Tag: gov20

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Innovations In Government

The National Association of Counties just concluded its annual mid-winter Legislative Conference in Washington, DC.  I was there in my role as NACo’s first Senior Fellow.

As usual, its Chief Innovation Officer, Dr. Bert Jarreau, created a three-day extravaganza devoted to technology and innovation in local government.

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The first day was a CIO Forum, the second day NACo’s Technology Innovation Summit and the final day a variety of NACO committees on IT, GIS, etc.

County government – especially the best ones – get too little recognition for their willingness to innovate, so I hope this post will provide some information about what county technologists and officials are discussing.  

One main focus of the meetings was on government’s approach to technology and how it can be improved.  

Jen Pahlka, founder and Executive Director of Code For America and former Deputy Chief Technology Officer in the White House, made the keynote presentations at both the CIO Forum on Friday and the Tech Summit on Saturday – and she was a hit in both.

She presented CfA’s seven “Principles for 21st Century Government”.  The very first principle is that user experience comes before anything else.  The use of technology is not, contrary to some internal views, about “solving” some problem that the government staff perceive.  

She pointed out that the traditional lawyer-driven design of government services actually costs more than user-centric design.  (I’ll have more on design in government in a future blog post.)

She referred to the approach taken by the United Kingdom’s Digital Service.  For more about them, see https://gds.blog.gov.uk/about/   When she was in the White House, she took this as a model and helped create a US Digital Service.

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She also discussed the importance of agile software development.  She suggested that governments break up their big RFPs into several pieces so that smaller, more entrepreneurial and innovative firms can bid.  This perhaps requires a bit more work on the part of government agencies, but they would be rewarded with lower costs and quicker results.

More generally she drew a distinction between the traditional approach that assumes all the answers – all the requirements for a computer system – are known ahead of time and an agile approach that encourages learning during the course of developing the software and changing the way an agency operates.

By way of example, she discussed why the Obamacare website failed.  It used the traditional, waterfall method, not an agile, iterative approach.  It didn’t involve real users testing and providing feedback on the website.  And, despite the common wisdom to the contrary, the development project was too big and over-planned.

It was done in a way that was supposed to reduce risk, but instead was more risky.  So she asked the NACo members to redefine risk, noting that yesterday’s risky approach is perhaps today’s prudent approach.

Helping along is the development of cloud computing.  So Oakland County (Michigan) CIO Phil Bertolini has found that cloud computing is reducing government’s past dependence on big capital projects to deploy new technology, thus allowing for more day-to-day agility.

Finally Jen Pahlka suggested that government systems needed to be more open to integration with other systems.  In a phrase, “share everything possible to share”.  She showed an example where the government let Yelp use government restaurant inspection data and in turn learn about food problems from Yelp users.  (And, of course, sharing includes not just data, but also software and analytics.)

In another illustration of open innovation in the public sector, Montgomery County, MD recently created its Thingstitute as an innovation laboratory where public services can be used as a test bed for the Internet of Things.
Even more examples were discussed in the IT Committee.  Maricopa County, Arizona and Johnson County, Kansas, both now offer shared technology services to cities and nearby smaller counties.  Rita Reynolds, CIO of the Pennsylvania County Commissioners Association, discussed the benefits of adopting the NIEM approach to data exchanges between governments.

The second major focus of these three days was cybersecurity.  

Dr. Alan Shark, Executive Director of PTI, started off by revealing that latest surveys show security is the top concern for local government CIOs for the first time.  Unfortunately, many don’t have the resources to react to the threat.
Actually, it’s more a reality than merely a threat.  It was noted that, on average, it takes 229 days for organizations to find out they’ve been breached and that close to 100% have been attacked or hacked in some way.  It’s obviously prudent to assume yours too has been hacked.

Jim Routh, Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) of Aetna insurance recommended a more innovative approach to responding to cybersecurity threats.  He said CIOs should ignore traditional advice to try to reduce risk. Instead “take risks to manage risk”.  (This was an interesting, if unintentional, echo of Jen Pahlka’s comments about software development.)

Along those lines, he said it is better to buy less mature cybersecurity products, in addition to or even instead of the well-known products.  The reason is that the newer products address new issues better in an ever changing world and cost less.

There was a lot more, but these highlights provide plenty of evidence that at least the folks at NACo’s meetings are dealing with serious and important issues in a creative way.  

© 2015 Norman Jacknis

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Libraries And Open Government

Last spring I wrote about my participation in a workshop on the role of libraries in open government, led by the Center for Technology in Government (CTG) at the University of Albany and funded by the Institute for Museums and Library Services. 

Last month, CTG released their final project report.  You can get the report from their website, but I want to provide a summary here.

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Overall, CTG’s key finding is straightforward:

“The traditional and important role of public libraries as trusted information intermediaries provides a powerful platform for public libraries to be key facilitators in opening government … Libraries need to work with government partners and other key stakeholders to develop portfolios of programs and services geared toward helping community members access and use information and engage with their governments.”

As someone who has been involved in open government, public technology and libraries, the role of libraries seems obvious to me in at least three ways.

First, libraries are places that almost everyone recognizes as neutral, objective and fair purveyors of information.  The trust in this role of libraries is a valuable asset for any government leader who wants constituents to take seriously his/her pledges of openness.

Second, librarians have the training and experience to help the average person make sense of vast volumes of information.  And the open government initiatives around the US have certainly provided a vast amount of information.  Just making this information available is a bit like trying to open a library by buying a million books and dumping them all into the middle of the floor.  Without the assistance of librarians in these initiatives, the ideals of openness and transparency will not be achieved.

