Noveck: Fighting Short-Term Thinking Through Deep Participation

Credit: The Long Now Foundation

The Long Now Foundation is the group of folks out in San Francisco who concern themselves with considering how the world might play out over the next 10,000 years, so it makes sense that when Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer for open government Beth Noveck headed there to give an address recently, her mind was on the long term -- as in, how political decisions with perhaps generations-long impact are made by people who might be out of power in two years (if not sooner). "Very long term decisions that affect the fate of our planet, the fate of our economy, the fate of our major systems of health care and education," Noveck said, "are being made by people who are in very short term political positions."

It's a problem that others have identified. But Noveck comes at it from an intriguing angle. If decisions are made quickly but people with a distinct lack of long-range vision, then we can help ameliorate the situation by going deep -- that is, pulling into service a wider range of people to act collaboratively. It's the spirit, in many ways, of Rep. Tim Walz's project to group-vet 98 earmark requests we profiled yesterday. It might come across as tech-tinged West Coast froo-froo thinking. But as Noveck points out, it's not exactly new. She tells an annecdote about how, when in the 1790s Thomas Jefferson headed up the U.S. Patent Office back, he was having trouble with a patent, and so wrote a friend who was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and said, Hey, I don't know anything about alchemy. Can you help me out?

As for what the Obama administration has accomplished in the collaborative government space, Noveck points to things like Data.gov, Recovery.gov, the posting of White House visitor logs, the Sunlight Foundation's annotation of the health care summit video stream distributed by the White House, Apps for the Army, and more. You'll notice that a heavy emphasis on transparency/disclosure, rather than actual collaboratioin, in that batch of accomplishments. And Noveck admitted that the trick of engineering experiences to produce constructive participation is one that the Obama administration is still practicing. "People have to know what's being asked of them," she said. "And we have a long way to go to learn how to do that."

One additional thing that jumped out from Noveck's talk is that her focus on tech-centric "open government" actually shares a great deal in common with the broader current discussion over ending the filibuster, calling a consitutional convention, and otherwise rethinking the instutitons of government. Noveck, for example, used an Alexis de Tocqueville quote: "I am tempted to believe that what we call necessary institutions are often no more than institutions to which wehave grown accustomed." The rest of that quote? "And that in the matters of social constitution the field of possibilities is much more extensive than men living in their various societies are ready to imagine."

Go ahead and grab the audio of Beth Noveck's Long Now talk here.

(One fun little tidbit from her address: as Noveck puts it, the Obamas "crowdsource" the weeding of the White House vegetable garden. Those working for the White House can sign up for a volunteer shift. Noveck notes that there's no shortage of volunteers, and nary a weed in site.)