Takuya Homma's Library tagged Gov2.0 →  View Popular, Search in Google

"We use Facebook to schedule the protests, Twitter to coordinate, and YouTube to tell the world," said an unnamed activist in Cairo in January.

Many of the issues and themes in 2011 were extensions of those in the 2010 Gov 2.0 Year in Review: the idea of government as a platform spread around the world; gated governments faced disruption; open government initiatives were stuck in beta; open data went global; and laws and regulations were chasing technology, online privacy, cloud computing, open source and citizen engagement.

(image) As I begin to dig into the work of my next book, I’ve found myself thinking about politics and government far more than I anticipated. (For initial thoughts and stats, see Government By Numbers: Some Interesting Insights).  While the body politic was always going to be one of the main pillars of the book, I didn’t expect it to push itself to the foreground so quickly. Certainly the Occupy Wall St. movement is partially responsible, but there’s more going on than that.

Well before #ows became shorthand for class disparity in the United States, I began to formulate a hypothesis on the role of government in our lives. (I focus on the US for this exercise, as I am writing from my own experience. I’d be very interested in responses from those living in other countries).

- Identity. We are increasingly going to the Web/Interent as the platform for our lives. There, our identity is not managed by the government. It’s managed – in the majority – by Facebook. When we buy things, our identity is managed by PayPal, Amazon, and Amex/Visa/Mastercard, not to mention a raft of pretenders to our identity throne, including Facebook, Google, and startups like Square. All of these are private corporations. None of them ask us for our government issued identity cards before allowing us to make a purchase. Some do ask for our SSN, of course. But online, the “government layer” is melting into the background of our identity – rather like DOS melted into the background of Windows 3. I expect this to be the source of some serious conflict in the coming decade(s).

- Control. It used to be the only entity that was legally allowed to track citizens on a regular basis was law enforcement – agents of our government. Now, of course, we happily leave digital breadcrumbs everywhere, and private corporations, driven by profit, are far more advanced than the government at profiling and tracking us. Again, I expect this fact to be a source of conflict in the future.

- Delivery/Communication. For most of the past couple of centuries, you’d use a government agency if you wanted to get something important – either information, goods, or money – from one place to another in our country. That agency was called the United States Postal Service, and it worked really, really well, considering all it had to do. Now, the Postal Service is broke, and we use  UPS or FedEx for physical goods, and the Internet for information. While the government built the infrastructure for all these companies (airports, roads and Interstate highways, DARPAnet, commonly owned airwaves), it has now receded DOS-like into the background, and we now entrust the function of delivery to private corporations driven by profit.

 "Moneyball", first a book and now a film, outlines how Oakland A's General Manager Billy Beane used analytics to do more with less money and compete successfully against the deeper pockets of the New York Yankees and other big-city baseball franchises.  

President Obama unveiled the Campaign to Cut Waste in June with a strong IT component. As part of the plan, federal agencies must shut down half of existing websites by the middle of next year. It also called for a freeze on the creation of new websites, which the OMB later extended to the end of the year. 

Prior to the President's speech, top officials from numerous countries, including Brazil, Kenya, the United Kingdom, the Phillippines, and others gathered at Google's New York offices to discuss their own plans. Those plans included new websites, numerous pledges around transparency and equality, improvements to open data, and even public participation in the budgeting process. 

Mobile has been called transformative for healthcare, commerce, development and education. Mobile will be transformative for government, too.

The case for Mobile Gov is driven by:

  
• the ubiquity of mobile use in the U.S.
• opportunities to use mobile to improve the efficiency of service delivery in government.
• innovations in mobile that can propel new government services/service delivery.
• improved transparency through increased access to government data and information.
  

The Karnataka Government has finally embraced online media. To help the general public, it is planning to upload government documents like orders, circulars and announcements on the internet, reports Techcircle. This will enable people to easily access these documents.

“As per the proposal, all the departments would have to upload all of their following documents on internet: orders, circulars, announcements, land records, survey records, land conversion records and other records related to land,” said higher education minister VS Acharya.

What is clear, amidst growing concerns of a multi-billion dollar disaster, is that the New York City government’s website hosting strategy needs to be revisited. According to Provide Security, NYC servers are hosted in a data center in Brooklyn. Spikes in demand are precisely what cloud computing offers to the private sector and, increasingly, to federal government. As hurricane clouds gather, it’s probably past time for New York government to get familiar into cloudbursting or move quickly implementing internal architectures that include a private cloud, through Nebula or something similar, to handle the load. In the context of disasters, surge capacity for government websites is no longer a “nice-to-have” — it’s a must-have.

UPDATE: Civic technologist Philip Ashlock is mirroring NYC Irene data & links on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Even though NYC didn’t move critical resources to the cloud itself, a member of New York City’s technology community stepped up to help the city and citizens in a crisis. That’s Gov 2.0 in action:

The open source Android version of the Congress app, however, has proven to be much more popular, with over 400,000 downloads to date since its release and between 60,000 and 80,000 uses a week, based on the API calls its users have been making.

In April, Radar reported that Energy.gov was moving to Drupal. This morning, the Energy Department launched a redesigned Energy.gov as an interactive open platform that enables information exchange, open data and localized information for citizens. The new Energy.gov uses a combination of open source technology and cloud computing will save an estimated $10 million dollars annually, according to Energy Department officials.

1. How can regulations.gov, one of the primary mechanisms for government transparency and public participation, be made more useful to the public rulemaking process?
2. OMB is beginning the process of reviewing and potentially updating its Federal Web Policy. What policy updates should be included in this revision to make Federal websites more user-friendly and pertinent to the needs of the public?
3. How can we build on the success of Data.Gov and encourage the use of democratized data to build new consumer-oriented products and services?
 
 

Mastering the use of the internet shows a leader’s quality and ability. We hope that more and more leaders show their capacity for speech on the internet and on microblogs, and find popularity. We hope even more that more and more leaders address the conditions of the people in the real world, through real actions.

If governments can correctly and properly guide public opinions, use microblogging as a good platform to learn about public opinions and the wisdom of the people, and find and solve problems as soon as possible, forming a widely-participated, orderly and interactive microblogging public opinion environment is completely possible. Microblogging will also become a "release valve" of social emotions and the "lubricant" of government-public relations.

1. FCC.gov runs on open source

2. FCC.gov is hosted in the cloud

The new Energy.gov is built using Drupal 7, the same open source content management system used at WhiteHouse.gov, Commerce.gov, House.gov, and it's the system that supported the reboot of FCC.gov as an open government platform. Drupal distributions are now supporting a growing number of open government platforms in local, state and federal government.

"This is about telling complex stories with data, and beautiful maps matter," said Development Seed founder Eric Gunderson in an interview this morning. "It just makes data a lot more consumable for citizens. The best part is that agencies are now able to do this for free on their own using open source tools."