Third, following on the previous point, librarians can do even more than help to organize and make accessible all of this new open government data.  Librarians can also help train the average person to know how to make sense of the information.  They can provide the space and the platform for citizens to collaborate on their use of open data.  For example, John Szabo, the head of the Los Angeles Public Library, has provided a digital forum for people in south Los Angeles to use public land and building data as they consider and debate a major new development project in their neighborhood.

Of course, while giving libraries a key role in open government initiatives can make those initiatives much more successful, library resources are limited.  So it would be useful if part of the budget for open government be devoted to funding the role of librarians.

CTG elaborated on these six recommendations:

“1. Clearly define the role of public libraries in community-focused open government activities.

2. Adopt a focus on the demand side of open government.

3. Adopt a community-wide perspective on open government.

4. Build capability to create and sustain new kinds of partnerships with a wider range of community actors.

5. Build a knowledge base of public library open government initiatives.

6. Fund and carry out a set of pilot projects focused on building new understanding of preferred and best public library open government practices.”

If you’re involved in government, open data/information, public sector transparency or libraries, it will be worth it for you to read CTG’s report for the rest of the story.

© 2015 Norman Jacknis

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The Experience Economy In The Public Sector?

B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, the authors of a groundbreaking article in the Harvard Business Review in 1998, followed up in 1999 with their influential book – “The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business A Stage”.  (The book was later updated with a 2011 edition.)

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The original article and book were widely credited with establishing the field of customer experience management and the idea that a successful business relationship involves more than just delivering the goods or services promised. 

As the summary of the original article says:

“In this article, co-authors B. Joseph Pine II and James Gilmore … preview the likely characteristics of the experience economy and the kinds of changes it will force companies to make. First there was agriculture, then manufactured goods, and eventually services. Each change represented a step up in economic value – a way for producers to distinguish their products from increasingly undifferentiated competitive offerings. Now, as services are in their turn becoming commoditized, companies are looking for the next higher value in an economic offering. Leading-edge companies are finding that it lies in staging experiences.

“An experience occurs when a company uses services as the stage – and goods as props – for engaging individuals in a way that creates a memorable event. And while experiences have always been at the heart of the entertainment business, any company stages an experience when it engages customers in a personal, memorable way.”

These memorable moments stick with people and cause them to comment favorably to others.  To help them remember, many companies even provide souvenirs – another form of experience.  When business people think of souvenirs, it is not necessarily something elaborate.  For example, what one business would hand out as a simple receipt a smarter, more experience-oriented business would provide as an elaborate document, perhaps even on thicker parchment-like paper.

The books go into great detail and elaborate these ideas beyond the simple summary I’ve provided here.  It’s worth the time to read.

And the kind of thinking presented by Pine and Gilmore has had a big impact in the business world.  Many of the modern heroes of the economy, such as the late Steve Jobs of Apple, were known for the way they built their success on customer experiences.

Yet, the ideas in the Experience Economy have had only a small impact on the public sector and few pubic officials are sensitive to the experience their constituents are having.  This is somewhat surprising for several reasons.

First, as a matter of electoral survival, incumbent office holders want the residents of their community (i.e., the voters) to have favorable memories of the experience of being a citizen.  Indeed, professional campaign consultants have heard stories of public officials who “did everything right” – these politicians did what the public wanted – but were rejected anyway because people were unhappy with the experience of being a citizen in that jurisdiction.

In the broadest sense, this is about making a difference in the lives of citizens – something that drew many officials to public service in the first place.

Second, in a world where people have increasing choices about where they might live or travel to, the experience of being in a city or state will have a big impact on the economy there.  If it’s a positive, memorable experience, more people will want to be there and the economy will grow – as will funding for the government.  If not, bad experiences will lead to worse experiences for those trying to lead a community with declining population and declining revenues.

Although great experiences are not everyday events even in the business world, it is not necessarily that difficult to create these experiences.  Think about the typical interaction between a citizen and the government.  What would it take to turn that into a positive, memorable experience?  Not a lot of money; just an increased sensitivity to the experience from the citizen’s side. 

And public officials might also find that their staff, rather than resisting the changing to make the workplace more fun and memorable, would become more motivated.

I’d like to continue this conversation by elaborating on how the ideas of the Experience Economy can be applied in the public sector.  Let me know if you want to see this and, of course, please share any examples you have of memorable public sector experiences.

© 2014 Norman Jacknis

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Keeping Citizen Engagement Engaging

Starting at the national level with the Obama Administration’s open government initiative in 2009, there have been many attempts at crowdsourcing in various governments and public agencies.  

From his campaign, President Obama realized that we can now scale up collaboration and participation – and create a 21st century version of the old New England Town Meetings that, while not perfect, did a pretty good job of engaging residents.

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Unfortunately many of these efforts have been disappointing in various ways:

  • Fewer people participated than expected.
  • The forum was “hijacked by fringe groups” – this was one criticism of the early Obama open government efforts because decriminalizing Marijuana turned out to be one of the more popular proposals.  (But see my earlier post “Do Good Ideas Bubble Up From The Crowd?”)
  • The site went stale, with early excitement evaporating and participation going to zero.  As an example, see the Texas Red Tape Challenge.
  • Citizens were encouraged to participate and did so, only to find that their ideas were disregarded by public officials, which only increased the frustration among both citizen and officials.

