Live blogging a Florida meeting. Hope for the White House blog…

[Tags: ego e-gov obama ]

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From the Wikileaks’ post:

Wikileaks has released nearly a billion dollars worth of quasi-secret reports commissioned by the United States Congress.

The 6,780 reports, current as of this month, comprise over 127,000 pages of material on some of the most contentious issues in the nation, from the U.S. relationship with Israel to abortion legislation. Nearly 2,300 of the reports were updated in the last 12 months, while the oldest report goes back to 1990. The release represents the total output of the Congressional Research Service (CRS) electronically available to Congressional offices. The CRS is Congress’s analytical agency and has a budget in excess of $100M per year.

Open government lawmakers such as Senators John McCain (R-Arizona) and Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vermont) have fought for years make the reports public, with bills being introduced–and rejected–almost every year since 1998. The CRS, as a branch of Congress, is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.

CRS reports are highly regarded as non-partisan, in-depth, and timely. The reports top the list of the “10 Most-Wanted Government Documents” compiled by the Washington based Center for Democracy and Technology. The Federation of American Scientists, in pushing for the reports to be made public, stated that the “CRS is Congress’ Brain and it’s useful for the public to be plugged into it,”. While Wired magazine called their concealment “The biggest Congressional scandal of the digital age”.

A mere scan of the list of titles is fascinating. For example, here’s what our representatives have been told about the number of civilian casualties in Iraq. Here’s 1998’s Sono Bono Copyright Act explained in terms our legislators could understand. Here are the legal basics of the Elian Gonzales case. Here is the background our reps got on Israel’s 2005 disengagement from Gaza.

This stuff looks even-handed and informative. And, had it been made public at the time, not only would we citizens have been educated, we could have enhanced, disputed, and corrected oversights and biases.

Not to mention the effect these might have had as “social objects.” If they had been released publicly when they were given to Congress, they might have shaped public debate around dispassionate starting points. [Tags: csr transparency e-gov egovernment egov ]

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The new rumor is that Vivek Kundra will be made administrator of e-government and IT for the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB), not the federal CTO as previously rumored.

This would be good news, although it would leave the rumored good or bad news about the national CTO open to rumor.

[Tags: vivek_kundra omb obama cto e-government e-gov egov ]

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NPR.org is running a post of mine that says we should expect e-gov to come from we the people faster and better than what will come from the government. (If it’s not obvious, the post started life intended as a spoken commentary for All Things Considered.)

[Tags: e-gov e-government obama egov ]

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The National Journal says that Obama has picked Vivek Kundra, DC’s CTO, to fill the national post. This would be fantastic news. Vivek is all about transparency.

It’s just a rumor. But it’s a rumor that makes me happy.

[Tags: national_cto vivek_kundra obama transparency e-gov egov e-government ]

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I recently in passing lamented the lack of links from the new Whitehouse.gov to George Bush’s version. Matthew Battles has pointed me to the archive of it. He also points to the version right after Bush’s 2001 election, which is hilariously bellbottomsy in aspect.

[Tags: egov e-gov e-government ]

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Within minutes, the new WhiteHouse.gov went up. (Here’s the before and after.) The first blog post (yes, blog post) promises communication, transparency and participation. At the moment, though, there’s no way to participate, including no comments on the blog. I do admit that it’s not obvious how best to enable conversation on this site. (There’s a page that promises more participation.)

All the original content is copyright free, of course. Third-party content is posted under a CreativeCommons license.

[Tags: white_house obama president_obama e-gov e-government e-democracy ]

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Change.gov, the transition site, has moved its content to a Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution license. So, anyone can use it so long as they attribute it back to its source. Very cool.

Open content is, of course, a creativity magnet. Already, apps have sprung up that let you get Change.gov content on your iPhone and as a widget elsewhere.

A government whose first instinct is toward openness! What a difference a mere 69 million votes can make!

Next: Putting government under revision control, as Tim O’Reilly advocates.

[Tags: obama e-gov transparency creative_commons tim_oreilly ]

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I want to propose an hypothesis.

Suppose our new president gets serious about using the Internet as a tool of governance. So, he takes his email list and uses it to kickstart a new e-gov social network. In fact, his opponent provides his email list, too. So, let’s say we have 5M on this network. Let’s say it prominently features blogs and forums. Let’s say after two years there are 30M registered users, and some good percentage of those are at least occasionally active. Of course, I’m making all of this up.

Now, the problem the Internet has faced almost from the beginning is how to scale conversations. We’ve solved it time after time, whether it’s threading and forking Usenet discussions or Amazon’s reviews of reviews. So, let’s imagine that this new social network solves the problem through a combination of forking (or recursive conversations … see orgware [Disclosure: I’m an adviser]) and reputation, more or less along the DailyKos lines.

So, 30M people are engaged in vital conversations. Some people gain prominence in discussions on particular issues. The administration notices this. The relevant government policy makers want to engage in these conversations, because otherwise the 30M citizens feel like they’re being ignored. The emergent discussion leaders become the online points of contact between the administration and the conversations, because that’s how those conversations scale.

For example, PolarKing111 gains an enormous reputation because he writes about polar warming so knowledgeably and passionately, because he engages with all sides in the discussion with respect, and because he’s so good at representing all the various opinions. Administration officials engage with him on the site, often in a spirited back-and-forth. He ably represents the concerns emerging from the many discussions on the site. It’s a public dialogue with just enough structure, one unlike any our democracy has seen.

Inevitably, one day in early 2011, the media will discover that PolarKing111 is a 15 year old girl, but that’s not my point. My point is that the emergent online discussion leaders play a role unprecedented in our democracy. They are not elected yet they represent us. They are not members of the government yet they directly affect government. They have some power but the power comes from an emergent process. We don’t even have a word for this role.

Of course, I’m making all of this up. It’s just an hypothesis. Yet, it’s easy to imagine something like this happening, while it simultaneously being impossible to predict exactly what will happen. Nevertheless, there’s a strong possibility that some form of e-gov social network will emerge, either from the government or from the people. This social network could create new roles or processes of democracy that could well turn out to be quite important. But, just as Facebook can alter the nature of privacy by deciding whether or not to set a checkbox on or off by default, the roles and processes of this new layer of democracy will depend to a large degree on small decisions about how the software happens to work.

Democracy is susceptible to software.

Personally, I think that’s likely to be a good thing. But, who knows?

No one, that’s who.

[Tags: democracy e-democracy e-government e-gov ]

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