Book chronicles how the Gov 2.0 movement is slowly becoming a reality

We’ve known for years how social media and Web 2.0 have been transforming the way political campaigns are run, the way we interact with big institutions, the way news is reported and distributed — indeed, practically all facets of modern society. So it comes as no surprise that social technologies are slowly transforming the way government works.

What is surprising is that editors Daniel Lathrop and Laurel Ruma and O’Reilly Media have managed to make a potentially wonky topic like Government 2.0 accessible, fresh and actually interesting. Open Government: Collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice is a big (432 pages), beautiful book, from the gorgeous, sumptuous cover to the breadth of ideas and angles inside. In its collection of 34 essays written by thought leaders and practitioners in government reform, the book offers dozens of examples of a new approach to government: open, democratic, distributed, bottom-up, shareable, data-driven and focused on making “we the people” a reality again.

Tim O’Reilly, CEO of O’Reilly Media — the best computer book publisher in the world — carried the same message in a webcast today that proved so popular my browser crashed four times. O’Reilly has been at the forefront of the open government movement and contributes the key second chapter, “Government as Platform.” O’Reilly Media co-produces the Gov 2.0 Expo, coming May 25-27, and Gov 2.0 Summit on Sept. 9-10, both in Washington, D.C.

In today’s “The Power of Platforms” webcast, O’Reilly touched on Apple’s iTunes Store, saying that Apple programmers had written only 15-20 apps for the launch of the iPhone but by opening up the platform (relatively speaking) to third-party developers, there are upwards of 200,000 apps in the store. “That’s the magic of the platform,” he said. He said governments need to take a similar approach, creating emergent platforms “instead of building finished solutions.”

O’Reilly cited a number of great examples (and the live chat contributed a few), ranging from Ushahidi in Haiti to the U.S. State Department on Twitter to the local businesses in Hawaii that decided to fix a key road themselves instead of waiting two years for government contractors. (I had already included a few of these examples in my upcoming Mobilize Your Cause Bootcamp at Personal Democracy Forum on June 2.) The webcast should be live soon — it’s worth a look

Opening up data mines, collaborating on revealing campaign contributions

In the book, the editors have assembled some of the top names in the government reform movement: Ellen Miller, Micah L. Sifry, Mark Drapeau, as well as Fernanda Viegas, Dan Gillmor and dozens of others. (Disclosure: I’m friends with many of these people.) You’ll learn about the potential of data.gov, the initiative to create a simple framework to share public information, and Open Secrets from the Center for Responsive Politics, used by MAPlight.org to correlate congressional voting patterns and campaign contributions. The chapter on Tweet Congress details the efforts to get members of Congress to use Twitter — even today, Republican Congressmen out number Democrats on Twitter by something like a 2-1 ratio. Other chapters lay out countless other examples of how open government has moved from a geek idea to the mainstream.

Writes O’Reilly in a key passage:

Government 2.0 is not a new kind of government; it is government stripped down to its core, rediscovered and reimagined as if for the first time. … There is a new compact on the horizon: information produced by and on behalf of citizens is the lifeblood of the economy and the nation; government has a responsibility to treat that information as a national asset. Citizens are connected like never before and have the skill sets and passion to solve problems affecting them locally as well as nationally. Government information and services can be provided to citizens where and when they need them. Citizens are empowered to spark the innovation that will result in an improved approach to governance. In this model, government is a convener and an enabler rather than the first mover of civic action.

If you roll your eyes at that and think government is the problem, buy the latest Ann Coulter fairytale. But if you believe that government belongs to us, and we can collectively convene to solve some of the great issues of our day, then get “Open Government” (it’s a bit pricey at $45 for the paperback — $36 as an ebook). Buy one for any of your friends who work in a government agency. Change can happen one small miracle at a time.

This is always a challenge for book publishers, but it’s too bad that the inside title page displays the usual “All rights reserved” copyright mark instead of a Creative Commons license, given the public importance of the topics covered. (Later: Seven chapters are available online as a downloadable PDF.) Still, much of the information layered in this book is available online, and I’m halfway done in putting together an Open Government section of the Socialbrite Sharing Center. This book will make a prominent addition to any such collection.

Note: In a previous life, I was — among many other things — a book editor at the Sacramento Bee.

Related

• Gov 2.0 folks to follow on Twitter (Socialbrite)

• Citizens as government watchdogs (Socialbrite)

• California’s Secretary of State: Come and collaborate! (Socialbrite)

• How the government can help spur social innovation (Socialbrite)

• Mobilize Your Cause Bootcamp at Personal Democracy Forum

• Civic Engagement on the Move: How mobile media can serve the public good (PDF — a free ebook by JD Lasica)

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You don’t need to be a card-carrying member of the press corps to serve as a public watchdog over the government and elected officials.

First, the Freedom of Information Act applies to U.S. citizens and foreign nationals, not just members of the Fourth Estate. Since its passage, countless examples of government waste, fraud and mismanagement have been brought to light by citizens, activists and journalists.

In addition, a number of organizations now empower citizens to hold the government accountable. Sites like the Sunlight Foundation, Maplight.org, Opensecrets.org, Follow the Money and OpenCongress are increasingly giving ordinary citizens the ability to easily document the flow of special-interest money and how it influences the legislature. Some of the top government watchdogs:

• Sunlight Foundation: The foundation says on its site: “Through our projects and grant-making, Sunlight serves as a catalyst for greater political transparency and to foster more openness and accountability in government. Sunlight’s ultimate goal is to strengthen the relationship between citizens and their elected officials and to foster public trust in government. We are unique in that technology and the power of the Internet are at the core of every one of our efforts. Our work is committed to helping citizens, bloggers and journalists be their own best government watchdogs, by improving access to existing information and digitizing new information, and by creating new tools and Web sites to enable all of us to collaborate in fostering greater transparency.”