Nevertheless, when they succeed, citizen engagements can satisfy several public purposes.  They are a great way to get help and new ideas, test proposals, understand priorities of voters and educate citizens about the complexities and realities of governing.  Moreover, in response to the general decline in respect for major public, nonprofit and private institutions, crowdsourcing is a way of earning back respect and trust – and convincing a skeptical public that public officials really care.  All of these benefits make it easier for public officials to govern better.

And the successes have provided important lessons.  Most important, like lots of other things, crowdsourcing requires some thought before implementation.  

You won’t get the best results if you take a “just build it and they will come” approach.  At the other extreme, you can bury any government initiative in “analysis paralysis”.   A reasonable balance is to plan how public officials will:

  • Set realistic expectations within their own organization as well as with the public;
  • Target the appropriate audience for the discussion;
  • Set up the topic/question in a clear, unbiased way;
  • Start the conversation with citizens;
  • Figure out how to manage the conversation and keep citizens engaged; and last but not least,  
  • End the engagement in a way that provides a positive experience for citizens and the government.

When these engagements actually engage citizens, they help redefine the relationship between public officials and the people they serve.  And they can provide a core of solid support from the public that any public official would desire – the kind of support that will carry officials through those bad times when they also make mistakes.

More later.

[photo credit: http://community.weber.edu/WeberReads/meeting_21922_md.gif]

© 2014 Norman Jacknis

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The Internet versus The Nation-State?

I’ve been reading two books that haven’t usually been mentioned together.  The authors – one pair from and heavily influenced by the tech industry – and the other from the foreign policy establishment end up taking positions that are somewhat opposite to where they would be expected.

Together the two books lay out a debate as to whether the Internet will have only a surface effect on government or be part of a fundamental change.

Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google, and Jared Cohen, former member of the US Department of State’s Policy Planning Staff wrote “The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives”.

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Despite its futuristic vision in parts, the book’s concept of government seems mostly to be stuck in the present, perhaps even the past.  The authors’ view is that the Internet is “just a tool” that will be used by the nation-state and citizens to interact in much the way they have done so in the past couple hundred years – since the idea of a nation-state began to form.  Their chapter on revolutions even has the dynamics of protest and revolution following old rules, with the Internet playing a supporting role.

But new tools are not always merely new means to old ends.  They change things in fundamental ways.  Consider the impact of tool making and tools on the evolution of the human species.  Or, remember the succinct statement about television a couple decades ago by Marshall McLuhan: “the medium is the message.”

And then there’s Moisés Naim, former Foreign Policy editor and Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who wrote “The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being In Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be”.

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He writes:

“We know that power is shifting from brawn to brains, from north to south and west to east, from old corporate behemoths to agile start-ups, from entrenched dictators to people in town squares and cyberspace.  But to say that … is not enough.  Power is undergoing a far more fundamental mutation … Even as rival states, companies, political parties, social movements, and institutions or individual leaders fight for power as they have done throughout the ages, power itself – what they are fighting so desperately to get and keep – is slipping away.

“Power is decaying.

“To put it simply, power no longer buys as much as it did in the past. In the twenty-first century, power is easier to get, harder to use – and easier to lose…

“The decay of power is changing the world.”

Naim’s book makes a persuasive case that the Internet, along with other major factors, is fundamentally reducing the power of the nation-state and other centuries-old institutions.  The tools are diminishing and modifying the nation-states, not merely being added to their arsenal.

©2014 Norman Jacknis

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Accelerating Internet Activism?

Last week I was at the Personal Democracy Forum (PDF), the annual gathering of technologists, political activists, entrepreneurs and many others focused on the ways that the Internet is playing a role in government and society.  As it does every year, PDF had an interesting and thought provoking range of speakers and panels.  The event was inspiring both in the activities of many of these individuals and the sheer creative ambition that drives them.

With more than 140 speakers in both plenary sessions and breakouts, it is not physically possible to hear everyone.  But something was bothering me in many of these sessions I did attend.

It was brought home by Anthea Watson Strong’s reference to the Calculus of Voting written many years ago by the political scientists William Riker and Peter Ordeshook.  This was a relatively rare moment in which someone explicitly or implicitly referred back to previous research and analysis of political behavior.

And in a breakout session, Ben Berkowitz, the founder/CEO of the very useful and successful SeeClickFix, rightly expressed concerns about the focus of many activists on just the next election.  He asked for a new approach – a consistent effort, an organization, that helps people with the daily public issues and annoyances that bother them.  

I told him that there used to be organizations that did just that – the old urban political machines.  They were building long term supporters for a party, so their timeframe was more than just the next election campaign of one politician.  While they helped people with their problems, of course, the old machines were also corrupt.  A modern more ethical version may be what he’s looking for.  Not a new idea, just a better one.  (For a recent assessment of the political machines of the 19th and early 20th centuries, see Terry Golway’s book “Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics”.)

This was one of several examples in which more historical context would have been helpful.

Perhaps it was entrepreneurial enthusiasm to push ahead and not look back.  Perhaps it was a matter of being so convinced that what you’re doing is so new, no one before you could have something of value to contribute to your thought process.  (I have to admit that this is something I’ve also been guilty of myself in some of my entrepreneurial enthusiasms.)

Newton famously said: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”   In the world of political technology this means understanding previous political thought and analysis, history and modern research on political behavior. 

Most people in the audience were excited by the possibilities for true democratic governance that the Internet and related tools make possible, including me.  But to accelerate this movement there needs to be more context and deeper knowledge on the part of the creators and activists. 

