leaving a protected area. Liz wonders about the efficacy of using disclaimer language, however. At Change.gov, if you decided to apply for a job, you start getting a lot of emails from the transition team.

The State Dept. Blog, “unfortunately named DipNote,” has been expanded. They twitter now. On Twitter, they’ve responded to citizen questions. E.g., Rebecca MacKinnon pointed out that a Chinese citizen had been arrested. The State Dept. tweeted that they were looking into it, although that tweet was deleted from Twitter shortly afterward. Rebecca also noticed that State Dept. photos posted on Flickr were marked as copyrighted; State now gives them Creative Commons licenses. Liz points to the CC notice and the DMCA takedown notice on the same page at Change.gov and says that there we see the manifestation of the conflict between acknowledging the culture of sharing and the support of existing rules.

She worries about the “googlization of government,” i.e., commercial entities hosting info that is part of the public record. E.g., gov’t sites that use Google Maps.

At Recovery.gov, you are encouraged to “share your story.” But what happens to those comments? How are they archived? Which ones will be displayed. They say in six months they’ll start posting that material, but it’s not clear how.

Q: [me] Whitehouse.gov has started posting at Facebook where people can comment…
A: And this is a disaster for archiving.
Q: What would you do with comments at Whitehouse.gov blog?
A: I’d like to see moderated comments. I do understand that there are limited government resources. Creating digital versions of Congressional records would maybe be a better way to spend the money.

Q: By going onto Facebook, the Admin is reaching out into civic society. That conversation would have been in coffee shops and not part of the public level. So maybe this shouldn’t be archived. How do we draw the lines as the lines between public and private are being blurred?
A: It’s a complicated thing. Suppose there are responses from officials to comments on FB? These are always difficult issues. [Paraphrasing!]

Q: Does government data include the back and forth between citizens? If we say it’s part of the public record, the gov’t won’t be able to participate, or build helpful stuff, as quickly. Would we want an archived federal Twitter that was crappy but kept a permanent record? Should the gov bring more of these social tools in house, or use existing, commercial sites and give up on including everything in the permanent record?
A: I tend toward wanting more stuff in public and archived. Let’s think about harvesting some of the discourse going on in the crowd.

Q: It seems like they’re doing lots of experimentation without the backbone of a full, stable archive behind it. Is this experimentation is leading us into an unknown state…?
A: The Archive is archiving some material on third party sites. The WhiteHouse.com blog is impersonal and press-release-y, while the TSA blog (started under Bush) is folksy. So, some of these experiments have histories.

A: I’d give Recovery.gov low marks for transparency because the PDFs are packed with charts that are not reusable.

Q: Social media is relatively new but and people express things that they don’t want known 5 years later…
A: A student applying for a job as a police officer found that they looked at his FB page and the pages of his friends. In the old days, they would have called his friends and asked questions.
Q: We’ve shifted the line between public and private life. Are we going to be able tor retract things from the public record?
A: That will be an issue.

Q: Any examples of the next frontier or participation, namely direct democracy
A: They still count emails. It’s quantitative, not qualitative. I worry about pseudo-interactivity, such as town hall meetings and the use of the Internet for political spectacle. That’s why I worry about these “share your stories” sites.

Q: During the Malagasi coup, people in Madagascar started talking about the deposed president finding sanctuary in the US Embassy, using Twitter. That could have flash-mobbed the embassy. Within 7 mins, the US embassy had responding, tweeting that the rumor was false. Can we give Obama a little bit of a break? All of us engaged in social media will screw up dozens of times …
A: That’s why we shouldn’t be cheerleaders. “I’m impressed by many of the social media efforts, but I think this form of criticism is important to do.”
Q: How do we encourage people to experiment in these spaces? As people go into these tools, they’re inept at first. At what point does the criticism discourage government officials from experimenting?
A: Many of my criticisms are that they’re not doing enough. Not enough commenting, with data representation, experimenting with new forms of participation.

Q: How much of out-of-the-box thinking are they doing with social media?
A: Theyre usually using them the way people already do. I wish they’d be more experimental.

Q: A crowd consists of the people who are uninformed. Government is about managing uncertainty. But if the info you get is biased and uninformed, you can’t manage. What’s the role of the crowd?
A: I don’t take as dark a view of the crowd. You can create political spectacles where a crowd is just a display, but you can get more participatory forms. There can be smart mobs. There are ways they can participate that are meaningful. The Obama admin is trying to take advantage of social occasions that are oriented around civic identity, not persuasion. “As a rhetorician, this is an interesting administration to watch.”

Q: Are Republicans inherently bad at social media?
A: Not at all. Sam Brownback had a great Web site. It does not divide easily along partisan lines.
Q: It depends in part on the demographics of the party. Libertarians have an incredible presence on line.
Q: Markos Moulitas says that Republican’s political philosophy leads them to be uncomfortable with bottom-up media…
A: Republicans do seem to like talk radio, where only a few get to participate.

Q: There was a time when there were a small number of leftwing political blogs and they bemoaned the fact that they had so little Web presence compared to conservative and libertarian blogs, around 2002-3. The populist element is present in all parties and drives a lot of social media. Some believe that the Dean campaign derailed because it thought the comments on its blog were representative of the world…
A: The postmortems are still being done.

