Archive for '11:15 Sat'

Congress 2.0

Posted on 02. Apr, 2009 by thedrake000.

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http://briandrake.wordpress.com/2009/03/29/congress-20/

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[Room 108] Twitter in Crisis Communications with the Air Force

Posted on 28. Mar, 2009 by lkthrock.

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Case Study: Witness reports crash of Air Force C-17. Within a minute the story was on CNN. Seventeen minutes later, the Air Force countered that it wasn’t true using Twitter.  Fifty-five minutes later CNN retracted story.

Rumor control was phenomenal and empowering. 

With the C-17 scenario, the Air Force had established a precedent for quick response . A couple days there was an F22 crash (which was true), so they had to balance the expectation/precedent for quick response with the time needed to inform families of those who lost their lives. To balance, the Air Force  issued a statement indicating that they were aware of the situation and were insuring and validating information. As the story began to materialize on Facebook, they continued to communicate and ask for patience as they notified next of kin.

Citizen’s for a Free Tibet uses Twitter as the backbone/back channel of crisis communication.

Case Study: Twitter “Vote Report” - developed series of hashtags, 800 numbers, iPhones, androids, to aggregate  data (full case study on Personal Democracy Forum - www.personaldemocracy.com) - software is from get hub.

Monitoring tools: http://search.twitter.com and www.tweetgrid.com

Discussion of concern over using Twitter as the sole channel for crisis communication. Twitter should be one channel. 

SMS is the most reliable channel in a crisis. Frontline SMS mentioned. 

Q: How do you handle the intentional “bad actors?” 

A: Suggested that your community will drown them out. 

Case Study: State Department - There was a rumor started on Twitter that the U.S. was harboring people in Madagascar last week. State decided that because the rumor was started on Twitter, they were going to combat it on Twitter and were successful.

Opinion: Distinguish between micro blogs in a private, contained, closed network and Twitter. Using a public service like Twitter opens up to to bad actors.

Private options:

Laconica - Open Source Twitter clone

IRC

WordPress

Mission is always first, the tool is what helps you accomplish mission.

Lots of debate on  the use  of Twitter at the RNC (specifically with regards to Activist communications). Thought on public versus private networks - private networks often get shut down by local governments in crisis situations.

A first responder commented that sometime the lack of information is critical to control. Not to be secretive about it, but to protect the scene (like an active  shooter situation at a high school) and in order to deliver accurate information. Many times the real-time communication causes mass hysteria and panic. It’s not always about free and open information, sometimes it’s about accurate information.

Continue the discussion at Barcamp.org/CrisisCamp  - Washington, DC - June 13-14

These are the notes for the session http://www.government20club.org/2009/03/room-108-using-twitter-in-crisis-management/

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Social Media & Economy

Posted on 28. Mar, 2009 by BaileyMcC.

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Hi, my name is Bailey McCann you can find me @BaileyMcC. These are the notes from the session Social Media & Economy.

Three Theories of Economics-

  • Libertarian - get rid of government regulation and buy a gun.
  • Levels - if you adjust the different levels you’ll come out fine.
  • Social Economics - people do things when they feel good so when that crashes you have a problem.

Now there are ways of getting a lot of things done for free.  Continuing to bridge the digital divide means that even if you have no money, you’ll still have things to do .  How do you relate the social media phenomenon effectively to economics?

If you look at scenario’s for economics over the next ten years things look kind of dire.  So is there a way for web 2.0/social media to help with these kinds of issues? What is the government role in these issues?

  • Protectionists have said our interconnectedness is what brought us all down - but that’s economically connected, not so much people connected in the way that they are through social media.
  • If we can help poorer countries break the digital divide, should USAID be responsible for laying bigger pipes? Is there an ROI argument for that?
  • Isolation breeds bad things look at North Korea, Pakistan, etc. The downside to not investing is isolation, losing the digital leadership potential in those areas.
  • Presenting the economic argument for these issues effectively is key because it already has to align with the broader goals of the decision makers.

The premise is the US has ways to get out of the deep recession because everyone will loan us money.  But what about other countries who are not so lucky?

  • Pakistan is on life support economically, they also have nuclear weapons. Should we invest in their technology as a national security issue to ease the issues of poverty through increasing connection.
  • You need a stable country for a stable economy so if social media technologies stabilizes people is that not a strong enough economic economy?
  • UK commenter points out that how the focus on in the US is top down, whereas in the UK the top down efforts fail, and the focus is people up.
  • Government in DC is its own industry but outside that loop everyone is spread out taking care of themselves because they can’t trust the government to take care of them at any level.