Otherwise, we end up becoming another example of the old story about reinventing the wheel.  Not only is that wasted effort, but, without learning, each new reinvention of the wheel seems to start out as immature as the last one.  In turn, that immaturity and lack of progress may dampen the potential engagement of the larger number of potential citizen activists which the PDF movement will need.

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© 2014 Norman Jacknis

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Crowdsourcing For Legislators?

[This blog is a slightly early contribution to the dialog of the annual Personal Democracy Forum to be held tomorrow, June 5, 2014, in New York City.  See http://personaldemocracy.com/conferences/nyc/2014 .]

In a previous post, “Is The Voice A Model For Crowdsourcing?”, I noted that crowdsourcing can be a modern manifestation of the civic involvement that is the foundation of successful democracies – by providing public officials a good sense of the priorities of citizens, in addition to giving them new ideas.

When he took office in 2009, President Obama made crowdsourcing a key element of his open government initiative, using the IdeaScale platform.  So did other elected officials in national and sub-national governments around the world. 

In some respects, it is surprising that public officials with executive responsibilities have taken to crowdsourcing more than those in legislative positions.  Most legislative bodies in democracies have encouraged petitions and testimony from the public as they consider new laws.  The National Conference of State Legislatures of the USA prominently features the importance of citizen engagement, mostly focused on ways this has happened for decades.

So, in the Internet age, crowdsourcing would seem to be a natural extension of that traditional pattern.  But that’s happening slowly.

I would expect this to pick up as legislators realize it is in their professional interest to better engage with their constituents.  That engagement helps to even the playing field in the frequent contests between legislators and public executives – a situation where most voters have much less awareness of their legislators than of the executives and so can provide less support for the legislative side.

There are two interested examples of crowdsourcing in the legislative arena.

Last year, the Ministry of Environment in Finland used crowdsourcing to draft a new law on off-road traffic, a subject with conflicting public priorities so it was good to encourage wider involvement in the debate than would normally occur.

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A GovLab report, at the end of last year, noted these ways in which this was a positive experiment:

  • Almost all the comments were constructive, with a very small percentage weeded out.
  • Participants as a group were realistic about their expectations and the fact that their input would need to be refined.
  • The participants learned from each other which helped to elevate the level of the debate and presumably made it easier for the government to arrive at a reasonable compromise.
  • The “crowd preferred commonsensical and nuanced ideas, while rejecting vague and extreme ones”

Clearly the experience of the Finnish would indicate that some of the fears public officials have had about crowdsourcing haven’t come about.  The public is trying to participate as reasonable adults in a governmental process; they’re not attacking officials with their “virtual pitchforks”.

Earlier this year, in what he said was a first for the USA, California Assemblyman Mike Gatto of Los Angeles did the same for a proposed new probate law.  The number of people who took advantage of the opportunity was relatively small, not surprising considering that probate law is perhaps not the most exciting topic for most people.  Nevertheless, he plans to shepherd the ideas from the crowd through the legislative process as part of a larger effort to modernize the way that citizens interact with government.

As crowdsourcing in legislation – both big and small – continues to develop a good track record, I would expect to see many more legislators and legislative bodies begin to use the modern tools for gathering ideas and priorities from the public.

©2014 Norman Jacknis

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What Is The Role Of Libraries In Open Government?

Earlier this month, I was invited to participate in a workgroup that focused on and merged two of my strongest interests – libraries and open government.  This workgroup, made up of approximately two dozen leaders of the worlds of libraries, open government and the Internet, was pulled together by the Center for Technology in Government (CTG) of Albany University, as part of a project funded by the Federal Government’s Institute of Museums and Library Services (IMLS).

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CTG describes the rationale for the project this way:

“State and local governments are exploring new ways to open their governments using technology to engage citizens, increase transparency and accountability. Such efforts provide new opportunities and challenges for public libraries as citizens turn to them for both access to and assistance in their interactions with government … An open government initiative will impact and can be facilitated or impeded by a community’s information ecosystem. Libraries can have a critical influence on an ecosystem and the success of such an initiative.”

The CTG staff will summarize the day and a half of intensive work at a later point.  But I thought I’d share some of my observations from participating in it.

First, while open government, particularly the open data initiatives that have occurred all over the US and elsewhere, is clearly a step forward for transparency, it is not always very useful to the average citizen.  That’s why too often, the data has been used mostly for “gotcha” articles by local news media. 

Typically, the data is put out on the web.  This is akin to setting up a library by buying 10,000 books and dropping them all in a big pile in the middle of the floor.  Librarians have long developed skills in organizing knowledge and, as reference guides, in helping people find what they need.  So the most obvious first role of librarians is to help open data initiatives succeed by applying their professional skills to the data.

Second, libraries can be the place where open government occurs.  This role not only involves making available to citizens the printed and online forms they need to interact with government – or even extending that to enable citizens to have video conversations with government staff who are located many miles away from home.

Libraries can also encourage the discussion of public issues.  Traditionally, libraries have used their meeting spaces for open forums.  More recently and much more interesting is the role the Los Angeles Public Library has played in a community in south Los Angeles.  The local library branch there is hosting Betaville, open source software to enable people to collaborate together to propose urban design solutions for their community.  Betaville is being used for people to do exactly that with respect to a large proposed redevelopment of the Rancho Cienega facility.  The library was the only place where people could come together to do this work, which had the proper technology and also the trust of residents that it is an objective, open facility.

