Citizen 2.0

Posted on 28. Mar, 2009 by Andrew J. Cohen in 11:15 Sat, Blog, Government 2.0 Camp Day 2

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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