On September 29, the FASTforward blog hosted a stellar conversation between Beth Simone Noveck, US Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government and Andrew Rasiej, the co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum.
We’ve compiled highlights of their conversation into a handy little ebook, available here. You can also access the recording of the discussion here.
And lastly, the audience for this webinar was particularly engaged, tossing out lots of great questions we promised to post as an attachment to this highlights piece when it came out. As regular readers of FASTforward, you likely have responses and perspectives on some of these – feel free to take them up in the comments.
Q: Do you see the direct interaction of citizenry with government circumventing the representative process and shifting more control to the Federal government instead of the states?
Q: How do the non-technical participate in a social media government?
Q: The CIA’s Intellipedia wiki speaks to the issue of transparency within an agency.
Q: We see technology being used in government to offer services, etc. How does local government use this technology to educate its citizenry and encourage civic engagement? Any suggestions or examples?
Q: Will we be making the census data available at no cost in raw form as well?
Q: How does this conversation apply to PACER Court records, which are ideally suited to being made publicly accessible? They are organized, and have no copyright, but for administrative reasons, there are onerous fees to get these documents. There are public projects to make these available, but sadly, the bureaucracy has actually worked to slow these.
Comment: With regard to open government and transparency, it would be useful to communicate to the public (in an easy way, like a graphic) the impact of new state and federal policies, such as the proposed Renewable Electric Standard and the Cap and Trade Program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Too often, the viability or impact is not communicated or lost in a sea of text.
Q: How will the collaboration work for those parts of our country that do not have high speed internet connections in their homes? Will these people be ignored because they cannot readily interact with government?
Q: How does citizen participation solve the extreme polarization evidenced by Fox News/MSNBC? The trend of polarization is getting worse. Does Gov 2.0 make that worse or solve it?
Q: Online collaboration is deeply inviting to manipulation by ideologues. Anyone who has argued politics online knows this very well. So what will the administration’s general policies be to ensure that the processes remain fair across partisan lines?
Q: Where would you see differences in Gov 2.0 use internationally (especially USA / Germany)?
Q: How will people collaborate in specific policy issues when they actually disagree concerning the main points involved in that discussion? Does collaboration in policy-making process work only in consensual issues?
Q: With regard to public participation, I’d like to know what the next milestones are (as we’re going into 2010).
Q: It would seem that government communication and political communication are in conflict here because the elaborate use of data and openness is in opposition to the level of openness preferred by politicians to be able to implement policies. Is this true?
Q: Do you believe than an agency has to be more transparent, collaborative and participative internally in order to be so externally?
Q: Don’t these ideas require government personnel to be open to input and to change their policies and behaviors?
Q: What can an agency administrator do to begin to implement the President’s policy with regard to transparency? What support will the administration provide to such an administrator?
Q: Do you think the NYT article “Athens on the Net” got it wrong by talking of just two views of Gov 2.0: one an Athenian-style direct democracy, where “our consent is gathered every few minutes, not every few years” and the other a false illusion of equality that can be hijacked by well organized groups?
Q: Can either of the presenters speak to what we can learn from other countries on collaborative government?
Q: What are the types and sources of resistance to greater collaboration in governance?
Q: Do interactive methods of obtaining public comment result in different comments being collected? For example, do respondents comment on each other’s feedback, resulting in more synthesized and thought through comments overall?
Q: Can the States work with the federal government to assist in the culture change that Deputy CTO Noveck referred to?
Q: Do you envision a day when multi-stakeholder scenario planning will be available/created with the public to deal with on-going complex public policy issues – such as water management?
Q: What is being discussed assumes a “public” that wants to and is willing to spend time making their contributions in this collaboration. What if there is a large portion of the population who just want to live their lives and not spend time helping in a collaborative democracy? Isn’t this still just a government of the few who care enough to participate – just using social media tools?
Q: Will individual government employees be more accountable with this additional transparency? How will government employees have an appropriate expectation of privacy?
Q: What do you think of a benchmark session in New York with all Open Data Initiatives from other countries like UK, and France?
Q: There seem to be both organizational and local levels for affecting change: The plain language movement was something that seemed to be adopted across agencies, at a higher level, through legislation. We’ve also heard about smaller DIY (or DIO) initiatives like everyblock.com where citizens are taking government data and building a service around it. Do you see these smaller local initiatives as the primary path for improving interaction and service models system wide, or is it a combination?
Q: Citizens send in comments to go that may not be machine readable – is there a budget to fix that?
Q: Will the implementation of Gov 2.0 require legal reform?
Q: During the 1990’s “reinventing government” effort, the White House DID see “e-gov” as including citizens in the decision-making process. How much do the panelists really know about that effort (e.g., lessons learned)?
COMMENT: Aneesh Chopra just answered the question about whether the White House will develop their own “Open Govt. Plan”. (Basically, he said “no”).
Q: The CTO says that the soon-to-be-released “Open Government Directive” will require each federal agency to develop its own “Open Government Plan”. Will the Executive Office of the President (EOP) be EXEMPT from that requirement?
Q: Given the polarization of hot-button issues and the danger of poorly interpreted data (such as climate data) do you think that a consensus mechanism (such as what occurs in wikipedia) is viable?
Q: Data interpretation is a science/art with the potential for misinterpretation; what measures do you envision to keep misinterpretation from occurring from citizen-open-source apps?
Q: Organizing data, AKA knowledge management, is essential to good access, and currently many federal sites are very poorly organized. What types of effectiveness measures do you see implementing to increase usability?
Q: How can we be sure that the underserved, who likely have no access to a computer, are not left out of the new collaborative model?
Q: How do elected officials feel about how this more dispersed approach might diminish or conflict with old-fashioned representative government?
Q: Can the spread of technology create an externality? For instance, how, with widespread and quick-spread nformation can misinformation be corralled or contained?
Q: In regard to the point about engaging employees as we have the public in this discussion, how is whistleblower protection being weighed in post-OGD discussion and analysis? It received the greatest amount of public support (many comments from federal employees directly) in stage three of the OGD, and is fundamental to transparency in any government agency.
Q: What is “WIKI Government”?
Q: Is the CTO office looking to make data natively available on agency websites through the web using Semantic Web of Linked Open Data rather than through data warehouses?
Yesterday I had the privilege and pleasure to interview Marty St.George, the CMO at JetBlue.