Third, Jamie LaRue, former director of the Douglas County library system, which has been a pioneer in libraries as creators of content, built on that experience to propose an additional role for libraries.  In the face of the demise of many local news outlets, he suggested that this creative role of libraries be extended to becoming the platform for local news.

Finally, while a number of state and local governments have encouraged their local software developers to create apps using open government data, this is clearly not enough.  There are many apps that are needed, but make no sense for private companies that ultimately require profits.  Government cannot abdicate its own technology role.  Recognizing that it can’t do everything, however, government can call on librarians to understand what gaps exist based on what they are asked for by library patrons.

For more information, see CTG’s website at http://www.ctg.albany.edu/projects/imls .  They have also posted a concept paper at http://imls.ctg.albany.edu/book/enabling-open-government-all-planning-framework-public-libraries .  If you’d like to participate in the discussion about libraries and open government, you can do that at http://imls.ctg.albany.edu/forums/online-discussion-concept-paper . 

© 2014 Norman Jacknis

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Is The Voice A Model For Crowdsourcing?

Crowdsourcing — using the wisdom of the crowd on the Internet — has been especially intriguing to public officials. It gives them access to new ideas as well as an assessment of the popularity of those ideas. 

Of course, not all of these crowdsourcing projects have worked so well. 

In many cases, these efforts have failed to meet the criteria that James Surowiecki identified in his book, “The Wisdom of the Crowds”.  Among other factors, he pointed out that the crowd’s assessment is most useful when they have a great variety of viewpoints based on diverse experience and their judgments are independent of each other.  It has been too often the case in public sector crowdsourcing that these criteria are not satisfied.

There has often been a sense by the public that their suggestions get lost and are no one pays attention to them, which leads to low participation.  For their side, the professional staff ask “where do we come in?”  Is there no role for expertise anymore?

The very popular and Emmy-award winning reality TV series, “The Voice”, may provide a model.  The show is intended to identify new singing talent. 

The Voice starts with open auditions in many cities, much like crowdsourcing sites are open to anyone to propose an idea.  Then in the winnowing process, the professionals enter the picture.

At the beginning of the televised season, professional and well-known singers select candidates for their team.  So they act as a filter.  This, in a sense, parallels the selection of the public’s ideas that professional staff in government decide they will actually consider.

Then the professional singers do something else – they provide mentoring, advice and training to the candidates on their team.  So far as I know, I haven’t seen anything like this in the government or corporate use of crowdsourcing, but it is something they should be doing in order to refine and improve on ideas that arise from the public.

After a few additional trials of their talent, the professional singers select a final set candidates.  At that point, the public re-enters the picture.  (And the Voice does seem to follow the characteristics of successful crowdsourcing that Surowiecki found.)  

Over the rest of the series, it is the votes of the public which determine ultimately who walks away with the number one position and the prized recording contract. In a twist on the usual way people vote, The Voice allows multiple voting – a measure of intensity of support, which also parallels many political situations where intensity is as important as the raw numbers.

While the producers of the show likely do this to enhance their ratings and the public’s involvement with the show, there is a lesson here as well for public officials.  While these officials may sometimes dismiss the public’s ideas as misguided, that easy dismissal or failure to follow up on public suggestions only serves to increase the cynicism of voters about the government.

Instead, perhaps like The Voice, after initial rounds of public suggestions, the experts in government could work with the most best ideas to hone them and then present those back to the public to identify which they like the most.  This provides the experts a meaningful role in the process and it also brings in the public in what is the ultimate step in a democratic decision process – the priorities of the citizens.

This final step would certainly lessen the cynicism that has accompanied government crowdsourcing efforts in the past and increase participation in those efforts, which would only help to make them even better.

©2014 Norman Jacknis

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National Association of Counties Innovation Summit

As the first Senior Fellow of the National Association of Counties (NACo), I had the privilege to be part of their recently concluded five-day Legislative Conference in Washington, DC.

It was also an opportunity for me to introduce to the counties the Rural Imperative of the Intelligent Community Forum.  Since I blogged about the need for a new connected countryside a couple of weeks ago, ICF announced my new role, which you can read about at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/02/prweb11614027.htm.   There’s also a brief video that I did at http://youtu.be/d0fD6rguvwQ.

For three days, there was a special focus on technology and more interesting presentations than I can summarize here.  Sometime next week, you will be able to see video of Saturday’s Innovation and Technology Summit at NACo.org.

Here are some of my observations:

  • The VP of the Maui Economic Development described their strategy.  I cheered when she said that, notwithstanding the traditional incentives and approaches of economic development, the most important thing is to “grow your own”.  She went on to describe how they are focused on workforce development and all kinds of creative, only-in-Hawaii learning opportunities.  But much of that targeted children.  In an economy where adults need to keep refreshing their skills and knowledge until well past what you used to be retirement age, adults also need access to learning opportunities.
  • The Directors of the Health and Human Services Departments of both Montgomery County, Maryland and San Diego County, California both focused on outcomes.  This too is an important step forward beyond the usual output measures that have dominated performance data in government.  Montgomery County also puts as much emphasis on social return on investment as on pure financial return on investment.
  • One other part of the San Diego presentation caught my attention: that counties need to lead the “higher levels” of government.  In the face of Federal government dysfunction for the last several years, most local and state governments have taken the approach of go ahead without waiting for the Feds to take action.  So we’ve seen much more innovation at the sub-national level than at the national level.  Now it seems that some sub-national governments are actively upending the pyramid of power and hoping to guide the Federal government to a more innovative posture.
  • There was a keynote speech by a White House staffer on open data and much discussion of open data on various panels.  Rich Leadbeater of ESRI rightly pointed out that “open data is not an end in itself.  It’s what you do with it.”  This is a refreshing attitude since too many governments seem to spend a lot of time congratulating themselves for making the data available on the Internet and leaving things at that. 
  • Some governments have encouraged private companies to develop apps with this data.  Curiously, those governments have not usually embedded the apps into their own systems so these companies are left on their own to get citizens to know about them.  Worse, too many government think that asking private companies to create these apps absolves them of their own responsibility.  The reality is that not all the applications that are needed or can be developed with open data will generate the revenue a private company seeks, but those apps are still useful for the public too have.  The only way they will be created is if the government does the development itself or pays for the app to be developed.  Considering that the costs of software development have gone down considerably over the past decade, this is not something that can easily be dismissed as out of budget.

