Archive for 'Government 2.0 Camp Day 2'
Congress 2.0
Posted on 02. Apr, 2009 by thedrake000.
http://briandrake.wordpress.com/2009/03/29/congress-20/
Continue Reading
[Auditorium] Running a Federal Blog
Posted on 02. Apr, 2009 by lkthrock.
[Auditorium] Running a Federal Blog with Jeffrey Levy of EPA
EPA launched a blog called Greenversations on Earthday in 2008.
Had some people from State come to consult on best practices (State’s blog is DipNote)
Focus on Mission, Mission, Mission
Why communicate?
What do they need to know?
What do you need to know?
Wanted to get people jazzed about the environment.
Why blog?
Put a human face on the agency (aka the big black box).
Share personal stories of environmental thinking (e.g. buying a car, gardening).
Share the breadth of government work (dye’s used to color your sheets to pesticides on the food we eat - all regulated by EPA).
Speak in a new way (the way that isn’t a press release or a planned speech).
Supplement, not replace , other channels .
On Comments:
Simple, clear comment policy
- Be civil (don’t attack or use vulgar language)
- Don’t spam
- Stay on topic
Comment policy is linked on the blog. Comment section says “Read the Comment Policy, Leave a Comment”
Comments are usually approved in a day
EPA’s experience: 11 months, 6000 comments, 10 nasty ones (most came in the first month)
Nervous management? Point to other agencies that are doing it.
People seem to respond to the idea that an agency is blogging - a cool lightbulb effect.
Three regular features every week:
Question of the week (Monday)
- Gets the most comments: usually 50 or more (e.g. do you bike to work? do you buy bottled water? cloth vs. disposable diapers, etc.)
- Some have received hundreds of responses
- Advertised to 55,000 news release recipients
Science Wednesday (wants to promote that EPA is, in fact, a science agency)
- Run by research/development office
Bilingual Thursday (
- English/Spanish were in the same post, now split
- Managed by our Hispanic Liason w/three writers
EPA has been astonished with the articulateness and thoughtfulness of comments.
Q: What is response policy?
A: Encourage bloggers to respond, don’t require them to. No complaints to date on what’s happening with EPA’s comments.
Original goal/intention was 3 posts a week. Since onset, it has defied expectations and posts are daily.
Q: Process of launching the blog?
A: Strong requirement that everything reside on EPA.gov, so launched an experiment on an HTML site that couldn’t accept comments. Then set up a TypePad account (flowoftheriver.gov). Made case for a real blogging platform (requirements). Started using WordPress hosted internally (LAMP server that hosts blog and wiki) and then had the conversation with State Department to understand their best practices. Within EPA, individuals interested in blogging needed to get their managers approval and they had an intro conversation with Jeffrey. Created a blogger guide: www.scribd.com/levyj413.
Q: How do you work through approvals with very scientific posts/comments?
A: Your role is whether it’s vulgar, etc. not the scientific discussion.
Q: Did launching your successful blog make people want their own?
A: Yes, but that has been balanced by commitment or quantity of content realization. We can give them their own categories pretty easily. Logistically it’s easier for them to do it through Greenversations.
Q: How do you get bloggers?
A: We have a good communicators network. Asked them to nominate people to be bloggers. They went out and found good people for us. We’re always asking people. next step is blogger outreach for guest bloggers. Jeffrey also finds people on Twitter - people passionate and consistent on Twitter.
Gratuitous plug - www.epa.gov/earthday - submit photos and videos in various categories. Starting April 1st, will feature content that catches EPA’s eye.
Q: Do you have blogs internally on your Intranet?
A: One or two.
Audience suggestion: Set up a google doc or wiki and Tweet that “we’re looking for guest bloggers.” Very fast as a way of generating a guest blogger list. Example: http://www.isteconnects.org/2009/03/13/calling-all-twitter-users-going-to-necc-2009/
With regards to records management, it’s not FOIA-able because it’s online (so already available). Storage is not an issue because it’s very small as far as data size goes.