Economists have been forecasting for a few years that there has to be a huge technology development to save the economy because trust in investments will continue to fall.

  • Need a psychology breakthrough more than a technology breakthrough because too many people still think they can make fast money in the markets and its a ponzi scheme. Combined with much of those returns because real cost has never been accounted for. Then responsibility falls on government to come in and clean those up.
  • Public-private partnerships/”1000 flowers bloom” are failing at the national level, there has been consistent movement away from investments like DARPA/Internet.  But a lot of other pub-private partnerships are happening far away in the UK or in towns/cities.
  • People have to willing to take risks for potentially smaller returns.
  • Internet has been detrimental to markets because it allows speculators to collaborate and change investor psychology through blogs and message boards.
  • Education about these issues has to increase almost before or with the increase of regulation
  • Stock market is a poor predictor because it follows influencers and allows for a herd mentality.

Macroeconomically though, regardless of the causes, even if SM was part of the problem via gaming/shorting - can it be part of the solution because isolation leads to crimes, war, etc. Should there be a community that brings people together say from India and from Pakistan?

  • Can you use social networks to prevent catastrophic events?  If you look at most major wars there was a large economic problem preceding them.     Can we trust the SM audience to ameliorate that, by personal connections rather than a competitive economic interconnectedness?
  • Can Semantic web/linked data create more trust in investments by offering stable linked data?
  • What happened to dividends? Focus on stock value because CEO’s are shareholders in their own companies.

Systems like Drupal/Wordpress are bringing down the costs for setting up networks/distribution. So what does that do economically?

  • Examples, music, publishing - creative destruction of their business model.
  • If you invest in the connectedness pipes, terminals, for open source platform run systems how does that fit in? The business world doesn’t embrace in open source because it has lower returns. Open source is forcing the evolution of business models.
  • A richer life but not completely focused on monetarily richer life.  You have to shift from money to the personal benefits of a more connected but not more monied life.  People have to have that shift from old ways themselves by interacting with the technologies and understanding what the connectedness means.
  • Can we create value using social media methods that adds value to the living standard for everyone? Does being able to express your frustration through Facebook ameliorate the need to go out and steal, get drunk, etc.
  • Hope for the administration to build out the knowledge superhighway - that can employ a lot of people to build out frameworks like Digg/bookmarks/etc.
  • Linked data can provide better knowledge management solutions by linking data that’s not planned to already link.
  • Privacy issues come with linked data- but linked data can provide better security by allowing you to make individual items private rather than whole chunks.
  • Is there funding for linked data? Capital will find good solutions esp if they are presented well/as being relevant.

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Cloud Computing, Web 2.0, and Web 3.0 Semantic Web

Posted on 28. Mar, 2009 by mollymoran.

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Mills Davis, of Project10X, is leading a session called, “From E-Gov to Connected Governance: What is the Role of Cloud Computing, Web 2.0, and Web 3.0 Semantic Technologies in an Era of Connected Governance?”.  It’s a full room, and right now we’re introducing ourselves.  Seems there are many technical people here.

Eek - technical difficulties!  Mills will begin without the projector.

Connected governance: we’re moving to a digital age democracy (to participatory, engaged, integrated interactions between gov’t and citizens).  New models and ecosystems for engagement, interaction, decision-making, and service delivery.

The “next internet”: internet of services, things, and 3D interactivity; virtualized infrastructure and everything as a service.  Cloud computing is: scalable, on-demand, click-and-run, pay-by-the-drink resources and services provisioned over the Internet.

One benefit of “pay-by-the-drink” is not having to go through the procurement cycle.

What is Web 3.0?  A web of meanings.  Semantic technologies represent knowledge separately from documents, data, and program code.  

How does this apply to search?  Recovery, discovery, intelligence, question answering, and smart behaviors.

Next generation collaboration?  Combining wikis, semantic content tools, semantic search, ontology-driven applications, and intelligent user interfaces.

Mills gives seven steps that every agency can take (see last slide of presentation).

Good question from the audience about how to deal with inter-disciplinary knowledge: how does the semantic web combine knowledge when we have different understandings of what things mean?  Mills’ answer: we deal with this problem in all discourse (conflict, ambiguity, etc) - it’s part of the knowledge.

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Citizen 2.0

Posted on 28. Mar, 2009 by Andrew J. Cohen.

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Introductions:

Session facilitator: Andrea Baker (@immunity), Navstar, Inc.

Alan Rosenblatt: Disturbed to learn that Yahoo trademarked “citizen 2.0″ about 1.5 year ago! Perfer “citizen 2.0″ to “web 2.0″ because it’s about individuals.

