Archive: Year: 2009

Right now, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy's blog is in the middle of the second, "Discussion," phase of its unique effort to engage the public online in fleshing out the details of President Obama's Open Government Directive. After a bit of a rocky start, with a flood of semi-disruptive posts from "birthers," the conversation seems to be finding its footing. A new post by Robynn Sturm, titled "Transparency: Open Government Operations," raises some interesting questions and is generating equally stimulating answers. She writes: As the Obama Administration contemplates new approaches to making government more open, we want to hear from you. What do you – the non-profit fighting in the public interest, the company creating jobs for...

The folks at the National Academy of Public Administration who are managing the White House's Open Government Initiative brainstorm site have posted a call to participants for help. Specifically, help in voting down "postings you feel are counterproductive to maintaining a free-flowing exchange of ideas" and help in flagging content "that you feel is duplicative or inappropriate to the discussion." While the post speaks only in general terms, it's clear that it's a reaction to the flood of posts in recent days from people raising questions about President Obama's birth certificate and his eligibility to be president (whom I derisively referred to as the "birthers.") To NAPA's credit, they haven't simply deleted the many posts on this topic, which they could do...

It looks like people in the Middle East wonder whether President Barack Obama, who is visiting their country later this week to make what is being billed as a historic address to the world's Muslims, is himself a Muslim. A lot more than Americans do, at the moment. Check out what happens if you start searching on Google for "Obama" after telling the search engine that your "region" is Egypt: Looks like they want to know more about his middle name, too. (I found the same results for Syria, Saudi Arabia and Israel, which suggests that the Google search engine is aggregating results from the whole region rather than one country.) The same search, originated in the U.S., shows more...

Right now, the Open Government Dialogue created as part of the Obama administration's new initiative to engage the public in a participatory discussion of ways to make the federal government more transparent and collaborative looks like it is being overrun by the so-called "birthers"--conspiracy nuts who think the President isn't legitimately a U.S. citizen. Here's a screenshot of recent tweets from @ogovbrainstorm, which automatically shows which ideas have recently gotten 20 positive votes or more: The site also appears to have experienced a big jump in users and comments in the last few days, which may be coincidental or a sign that more people are hearing about it randomly, but also a possible sign of trouble. All online interactive sites are subject...

[This letter is reposted from DIYcity.org, with the permission of its author, John Geraci. We fully endorse its contents and call on others to help spread the word. The Editors. The Honorable Michael R. Bloomberg Mayor of New York City City Hall New York, NY 10007 Dear Mayor Bloomberg: Under your leadership, the City's 311 System has grown into an invaluable civic service that has accumulated vast amounts of actionable data about all kinds of topics residents of New York City care deeply about. Now is the time to transform 311 into a tool of even greater value, for use by elected officials, policy makers, local leaders, and everyday New Yorkers by allowing any and all software developers to freely access, work with and...

Here's an updated guide to the breakout sessions in the works for Personal Democracy Forum 2009. This year's theme is "We.gov"--in other words, all the ways that people are using the internet and interactive communications technologies to transform politics, campaigns, media, governance and civic action. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, we're envisioning four main thematic tracks to the breakout sessions, which will run in the afternoon of both days of the conference: 1) State-of-the-art online politics; 2) Exploring government 2.0; 3) New organizing opportunities, tools and challenges; and 4) The future of political journalism, blogging and networked media. There's also a couple of sessions that bridge several of these categories that we think will be pretty interesting as...

Calling all developers: The Sunlight Foundation, Google, O'Reilly Media and Techweb are launching a new contest, Apps for America 2: The Data.gov Challenge, to celebrate the launch of Data.gov today. They're looking for applications using one or more of the data sources on this new open repository of government information, and will judge submissions based on the following criteria: 1. Transparency: Does the application help citizens see things they couldn’t see before it existed? 2. Permanence: Will the application be usable over a long period of time? 3. Design & Visualization: Does the application visualize data in a new and interesting way? The $25,000 in prizes will be divided among 14 winners, with the top three receiving airfare and hotel for a trip to...

I'm going to start posting, as much as possible, about the variety of fantastic speakers and panels we're having at Personal Democracy Forum this year, and I'm starting with one of the most unusual, our session with authors Doug Rushkoff and Tara Hunt on "Building the Social Economy: CraigBucks, NewMarks and Making Whuffie." Doug Rushkoff has been writing about all things cyber for longer than almost anyone, and the perspective he brings to the discussion this year may be the most radical that you've heard yet. He calls his new book, Life, Inc., his "life's work" and even from this short video he's made about it, you can see how the book ties together all of the major themes that he's...

We're hard at work on this year's sixth annual Personal Democracy Forum, taking place June 29-30 in New York City, and I thought this would be a good time to share more details on all the incredible breakout sessions in the works. (We'll also have an announcement soon with more of our confirmed speakers; the current list is here.) As you know, this year's theme is "We.gov"--in other words, all the ways that people are using the internet and interactive communications technologies to transform politics, campaigns, media, governance and civic action. And that includes more transparency on how the sausage is made. Hence this post. Right now, we're envisioning four main thematic tracks to the breakout sessions, which will run in...

When it comes to government agencies adapting to the Networked Age, the State Department is no slouch. It's had an Office of eDiplomacy since 2003; its staffers make heavy use of an internal unclassified online encyclopedia called Diplopedia; it's been blogging since September 2007 at Dipnote; and now State even has a Twitter feed. ExchangesConnect, a cultural exchange social networking site (built on Ning.com) that focuses on foreign exchange students, recently topped its 10,000th member. Under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the State Department has also been in the forefront of Obama administration moves to experiment with and adopt new ways to interact with the public, including using YouTube and text-messaging as ways to pose questions directly. The overall push...