10:15 Sat | Government 2.0 Club

Local Government Follow-Up

Posted on 28. Mar, 2009 by schrier.

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Notes from the Local Government follow-up discussion, Government 2.0 Barcamp, Saturday, March 28th, Room 101. Notes by Bill Schrier, CTO, City of Seattle, bill@schrier.org

Summary of underlying or overarching ideas and themes from this session.

· If the Obama administration rolled out an open standard on collaboration, open source tools, created a space for local governments and communities, would local government use it. Sort of an Interstate Highway system for transparency and collaboration. Collaboration spaces, community meetings, RSS feeds, community-based widgets (EPA), etc. Turn the government upside down from being hierarchical to more community based.
· Can Governing be helpful in fostering these conversation.
· Government 2.0 uses in emergency situations - NIMS, ICS - best practices for use of social media in these situation.
· Convergence - where are the lines or are there lines between levels of governments or governments - people don’t want to worry about which level or kind of government - they want service!
· Inverted dollars - more dollars to federal government but there are local needs such as schools and parks.
· State senators as “social workers” - issues which need to be addressed or promoting business - placing the senator as a connector and aggregator of info across the state. Similar connections across the United States.
· Fifty state wiki - best practices for internal and external practices and innovations, policies, strategy, case study. Legislative wikipedia.
· Empowering local governments - is this just 1960’s community organization which degenerated into unfunded mandates. Is there a way to empower local governments.
· Data standards for local governments in a peer kind of way? Local governments have all sorts of different databases which prevent data sharing. Data fiefdoms and silos. Voterfile is another example of the lack of standardization and sharing.
· City state and local governments are separate but how can data be made more available and transparent through widgets and other government 2.0 tools.
· Using social media to connect blockwatches through blogs or other social networking.
· Taking this information and ideas and working it into better service delivery.
· Integrated social media in a community … face-to-face parties to introduce web 2.0 tools. “Large governments” and organizations have difficulty responding in crisis situations so communities and neighborhoods need to have established relationships to meet these crises.

Government 2.0
· Bi-directional communication
· Putting info on the net in a way people can understand it
· Empowerment of individuals through the use of transparency of data - info about parcels of land and twitter.
· How much can citizens be empowered when they have elected officials who they have empowered to run the governments and make the decisions.
· Turning elected officials into spoke-and-hub contacts - for the people of the people, governing with the consent of the people - have become distracted from these ideals over the past 200 years and need to return to that. Concentric networks of people. Empowering people to engage their officials.
· Putting the “representative” back in “representative democracy” - many have been doing this, but with difficulty.
· Still a role for a leader - to have a greater vision and communicate that - but the leader’s vision can also be informed by empowering individual citizens.
· Not so much about “turning it over” to citizens as making the information readily accessible so they can engage.
· Onus is on government to make the data available. Web 1.0 is putting information online, but needs to be searchable and mashed up and used and aggregated. Getting back to basics.
· How is it integrated - data on neighborhoods is collected by feds, state, local but held in their respective silos.
· An impending tremendous shift - heading into 80 years of chaos and the fall of the nation-state. The rise of community groups. Fedgov too big and unresponsive. Nation is struggling with how to add value. There is a role for leadership here - efficiency in services and understanding the major shift of power from centralized to distributed.
· Example: senators and representatives cannot vote when they are out of town. Huh?
· Data and data portability rather than proprietary information. Data transportability between levels of government.
· Empowering individual constituents to take action via availability of data in this fashion, compiling these different data sets, safety record of a school system or a particular building.
· Does mass internet communication actually result in mass interaction or engagement? The predominant attitude of most people toward their government is … apathy?
· Reduces the cost of interaction between organizations and internally to externally.
· Peer creation - people try to hold on to information (to hold on to their jobs or power?) - government 2.0 is about information sharing.
· Ask “citizens” to create the advertising or outreach?
· Generational theory - four of them, cyclical and occuring in a regular order - 80 year cycle. Gen X is ascending into mid-life and has the experience and world view to solve the problems of the day. Boomers ascended into midlife to solve the problems of that day. Gen X worldview: systems are very broken. We have broken systems. Not time for a values conversation about relevancy. Gen X’ers understand a “broken” world? If a local government doesn’t open up its data, a Gen Xer might move elsehwere. Gen Xer’s not loyal to institutions but rather data. Ascending power is this Gen X value - local governments need to open up their data.
· Want to live in a county that opens up its data and builds community through social media.
· We don’t “give” people the systems to find data - we put the data out there and let them “work” it …
· How do policy get formed, how do decisions get made and the cost of land.
· Community meetings with flip charts, not enuf pencils and the microphone doesn’t work - not even the agenda was displayed and people couldn’t participate online. Idea: how do we use these tools to transform the public meeting process.
· How do we get people who are not tech saavy on board with this agenda? Some people don’t use the Internet for much more than e-mail?
· Change has to come at the level of the elected officials. When there is too much detail there is also a “shitstorm” of conflicting ideas. Three minutes at the microphone is the way most people get input into the process with elected officials. Having too much data out there gives too much chance to second guess or offer conflicting ideas.
· A mandate to “try things” … take risks, but make the trials or pilots simple and clear - if you are going to fail, “fail quickly and cheaply”.
· Challenge: Where do we start - can we start piecemeal - one small step, e.g. budget process is very hush-hush but then the budget comes out and asking for feedback, but people are then angry because they have not had a chance to look at the data or analyze it.