• Opensecrets.org: From the Center for Responsive Politics, Opensecrets.org helps the public follow the money, such as donations made to legislators and their votes on related issues. A 2007 survey conducted by Opensecrets found that 59 percent of its users said they use the site for personal — not professional — reasons.

• Maplight.org: “MapLight.org’s open-data initiative epitomizes a technique known as ‘database journalism,’ a new reporting paradigm that allows citizens to act as consumers, custodians and contributors to vast wells of information stored in web databases,” writes Wired.com.

• Follow the Money: The site says it’s “the nation’s most complete resource for information on money in state politics.” It provides access to data by legislator, bill number, bill subject or special interest.

• OpenCongress (formerly Congresspedia): A project of PPF and the Sunlight Foundation, OpenCongress is an editable guide to Congress “for the people, by the people,” containing lots of wiki-based political reporting resources.

Sources: Wired.com, original reporting

Related

• Maplight shines a light on politics and money

• Freedom of Information: It’s for everyone

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Spent Wednesday night at SocialVoter, a special event featuring California Secretary of State Debra Bowen and presented by CitizenSpace and the Social Media Club. You can follow the tweets on Twitter — for the next two weeks, anyway, when they disappear. So I thought a blog recap would be in order.

Here, too, is a Flickr photo set of the gathering.

For readers who don’t know Debra Bowen, she’s one of the most forward-looking public officials in the land, with a presence on Twitter (@DBowen) and Facebook and, more importantly, a commitment to bringing the public into public policy discussions.

The conversation between Bowen and the 35 participants in the room was free-flowing and wide-ranging, with suggestions about how to provide voters with critical information about candidates and ballot initiatives, how to crowdsource ballot explanations, how to increase transparency in the election process, et al.

Instant runoffs and crowdsourcing ballot arguments

Some highlights:

• Debra Bowen: “The most important resource we have in the Secretary of State’s Office is that I’m there and I want to make this happen. I want people to tell me about how they think this should work. … That’s your job, to figure out where this might go” and to help her and her staff work in a highly collaborative way. “What if people actually worked at the front of the policy chain instead of reacting to it?”

Echoes of President Obama’s call for bottom-up civic participation.

• One practical reason Bowen is looking to democratize some of the work that might traditionally fall to her office: The Secretary of State’s office has 470 employees. 80% of them are doing corporate and business filings and document processing. The elections staff has fewer than 30 employees. The voter education “staff” consists of one full-time and two part-time workers.

• I’ve long been among those who support a system of “instant runoff voting,” which San Francisco has done in the past and Alameda County and other districts are now seriously considering.

In an instant runoff, voters get to vote for not just their favorite candidate but their second and third choices, allowing citizens to vote for their preferred candidate rather than the lesser of two evils. If your candidate finishes out of the running, your vote goes to your second choice, allowing races with multiple candidates to be decided instantly without a runoff. Brilliant.

Said Bowen: “One of the conditions will be a voter education program so we don’t lose a big chunk of voters for an election or two while they figure out how it works.”

• For decades, California voters have been presented with two sides of every ballot proposition, pro and con. “East of the Mississippi, no one does this,” Bowen said. They’re either flummoxed or amazed. But some states are looking to California to emulate the practice.

Meantime, Bowen is taking the pro and con idea one step further. What if we crowdsourced the ballot arguments? she asked us. How would that look? Who polices it? How could people contribute, and should the arguments be limited to just two?

• Bowen asked for a resource with an easy-to-understand glossary for the public to learn about terms like social media, APIs and Creative Commons. I pointed out that Socialbrite.org has the best social media glossary around, and we’re happy to expand it. (It’s shareable under a Creative Commons BY license.)

• One especially good idea: Use the social graf when it comes to financial disclosure to identify which groups are backing what propositions.

• More Bowen: “I don’t think there’s anyone in California with a .gov address who’s done anything with a wiki.” It’s time to change that, and the group came close to agreement on setting up a public site to document all of these resources.

• Bowen: “95% of the voter education budget is spent on newsprint to print the voter information guide.” Almost zero for online info.

• I asked about restrictions against rewarding people for voting. In New Jersey, you can get free donuts or a cup of coffee for showing your voting slip. Not so in California, where giving a voter a donut for voting is a crime. There are no federal laws against the practice, Bowen told me. But there may be good reasons for the state’s prohibition, which prevents monied interests from shepherding poor voters to the polls to vote for a specific issue.

Grassroots politics resources

Some of the grassroots organizations and resources that were mentioned during the evening:

• The Sunlight Foundation for its pioneering work providing watchdog tools and advocating for political reform and transparency.

• Dan Ancona is building a “Democracy Dashboard,” which he showed me (looks really cool) and which will be ready for release soon.

• Uservoice, a way to turn customer feedback into action.

• Ideascale, a “crowdsourcing platform providing a way to suggest and discuss ideas for increasing openness and transparency.”

• Google Moderator, a tool that allows distributed communities to submit and vote on questions for talks, presentations and events.

• Civio, a voter activation network that debuts this fall.

• TransparentDemocracy, a site that helps you understand your election choices so you can vote more intelligently.

• SmartVoter and California Voter Foundation.

• The League of Women Voters, natch. and the League of Young Voters.

• Citability.org, making government “accessible, reliable and trasparent” through permalinks.

• Lala.com, a service that will give you a link to a song you want to cite so you can share it where you want.

• Adina Levin mentioned discussions around hacking open government at OSCON last week, though not sure where to look for info about that.

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