In my end-of-day review and commentary on the sessions, I offered my reaction to the data being put out on the web – “TMI, TLK”.  Too much information, too little knowledge.  Governments should recognize that they and their constituents have to start working together to make sense of all that data and use it to make improvements in policies and programs. 

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Zooniverse: The Next Wikipedia?

Nearly everyone who uses the Internet has heard of Wikipedia and likely used it at least once.  Wikipedia has often been held up as the poster child for the way that the Internet enables people all over the globe to collaborate with each other and produce an incredibly valuable result.

While Wikipedia itself has had some growing pains – or is it maturity pains? – there have been other more recent examples of virtual collaboration.

One of my favorites – and a potential successor to Wikipedia as the poster child for virtual collaboration – is Zooniverse (https://www.zooniverse.org/ ).  Recently, Zooniverse passed the 1,000,000 mark – that is more than a million people have registered to help out.

image

This is a large number that is even more impressive when you consider that Zooniverse is not a fan site or a fantasy sports site, but is all about the participation of “everyday people” in science.

Their projects range from analyzing data collected in space to biology, nature and the environment.  They even have room for what might be considered scientific analyses applied to the humanities.

Unlike Wikipedia whose users vastly outnumber its contributors and whose rules specifically exclude original research, Zooniverse is intended to make everyone a volunteer and to create new science.

It’s a very ambitious goal, one that seems to be working well under the leadership of the Citizens Science Alliance (CSA).  CSA describes itself as:

“a collaboration of scientists, software developers and educators who collectively develop, manage and utilise internet-based citizen science projects in order to further science itself, and the public understanding of both science and of the scientific process. These projects use the time, abilities and energies of a distributed community of citizen scientists who are our collaborators.”

It’s exactly this kind of project that provides hope for the positive value of the Internet as an unprecedented tool of the knowledge age. 

And it also should raise the awareness of public officials about their citizens’ thirst for participation of all kinds.

© 2014 Norman Jacknis

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New Soft Cities

Carl Skelton is my colleague and co-founder of the Gotham Innovation Greenhouse and former director of the Experimental Media Center at NYU/Polytechnic Institute.

He has written a book about the Betaville open source project that enables residents of a city to collaborate and participate in urban design and planning.  But it’s more than just about the history and role of the Betaville project.

The book provides context for urban design in an Internet-enabled era.  As the publisher’s (Springer) summary states:

“the reader can gain a deeper understanding of the potential socio-technical forms of the New Soft Cities: blended virtual-physical worlds, whose public works must ultimately serve and succeed as massively collaborative works of art and infrastructure.”

Hence the title of Carl’s book: “Soft City Culture and Technology”, which will be officially published at the end of this month.

© 2013 Norman Jacknis

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Visual Images And Text

Summer is always a good time to catch up on some off-the-usual-track reading.  For me, that means reading a couple of books that look beyond the superficial surface of the Internet and related digital media to the deeper ways that these phenomena have affected people and moved us all to a post-industrial way of thinking and acting.

The books both demonstrate and elaborate on the ways that visual images, rather than text, are the ascendant medium of human communications in this Internet age.

The best of these books is Stephen Apkon’s “The Age Of The Image: Redefining Literacy In A World Of Screens” (2013).  Apkon is the founder and head of the Jacob Burns Film Center, just north of New York City.  The film center has a wide variety of programs, including education of children in visual literacy.  

While just 263 pages, the book describes the history, the language, the business, the techniques and the social and educational impact of visual media.  Apkon’s overall theme is that the dominance of visual media in this century means that all of us (not just children or digital natives) need to become visually literate.

As he states in his introduction:

“The power of visual media has been with us from the beginning of our species … With today’s visual technology, our work lives will be changed forever, and soon it will be as unfathomable not to know how to make a video as it is not to know how to send an e-mail.  The vocabulary of Hollywood is becoming the vocabulary of Main Street.  We must embrace these powerful tools …
“After each revolution, political or cultural, we can look back and see the elements that came together to make it possible and even inevitable.  Those who understand and prepare for these revolutions thrive, and those who don’t are left behind.  We are at one of those moments with regard to the ways in which we participate in society, democracy and the global economy, and visual images and story are at the heart of this historic change.”

A few weeks ago, I was involved in a radio interview with the author that is available on iTunes and also at   

http://wowididntknowthat.com/2013/08/08/the-new-literacy-special-guest-steve-apkon-author-director-jacob-burns-film-center/

A somewhat related book is “The Art of Immersion: How The Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, And The Way We Tell Stories” (2011) by Frank Rose, contributing editor at WIRED Magazine.  The focus of this book is much more on millennials and on the business impact.

