The Obama Administration is Going to “Listen to Citizens”

From time to time, we receive submissions from entrepreneurs with ideas and/or products that we think ought to be of interest to PdF/tP readers. Running those pieces should not be construed as an endorsement of a specific product. Rather we welcome these submissions because it's important to build dialogue between technologists and politicos, that is, between the makers and users of new tools and services. In that spirit, we welcome this piece from J. Brooke Aker of Expert System USA. The Editors.

The Office of Public Liaison in the new Obama administration is promising to listen to citizens as it considers policy direction, legislation and brings the people to Washington rather than bringing Washington to the people. The most concrete of these proposals is to allow a five-day comment period by citizens via the Internet before the President signs any legislation. Even now, anyone can offer an opinion directly to the President here. You can contribute up to 5,000 characters. That is roughly 400 words.

The windows are open in the White House and a new breeze of inclusiveness is blowing right in. This is certainly a change over the previous eight years when the White House was shut tight with the air inside growing staler by the day. But I wonder if the administration is prepared for the hurricane force winds that could result?

If you ask for comments on pending legislation, how many comments will the White House get? There are some hints from around the blogosphere. Go to Technorati and ask for a count of the word “bailout” over the last 6 months. The chart below is what you get.

The peak of more than 14,000 blog posts was around the passage of the first multi-billion bank bailout in the early Fall. An estimate of the average around this spike looks to be roughly 6,000 posts per day. You can be sure the number will spike again. But let’s be conservative and assume 1/3 of the average would comment directly to the White House on the next big piece of financial legislation over the five-day period promised. That would be 10,000 comments President Obama says he will consider. The current estimate of U.S. bloggers is 22.6 million so 10,000 comments may only be a drop in the bucket.

Short of a small army of readers, how will Valerie Jarrett and her staff understand this “wisdom of the crowd” input? We do know that President Obama has hired some tech vets to lead this kind of effort.

Chief among these is a former Google product manager Katie Jacobs Stanton who will be the new President’s “director of citizen participation." It is not just a coincidence that Ms. Stanton was in charge of Google Moderator.

A quick look at this tool reveals the ability for anyone to post a question (or I suppose a comment) and then have others vote for its importance relative to all the other questions posted. Looking through the questions posted around the Presidential debates is another estimate I can find that might look like what the White House will experience. The breakdown of topics, questions asked, votes recorded and citizens participating look like the table below.

Here is the rub. No matter how you count what can be expected from citizens participating in the new administration, technology beyond posting and voting is going to be needed. It’s not clear on Google Moderator if the categories were decided before the questions came in or after everyone posted. In any case, I took the top vote getting comments from each of these categories and analyzed them again using our semantic technology to see what categories come out. I could find 90 categories in total across all those who commented. The top categories (more than 1% of the total) were the following;

That’s easily more than twice what Google Moderator can bucket things into. The point is that true participation means more than a simple tally. It should mean listening, really listening to the context, the nuances, and the breadth of what citizen’s experience in their daily lives and what they expect from their government. Volume is only the first problem for citizen participation. The bigger issue is, as the intelligence community who is familiar with these problems puts it, finding dots, connecting dots and understanding dots.

I believe semantics to be a core technology that can not only process the volume of what the White House is about to experience but can also capture the full picture of true citizen participation. At Expert System, we build technology that does exactly this. We have deployed our solutions successfully within both governments and private industries who wish to be responsive to customers and citizens. With several won awards from Prime Ministers and industry associations, Expert System is confident that we could—and would love the opportunity—to do the same for the Obama administration. Others do a good job at this as well, including GetSatisfaction and InQuira.

It will not do President Obama any good to promise to listen to his most important constituency and later be accused of lending a dull ear to the process. There is great promise in having the breadth and range of American opinion directly influence the highest office in the land. Everyone can see technology is the key to extending our democratic reach to every living room and kitchen table. The peril is in not applying enough or the right technology resulting in enough citizens feeling as though they were not sufficiently heard. That would do democracy harm indeed.

Bio: J. Brooke Aker is the CEO of Expert System USA, a semantic technologies company. Mr. Aker is a serial entrepreneur and economist by education. Prior to being named CEO of Expert System USA, Mr. Aker was the CEO of Acuity Software and before that, Cipher Systems. He is the technology designer of intelligence software for corporate use, and a long-time speaker and author in the areas of strategic planning, knowledge management, and business intelligence. His designs have been recognized by IBM, SCIP and The Journal of Strategic Planning.