We don’t allow people to promote products. Too hard to discern between honest third-party recommendation and company promoting.
We don’t have a blogger core yet, will be open to teleconference, live Twitter chats when that is assembled.
Use Vocus, www.vocus.com, to identify bloggers.
Continue Reading
Creating a Citizen Driven Idea Sourcing Platform & Needs Matching System
Posted on 29. Mar, 2009 by corbett3000.
The following presentation will provide you with a detailed recap of Peter Corbett’s session during Government 2.0 Camp on “Creating a Citizen Driven Idea Sourcing Platform & Needs Matching System”.
Creating a Citizen Driven Idea Sourcing Platform & Needs Matching System from Gov 2.0 on Vimeo.
DOWNLOAD THE PRESENTATION or flip through here:
Citizen Driven Idea Sourcing and Solutions Matching
Drawing by Diane Cline
Continue Reading
[Room 205] Strategies for Deep Citizen Participation
Posted on 29. Mar, 2009 by macurak.
Jeff Christensen, Rhiza Labs
Deep Citizen Participation goes beyond 142-character messages – deep civic engagement is when citizens, armed with data, can translate data into action and use it in interacting with elected officials
Three easy steps:
FIRST: Distribute something. Do this first or there’s nothing to talk about.
SECOND: Then, create tools that allow the community to MAKE something. Can be meetings, maps, whitepapers, whatever.
THIRD: Then make it so those tools can allow them to DO something, to get what they’ve created into their lives and into action.
Solutions before problems
We say we want all public data accessible to us immediately – once we have it, what do we do with it? Understanding this requires understanding your audience – not just who consumes data, but who makes it.
Define your problem, then use the audience to determine its solution. (A website with mapping tools? Web service API? Depends on community – there is a laundry list of technologies, determine the audience to figure out which.)
One scientist creates coveted dataset – now what happens with it? Are people going to use it?
To address this, implement built-in feedback loops directly within the tool. Link an artifact to every single time that data has been used by someone else – allow users to comment, leave ratings – build in the conversation between different parts of audience
Rhiza’s examples: Insight.3rc.org; insight.rhizalabs.com; humanservices.net; Southwestern PA After School
If we’re talking about Deep Engagement, we want to inform a group of people to give them a specific action to take – if you give everyone all the information after they digest it they have no time to take a position
So, design tools that enable people to make sense of that data – figure out how users can actually use the data and how it can influence others to take action – can create a cascading effect
Data.octo.dc.gov (DC OCTO)
Apps for Democracy
Can issue-oriented groups mash up the tools and data to communicate across constituencies, make the data available and people who are interested will make things happen?
Gov’t also has a responsibility to provide info in plain language ways that is direct and unbiased to get people who aren’t going to be affected by NGOs or where there is no NGO ecosystem around the topic or where NGO ecosystem is too polarized to be able to use it.
Other problems:
Most people interact with local government over federal government.
Twitter is not deep engagement.
In rural areas no one is building mashups.
If you’re interested in deeper engagement, making data available so people can play with it is great but not enough – and how long will it take until all of gov’t data is available ? – but you have to start making inroads.
Deep engagement is more than just having information available. Gov’t produces so much information and groups are overwhelmed by their content and have no knowledge of correlating activity or how it relates to them
Local governments vs. federal government
Federal has variety of information – business not accessible to average citizen – than you would see on the local level.
All these social networking tools out there, and people can comment on all different things, supposed to be used to engage the public to action – but when simple public meetings aren’t online for them to access, what are they going to use it for?
Current social tools we have access to are just about as effective for this as Web 1.0 “Click to email your congressman your comment” forms – i.e., not effective.
How do you take what’s online and interact in the community with people, with agencies, with whoever your audience is?
Depends on where you’re at in the process – if you’re at gov’t level impact is how open is your data, at advocacy group level how many people are you mobilizing, how are you impacting your legislators?
