opengov – Looking Forward

January 21, 2015

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.

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.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/108736939340/libraries-and-open-government]

November 5, 2014

Six Lessons For Mayors – Part 2

[As a reminder from last week, I’ve repeated the introductory paragraphs, but continue on from lesson 4.]

Mayors, governors and other local government leaders are being inundated by all sorts of “experts” telling them how to run a smart city. Often, the ulterior commercial motivation of these messages is not even well hidden.

Fortunately, in recent years, an objective and disciplined set of academic researchers have stepped up their focus on these questions.

The Center for Technology in Government (CTG) at the University at Albany has worked with government officials all over the world and studied their efforts to build smarter cities and use technology intelligently. As recently designated Government Fellow at CTG, I have taken a look at some of their past research and work.

Here are the last three of six lessons, which stand out to me. (By the way, it’s worth noting that these also apply in the private sector, although that’s not what CTG studied. Where it ways government, think company, and where it says citizen, think customer.)

4. Government Staff Can Be Supplemented

Lesson #4 is that cities with successful smart city services did not do this all within their own agencies.

At its simplest, CTG also saw examples where private sector partners in a city who have deep experience operating call centers can be helpful in training government staff for this kind of work. Volunteer neighborhood liaisons were also used to extend the reach of 311 and related services.

At its simplest, CTG describes examples where private sector partners in a city who have deep experience operating call centers can be helpful in training government staff for this kind of work. Volunteer neighborhood liaisons were also used to extend the reach of 311 and related services. Many times governments feel that they must take on all the aspects of an initiative, when many times there are private and non-profit organizations looking to play a role.

5. The Smart City Involves More Than City Government

From the citizens’ viewpoint, smart government services may require sharing data among different government entities. As difficult as it is to share data within a single government, it gets even more complicated to share between agencies of different governments. Understanding this complexity is critical to successful IT efforts.

As CTG reports:

“Expecting a great variety of benefits, governments around the world have initiated an increasing number of cross-boundary information sharing (CBIS) initiatives. Collaborating and sharing information in metropolitan areas is different from sharing within organizational hierarchies. Normally, government agencies in metropolitan areas are not subordinated to a single entity and their willingness to collaborate and share information is mainly motivated by common needs and interests.”

“Network organizations are an alternative to hierarchies because they are based on relationships, distributed knowledge, mutual dependency, and norms of reciprocity… Networks in fact can be an alternative to traditional bureaucratic and hierarchical solutions and e-government information integration can be a good example of that.”

Lesson #5 is that a mayor may succeed faster by facilitating these informal networks of relationships, rather than going through the arduous process of imposing cooperation through legislation and complex legal arrangements.

6. The Single Most Important Player Is The Mayor

CTG’s research all over the world highlights this single most important Lesson #6: the most critical role in the whole smart city ecosystem is that of the mayor, who must provide consistent and visible leadership for a smart city across all agencies under his/her control and those his city interacts with.

CTG observed:

“despite important challenges, information integration initiatives can be implemented with relatively good results if there is enough political support from top government executives. … This work offers insights on how the support of the mayor can significantly influence the implementation of an information integration strategy in at least three different ways: (1) the creation of an adequate institutional framework, (2) the alignment of diverse political interests within the city administration, and (3) the increase of financial resources.”

“The executive support and political champions help resolve interdepartmental conflicts.”

As with all knowledge, these lessons may seem obvious once presented – but not so predictable before they are presented. Indeed, it is also clear from the research that not all of these lessons have been heeded in the rush to the smart city movement and the result has been much less than mayors have hoped for.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/101845371086/six-lessons-for-mayors-part-2]

October 29, 2014

Six Lessons For Mayors – Part 1

Fortunately, in recent years, an objective and disciplined set of academic researchers have stepped up their focus on these questions.

Here are the first three of six lessons, which stand out to me. (By the way, it’s worth noting that these also apply in the private sector, although that’s not what CTG studied. Where it ways government, think company, and where it says citizen, think customer.)

1. Systems That Can Share Will Enhance Citizen Service

CTG worked with and studied cities that implemented 311 systems and later rolled out larger service management systems. While the cost of handling 311 telephone calls, among other reasons, have diminished the number of new telephone-only installations, the 311 experience has provided lessons on the obstacles to providing better service to a city’s residents.

311 systems and other single points of entry for citizen service, even the web, make glaringly clear the lack of integration across government agencies. Complex technology that is not interoperable only adds to the traditional human problem of bureaucratic silos.

So Lesson #1 is that the city needs to make sure its computer systems are interoperable – or at least open to sharing data. Integrating the back end is just as important as providing a citizen interface on the front end.

2. It’s Not Merely About Technology

Having said that, CTG’s research makes Lesson #2 clear: any mayor, who thinks that simply building a system for citizen services is sufficient, will not likely succeed in his/her larger goals of creating a smart city.

As one of their reports states:

“A smart city is not only a technological concept but a socioeconomic development one. Technology is obviously a necessary condition for a smart city, but citizens’ understanding of the concept is about the development of urban society for the better quality of life. The adoption of up-to-date technologies per se does not guarantee the success of smart city initiatives. Rather, innovation in management style and policy direction makes a city more livable. Success of smart city projects is not determined by technology or technical capital. Success is dependent on leadership and interorganizational coordination. Technology itself does not make any contribution to innovation.”

3. Government Staff Overcome Technological Limitations

Lesson #3 is that, in various ways, government staff (people) can overcome the lack of integration of citizen-facing systems in government. .

The 311 experience has illuminated the weaknesses of legacy systems and the frequent situation where the 311 software used by operators is not really connected to the legacy systems that departments use to manage the services they deliver to the public. So 311 becomes a cover for the disorganization behind the scenes. In such cases, CTG has found that well trained, qualified human agents can fill the gaps and give the citizen the kind of integrated service which is expected.

