From #GovWebCon: Jeff Jarvis on WWGD, Failure, Innovation and Change

Jeff Jarvis is now up, keynoting at the Government Web Managers Conference. As with prior posts, my notes that follow are semi-verbatim but not be taken as exact quotations, though when I put something in quotes, it's a good rendition of what someone said. My comments and observations are in [brackets].

Sheila Campbell introduces Jeff by telling the audience that he got to DC in part by Twittering his need for a ride from Baltimore, after his Amtrak train from NYC was delayed by a flood in that city. The audience cheers. Here's Jeff's rap:

You are the best hope we have for transparent government. You are the link. You feel your shoulders just got heavier? Well, I'm here to offer some arguments, some bullets you can fire in the struggles that you're involved in inside government.

I think we are truly going from the industrial age to what comes next. This is bigger than a recession or a depression, he says. And I decided to report on Google, the fastest growing company in the world, to understand what is going on, what is coming next.

Give the people control, we will use it. Jeff describes blogging about his "Dell hell." Dell ignored the bloggers, their policy was "look don't touch" the blogs. But lots of people started pointing to his post. Then after about a year, they started blogging.

He asks how many in the audience have read the Cluetrain Manifesto, and only about 3-4 raise their hands.

Dell started to get collaborative, in addition to blogging, they launched Ideastorm to get better ideas from their customers. When you give up control, you win. When you hold on, you lose. Hard for government to do, I know, but it's our government, isn't it? You are us. This ought to be logical.

There is an inverse relationship between control and trust, says David Weinberger. When you don't give up control, you aren't trusting the people. You're saying they're a bunch of dummies. When you don't trust them, you don't believe in democracy or capitalism or freedom of religion.

The good stuff is there, not just people saying S-H-I-T on the web. You have to focus on finding it. Google does this really well. They fail brilliantly and learn from their mistakes. Government is terrified of making mistakes, unfortunately. Google releases beta products all the time, a way of saying this product is imperfect and uncompleted. It leads them to being collaborative. By being incomplete, you are opening up what you do (tells the story of the release of Google News, should it sort by date or location--emails from initial users told them the answer, sort by date).

When you post a half-baked post, you're saying to your audience: "Here's what I know, here's what I don't know, what do you know?" This leads to collaboration. My great hope this might even change the tenor and tone and discussion of government in this country. It's not just "get the bastards," since most people in government are there to do good things. How do we change this tenor, and get a smarter government (not rule of the mob, he says)?

What does "Don't be evil" mean for Google? It gives their employees a license to speak up in a meeting and ask, is this right? Wouldn't it have been nice if that had been etched on the walls of Wall Street and insurance companies? Was it right to sell people on loans they couldn't repay?

This is also about thinking like a network and understanding the internet as a platform, as Google has. Government ought to be a platform for the people, too.

Can we make transparency the default for government? Make everything clickable, linkable, searchable. We'd have millions more people watching and participating in helping make it better. (Ironically, Google isn't transparent enough about its own practices, he notes.)

We of course need to be visible to Google, or we won't be found. "All God's people need Google juice," he says, to laughter. "I like you people." [The crowd is certainly eating this up.]

A new problem: speed. Everything moves faster now, and our expectations are higher. Answers are instantaneous. Life is live. A mob can form in a flash. This isn't about just updating your home page. The demand from the web is constant.

Small is the new big. There are no masses, only ways of seeing people as masses (Raymond Williams). It used to be efficient for government to treat us as masses, but we're individuals. The media calls this fragmentation, he says, but that's because they're losing share. We can connect in new ways now. I got a ride here because of the internet.

Hopefully, now we'll see a breakdown of the red-blue divide and allow us to coalesce around all the things we may share in common.

He tells his story from the book about Mark Zuckerberg telling the major media mogul from NY that he couldn't have a social network around his newspaper, but if he brought elegant organization to what people were already doing, they'd stay by him. Jarvis says government has a real opportunity here, to bring elegant organization to the part of people's lives that involve interacting with government or getting the things they need done from the public arena.

