Google’s policy toward niceness is an interesting approach to business. Including morality in official business isn’t usually part of the bottom line, and since this isn’t the offical tagline, we can assume that the executives felt this way too. However, actions speak than words, and the company has recently taken on the role of protector. A recent news story highlighted the efforts of Google to stop a Brooklyn, NY-based seller of eyeglasses from using an increasing amount of negative feedback to propel his company to the top of the search engine’s results pages. How this is done is secretive, though, and the company’s new “evil company” filtering mechanism has received “best practices” speculation.

Meanwhile, the move away from “evilness” that Trippi refers to goes well beyond Google. He speaks of Ford’s need to build a community around Mustang fans. This is a point that the private and public sectors are still learning. The ability to tap-into or construct a community around your products and services is becoming integral to organizational sustainability. One of the most difficult aspects of this transition, though, is the volatility of the internet and, especially, the tools that are used by the internet’s citizenry. However, as Trippi would posit, tapping into the lessons of political campaigns might be a great starting point.

What works and what doesn’t work in political campaigns, though, is becoming dramatically more localized. As major campaigns are launched on grassroots budgets, tools are being developed to serve local populations. With more community input, negative ad creation, which Trippi predicts will dwindle, isn’t always in the hands of the campaigns themselves. As we saw with the Vote Different video, portraying Hillary Clinton as “big brother” in a mashup of Apple’s 1984 ad against IBM, negative ads can be made independently. This begs the question: do we want negative ads? Or, are we merely creating tools similar to those that are proven to work?

One thing is certain, though: the Obama campaign did not have to create this negative campaign ad that went viral, nor did it have to pay for its airtime. This is powerful, and it sidesteps the traditional role of major media, another point Trippi makes in his conclusion. He wonders if we will need the major media outlets’ or governments’ assistance in obtaining information, hoping that we will become better informed and enabled to conduct investigation in our personal specialties, such as in the Killian Documents Controversy.

I am not sure, though, that we can supplant major media. While I believe that their role is important, I’m not entirely sure of what their role is, especially since it has been in flux for over a decade. The delivery of news, though, is still segmented and, while an increasing amount of people use the internet as a news source, I believe major news outlets are their target.

However, that is a choice. We are more and more empowered to choose what we watch, listen to, or read. This is probably the greatest point that Trippi makes, the epiphany that has the most validity and impact on his story. I agree with his statement that we are in the “age of empowerment”, and it is something that has inspired me to work with government to empower citizens.

As we enable more and more transactions of information, we develop a greater social wealth – stronger networks, more exchange of opinions, large amounts of information. How this commerce takes shape is still being researched, and many believe that this exchange of ideas is often more about boosting one’s own ideals than learning about one another’s beliefs. However, as Joe Trippi experienced, there is a greater force “out there” that we must learn to embrace. Whether we are talking about social movements or building cars, empowerment will be one of the driving forces in our decisions like we’ve never seen before.

The results?  A neat tool that visually breaks down each of the mashups in Girl Talk’s new album, All Day (dl here).  Click the screenshot to take it for a ride.

For me, one of the coolest aspects of this project is the option menu in the top right corner that lets you choose between metadata sources.  Wikipedia – archived or live – and AllDaySamples.com have listed the 329 songs that are remixed in Girl Talk’s newest album.  Comparing the data is interesting, too, as AllDaySamples has included timecoding for samples, while Wikipedia’s information is less robust.  I wonder what this can lead to in the future..

Pretty cool stuff!

Focusing her research on the EU, Krassimira believes that the legal and regulatory framework enabling e-governance is an essential element in advancing such initiatives.  Nations in Europe will need to strategically pursue a common ground for international collaboration and, most importantly, safety.  One large assurance, though, is that the European Union has foreseen technology’s impact on governance for nearly a decade.  This provides nations with some common directives for interpreting the schema of things to come, but it has not ensured coordinated collaboration.

The EU has embraced the idea, stating that it can improve citizen-centered services and government processes, advance the democratic process, and promote more inclusive decision-making processes.  The governing body also believes that e-governance is a “potential provider of major economic boost”, which means they believe there is a market for the delivery of new and old services (applications for permits, interactive bus schedules, etc.), and the government can become a regulatory power in that market.  Meanwhile, one of the most basic issues at hand is the definition of e-governance.

There is little consensus on the term’s exact definition but, there is general agreement on both the challenges that lay ahead and the terminology that will be used, so I guess that’s a step forward.  If we are on our way to more collaborative governance, will a more navigable international landscape catalyze international innovation?  I believe the answer is yes, but privacy, security, and the sanctity of our representative institutions need to be properly addressed.

