Alexander Howard 2013-05-19T18:00:06-04:00 Alexander Howard http://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=alexander-howard Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Alexander Howard Good old fashioned elbow grease. White House: 'Cybersecurity Legislation Must Not Violate Americans' Right to Privacy' tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.3188186 2013-04-30T18:40:40-04:00 2013-05-01T13:19:16-04:00 Alexander Howard http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alexander-howard/ responded to an e-petition asking the Obama administration to stop the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA).

"The President has been clear that the United States urgently needs to modernize our laws and practices relating to cybersecurity, both for national security and the security of our country's businesses -- but that shouldn't come at the expense of privacy," wrote U.S. CTO Todd Park and Michael Daniel, special assistant to the president and the cybersecurity coordinator.

The White House issued a veto threat for the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) on April 16, because the legislation did not fully address our core concerns (especially the protection of privacy). Even though a bill went on to pass the House of Representatives and includes some important improvements over previous versions, this legislation still doesn't adequately address our fundamental concerns.


As the response acknowledges, CISPA passed the House of Representatives by a wide margin (248-168) when 42 Democrats voted for it. When the Senate subsequently indicated that it would not be taking CISPA in its current form up, however, the bill's progress ended. That makes the timing of this response, issued after CISPA stalled, interesting.

Responding to the popular e-petition gave the administration an opportunity to do five things.

  1. Make a case for what it has done in the absence of Congressional action on the big bucket of issues that is "cybersecurity" today, specifically issuing an executive order and industry partnership.


  2. Outline three principles the administration wants to see in any subsequent legislative proposal.

    Does it (1) sufficiently protect privacy and civil liberties, (2) ensure that a civilian department -- not an intelligence agency -- is the primary point of entry for cybersecurity information sharing, and (3) provide narrowly tailored liability protections that would allow the private sector to respond to threats


    That will be relevant as the Senate considers information-sharing bills in the coming months and in any subsequent conference, should any draft earn enough votes in the House of Representatives.


  3. Remind the nation that there is bipartisan agreement across government and civil society that the nation needs to share information better to detect and respond to threats, as long as such sharing protects civil rights and upholds the Bill of Rights online.

    "There is broad consensus on the need for more threat-related information sharing -- including among the leading privacy advocates we regularly engage on the issue," wrote Park and Daniel. "The essential question on which people across the spectrum disagree isn't if we can share cybersecurity information and preserve the principles of privacy and liberty that make the United States a free and open society -- but how."


  4. Affirm that the American people have a right to privacy. Protecting those rights, given the expanded information sharing in government, that has already happened, hasn't become any easier in the wake of a surge in hacking and data breaches over the past few years.

    In the months to come, the Senate looks likely to consider an update to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. Such a reform could add badly needed digital due process for law enforcement that wishes to access the online email and data of citizens.


  5. Connect with the 117,576 people who put their signatures on the e-petition. The WeThePeople platform now has some 8 million users and continues to grow quickly. It has quickly become one of the biggest open government websites on the planet.



Whether the voices of the people on it are driving administration policy remains up for the debate. What can't be said now is that they're not paying attention to the issues raised. We, the People, should be heard. Now there are new ways to you raise your voice.]]> Exit Interview: Alec Ross on Internet Freedom, Innovation and Digital Diplomacy tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2860211 2013-03-12T13:57:49-04:00 2013-05-12T05:12:01-04:00 Alexander Howard http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alexander-howard/ digital diplomacy" in the 21st century. Almost three years ago, I talked with Ross about his role and goals, like supporting "Internet freedom" through funding technology.

alex-ross-state-rare-books-600xHe told me then that technology was changing and challenging the hierarchical, traditional authority structures that dominated the 21st century, disrupting the ability of governments, companies and powerful people to control information about themselves or their societies. In many interviews and speaking appearances since, he said that "the 21st century is a terrible time to be a control freak. That's an observation one could easily applies to the institutions and officials of the United States government.

