8 June 2009
Community, Transparency and Government
Posted by Connor under: Elections; Internet; Media; Politics; Technology; Transparency; Uncategorized .
It is almost an article of faith at this point that Barack Obama is “the Internet President,” having perfected the medium as a campaign tool, he is using it to open up the workings of government. For example,recovery.gov, data.gov and the White House Open Government Initiative. Obama has also hired the first-ever national Chief Technology Officer and announcing a long overdue cyber security initiative. So, yeah Team Obama “gets it” about the Internet.
It is true that many states and municipalities have made their citizen’s lives easier by putting so much information on the web. But, in too may areas there is still a fundamental misunderstanding of exactly the type of sea-change that the Internet is bringing to society and governance.
Here is an excerpt of a teriffic post by Tom Steinberg of the UK-based mysociety.org, which builds community organizing and open government websites, called What The Government Doesn’t Understand About The Internet And What To Do About It:
Current government policy in relation to the Internet can broadly be summarised as occupying three areas:
1. Getting people online (broadband access, and lessons for people who don’t have the skills or interest)
2. Protecting people from bad things done using the Internet (terrorism, child abuse, fraud, hacking, intellectual property infringement)
3. Building websites for departments and agencies.The government does all these things primarily because it believes that the Internet boosts the economy of the UK, and that IT can reduce the cost of public services whilst increasing their quality. Together, these outweigh the dangers, meaning it doesn’t get banned. Gordon Brown’s recent speech at Google was an exemplar of this mainly economically driven celebration of the Internet’s virtues, telling audience members that your industry is driving the next stage of globalisation”.
The first challenge for the government is to understand that whilst these beliefs are true, they are only a minor part of the picture. Tellingly, Browns’ speech contained almost no language that couldn’t have been used to explain the positive impact of electrification or shipping containers.
What is different is the way in which the Internet changes social and economic practices – the vector of attack. In the 20th century, advancement of human welfare went hand in hand with the rise of companies that used economies of scale to deliver better goods and services for customers. Technology effectively made it possible and much easier to be a big, highly productive company, to gather expertise and capital together and to target markets for maximum yields.
Now take a look for a moment at Wikipedia, MoneySavingExpert, Blogger or Match.com – all big websites, all doing different things. Each one, however, is in its own way is reducing the ability of large, previously well functioning institutions to function as easily.
These services are reducing traditional institutions ability to charge for information, seize big consumer surpluses, limit speech or fix marriages. It has, in other words, become harder to be a big business, newspaper, repressive institution or religion. Nor is this traditional ‘creative destruction’ going on in a normal capitalist economy: this isn’t about one widget manufacturer replacing another, this is about a newspaper business dying and being replaced by no one single thing, and certainly nothing recognisable as a newspaper business.
Disruption like this is scary for any institution, which will tend to mean that as a public entity which interfaces with other institutions the temptation will be to hold back the sea, not swim with it. Government must swim with the tide, though, not just to help citizens more but to avoid the often ruinous tension of a citizenry going one way and a government going another. There are various things government can do to be on the right side.
1. Accept that any state institution that says “we control all the information about X” is going to look increasingly strange and frustrating to a public that’s used to be able to do whatever they want with information about themselves, or about anything they care about (both private and public). This means accepting that federated identity systems are coming and will probably be more successful than even official ID card systems: ditto citizen-held medical records. It means saying “We understand that letting train companies control who can interface with their ticketing systems means that the UK has awful train ticket websites that don’t work as hard as they should to help citizens buy cheaper tickets more easily. And we will change that, now.”
2. Seize the opportunity to bring people together. Millions of people visit public sector websites every day, often trying to achieve similar or identical ends. It is time to start building systems to allow them to contact people in a similar situation, just as they’d be able to if queuing together in a job centre, but with far more reach and power. This does open the scary possibility that citizens might club together to protest about poor service or bad policies, but given recent news, if you were a minister would you rather know about what was wrong as soon as possible, or really late in the day (cf MPs‘ expenses, festering for years)?
The killer app of the Internet as it relates to human politics and governance is not any sorf of enabling of direct democacy, which is simply too unwieldy for a handful of people let alone hundreds of millions. Instead it is the ability to maintain honesty in government through distributing the load of watchdogging it among millions.
Take the groundbreaking recovery.gov: “The site will include information about Federal grant awards and contracts as well as formula grant allocations. Federal agencies will provide data on how they are using the money, and eventually, prime recipients of Federal funding will provide information on how they are using their Federal funds. On our end, we will use interactive graphics to illustrate where the money is going, as well as estimates of how many jobs are being created, and where they are located. And there will be search capability to make it easier for you to track the funds.”
This is groundbreaking in the sense that this is the first time an administration has seriously attempted to embrace the Internet not as an extension of existing media but as a new medium in its own right. But it is still not up to snuff, it still shows an attitude that the primary role of the Internet is to reduce the cost of public services whilst increasing their quality — in this case making it faster and cheaper and more efficient to maintain a (albeit well-intentioned) veil of accountability for the massive spending being undertaken.
The recovery.gov site is kind of clunky. It also doesn’t go very deep. Mousing over the map of Iowa for example shows that $1,08 billion has been announced for Iowa. Clicking on Iowa takes you to a list of spending programs (of which the state budget stabilization fund is at the top at $472 million) for which money has been allocated. And… that’s pretty much it.
On the other hand, recovery.org is far more in depth. At their website, I can see that there are 291 active projects valued at $250.4 milion. I can drill down by county to see that Clinton has 2 active projects valued at $1.6 million and by drilling down further I can see that those two projects are for replacement buses for the Transit Authority.
Now, recovery.org is the product of onvia.com, a for-profit organizaiton that helps companies find state and fedral contract opportunities. They have a large research staff that combs federal, state and local media to glean this detailed information and post it not only for the benefit of their customers but free for everyone. Onvia’s information is not complete, just showing what projects are currently open for bid, instead of all projects planned, let and in progress or complete. But that’s okay, that’s not what Onvia is about.
What it does show is the power of community production and how the creative collective production that creates something like Wikipedia can be harnessed to keep our government accountable. And while things like recovery.org can scale up to the national level, they can also be scaled down to the state and local level.