Posted: May 1st, 2009 | Author: berendes | Filed under: Civic engagement | No Comments »
The Recovery Accountability And Transparency Board (RATB) is sponsoring a public, web-based dialogue on promising IT to support transparency and accountability of the Administration’s Recovery Act spending. It is groundbreaking. However, seeming parallels with Digg, Slashdot, and other social media sites are misleading. Indeed, they obscure steps that could still be taken to make this effort, and future efforts, highly effective models of citizen engagement and transparency. Clay Shirky is a wise observer of the rise of easy online collaboration processes for large groups. His work provides us with a framework to clarify the ways in which the Recovery.gov effort is fundamentally unlike many more familiar social networks and to suggest tweaks that would help it realize its unique potential.
Shirky’s Promise, Tool, Bargain
In Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky argues that successful web-based coordination communities meet three challenges:
- A plausible promise – not too mundane, not too sweeping – that persuades would be participants to join the group
- A useful tool that supports the desired coordination, and
- A bargain that develops through interaction and over time, often implicitly, which specifies what participants can expect and what is expected of them
For instance, Delicious.com’s promise is that it provides personal value – storing your bookmarks and making them accessible from anywhere – from the get go. The tagging component of Flickr provides a tool that makes it easier for members to connect with other participants who have posted similar photos, famously, of the Coney Island mermaid parade. And the bargain for Flickr’s “Black and White Maniacs” group requires that participants who have posted a photo immediately comment on at least two other photos, in order to keep an interaction going.
How does the National Dialogue website fare on Shirky’s criteria?
Promise: the good stuff is vague
The introduction bills the Dialogue as an opportunity to help the Administration keep its commitment to make Recovery spending transparent and accountable:
Your ideas can directly impact how Recovery.gov operates and ensure that
our economic recovery is the most transparent and accountable in history….
Participants can refine these ideas in open discussion, and vote the best ones to the top.
The call for participation email message from 4/23 notes
The results of the dialogue will be reviewed for the most innovative suggestions around making Recovery.gov a more effective portal for transparency.
The “about” page makes a commitment:
Upon the close of this dialogue on May 3rd, 2009, the President’s Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board will review the results of this discussion.
The promise is vague, but might be glossed as “you can put your proposal in front of us – the government - and we will review it carefully”.
Unlike the first promise of Delicious, thenationaldialogue.org does not promise to serve the participant in a direct or tangible way, nor to connect him or her with other participants.
Further, the central part of the promise – “we will review it carefully” – in fact happens mostly outside of the tool, indeed, out of sight.
(More on apparent listening/reviews already underway.]
Tool: the payoff happens offline and out of sight
The website seems adequate for the first part of the promise – participants can submit proposals quite easily and there is a tutorial as well. There is little to go on to determine how well the tool serves the review process. Since proposals can be sorted by average user rating and number of comments and the invitation states that participants can vote the best ideas to the top, we can infer that these criteria will be used to select the proposals for review. But, again, it’s vague – the top 10 ideas? The top 10%?
An even bigger question is whether voting and commenting by fellow participants are appropriate features, given the promise and purpose. Digg and Slashdot are misleading models for thenationaldialogue.org: they support lateral communication between participants. For Digg or Slashdot, the reading audience is also the voting audience.
Thenationaldialogue.org supports, instead, vertical and asymmetric communication – from participants up to RATB IT staff. These ultimate “idea consumers” are as far as we know not the voters or commentators on the site. Thus, it’s plausible and even reasonable that Federal IT staff will evaluate and adopt ideas with low ratings or few comments. So, how will participant ratings of ideas be helpful to them?
Further, one could imagine situations where voting is actively counterproductive – if a small company or one person firm proposes an idea that is feasible and valuable but contrary to the interests of a large IT company whose employees are participating in force on the site, the behemoth could easily and conclusively vote down the dangerous (to them) idea. It is to the credit of the participants that this doesn’t appear to be happening, but it does raise the question of why voting is a feature on this site.
