Government 2.0
“[I]t’s time to reorganize our state and local government structures for today’s realities rather than cling to the sensibilities of the 20th century,” wrote Tom Brokaw in a NYT op-ed last week. “If we demand this from General Motors, we should ask no less of ourselves.”
And indeed there is a lot discussion about efforts to reinvent government, from inside and out.
NPR spoke with Clay Johnson of Sunlight Labs about the Apps for America contest.
The more transparent we make government, the more people can participate in it. And when people participate in it, they're no longer apathetic about it. So transparency kills apathy.
Johnson and Sunlight also posted ideas on design and accessiblity for the Data.gov site, expected later this year.
Meanwhile, the EPA launched MyEnvironment, map-based view of agency data. The text box is a little buried on the EPA homepage, so here is a view of results for my hometown of Portland, Ore. If this type of place-specific EPA data is of interest, take another look at Scorecard, developed over a decade ago by Environmental Defense and now maintained by Green Media Toolshed.
Craig Newmark (of Craigslist) posted on Department of Defense efforts to utilize Web 2.0 strategies, not for improved transparency, but for improved internal operations.
Paul Clarke asked the question: What do we mean when we say "open government"? ("Open government" is the UK equivalent of the Americanism "government 2.0." Or is it?)
And Tim O'Reilly had two great posts: one on Aneesh Chopra, Obama's nominee for Chief Technology Officer (see Chopra's talk at the State of the Net Conference), and one on DIY approaches to governance, otherwise knows as civil society.
[G]overnments, like corporations, are vehicles for collective action. We pay a government, or a business, because it's an efficient way to tackle projects that are larger than a single person or group of friends can take on. But let's not forget that we ourselves are the raw material of collective action.
Traditional communities still remember how to do a barn raising. Those of us who spend our time on the internet celebrate wikipedia, but most of us have forgotten how to do crowdsourcing in the physical world.
The internet provides new vehicles for collective action. A lot of people pay attention when social media is used to organize a protest (as with the recent twitter-fueled protests in Moldova.) But we need to remember that we can organize to do work, as well as to protest!
