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.)

A White House conference call on the Open Government Directive, wrapped just moments ago, made clear that the Obama Administration's open government team is betting on the idea that those people who President Obama has appointed to office share a commitment to a new kind of open and participatory politics, and that leadership on the Secretary level will filter down throughout the agencies and departments they head up. There was far less focus on this morning's call on more formal and structured enforcement and accountability mechanisms.

On the call, led by special counsel to the President Norm Eisen and Beth Noveck, Administration officials were asked what the White House sees as the mechanisms for enforcing this new open government order, and in particular the ambitious timeline handed to agencies for the development of their own internal plans and procedures. The Directive itself comes in the form of a memorandum (M-10-06) from Peter Orszag, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, to the heads of executive branch offices and agencies. And perhaps importantly, there was no representative from OMB itself on the call. But what if, asked a participant, "a recalcitrant agency misses a deadline? Who in the White House will asses that, and make sure the agency is on board with the directive?"

Noveck's response was that...

The White House has just released its Open Government Directive, long-awaited by transparency and "government 2.0" advocates, and at first glance, the meat on the bone looks pretty juicy. (Or, if you prefer a vegan metaphor, the sauce on the seitan looks pretty, um, creamy?) Nancy's got a sharp and detailed write-up here, and since I've been stuck in a meeting all day, I'm only going to add one additional wrinkle on a topic close to my heart that I think is worth highlighting, nay, hailing.

To me, one of the most important parts of the new directive is in this paragraph, in the section on "Publishing Government Information Online":

b. To the extent practicable and subject to valid restrictions, agencies should publish information online in an open format that can be retrieved, downloaded, indexed, and searched by commonly used web search applications. An open format is one that is platform independent, machine readable, and made available to the public without restrictions that would impede the re-use of that information.

U.S. Deputy CIO for open government Beth Noveck surveys the landscape, finding experiments in participatory democracy bubbling up throughout these United States:

Inspired by the President’s call for more open government, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts launched its data catalogue, following in the footsteps of Washington, DC, San Francisco, New York, and elsewhere around the country (as well as cities in Canada and the UK), to provide public access to information by and about government. What makes this exciting is not merely having transportation information available in machine-readable formats, but that professional and amateur enthusiasts can then get together, as they did last weekend, to create new software applications and data visualizations to better enable public transit riders to track arrival times for the next subway, bus, or ferry. Publishing government information online facilitates this kind of useful collaboration between government and the public that transforms dry data into the tools that improve people’s lives. (For another great example, check out what happened when we published the Federal Register for people to use.)

The National Association of State CIOs is helping to spur this movement toward greater data transparency at the state level by publishing “Guidance for Opening the Doors to State Data.”

Just as the federal government is using online brainstorming with government employees and the public to generate ideas for saving money or going green, state and local governments are also using new technology to tap people’s intelligence and expertise. The City of Manor, Texas (pop. 5800) has launched “Manor Labs,” an innovation marketplace for improving city services.  A participant can sign up to suggest “ideas and solutions” for the police department, the municipal court, and everything in between. Each participant’s suggestion is ranked and rewarded with “innobucks.” These innobucks points can be redeemed for prizes: a million innobucks points wins “mayor for the day” while 400,000 points can be traded for a ride-along with the Chief of Police.

Exciting stuff, and one tangible outgrowth of President Obama's call for more open government does seem to be the freedom and inspiration it has delivered unto those working at all levels of government. To get at the actual links to the projects and programs Noveck mentions, though, you'll have to click through to her original post. The White House still insists on attaching warning notices to every external link on Obama Administration sites, which messes up the underlying code and makes it more difficult for normal folk to remix and reuse what the White House open government team is putting out into the world. There's an irony in there somewhere...

Reposted from "Increasing Citizen Engagement in Government," the Fall 2009 newsletter from the Center for Intergovernmental Solutions, an office of the General Services Administration.

To be effective, Internet professionals navigate between two dangerous currents: dismissal and utopianism. The challenges of dismissal are pretty obvious—the boss who forgets to invite you to the meeting, or the subtler demotion of online work to a pure marketing function.

The risks of utopianism are harder to see, but the danger is just as great: If we overstate how online tools can change the world, we ask our clients and colleagues to sail on faith into uncharted waters and we risk losing allies in the daily work that makes change a reality over time.

The Obama Administration arrived on a surge of optimism about online partnerships between citizens and government. As excitement transitions into a season of experimentation, Internet professionals, government professionals and regular people face important questions about the readiness of tools, institutions and individuals to turn optimism into operational change.

Beth Noveck, White House Deputy CTO for Open Government, is leading the effort to rethink public participation. She says the administration wants "to make government more relevant to people's lives" by providing more information, and to create "opportunities for people to share their expertise and participate in solving problems." Noveck believes that transparency and participation tools are most powerful when combined. "Data helps to focus people's attention," she says, "to develop actionable proposals based in empirical measures." Noveck and the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) have already coordinated web discussions on declassification policy, FCC rules, use of web cookies, Pentagon Web 2.0 guidelines and recommendations on the Open Government Initiative.