(In a future post, I’ll examine ways in which the RATB could create future events that explicitly supported participant to participant interaction as an appropriate part of the promise, tool, and bargain, but for this post I’ll focus solely on the Dialogue as an event for suggesting IT ideas for Federal review and adoption.)
Bargain: “Wham, bam, thank you, citizens” is not the way to go
The core of the Shirky’s notion of bargain is that it evolves over time and that it is as much or more a matter of participants’ understanding, assumptions, and expectations as it is of any “fine print” or “terms of use”. Kevin Rose of Digg discovered in 2007 this when his users revolted against his efforts to complete with legal demands from MPAA to remove information from Digg that could be used to crack HD DVD encryption. Digg users’ expectation was that they controlled what was voted up and Rose quickly realized that his community would disintegrate unless he bowed to their wishes.
With only one week allotted for the current discussion, thenationaldialogue.org is not yet in a position to benefit from an evolving bargain – there’s no time for it to develop.
Inches from greatness: Suggested improvements
I’ve worked with the Federal Government, notably on an early web-conference in support of then Vice President Gore’s Reinventing Government initiative – similar in some respects to this effort - , and I’m fully aware that the perfect can be the enemy of the good.
It is remarkable that this site exists, and I think it provides a great foundation for future efforts. It also makes sense to view this event in a broader context and consider additions and changes that build relationships not only for this event, but also for similar events in the future. So I’d like to focus on where RATB could take it from here.
Clarify and bolster the promise of careful review
RATB should recognize that some of the lessons from Digg, Slashdot, and similar social media sites do not apply, to the extent that this site is for asymmetrical communication between developers and idea-mongers on one side and Federal IT staff on the other and tune the explicit promise with this in mind.
RATB should clarify whether each idea will be reviewed and, if not, how comments and ratings will be used to prioritize ideas for review, and announce this clarified promise on the site and in email in the coming days.
At this point, it seems likely that the total number of ideas will come to less than 600.
It would not be unreasonable for participants to expect that each idea will get at least one thoughtful comment. In any case, RATB should be explicit, transparent even, about this.
Align the tool with the promise - make the review transparent
To fulfill the promise of careful review for ideas, RATB could require that its IT reviewers use this site for comments and votes on the ideas, rather than doing the review offline and out of view. Comments and votes could be anonymous, if necessary. But thoughtful feedback, on the substance of the ideas, their feasibility in the ARRA context, and on the way participants presented them, could be a huge win for participants. And it would be a tangible fulfillment of this site’s promise.
For future events, RATB and others in the Administration should consider whether voting and rating is appropriate, given the differences in social context between Digg and these events.
Build the bargain for the future: there will be more dialogues
Shirky reminds us that the bargain develops, organically and implicitly, over time.
If you look carefully, you’ll see that the content of the earlier Health IT dialogue from October 2008 is still present on www.thenationaldialogue.org. From what I can tell, the profiles and userids of the previous event are entirely disjunct with this event.
I’d suggest that future dialogues break the precedent of discontinuity and, instead, build explicitly from this event. RATB should invite current participants to continue to follow the development of recovery.org via a specific feed (email, twitter, blog). People arriving in a week or a month or a year should of course also be invited to join, but current participants should be treated, welcomed, and celebrated as “early adopters” and pioneers.
In addition to using the site to present Federal IT staff comments and ratings, it could also be used for new ideas, initiated either by RATB or by ordinary participants. The need for new ideas and the inevitable generation of new ideas surely won’t stop on May 3rd.
Keeping the site “hot” would jumpstart subsequent dialogues and build a base of participants who are wise both in the use of the tool itself, and in the issues and constraints involved in Federal IT issues.
RATB might also draw on its interagency relationships to bring promising ideas to the attention of IT staff in other Departments and Agencies. Minimally, it could send email showing other IT managers how to use the tags and the search engine for a quick review of ideas that may be of interest to them. (Imagine a headline highlighting a small business that used this Dialogue to grow its relationship not only with RATB but with another Federal agency, with great benefits to transparency and efficiency.)