While the the outcomes of revolutions across North Africa and the Middle East are far from certain, what is clear is that the world has seen historic changes that can be in part attributed to so-called connection technologies. After Ross announced on Twitter and Facebook that he would be leaving the State Department this month, we connected to discuss about his plans and reflections on his tenure. Our unedited interview follows. For more on what's next for Ross and his thoughts on his work, make sure to read Sarah Lai Stirland's interview with Ross on 21st century statecraft at TechPresident.

First, what's next for you?

Ross: I will be returning to private life with an initial focus on three things: writing, learning and advising.

I will be hunkered down on several writing projects. Nothing autobiographical. I'm going to write a book and write for the screen.

I will also be immersing myself in new learning opportunities. After 1 million miles of travel over the last five years, I have seen a lot of the world. I'm eager to explore those remaining parts of the world where I have not yet traveled. I also plan to dig deep and explore areas of emerging opportunity in the innovation space. There are products that only live today in peoples' imaginations that will help us live happier, healthier, more productive lives while unleashing the next stage of value creation and economic growth. I will be spending a lot of time engaged with the thinkers and entrepreneurs imagining and inventing the future.

Finally, I will spend time as an advisor. I will actively mentor a group of young entrepreneurs and government officials. There is nothing I find more rewarding than investing in emerging talents. I will also start a company that will advise investors, corporations, institutions and government leaders to help them understand the implication of macro factors emerging at the intersection of geopolitics, markets and increasingly disruptive network technologies.

Is there going to be someone who replaces you or that will serve as an analogue to your role?

Ross: I have always focused on trying to have innovation at State become something that is institutional as opposed to individual. A study by Brookings identified 155 full-time practitioners of 21st Century Statecraft at State. So while yes, there will be people (multiple people) coming in to take on the role that I have played, the more important development is the institutionalization of this work beyond the Office of the Secretary of the Secretary of State.

How much did the State Department change while you were there, in terms of its use of technology to accomplish its mission? Where was the status quo when you arrived? Where do you stand as you leave?

Ross: First, I wouldn't define my mission just in terms of technology. I think the three things in my mission were the technologies, networks and demographics of the 21st century. In terms of how much we changed, I'd say that we went a very, very long way.

When I went to State, most people thought I was crazy. They said that State was the most innovation-averse segment of the federal government. I think we turned that around. In fact, last year, Deloitte & Touche and the Partnership for Public Service ranked State as having the most innovation-friendly culture in the friendly government.

While we produced a tall stack of measurable outcomes, perhaps the biggest impact was on the culture of a sprawling 60,000 bureaucracy spread over 190+ countries. I would
never take the credit for this. State is a very hierarchical organization and the women at the top of the hierarchy deserve the credit.

Hillary Clinton, her Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills, and my thought-partner Anne-Marie Slaughter, State's Director of Policy planning, were the ones that made this possible, in part by promoting and protecting an agenda from the top-down that could then produce
results from bottom up.

How much does "digital diplomacy" matter, in terms of offline effects? What examples of policy changes have resulted from tweets or other expressions from diplomats or national leaders online?

Ross: I wince when I hear a question framed in terms of the impact of tweets. Twitter and Facebook are important social networks, but they are only two of a large family of platforms and tools that our diplomats use.

I could share 30 examples of offline effects but let me focus on just one: listening Historically, the traditional counterpart of a diplomat abroad is a government minister, a general or a CEO. What social networks like Twitter and Facebook enabled was an ability for our diplomats to listen and learn from the perspective of citizens that aren't sipping tea with them over a mahogany table, flag flying in the background.

Social media has made our diplomats much better listeners. They understand foreign publics better. I always tell our ambassadors when they start using social media, "remember, you only have one mouth but two ears."

What have you learned about what doesn't work?

Ross: You can't hack a solution to sexual violence in the Congo. As I leave government, the one thing that has most disappointed me is my failure to make an impact in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo. We came up with a couple good hacks, one focused on creating a mobile alert system and another focused on mobile payments to try and fight corrupt, cash-based systems in the military, but they ultimately failed because of local corruption and bureaucracy. Some solutions require more than code.