Despite the innovation—and fanfare—behind the White House pilots in transparency and public input, leaders in online collaboration temper their enthusiasm with questions.

The quality of the dialogue on the Office of Science and Technology Policy's Open Government blog continues to improve, day by day. Clearly, the folks running the show are learning as they go, and trying to tweak how they blog about policy so that a useful conversation can flourish. But the process still leaves a lot to be desired, which may be more the fault of the topic at hand and the tools available, then the specific choices being made by the OSTP's team. Should we drawing big conclusions from this experiment? Or should we treat is a big experiment, but just one of many that need to happen before we can draw firm conclusions about the prospects for involving the public in developing policy using online collaboration tools? (I think the latter.)

Here are some examples of what I mean. First the good news: The majority of the comments now appearing on the OSTP blog are serious efforts by citizens, and in some cases domain experts, to engage with the questions on tap...

Over on the Office of Science and Technology blog, Deputy U.S. CTO Beth Noveck puts a lid on the brainstorming phase of the White House's Open Government Initiative by imposing structure on some of the submissions that have flowed out of the all-ideas-on-the-table portion of the OGI experience. OSTP has helpfully sorted the open-government ideas they appear to be focusing on most closely into the "mindmap" on the right. In case your eyesight's somewhat less than a superhero's, here's a big version. Noveck subsequently blogged a preview to OGI Phase II -- the discussion phase.

A related note: the White House's open government folks are now on Twitter -- @opengov.

The folks at the National Academy of Public Administration who are managing the White House's Open Government Initiative brainstorm site have posted a call to participants for help. Specifically, help in voting down "postings you feel are counterproductive to maintaining a free-flowing exchange of ideas" and help in flagging content "that you feel is duplicative or inappropriate to the discussion."

While the post speaks only in general terms, it's clear that it's a reaction to the flood of posts in recent days from people raising questions about President Obama's birth certificate and his eligibility to be president (whom I derisively referred to as the "birthers.")

Round One of the White House's Open Government Initiative creation process wrapped at midnight last night. Deputy U.S. CTO for Open Government Beth Noveck blogs on WhiteHouse.gov that the brainstorming portion pulled in about 900 ideas and 33,000 votes. So, is that good? Well, as in many ways this was a first-of-its kind experiment, there aren't too many apples-to-apples comparisons to be made. That said, the Recovery.gov "national dialogue" on IT pulled in just over half the idea submissions, with 470. And let's face it, open government is somewhat more obscure than IT, and offers less bait for vender participation as well. With that in mind, Round One of the Open Government Initiative enjoyed a not insignificant level of participation.

We know, we know, this wasn't a contest. But still, with 674 votes, the winner is...drumroll...House Republican John Boehner's somewhat off-topic call for a 72-hour pre-vote vetting period on congressional bills. Other highly-rated and solid ideas: funding long-term public collaboration projects on a multi-year basis, rather than going back to the trough year after year; and putting the President’s Management Council in charge of holding agencies to the president's open government principles. Finally, in what might be considered both a victory and a defeat, the inevitable marijuana question came in 5th with 279 votes.

The next step, writes Noveck, will be integrating Round One's public submissions with what was culled from the internal MAX discussion amongst federal employees from several weeks back. Then next Wednesday, June 3rd, begins Round Two, the discussion round. Noveck has details. (Noveck also announced a nice feature that increases the transparency of the OGI. Once this process is wrapped, all submissions will be archived on the White House's Open Government website for all the world to see.)

To the suprise of, um, exactly no one, Julius Genachowski was nominated today by President Obama to head the Federal Communications Commission. And word is that DC CTO Vivek Kundra will also finally get his nod as OMB e-government administrator shortly. But Mother Jones' Jonathan Stein has talked to tech advocates and other interested parties who are getting a bit antsy that the White House still has not named someone to the long-promised post of Chief Technology Officer -- despite the fact that, as Stein writes, "Obama has already given the CTO homework." By presidential memorandum, the CTO has until late May to draft an Open Government Directive.

For the time being, it seems that that first CTO assignment has been handed over to law professor Beth Noveck, who has set up temporary shop in the Office of Science and Technology Policy. But don't look for the OSTP website to provide much reassurance that there are sufficient hands on deck: the "Leadership & Staff" page is drop-dead blank. That said, Noveck seems to have a least some support. Federal News Radio's Jason Miller reported mid last month that GSA Interagency Policy and Management Director Michele Heffner is on a three-month detail at OSTP. The concern, though, is that, as Stein quotes the Sunlight Foundation's Ellen Miller as sharing, an eventual CTO won't feel a whole lot of ownership over a open-government agenda he or she didn't have a hand in creating.