Footnote:
More on Recovery.gov listening efforts [back]
It is too soon to tell whether the promise will be fulfilled, but two things suggest that some amount of review is already happening:
First, as of 3pm ET on Friday afternoon, Google reveals that 13 of the roughly 400 ideas have received comments from participants who are designated “dialogue catalysts”, notably one person from the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board. A tweet from @Natldialogue describes the catalysts’ role as trying “to ask focusing [questions and ] add detail [to] discussions; they promote further exploration w/o a particular POV”. A review of the catalysts’ comments suggests that they are meeting their goal, typically encouraging the author of the idea and asking in specific ways for more information. But why for only 3% of the ideas?
Second, mass email from the organizers to the participants on the morning of the fifth day noted:
The Dialogue has brought forth lively discussion on how to make Recovery.gov a place where the public can monitor the expenditure and use of recovery funds. The growing number of users and ideas posted on the site in just a few days illustrate how interested the IT community is in impacting the operation of Recovery.gov….
Now with three days left in this week-long Recovery Dialogue, we are receiving some interesting and thoughtful submissions. However, there are a few key concepts around which we need your ideas and approaches.
This could be read as a direct reaction to the ideas posted, but given its vagueness, it’s equally plausible that this email was drafted before the Dialogue began.
Posted: February 1st, 2009 | Author: berendes | Filed under: Wordpress | No Comments »
Off-topic, but as a minor “giving back” to everyone who helps Wordpress bloggers fight spammers.
I discovered this afternoon that a few of my posts had 200 or so links each to sites selling various pain medications. You probably missed it, as did I, because they were embedded between tags styled display:none, so they would show only to search engines. That’s still bad, because it increases my bandwidth load and could lead to Google deciding that this was a spam site and dropping it from their index.
So it had to be fixed.
I read up here:
and installed the Bad Behavior plugin.
Then I went to work in the database. If any of the following puzzles you, PLEASE STOP READING HERE. I’m not guaranteeing that this will work for you. It may blow up your blog, translate your categories into French (or perhaps English), or cause your hair (or mine) to fall out.
- I backed up the entire database via the phpMyAdmin interface, and also copied the table containing my posts, citizentools_posts in this case.
- I was able to determine that the infected posts had the spam text right at the end, i.e. those posts ended with <u style=display:none> 100’s of bad links </u>
- so I used this criterion to find them:
SELECT * from citizentools_posts
WHERE
REPLACE( `post_content` , "</u>", CHAR( 10 ) )
REGEXP
CONCAT( '^.*<u style=display:none>.+', CHAR( 10 ) , '$' )
- then ran this SQL to fix them, tagging each fixed post with <–nospam–> so I could backtrack if needed
UPDATE citizentools_posts
SET `post_content` =
CONCAT('<!--nospam-->',SUBSTRING_INDEX(post_content,'<u style=display:none>',1))
WHERE
REPLACE( `post_content` , "</u>", CHAR( 10 ) )
REGEXP
CONCAT( '^.*<u style=display:none>.+', CHAR( 10 ) , '$' )
Thanks to the posters before me - at the links above and elsewhere - who dealt with this and left careful notes.
Posted: December 5th, 2008 | Author: berendes | Filed under: Democratic businesses, Social networking | No Comments »
Craig Stoltz writes that it’s a mistake for Obama or anyone else to look for ways to use his extensive social network to govern. Instead, the instigator (for lack of a better word) should/can use the social network as a place to listen to the community and, respectfully, to join the conversation.
So far, so good. But there’s another opportunity: if you’re part of the conversation, you can also teach people. That’s a lesson from democratic businesses, such as Jack Stack’s Springfield Remanufacturing. Stack committed a long time ago to an employee-run business, and found that training is crucial:
Nobody can think and act like an owner without understanding the basic rules of business….