Citizen-initiated data-driven action
One city neighborhood used public data to prevent a park being clseod for re-routing the tracks – citizen engagement through info gathering and dissemination also engaged legislators, railroad officials.
Bird counts and bucket brigades – citizen-contributed data to large-scale research products
Continue Reading
Ten Recommendations for Successful Government Transparency
Posted on 28. Mar, 2009 by corbett3000.
Ten Measures for Transparency Success from Gov 2.0 on Vimeo.
The following video was created at http://government20club.org ’s un-conference “Government 2.0 Camp” and talks about ten factors for effective transparent governance.
Explanation by Andrew Rasiej of
http://www.personaldemocracy.com/
http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/
http://www.personaldemocracy.com/
Live mural graphic by Diane Cline of
Video recorded by Peter Corbett and published with NO RIGHTS RESERVED.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=ea72325b-5488-4822-87b8-ea7d7cf3303b)
Continue Reading
[Room 120] Brainstorm - Bridging the Web 2.0 Generation Gap
Posted on 28. Mar, 2009 by lkthrock.
Andrew’s blog (@krazykriz) http://generationshift.blogspot.com - he’ll post his presentations there and they are also below.
@dlblack - Is there a generation Gap with Web 2.0 tools adoption? If so, what do we do about it?
Unique sceanrio in the govt: The Greatest Generation, Baby Boomers, Xers, Millenials (Gen Y)
@JesseX - Four architypes:
Prophet/Idealist - Dominant
- define inner world of values and culture
- baby Boomer (1943 - 1960)
- Hippies
Nomad/Reactive - Reccesive
- pragmatic check on idealist excesses
- Thirteenth/Gen X (1961 - 1981)
- Juvenile Delinquents
Hero/Civic - Dominant
- rebuild the outer world of technology and institution
- GI, (1901 - 1924)
- Millenial (1982 - 200?)
- Boy Scouts
Artist/Adaptive - recessive
- ameliorate Civic excess and omissions
- Silent (1925 - 1942)
- Homeland (?)
Gov20Camp - Generations and Social Media
Generation C - consumer generating content - some one of any age that is actively using social media.
Stat: There are more boomers on the internet than milenials.
Important to understand online pursuits by generation.
USA Today article Boomers zero in on Social Media.
Boomers aren’t really going to retire - will take second careers to help others.
Gen Xers are right in the middle - those who feel like they didn’t have a voice.
Social media can help bridge the gap to government jobs (millenials)
Social media is not just for kids
Great need for training
Must be sensitive to people of all ages
Boomers need to create the culture now
Recruitment o f new
E-mail: transactional allows for control. Web 2.0 is much more horizontal.
Gen Xers (nomad architype) - hit childhood when children were a hassle. Millenials hit young adulthood in an opposite environment. Boomers are oriented towards turf.
This country needs practical Gen X leaders to serve as leadership.
Assume the monetary system that we know will not exist in short order.
2005 Census
Boomers - 64 million
Generation - 81 million
Millennial - 79 million
Social media bridges the gap because we don’t see ages.
Make it about the millennials, because Gen Xers will need to siphon between the two.
Craft your need in support of the rising generation.
Here’s a link to the Twitter stream from this session: http://tinyurl.com/c3ec23
Continue Reading
[Room 108] Twitter in Crisis Communications with the Air Force
Posted on 28. Mar, 2009 by lkthrock.
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/
Continue Reading
Social Media & Economy
Posted on 28. Mar, 2009 by BaileyMcC.
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.
Continue Reading
Cloud Computing, Web 2.0, and Web 3.0 Semantic Web
Posted on 28. Mar, 2009 by mollymoran.
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.
Continue Reading
Citizen 2.0
Posted on 28. Mar, 2009 by Andrew J. Cohen.
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
Continue Reading
-
stephenbuckley: As far as the "next step" for this "Top Ten" list,...
-
robinsonp: Anyone who is interested in virtual worlds and how...
-
pambroviak: Thanks Paulette for clarifying - there was so much...
-
-