New imperatives: encourage, enable and protect innovation. Don't worry about failure or its costs, at least you're trying! At Google, they say, fail quickly! How do we help government fail more? How do we push innovation without allowing for failure? I don't know but you will hopefully figure it out.

When you lose control of the platform you've built, you've won. When people start using it in ways that you didn't expect, you've won. Not like Microsoft, writing a long manual on how to use a product and then including a talking paper clip, in case you didn't get it.

If I had eaten my own dogfood, I would have put out a book online that is clickable, searchable, etc. Why didn't I? Dogs got to eat, and I got an advance, and I took it. But I did put the ideas in the book out on my blog for years, and my readers sharpened them. They practically wrote my chapter on insurance. And now the process continues. I have had three ministers write me about how they are trying to googlify their congregations, for example, and I've blogged about them.

What would a "googley restaurant" look like? When I come in, I'd see a menu showing me what the popular items are. I'd see data. I'm not suggesting that we have rule by the mob, I still want the cook cooking the meal. By analogy to democracy, I want the cook to be smarter. Not the mob. I still believe in a role for authority, authorship and creativity. I don't want to finish novels for the authors. But the chef, or the government worker, should be smarter because they heard better ideas. Public suggestion boxes, like IdeaStorm, allow everyone--the public and the company--to discuss their ideas together and refine them. Starbucks is using the same tool (Ideas, from Salesforce). Stupid ideas die on the vine.

He concludes with, "Argue with me."

Questions/Answers discussion:

Q: from the Weather service: we asked for comments when we put a new design or visual up and we got hundreds of thousands of dollars of great free advice about how to improve them.
A: Asks how many here are providing their data in APIs. Very few hands go up. It's a great way to get others to do stuff with your data. For example, every NPR app on the iPhone is made by someone not at NPR.

Q: How can we improve how we put out information, and also protect people better, in terms of life as beta and learning how to fail? And what would you do to Comcast?
A: When Katrina hit, people used the tools that were available as best as they could. Imagine if we had Twitter then. People started posting urgent message then on NOLA.com and the Coast Guard noticed, since it was paying attention to what people were saying about where people were stranded. (Everyone agrees that we have a phobia of failure in government, except one woman from EPA.) Jeff says the problem is the myth that we're perfect. We have to expect more innovative government, instead of perfect.

Q: How do we deal with the lawyers' objections? (not the politicians, who want IT to try things, but lawyers object.)
A: What are their objections? Privacy and security, someone shouts. Jarvis says, face the monster head on. What's the worst that can happen? Second, distribute yourself, via API, and let other people build new sites that you can't. Third, get your bosses to give you a safe harbor for innovation, a sandbox if you will. So you can shame the lawyers.

Q: From Jeffrey Levy, EPA: "Part of our job is screwing up off on the internet, in learning this stuff. Part of a government lawyer's job is saving your ass you." We can't leave here just chanting, screw the lawyers, they'll shut you down cold. You have to learn their priorities, and you have to train them. [corrections in those quotes from Jeffrey Levy.]

Q: Transparency and data democratization I understand, but my concern is with data that people rely on in real time. Our fear of failure isn't whether our site is found by Google, it's sometimes lives on the line (like NOAA data used by sailors).
A: The Guardian's API requires using their brand, using their ad network, and refreshing the data every 24 hours, to make sure the data is fresh.

Q: from someone who works for county government: Does the internet make us smarter? At the smaller, local scale, I'm not sure it does. Also, I would say that politics and government are inversely related (like control and trust).
A: I think the opportunites in the new economy are in building platforms, building niche things on top of that, and then building networks. So, for example, now is the time to bring together local gov web managers. Also, get ready for the new role you, local government, will have as newspapers die. The public will still demand journalism, and since you have source info they will be demanding the info from you. That will change local government, either through increased demand or legislation, or both.

The internet gave me a second childhood, and I'm sure it has for many of you. It's great to be able to be reinventing things.