We start with the idea that there are two things every company must do to stay in business: make money and generate cash…. [E]mployees learn about all the subtle and not-so-subtle challenges of doing these two things in the various industries in which we compete.
How could the Obama Administration encourage the development
of primers on key issues? On any contentious issue, various parties would want to have their say — I can’t imagine the conservative Club for Growth letting the Service Employees International Union frame the issue of labor organizing rules, or vice-versa, and neither organization would want to leave the framing to the Administration. Or perhaps the Administration could make available the information they’re considering as they come to policy decisions. Jack Stack relies on Open Book management. What’s the equivalent here?
Links: search Citizentools resource links for more information on open book management.
Posted: December 1st, 2008 | Author: berendes | Filed under: Design, Transparency | No Comments »
As we build tools that make government more accessible, are we addressing the actual needs and wants of citizens, or the needs and wants we wish they had?
In Sunlight Foundation’s Open House/Open Senate Project discussion, Clay Shirky wrote:
Without a middle step that helps large, disorganized groups take advantage of the newly transparent information, transparency may in fact further increase the net asymmetry betwee ‘interest group with lobbyists’ vs. ‘interest groups without lobbyists’ in getting the Government to craft the needed bargains their way.
The extreme programming technique of defining “user stories” to be
handled by the software could be useful here. One format is
As a (role) I want (something) so that (benefit).
Possible user stories:
- As a voter wondering whether to respond to Politician X’s
fundraising appeal, I want a summary of his track record on Issue Y so
that I can decide quickly whether to send him $25.
- As an “Issue Y” voter, I want to know whether today is the day I
should spend the four hours a year I have budgeted for calls and email
to my Senator, and what I should say to him, so that my four hours
have as much impact as possible on the Federal Government.
- As a policy analyst, I want to identify the Senator who has been
most vocal and consistent with my position on Issue Y, so can I get a
Senatorial hold placed on a bad bill. (e.g.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/12/18/victory/ )
- As an investigative reporter, I want to know what changed in seven
months, so that I can explain why FISA legislation that failed in
December 2007 then passed in July 2008.
- As a mash-up programmer, I want access to the geographical
locations of all the sites earmarked for funding in Bill Z, so I can
place them on a Google Map.
More on user stories:
http://www.agilemodeling.com/artifacts/userStory.htm.
Posted: December 1st, 2008 | Author: berendes | Filed under: Ethics, Shared awareness | No Comments »
Steven Clift:
the honest truth is that people have more influence when they generate new public opinion online. I saw this in E-Democracy.Org’s MN-POLITICS e-mail forum way back in 1994 and even more so in our local forums - http://e-democracy.org/if . Why do these spaces work? They have real voters within political jurisdictions communicating in public. This freaks out many elected officials because they can see it and they know the media does too.
Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, p. 163:
The military often talks about “shared awareness,” which is the ability of many different people and groups to understand a situation, and to understand who else has the same understanding. If I see a firebreak out, and I see that you see it as well, we may more easily coordinate our actions - you call 911, I grab a fire extinguisher…. This kind of social awareness has three levels: when everybody knows somehting, when everybody knows that everybody knows, and when everybody knows that everybody knows that everybody knows.
I’d add: when I know that you know that I know, I also know that you’ll be able to hold me to account - you know that I saw the fire, and can judge my action or inaction in that light. (I read recently that participation in social networking regarding politics also increases people’s propensity to write letters to the editor - one civic version of helping to “put out the fire”.)
Posted: March 18th, 2008 | Author: berendes | Filed under: Democratic businesses, Ethics | Comments Off
We expect that the citizens who show up will feel a sense of entitlement. What if we don’t take that at face value?
Can we talk about what’s going on?
The previous post buried the most important point. Consider:
- In public, the planner suggested that public participation was effective and worthwhile.
- In private, he disclosed that it had little impact on government.
- The difference between the public and private views is huge, but few people reading these words will be surprised.