The EU is working on some policy directives regarding e-governance.  Krassimira states,

E-Government now becomes an issue of not solely technology – it is also about reinventing the way in which service providers and customers interact and transform government processes, provide leadership, and enable economic development, and reinvent the role of government itself in society.

This is a lofty statement – that government will be reinvented thanks to technology – but it is not entirely unforeseen.  At least in the US, many government agencies have shifted from service delivery to service management, and streamlined approaches to coordination continue to evolve within the government sector.  What’s most important, though, is that the EU places a great deal of power into the hands of service providers and citizens.  In America, many scoff at the anti-competitive, pro-business track records of service providers – i.e. AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, Apple – and organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Harvard Law’s Berkman Center continue to champion the rights of individuals on the internet.  Perhaps this is one of the fundamental reasons why the EU has decided to include providers in their directives.  For instance, the basic need of access and the digital divide still needs to be mitigated through a partnership of these businesses and local governments.

Krassimira continues and addresses the different levels of coordination at play in developing an e-governance framework.  There are “a variety of impediments, including legislative and regulatory barriers, budgetary frameworks, digital divide, institutional traditionalism, bureaucracy, and lack of action.”  Additionally, successful implementation requires organizational restructuring (a major theme of this paper), ICT support, increased stakeholder involvement, and posturing of the government’s contextual role within the region.

How have federal, regional, and local governments navigated this evolving landscape?  Krassimira suggests that one building block is a reorganization of back offices.  There are roadblocks here, though: “Legal restrictions, for example on data sharing between agencies, can pose difficulties to data integration between administrative and regional entities.”  Governments haven’t been very successful navigating this issue, but some have come up with creative pathways, including Bremen Personal Documents, which shared birth and marriage certificates between federal and local governments, and the Citizens Portal in Denmark, which gave citizens the ability to access and combine their data, an activity the government wasn’t legally allowed to do on its own.

One local instance of reorganization is when the Mercer Island government went through a  in 1997 because of its inefficient construction and maintenance practices.  As a result of streamlining and digitizing its processes, the city has been one of the early founders of the regional eCityGov Alliance, an organization working to decentralize and facilitate web-based services throughout the Puget Sound.

The remaining roles of federal governments, in the author’s opinion, are: 1) public access to government information; 2) the protection of personal data; 3) providing information on its activities.  These can all be streamlined with new technologies, but there are many barriers to implementation that can cause political distress and mismatched priorities among leaders.  With diminishing budgets and upward costs of incorporating digital culture into their processes – such as writing policy and building software to accept digital signatures – local governments find themselves scrambling for action and, often as a result, avoiding e-governance as often as possible.

And so, Krassimira concludes, while organizational change is a major component of the move toward e-governance, the legal and regulatory frameworks that currently oversee our governments also need major overhauls.  Even more important, though, is that these changes are cohesive, inclusive, and thorough.  The author points out four main points of action for our legislators:

1. Legal changes facilitating fundamental human rights in the digital age;
2. Legal framework acknowledging the right to informational self-determination (are digital communications subject to the same principles as non-digital?  e.g. record of emails)
3. Providing access to all citizens
4. Protection of personal information

Thomas Beierle’s piece recounted a 2001 forum conducted by the EPA to moderate discussion and receive feedback on the agency’s new Public Involvemenet Policy (PIP) and to gather ideas on how it should be implemented.  This dialogue featured several elements, including an advertising campaign to recruit members, a briefing packet for participants to ready themselves for debate, basic forum tools (such as sorting options, daily summaries), and moderators who would lead discussions.

These tools, Beierle adds, make up an “interactive dialogue [that] can support a more reasoned analysis of issues by reducing the incentives for opposing interests to hew to extreme views and by subjecting assertions to direct rebuttal.” (157)

He is also keyed into some early lessons of online forums, including:

• increased access for formerly uninvolved populations;
• the creation of resources to help practitioners design more effective forums; and,
• the likelihood (86%) of participants to already be active internet users.

I believe the second point is one of the biggest takeaways.  Since the mid-90s there have been several free and fee-based services that will guide the development and design a website or forum.  That is simply not enough, though, and those who build and participate in online dialogues need to share resources to make their discussions more productive and responsive.  This practice can reduce barriers to entry for unexperienced designers and facilitators and can help future conversations avoid the common mistakes of previous efforts.

One great example of this type of work is E-Democracy.org:

Begun in 1994 as Minnesota E-Democracy, the first election information website, E-Democracy.org has evolved into the world’s largest network of online “issue forums”, with groups centered in Minnesota, England, and New Zealand.  This organization, however, hosts more than just a website.  With active blogs, listservs, and resources, practitioners from all over the world are sharing ideas and best-practices to help bolster the growing community of online civic engagement.  For the community engagement field, this is becoming the open source solution.