Together these books are thought provoking and provide a richly detailed image of the world we now live in.

© 2013 Norman Jacknis

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Citizenville?

I’ve written a couple of times about Carl Skelton’s Betaville software for citizen engagement in urban planning and design, so my eye caught the title of a book that came out a few months ago – “Citizenville: How To Take the Town Square Digital and Reinvent Government” by current California Lt. Governor and former San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom.  (Alas, Citizenville is a name based on the popular game, FarmVille, not Betaville.)

When the book came out, there was a little bit of publicity and reviews in a few newspapers.  Perhaps the largest audience Newsom had was an interview on the Colbert Report, which unfortunately was fairly cynical in tone.  Many people, even those who are interested in better government, haven’t read it.

Let’s first get the criticisms out of the way.  Some critics have dismissed Newsom as a lightweight and clearly he does not write in an academic style.  It’s more journalistic, even breezy.  (Many people might consider that a plus.).

The tone in places is somewhat clichéd and sometimes annoying to those of us who are much deeper into the role of the Internet in government.  For example, the implication that the private sector is almost always better than the public sector is too broad a view to be worth much as a guiding principle.

Some of it is too much about him.  And not all of it is correct or well thought through.  But then that would also be true of authors with more prestigious academic credentials.

Ok, now to the more important positive side.  The book is a reasonably good compendium of the various ways that the Internet is being used in the public sector.  It should be read. 

For me, the most significant thing about the book is that an incumbent, leading politician wrote it.  In a way, that’s also why the book is useful to other public leaders.  Newsom shares his experiences – both good and bad – and outlines at least some of the minefield facing other elected officials who wish to use digital technologies in public service.

In addition to writing a book that can help to educate public leaders, Newsom, along with Code for America, has created the Citizenville Challenge (http://citizenville.com/challenge/) that has enlisted cities such as Philadelphia and Austin.  

Over the last several years, I’ve seen more elected officials who understand the role of technology in better citizen engagement and better public sector outcomes.  My own experience has led me to realize that technologists, in and out of government, can really only succeed when the top elected official leads the way.  Ultimately, that’s why this book is important.

In a recent review, Pete Peterson summarizes this key to success:

Of course, technology can facilitate these opportunities — but not without public-sector officials who see governments as more than “service providers” and citizens who regard themselves as more than “customers.”

[Note: If you want to get a quick idea of what he’s been saying, take a look at this video from the Commonwealth Club of California.  http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/311166-1 ]

© 2013 Norman Jacknis

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Citizens Participating In Budgeting?

This week, the New York State Technology Leadership Academy will take place in Albany, New York.  As I posted two weeks ago, I’ll be speaking about deep citizen engagement – the ways that government leaders can get the benefit of citizen co-creation and co-delivery of public services.

Note: the new website for you to contribute to and assess ideas is at https://claritypresales-13df0e80fac.secure.force.com/ca_idea__ideahome .

A timely article by Governing magazine appeared Monday – Tax Day, appropriately enough – about a “Study: Citizen Budgeting Related To Better Outcomes”.  (http://www.governing.com/blogs/view/gov-study-citizen-budgeting-related-to-better-performance.html)

The study was published in The American Review of Public Administration and focused on the relationship between the degree of citizen participation in highway budgeting and outcomes, such as road fatalities and road surface quality.   The researchers found that the greater the citizen participation, the more positive the outcomes.  This effect was strengthened the earlier the citizens had a chance to participate.

While there have been increasing reports about participatory budgeting, this is the first study that shows that citizen participation is not merely a democratic ideal, but is also a way to get better government.

Go to http://arp.sagepub.com/content/43/3/331 , if you want to read the original article, “Citizen Input in the Budget Process: When Does It Matter Most?” by Hai (David) Guo and Milena I. Neshkova, The American Review of Public Administration, May 2013; vol. 43, 3: pp. 331-346. 

Some other reports about citizen participation in budgeting can be found here:

© 2013 Norman Jacknis

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Government-to-Government Services?

There was an interesting article in the New York Times, “Police Surveillance May Earn Money for City” (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/04/nyregion/new-york-citys-police-surveillance-technology-could-bring-in-money.html).

Because it focused on law enforcement, much of the article dealt with privacy and other issues raised by police use of technology.  These issues are indeed challenging, but not that new.

A newer part of the story is that this is a good example of something I’ve been expecting to see for a couple of years: government to government software-as-a-service.   

Here are some relevant excerpts from the story:

The policing system is making New York safer and it will also make money for the city, which is marketing it to other jurisdictions. 

Buyers would pay to access the software (at least several million dollars and more depending on the size of the jurisdiction and whether specifications have to be customized). New York City will receive 30 percent of the gross revenues from the sale of the system and access to any innovations developed for new customers. The revenue will be directed to counterterrorism and crime prevention programs. 

This government-to-government service allows less technologically skilled governments to get sophisticated services they could create for themselves.   It also enables the most technologically advanced governments to spread out their development costs over a larger base and to save some money for their taxpayers.  A win-win as the old expression goes.

Even beyond law enforcement – or maybe I should say, especially outside of law enforcement – the logic of this situation is likely to lead to an expansion of these government-to-government technology services.  More examples in future posts.  Please let me know if you have any examples.

© 2013 Norman Jacknis

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New York State Technology Leadership Academy

In two weeks, the New York State Technology Leadership Academy will take place in Albany, New York.  This event brings together hundreds of the technology executives who try to make technology serve, ever better, the needs of the people of New York.