So why is it difficult to discuss the value of a participative governance in a particular context?
Planners, consultants, government officials and others cant be sure what to make of the role of the particular citizens who show up.
Who are these people?
The previous post suggested that there is a general expectation, at least for PR purposes, that the citizens wishes be honored and even implemented. But its easy to argue against that. Who, after all, are the particular citizens who show up?
- Government officials, themselves either directly elected or specifically responsible to elected politicians, can ask: how can these folks claim to represent anyone other than themselves?
- Developers, who have money, time, and reputation on the line, can ask: what stake do these folks have in the outcome?
- Planners, with their training, analytical tools and data, and specific professional responsibilities, can ask: what expertise do these folks bring to the table?
And yet government officials, developers, and planners are all supposed to treat the citizens as their superiors. (And consider that some of the criticisms offered from the floor would never be tolerated with such outward good humor if the roles were reversed.)
Lessons from democratic businesses
Businesses that attempt to run on democratic principles have to confront both of these problems: theyve got to find ways to make participative governance work not just once, but over and over and over again, and they are generally structured so that participants in the process have vastly different expertise, face different risks, and come from unique and distinctive roles. What can we learn from them?
This will be an ongoing theme, so lets start with just a taste. Worldblu recently convened a roundtable of democratic businesses to consider lessons learned. What emerged thats most relevant to us is that democratic business processes work best when all participants
- Feel accountable, not entitled
- Are comfortable with transparency
- Recover from their mistakes quickly and with grace
- Understand their role in making the organization perform
How to placate support?
So lets forego the temptation to placate the citizens who show up for our public process, or put them on a pedestal, and ask a different question: what are their specific responsibilities, and how can we help them fulfill those responsibilities?
Posted: January 15th, 2008 | Author: berendes | Filed under: Ethics | No Comments »
At a public participation workshop a few years ago, I met a planner who ran the participation team for a large city. He spoke eloquently about working with citizens and with government on various, at times controversial, planning challenges and led us in some remarkably realistic exercises.
He took pains to point out that his group was advisory only they had no role with the city government to enforce the results of public participation. So I asked him, privately, how these participatory planning sessions influenced city government; he smiled ruefully, and admitted that officials often paid very little attention to them.
I dont think this is unusual, and it led me to consider who wins in participatory planning:
- Planners and facilitators often do: it can be stimulating to prepare for participatory sessions and great fun to run them;
- Politicians and other government officials may: they are seen listening to the people, and, if the project results are popular, they win big; if not, in the event that lack of follow-up is noticed, they can always argue that events have made the planning results outdated and impractical;
- Developers and other project sponsors may: if the bridge, hotel, or shopping mall gets built, even with substantial changes, they profit, and they can generally pull out if it seems likely that they wont;
- But what of the citizen participants? They invest their time and often their energy and commitment, but at best its a gamble. Perhaps their concern will be addressed, perhaps their requests will be incorporated in the final design, but often, of course, they wont.
As a wise gambler knows, the house always wins. If you play the slots in Nevada, even if you win from time to time, each pull of the lever on a $1 machine costs you, on average, around twenty cents.
An ethical casino publicizes its payout percentage, and emphasizes that gambling is entertainment not (for gamblers) a money-making activity. For a planner or facilitator, whats the ethical way to recruit citizen participants and to structure planning workshops when we know that their invested time and energy may not pay off?
Relevant links:
Posted: November 8th, 2006 | Author: berendes | Filed under: Phone banks | No Comments »
12/11/2006 update
The Grassroots Champions Coalition has used Advokit to organize precincts throughout California.
Bruce Daniels describes their implementation approach here.
What if you had tools that allowed participants to share their networks with your effort, in addition to their time, thoughtfulness, and energy?
Robo-calling: tempting for campaigns, annoying for voters, ten times the expense
In the election just concluded, I received countless robocalls, mass mailings, and email messages from candidates and elected officials. I voted, of course, but the only thing that moved me to action was a friend’s emailed account of his own door to door efforts in the Virginia Senatorial campaign.