Roxie Merrit, Department of Defense

Noel Dickover, Communibuild.com

Lucas Cioffi, co-founder, Deepdebate.org

Alan Silberberg, You2gov.net

Wayne Burke: openforumfoundation.org - building open platform for voter verification, etc.

openthegovernment.org - a coalition of organizations (over half state-based.

Eric Brown from FEC - polticalactivitylaw.com

Federal Practice for Gov delivery

Todd Pitt: need to provide tools and also let them know they now have an opportunity to participate. How do you keep them engaged and not get discouraged.

Census Bureau - as 2010 census comes up, we need better ways to reach/engage citizens so that they participate.

Kevin - xmdr.org

Anne Baker, grad student, works at Library of Congress

Ryan Alexander - Booze Allen Hamilton

Xena Washington - Social Media Consultant at IBM. How do we plan to respond when citizens actually start interacting.

Discussion

Was it a problem that the marijuana pro-legalization crowd dominated the question submission/voting for White House’s online town hall this week.  Is this a problem? ” Use ambition to counteract ambition” (James Madison) to make sure both sides are heard.

A fundamental shift is needed to release things. It’s not like many agencies are sitting on information that is structured in a pristine format. It’s all messy. It’s going to take time.

Several participants felt like that Obama (and media) marginized pro-marijuana activists who used new tools to bring their issue to the fore. People just dismissed it as “orchestrated.”

The questions that were answered were not the end of the White House discussion. This is new data that they can mine going forward.

But this tactic was a “web 2.0″ method. It increased the connection between government and citizens.

Example: Lance Armstrong’s bike was found and returned via people who learned about it via Twitter. Local police then started monitoring twitter (and relevant hashtags to monitor local happenings).

Question: Is Twitter (or microblogging generally) the most influential “citizen 2.0″ tool? (one person felt that connections are stronger via MySpace, etc.)

Book: Gareth Morgan “Images of Organization” — recommended book to understanding how beauracracies work (Organization as a Machine).

The power of social media is to spread the right message to the right audience — faster.

Plus these tools are “levelers.”

Question: Can we get someone like Guy Kawasaki and others to start using a common hashtag to aggregate “citizen20″ resources on alltop, and make it more easily found on Google.

How do we get the citizen’s trust. For some agencies — such as Federal Election Commission (FEC) is difficult. Tools can help build trust.

Industry messages — and co-option of social media tools — often have trouble gaining traction when people don’t see the value for themselves.

Hill staff are so busy, but will work with you if the information you provide to them is high-quality, and they know that they can trust you. For example, if they send you a draft of a bill in confidence, they can trust you won’t share it, if they ask you to not to.

Links mentioned:

http://www.communibuild.com/2009/03/16/putting-citizens-on-par-with-lobbyists/

http://adrielhampton.wordpress.com/2009/01/31/what-the-perfect-citizen-20-training/

http://blogs.zdnet.com/feeds/?p=331

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[Room 108] Twitter in Crisis Communications

Posted on 28. Mar, 2009 by lkthrock.

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[Room 108] Twitter in Crisis Communications with the Air Force

Case Study: Witness reports crash of Air Force C-17. Within a minute the story was on CNN. Seventeen minutes later, the Air Force countered that it wasn’t true using Twitter.  Fifty-five minutes later CNN retracted story.

Rumor control was phenomenal and empowering. 

Establish quick response for squashing a rumor. A couple days there was an F22 crash (that was true), so they had to balance the expectation/precedent for quick response with the time needed to info families.

in this case the Air Force  issued a statement indicating that they were aware of the situation and were insuring and validating information. As the story began to materialize on Facebook, they cntinued to communicate and ask for patience as they notified next of kin.

Citizen’s for a Free Tibet uses Twitter as the backbone/back channel of crisis communication.

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[Backstage] Open Source Security and Requirements

Posted on 28. Mar, 2009 by lkthrock.

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[Backstage] Open Source Security and Requirements with Pete CEO panel

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[Room 220] Agile Processes & Energizing Distributed Teams

Posted on 28. Mar, 2009 by yarnmaven.

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[Room 116] Role of Cloud-Computing w/ Gov 2.0

Posted on 28. Mar, 2009 by yarnmaven.

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[Room 101] What’s Your Problem? Making the answers.

Posted on 28. Mar, 2009 by sanford.

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In this session, we will collect the standard reasons for why government operations (IT, CIOs, CTOs) do not/can not/will not employ Web 2.0 strategies. Then we will work amoungst ourselves to answer the responses with examples and answers to communicate ROI and political value.

Presentor: Sanford Dickert (@sanford)

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