Q: I’m not sure how I feel about the gov’t investing enough in social media to do it well. Experimentation is great, but totally botching it at the federal level isn’t good for anyone…
A: Good search on gov’t websites should be a top priority. To get all of Bush’s signing statements, you’d have to know to search on “shall construe.”

Q: Don’t you need a proprietary company to provide those services?
A: We need to be asking questions. [Tags: egovernment egov e-gov social_media facebook twitter transparency ]

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I really like the fact that when Left 4 Dead (the great cooperative zombie killing game) introduced a new type of gameplay, one of the developers explained the math behind the balancing of the waves of incoming undead.

[Tags: games left_4_dead zombies transparency blogging expertise ]

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Tim Karr, campaign director of Free Press, moderates a small panel: Nathaniel James ( Media and Democracy Coalition) and Ellen Miller (Sunlight Foundation).

Tim: We’re in a period of turmoil, torn between “two distinct value systems”: Mass media and social media. Now is the crucial time for making the right policies. We’re seeing a perfect alignment of three movements: media reform, free culture, and open government. The principles of the unity of these three movements: Openness (neutral, nondiscriminatory net), transparency, innovation (through copyright reform), privacy, access.

Ellen: As Andrew Rasiej says, technology is not a slice of the pie, it’s the entire pan. (Ellen talks about the origins and current projects of the magnificent Sunlight Foundation.)

Nathaniel mentions that he’s very involved in One Web Day. But his talk is about fighting for the freedom to connect. He says the process of providing access needs to include a diverse swath of the country. The Internet policy process ought to be as participatory as Internet culture itself. “Are we building programs that allow empowerment and peer to peer education?”

Q: Politically, what’s it look like with the new administration and Congress?
Tim: We’re more hopeful. “The more the public gets involved in the sausage-making, the more visionary and courageous our politicians become”
Nathaniel: The Dems and Reps are equally opportunity offenders in this area.
Ellen: When it comes to the new admin, “it’s a delight to be pushing on an open door.”

Q: [googin] We’re seeing an increase in bottom up business, not just in media.

[Tags: f2c egov egovernment transparency f2c09 ]

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Announcement from the Sunlight Foundation or St. Sunlight, as I think of it:

Washington, DC -Today, the Sunlight Foundation announced ReadTheBill.org, a grassroots campaign to create a more transparent government by calling for all non-emergency legislation to be publicly available online for at least 72 hours before Congress begins debate. Joining Sunlight in supporting its ReadTheBill.org effort is a bipartisan group of individuals and groups, including Newt Gingrich, Joe Trippi, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Citizen and the Federation of American Scientists.

[Tags: sunlight_foundation egov e-gov transparency congress ]

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Aaron Swartz reports that the stimulus bill requires that government agencies use RSS [LATER: or Atom] to report on the stimulus money they disperse, so that those who are interested can get automatically updated. And those who are interested will include institutions and individuals aggregating that information so that the alarms can sound … and, we hope, the bouquets can shower down.

[Tags: rss stimulus e-gov egovernment egov transparency obama everything_is_miscellaneous metadata ]

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From the Wikileaks’ post:

Wikileaks has released nearly a billion dollars worth of quasi-secret reports commissioned by the United States Congress.

The 6,780 reports, current as of this month, comprise over 127,000 pages of material on some of the most contentious issues in the nation, from the U.S. relationship with Israel to abortion legislation. Nearly 2,300 of the reports were updated in the last 12 months, while the oldest report goes back to 1990. The release represents the total output of the Congressional Research Service (CRS) electronically available to Congressional offices. The CRS is Congress’s analytical agency and has a budget in excess of $100M per year.

Open government lawmakers such as Senators John McCain (R-Arizona) and Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vermont) have fought for years make the reports public, with bills being introduced–and rejected–almost every year since 1998. The CRS, as a branch of Congress, is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.

CRS reports are highly regarded as non-partisan, in-depth, and timely. The reports top the list of the “10 Most-Wanted Government Documents” compiled by the Washington based Center for Democracy and Technology. The Federation of American Scientists, in pushing for the reports to be made public, stated that the “CRS is Congress’ Brain and it’s useful for the public to be plugged into it,”. While Wired magazine called their concealment “The biggest Congressional scandal of the digital age”.

A mere scan of the list of titles is fascinating. For example, here’s what our representatives have been told about the number of civilian casualties in Iraq. Here’s 1998’s Sono Bono Copyright Act explained in terms our legislators could understand. Here are the legal basics of the Elian Gonzales case. Here is the background our reps got on Israel’s 2005 disengagement from Gaza.

This stuff looks even-handed and informative. And, had it been made public at the time, not only would we citizens have been educated, we could have enhanced, disputed, and corrected oversights and biases.

Not to mention the effect these might have had as “social objects.” If they had been released publicly when they were given to Congress, they might have shaped public debate around dispassionate starting points. [Tags: csr transparency e-gov egovernment egov ]

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The National Journal says that Obama has picked Vivek Kundra, DC’s CTO, to fill the national post. This would be fantastic news. Vivek is all about transparency.

It’s just a rumor. But it’s a rumor that makes me happy.

[Tags: national_cto vivek_kundra obama transparency e-gov egov e-government ]

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This widget comes via Ask Your Lawmaker. (Thanks to Deborah Elizabeth Finn for the link.)

[Tags: egov transparency everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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