I’m not alone. The news is filled with stories of voters in Arizona, New York and other states who are tired of getting calls.
It’s some comfort to know that robo-calling, at $275 per new vote generated, is 10 to 20 times more expensive than canvassing or phone banks.
Friend to friend
Pat Dunlavey has found a way that’s more humane and more effective.
In 1998, 1999, and 2003, Dunlavey organized ballot measure campaigns in Massachusetts to allow local governments to increase taxes to fund needed local services.
1998: Ten supporters identified per canvassser via cold-calls
In his first effort, call lists were assigned by the campaign based on geography. 85 volunteers each made 30 contacts per person, and identified only one third of the contacts as ballot measure supporters. Volunteers generally completed only 60% of their assigned contacts and found the cold calling an unpleasant experience.
Although the ballot measure passed, Dunlavey was disappointed with the results, and sought ways to avoid cold-calling.
2003: Fifteen supporters identified per canvasser via friend-to-friend
In 2003, his volunteers used a custom web application (reborn in 2004 as Advokit) to scan the town’s voter database and “tag” or claim voters that they felt, based on personal knowledge, would be supporters of the ballot measure. The 55 initial canvassers recruited an additional 40, and then each canvasser contacted more than 26 people on average and identified 15 supporters. The 2003 group was both happier — completing 85% of the calls assigned — and more effective — they converted almost twice as many of of their contacts to supporters (57% in 2003 vs. 31%in 1998)
Netalyst worked with Advokit (and CivicActions) during the fall of 2004 to support the VoteAllYourValues effort , to design an easier to use “lite” interface and to develop strategies that would allow the campaign’s ambitious targets for calls generated to be reached.
Advokit was also used with good results in that year’s New York State senate races.
The Advokit website provides an online demo and free download of this open source software.
Posted: November 3rd, 2006 | Author: berendes | Filed under: Demographics, Text messaging (SMS) | No Comments »
Text messages sent by cellphone — also known as Short Message Service or SMS — are becoming a powerful tool for political and civic participation.
Last fall, activists opposing the Supreme Court nomination of John Roberts recruited 25,000 volunteers for their Massive Immediate Response effort. Each volunteer agreed to respond immediately to a text message requesting that they call their Congressional Representatives. The 27% opt-in rate was five times that observed for the most successful commercial entertainment campaigns.
Rick Santorum, the Republican incumbent running for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, used SMS to reach out to his supporters.
On Halloween, Pat LaMarche, the Green Party candidate for Governor in Maine, asked her supporters to provide topic suggestions via text message for a speech at an upstate university.
Note that all of these initiatives relied upon participants who were already fired up for or against particular candidates and issues — SMS is less likely to be useful in converting a luke warm supporter into a passionate participant.
Almost one third of all cellphone subscribers send at least one text message per month, with younger Americans leading the way. A recent New Politics Institute study notes that cellphone subscribers comprise more than two-thirds of the population, that more than half of 18 to 34 year olds use text messages at least occasionally, as do one in five 35-54 year olds.
Among those 35 and under, text messaging reverses the digital divide. Five out of ten Hispanics, four out of ten African Americans, but only three of ten whites use their cellphone text messaging capability. So it should not be surprising that Voto Latino announced plans in July to register at least 35,000 Hispanic youths nationwide using cellphone text messaging tools.
These tools are rapidly reaching the “point and click” stage for campaign organizers. For instance, the Mozes service allows campaign manager to set up “text message ballots” easily. A “do it yourself” American Idol is using this service to let listeners to indicate the band they prefer in one on one matchups.
To track developments further, visit mopocket, textually, and the MobileActive Community Blog.
Update: 2006/11/17
The Democracies Online wiki provides a quick overview of SMS pros and cons and describes how SMS was used the Philippines, Lancashire, Bristol, and South Korea.