Another interesting development is the Open311 and OpenMuni projects launched by CivicCommons. This collaboration is an effort to create a community of developers whom are working to build more effective platforms for local governance.  In simpler terms, CivicCommons is attempting to build a website that any government can deploy that will include an “app store” of add-ons.  By cultivating a community of web and application developers, this project aims to build a sort of WordPress model for local governance, which will take an enormous amount of the costs of proprietary systems out of the equation for government IT teams.

Back to the EPA: The third point, that 86% of the EPA’s dialogue participants were already active internet users, is potentially a greater issue.  This clues us into the state of the digital divide in 2001, which has definitely been reduced in our nation over the last decade, but still pervades our public sphere.  According to the Seattle Dept. of IT”s annual report, 84% of households in our city have internet access, which is on the higher end of the spectrum. Meanwhile, the following statistics show room for improvement:

• Households earning under $30,000 are 66% as likely to have home internet access as those earning over $40,000;
• People with no college degree are 33% less likely to have home internet access;
• Less than 50% of Latinos/Hispanic Americans and 66% of African Americans have home access, whereas 90% of Caucasians have access; and,
• 62% of persons with disabilities have internet access at home.

These are issues that many governments are working to address, and there are a great deal of organizations bringing pressure to our legislators to find solutions to the digital divide, but, as “Design of Digital Democracies”  addresses, there are also aspects of society, including gender, that need to be included in the development of these systems.  Building a system that can be used by active internet and government users is not enough.  Different populations need access, and, as digital divide numbers show, many of those we need to include in the process are already excluded.

Elovaara and Mortberg looked into the work of Women Writing on the Net (WWN), a project directed in Bologna, Italy, London, England, and Ronneby, Sweden.  This projected intended to:

Further grassroots democracy by working with empowerment to conquer and redefine the public arena, to stop the drawing up of boundaries or dualism between public/private and expert/non-expert, and to build communities.  The goal of working with ‘empowerment’ within the WWN project was to encourage the participating women to redefine themselves: to become  and act as insiders in IT contexts, as well as in society as a whole.

Their analysis continues to dissect women’s interaction with a test IT system and concludes that women need to be recruited to be involved in the process of developing and managing government IT infrastructure.  They believe that through inclusion, government web systems will be more responsive to a larger population.  Extending this observation to the realities of the digital divide, it should be said that we need to recruit well-rounded teams of managers and developers to build responsive and flexible government websites.  Input is needed from all sides of society, and top-down approaches to dialogue do not tend to be wholly inclusive.

Perhaps the combination of addressing the digital divide and developing open source-like communities will help bolster society’s ability to build a more interactive governing structure.  Experts believe that including more people in the debate and development of these tools has the potential to build a more robust representative democracy.  Tools like KnowledgeAsPower, OneBusAway, and VanTrash are taking advantage of the first waves of freely distributed government data, while organizations like ParkingMobility have crowd-sourced the creation of much-needed data (i.e. availability of handicapped parking) – and there are plenty of practitioners who look hopefully upon the Open Government movement to drive this era of innovation.

What do you think?

• How do you interact with your elected representatives?  With your surroundings?
• Are there any issues you wish could be resolved with a text message or a tweet? (i.e. potholes, fallen branches, crime)
• Do you see any downfalls in developing a more robust governing structure this way?
• Are there dangers to creating civic engagement through fragmented services like VanTrash and KAP?

SaveOurJobsWa.com: Sleek and design-heavy, this website honestly looks like a corporate social responsibility website.  First you are struck with humanizing photos of workers in all different industries.  Then there are quirky ads and links to newspaper endorsements before you even notice the text that explains the motivation behind the initiative.  In fact, this page is not scannable at all, and tries to pack too much into one punch.  The volunteer page is quite simple, offering a form to submit one’s interest in helping, and contributions are accepted, through a second link, on an external, generic-looking site.  The section about claims is very defensive and heavy on rhetoric.

VoteNo1082.com: The campaign against the initiative is immediately rebellious.  Large print, bold colors, and informative page names that quickly inform you as to the intent of this website: Vote No.  There are a few different ways to volunteer, which you can choose without clicking through multiple pages, which is in stark contrast to the form submission option at SaveOurJobs.  Additionally, while contributions are handled by an external firm, the page for contributions appears to the unwatchful web surfer to be seamlessly integrated into the website.  What’s more, the claims investigated on this website are backed by citations from the text of the initiative and visitors can actually download a version of the initiative with highlights of “dangerous clauses”.