I’m on a panel Thursday, April 18, talking about Deep Engagement with the citizens of New York, enabling them to co-create public policy and deliver public services.  

As befitting the topic of the panel, there is now an opportunity to direct the conversation.  You can share your ideas or participate in the live conversation on April 18 at 11 AM Eastern Time.  Go to http://bit.ly/11LSR5U 

© 2013 Norman Jacknis

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When Will Citizens Be Able To Track Requests To The Government?

A little prelude that may seem obvious, except for the fact that it is widely ignored … 

The people that public officials call citizens or voters or residents are not single-minded civic machines.  Most of the time they are consumers and workers outside of the public sector and so what happens outside of the public sector affects the expectations of the public sector on the part of those same citizens, etc.  

So one of the more frequent parts of a consumer’s life these days is being able to track things.  Here are just a few of the many diverse examples, almost all of which have been around for at least a couple of years:

  • You can track your pizza order from Dominos from the oven to your front door.
  • You can track shipments, at all stages, through FedEx or UPS.
  • You can track the path of a taxi or “black car” that you ordered via Uber.
  • You can track airline flights so you know when to leave for the airport to pick up a relative.

However, in the public sector, this kind of tracking has been rare.  In addition to tracking mass transit in some big cities (perhaps imitating the airline services), there are few examples I could find, such as:

But clearly there are many more situations where people want to track their interaction with the government and cannot.

Why not enable citizens to track their government transactions in mid-stream?  While suggestions of this kind are often proposed to increase transparency of government, the tracking actually serves a much simpler goal – to reduce frustration on the part of the citizen.  If people can see where their request or application is, they will have a lower sense of frustration and a greater sense of control.

If the citizens could also get an estimate of how long it usually takes to go through each step of an approval process, all the better.  

When the Internet began getting much attention more than ten years ago, many governments decided to put applications on line, at least in the form of PDF documents that people could print and then fill out.  Eventually, people could apply online.  New York State government, for example, had a big project that was intended to put every citizen transaction on the Web.

Well, we’re past the point where citizens accept that as the best that can be done.  Now is the time to initiate a “big project” to enable citizens to track the status of each of those transactions.

Of course, the ultimate goal, in so far as possible, is to complete those transactions instantaneously online, like the fishing license app that Michigan makes available.  Then the tracking problem disappears, but that’s a subject for a future blog post.

© 2013 Norman Jacknis

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Does The President Need A 5th Column?

President Obama is now in his second term and he seems to realize that his ability to get things done through legislation is limited.  So he is very much dependent on his executive powers, including executive orders which can get him partly down the road he wants to go.

As chief executive, he also has at his disposal the formidable executive branch of the Federal government.  Every day, millions of Federal employees make decisions affecting the lives of tens of millions of other Americans in countless ways.  However, to an outside observer, the President has not adequately mobilized these employees to help him achieve his goals.  

Partly this is due to the fact that, like many other Presidents, Governors, Mayors and other public sector chief executives, he has focused on the formal organizational structure of the bureaucracy.  But, besides the President’s wishes, Federal employees face pressures from Congress, their own career bosses, the personal agendas of Cabinet secretaries and other political appointees.

This is why in his classic book, Presidential Power, Richard Neustadt starts with the story of President Truman speaking about what his successor, President Eisenhower, would face:

He’ll sit here and he’ll say, “Do this! Do that!” And nothing will happen. Poor Ike.  It wont be a bit like the Army. He’ll find it very frustrating. 

Many a chief executive in the public sector has heard “yes” many times, only to find out six months later that nothing happened to actually implement that supposed affirmation by staff.

In the election of 2008, many Internet observers were impressed by the Obama campaigns use of Web-based tools and social organization to win a tough primary campaign against the “inevitable”, establishment candidacy of Hillary Clinton.  Yet, the lessons of the campaign seem to have been forgotten when the President took office in 2009.  

Now the President has another chance and he should consider creating his own “fifth column”.   I realize the phrase “fifth column” has negative connotations, since it has designated a group of supporters who are hidden within and undermine the enemy camp.  

But that may be exactly what the leader of an entrenched bureaucracy needs – a group of supporters, at all levels, who will help him achieve his goals.  The President can mobilize an informal network of the large number of change agents and innovators in Federal service, a network that can exist in parallel to the formal organization.  By doing this, he can also provide encouragement to those innovators, who may sometimes feel lonely and could get support from each other. 

Of course, there were be those who object to anyone, even the President, trying to sidestep the formal organization chart.  That’s nice in theory, but many long time senior executives in Federal service already know that, in practice, its the informal relationships that let them get things done.  Why shouldn’t the President learn these same techniques?

Various Internet collaboration tools, like wikis, social media and video chat, make creating this informal network a lot easier than would have been the case decades ago.  Indeed, some of this informal network already exists.  This week, for example, there is #SocialGov Summit 2013, hosted by the 18-month old Federal Social Media Community of Practice (http://www.howto.gov/communities/federal-web-managers-council/social-media).

Build on that base, expand it to a larger network of innovators and the President may find it easier to get things done – at least in the Executive Branch.

© 2013 Norman Jacknis

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Overdue Convenience of the Day: City Hall as Food Truck

Great story in American City & County and also the Atlantic  about Boston taking an old idea and using it in a new way.  Even in a time when it seems everyone has a phone that can get on the Internet to government websites, the reality is that many people can’t operate this way – some never and almost everyone at least part of the time.

So this City Hall on the go is a nice alternative.

© 2013 Norman Jacknis

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