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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Joe Trippi is doing a chat at FireDogLake. Here’s one of his responses:

I think we are about to see the first “Connected” presidency. JFK was the first Television president — Obama will be first “connected” president — and congress is going to be the big loser in all this — because I think we are going to see a President directly connected to more Americans than any other President in history — and when 25 members of Congress are standing in the way of health care reform — they are going to find themselves standing between Barack and a hard place — between the President and millions of Americans organizing to pass his agenda. On the other hand the Obama administration is the Wright Brothers now — no one has ever done this before and there is a lot they could get wrong — being too careful and listening too much to the Washington establishment.

[Tags: politics e-democracy e-government joe_trippi obama ]

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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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According to the National Defense university, the Feds are entering SecondLife in force:

Dr. Paulette Robinson, Assistant Dean for Teaching at the Information Resources Management College, National Defense University, has a formeda multi-agency consortium to establish a sizeable federal presence inthe Second Life virtual world run by Linden Labs. Since the initial organizational meeting in July 2007, nearly 20 agencies have signed up for the ad hoc Second Life federal group, with more expressing interest every day. The Air Force and Navy have signed on as well as civilian agencies such as State, Transportation, Library of Congress, National Institutes of Health, and NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration–two of the early federal Second Life pioneers. Dr.Robinson said the consortium plans a major push to establish a federal presence in Second Life and other virtual environments, and along the way create processes and procedures to make it simpler for agencies to get a life in SecondLife.

(Thanks to John Palfrey for the link.)

[Tags: second_life e-government ]

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