Social Media:

When it came to Facebook, the VoteNo campaign had close to 1,300 more fans than SaveOurJobs (3,775 total), but the scenario flipped on Twitter, where SaveOurJobs accumulated 190 more followers (237 total).   In fact, the VoteNo campaign didn’t even seem to use Twitter at all, with 42 followers and 47 tweets during the year (vs 287 tweets by SaveOurJobs).  Posting on Facebook, though, was fairly similar, and received generally similar volume of “likes” and comments.  Both campaigns rarely responded to these comments.

What I find most interesting about these tweets and Facebook posts is that VoteNo was always on the offensive, citing the influence of large insurance companies and openly attacking claims: Meanwhile, the SaveOurJobs campaign was fairly positive in nature and often centered around endorsements more than position statements:

Campaign Spending:

What’s most striking, though, is that the VoteNo campaign actually spent more than its opposition ($3,886,495 vs. $3,250,034), according to the WA State Public Disclosure Commission.  With the fancy designs, quirky commercials, and financial backing of the insurance industry, I would not have thought the VoteNo campaign would have outspent (and out-fundraised) the SaveOurJobs group.  Perhaps it goes to show that money is better spent on mobilizing than on designing the best-looking materials.

Campaign Ads:

One last note is the type of television/YouTube ads that the campaigns used.  Watching the following two videos will demonstrate the stark contrast in strategies.  The SaveOurJobs group, which I have constantly called design-heavy and big on rhetoric, appeals to voters with quirky, colorful, sleek video, while the VoteNo campaign manufactured more straightforward and honest-seeming ads.

According to an article on the ABC News Website, there are at least two smartphone apps that will enable voters to report violations at the polls. I’d be interested to know (I just don’t have time to do the research right now):

1. Who created these apps?
2. Does their position/angle matter?
3. Who is getting the information, and what are they doing with it?
4. Will this information be shared in a timely & sensitive manner?

It will be interesting to see the results of this new tool.  I would also be interested in knowing if people are acting as vigilantes, shadowing their polling place, or if this is a more passive activity.  But mostly, if even somewhat successful, these apps tap into a serious distrust of our government.  And who would trust our election process after the 2000 & 2004 Presidential debacles?

Here in Washington State, we have to vote by mail, unless you are unable to do so, in which case other arrangements can be made.  Will somebody be watching over the machines and/or people counting ballots with these apps?  Certainly not – which means this isn’t a solution for voter fraud, but it is a type of watchdog role that citizens can play in protecting the sanctitiy of their vote.

Very interesting.

Also, because people who splice Sharon covering Bob with Soul Train videos are great people:

It also looks like Sarah is garnering some more attention in our region and beyond as she was just featured in a Fast Company column on e-government.

There are great opportunities for governments to collaborate internally, externally with citizens (e.g. usability studies, community forums), and between one another. I realize that this isn’t necessarily a new line of thought, but we are at a point in time when most governments – especially those in the US – face budget and performance gaps. Through different types of efforts, such as Open311, open data initiatives, and GovLoop, there is great potential to increase efficiencies, build collaborative relationships, and cut costs in the long-run.

This is an interesting time, especially for local governance. Just how far can IT infrastructure take us? How do we create portals for civic participation without burdening staff and resources? Can we effectively measure and encourage increased civic roles? And, if governments begin this change, can they be sure it won’t disenfranchise citizens and other partners?

Much of the debate we’ve read has revolved around an ownership model wherein the public domain is dominated by private enterprise.  Whether we speak of the corporate entities running our “public” media or the IT gurus operating our political campaigns, most analysis finds that we are operating in a controlled state.  Therefore, our public actions can only exist within a private, controlled environment.

I posit, however, a shift toward public ownership.  It is beginning in the food justice movement, which has blossomed out of the grocery co-op tradition in our nation (as well as slow food, peak oil, permaculture, veganism, etc.).  The Green Bay Packers are a non-profit, membership-run organization, and many “publicly owned” enterprises, such as local radio stations (e.g. KEXP, NPR), are doing exceptionally well.

But, of course, there is still some Darwinism at play and many of the entities we attempt to establish or retain will not, in fact, succeed.  Private investment still exists, be it through advertisement/sponsorship or even some form of subsidy, be it information or access.  And so, I wonder, just how far can we pull ourselves from top-down ownership of the public realm?  Some feel a re-alignment in politics is not possible, some think it is happening right now; how do we feel about the flow of information?

Other thoughts: private enterprise in the social sphere (i.e. companies working on social goods), crowd-sourcing vs open source