[TO BE CONTINUED NEXT WEEK] …

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/101256317797/six-lessons-for-mayors-part-1]

June 11, 2014

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 19^th and early 20^th 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.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/88472868695/accelerating-internet-activism]

May 21, 2014

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).

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 .

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/86405556739/what-is-the-role-of-libraries-in-open-government]

May 7, 2014

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.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/]

March 5, 2014

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.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/78650683108/national-association-of-counties-innovation-summit]

February 6, 2014

Do Good Ideas Bubble Up From The Crowd?

Almost five years ago, President Obama launched an open government website that asked for average citizens to suggest the most pressing public policy issues and then vote on the relative importance of those issues. In the words of IdeaScale, the company that has developed the software platform for these kinds of crowdsourcing activities, these efforts at Internet-based collaboration are intended to bubble up the best ideas.

So it was with some embarrassment on the part of the White House that the subject of the legalization of marijuana came out as one of the top issues in 2009. The opponents of the President took him to task about letting a tiny fringe minority dominate his Open Government efforts. As reported in an article “Clay Shirky: online crowds aren’t always wise”, this resulted even in one of the leading scholars and advocates of crowdsourcing discussing checks and balances on full national scale popular engagement on public policy.

Various explanations were given and there was lots of hand-wringing by the digerati and open government advocates, including this one in Wired and this one on the Personal Democracy Forum blog. The White House ultimately responded only to those important issues it thought politically acceptable to respond to – not including marijuana.

Then all this passed into arcane history. But I was reminded of this history when Colorado and Washington legalized marijuana in the elections last year, various governors announced their reduction in enforcement of anti-marijuana laws or even effective decriminalization and, indeed, even the Obama Administration has softened its stance.

Whatever you might think of these decisions as matters of public policy, it seems that the rush to negative judgment about the marijuana issue “bubbling up” in 2009 was perhaps inappropriate. It may well be that these crowdsourcing efforts, while not perfect and potentially manipulated, can act as a kind of leading indicator of public opinion. Clearly the supporters were a bit more than a tiny, fringe minority.

For now, we see that public opinion on marijuana laws is the opposite of what the media commentators would have had us believe in 2009. For example, there have been two stories this past year about the survey work of the respected and non-partisan Pew Research folks:

“Americans skeptical of value of enforcing marijuana laws” (August 13, 2013), in which they found “roughly three–in-four Americans say government efforts to enforce marijuana laws cost more than they are worth” and
“Majority Now Supports Legalizing Marijuana” (April 4, 2013) which seems to indicate the shift to the majority was identified in a 2010 survey.

In 2009, this was apparently still not a majority but on its way to becoming one. That is perhaps one reason that the organizations who use crowdsourcing also have found it to be a valuable means of developing innovative ideas and solutions – which are not yet, but will be, conventional wisdom in a few years.

So we do indeed need to get smarter about open government efforts, which is not the same thing as saying they don’t work. As leaders represent ever larger constituencies and thus have more difficulty understanding what’s on the minds of those constituents, crowdsourcing can be a useful instrument.

It is also something that voters will very much appreciate as a promising countervailing tendency to the disengagement from civic affairs that many have felt in recent years.

On top of that, leaders may also realize how much wisdom there is “out there” and look smart for adopting it early.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/75798707019/do-good-ideas-bubble-up-from-the-crowd]

June 19, 2012

21st Century Spaces and Experiences In The New American City

A few days ago at the 80^th Annual Meeting of the @USMayors, I was asked to elaborate, for its Council for A New American City, on one part of the future-oriented economic growth strategy I have developed for them – the blending of physical and virtual space to create new destinations and experiences that will attract and retain people in this century.

These ideas are intended to help a city remain vital in a future world where people can live anywhere. (See earlier posts if you want more background on the technology and socio-economic trends that are creating this future world.)

I described blended spaces for working, shopping and, in general, living in an urban area. First, cities need to enable new, more informal workspaces in which most people will earn a living in the future. These can be in formal co-working spaces or in homes. But they might also be in hotel lobbies or in parks (like Bryant Park in New York City that is equipped not only with Wi-Fi, but also electrical outlets along the edge of the grass for when your laptop needs recharging).

Second, cities should enable new virtual shopping options, which might be part of transportation systems, on the street, or in any public space where many people go by (and could buy). The deployment of virtual shopping has direct economic benefit to the city government because it can increase sales tax revenues, increase revenues from advertising in public spaces (like bus stops) and even allow the city to get a piece of the sales transaction that occurs in its facilities.

And, at least until it becomes more common, virtual shopping can provide people an exhilarating “experience” that adds to the quality of life in a city.

Beyond shopping, I gave several examples of how blended virtual/physical space can improve quality of life – how it can provide a “wow” factor for a city. For example, the mayors were intrigued by 3D projections on buildings. I referred, for example, to how Chattanooga could project on downtown walls or streets what was going on in its large freshwater aquarium at night when the aquarium is closed.

I also reminded the mayors that quality of life includes the experience of being a citizen in a city. That experience goes beyond merely getting city services on the web, but includes active citizen engagement in the co-creation of public policy and co-production of public services.

Finally, I noted that any city can implement at least one of the ideas I presented, without a big capital project. Compared to lots of other projects, these had little cost – and sometimes no cost at all to the city government. So the final guidance was: go ahead & experiment!

If you’re interested in getting a copy of the whole presentation, please feel free to contact me (njacknis@cisco.com).

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/25433017894/21st-century-spaces-and-experiences-in-the-new-american]