How did you and your team learn from or adjust to mistakes or failures? How does relate to "innovation?"

We learned that you cannot force solutions on people. There has to be demand for your supply. You have to create the right incentives, even for piece-of-crap corrupt Congolese generals, if you want them to cooperate with your programs. I think we learned to be more ruthless and less wrapped up in the kumbaya of some of the tech-for-development
crowd.

I think we also learned to embrace risk and not freak out over failure. There were times that it appeared that what we did failed, only to learn, 6 months down the road, that we we built produced some totally unexpected off-the-charts result.

Those who have heard me speak have heard me quote Theodore Roosevelt. I have quoted him 1,000 times and I'm going to quote him 1,000 more because I think it is important. He said that "It is far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure... than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat."

People who fear failure will never innovate. A real innovator embraces risk and tunes out haters. One of the things I dislike about social media is that it amplifies the voices of snarky people who live to take people down. They LOVE to identify failure and create a stir about it. There is a special class of social media superstar who comes up with the most erudite take-downs. It is necessary to learn from one's critics, but to tune out unproductive haters who only want to celebrate failure and paint a dystopian picture of the future.

How did you see foreign leaders and diplomats shift their communications strategies during your tenure? How did the U.S. adjust?

Ross: I think the USA got out there the fastest and the furthest. I think most other foreign ministries have figured out that social media is a powerful tool that they need to account for. Some are doing it well, some are still unnerved by it being an inherently individual versus institutional platform.

You've talked before about empowering digital diplomacy at the edge of the network. Some embassy staff have made independent choices that has created diplomatic challenges, as in Egypt. Will that perspective endure? Or will we see retrenchment and increased need to clear messages?

Ross: We've sent more than 100,000 tweets in the last 4 years. Fewer than 15 caused problems. The screw-up in Egypt was a result of bad judgment. That happens. The only reason it got attention is because it was using Twitter. People make mistakes on TV and radio all the time, but if they make a mistake on social media it's "news." I think that is
decreasingly the case, as people get increasingly accustomed to social media as part of the mainstream.

Under Secretary Clinton, you advanced an "Internet freedom" policy. Internet freedom can mean different things to people, depending upon your politics. After 4 years, what does it mean to you and the U.S.?

Ross: Internet Freedom is the freedom to connect to the Internet, to the websites of one's choosing and to each other. When people attempt to broaden that already broad definition, it is to serve their personal politics.

We've seen that social media or other electronic communications can be used to target activists or journalists, often with deadly outcomes. After 4 years of seeing "connection technologies" enter societies around the world, are you still fundamentally optimistic about their effects?

Ross: I am. These technologies can be used against citizens and they frequently are, to deadly effect. However, this does not reverse the irreversible dynamic of connection technologies putting power in the hands of citizens and networks of citizens at the expense of hierarchies, including the state.

Western tech companies have been publicly identified as sources of surveillance, filtering or other censorship software or hardware to autocratic regimes. What actions did the U.S. take to address those sales? What stances did you take at State?

Ross: We have taken a hard line publicly and privately against companies that certain technologies to authoritarian governments. My own history on this is well-known, from publicly going after the Wiretappers Ball to privately engaging in a way that has significantly curtailed the sale of these technologies.

I have to say, though, that while this has reduced the sale of American technologies to dictatorships, companies from other countries including China and Russia are only too happy to help fill the gap. I may have helped slow the sale of technology from American companies to dictatorships, but I don't think that necessarily kept authoritarian governments from getting the surveillance technologies that they wanted. This depresses the heck out of me.

Can the U.S. be credible, in terms of restrictions to such technology, if we deploy it ourselves?

Ross: There are certain communities of people who will never view us as credible, but the truth of the matter is that there are laws and due process in the United States that protect our liberties to a degree that simply do not exist in 99% of the rest of the world. That doesn't
mean we are above scrutiny or criticism, but we remain a country with the clear rule of law.

How much does what the U.S. do at home, with respect to our companies, states and cities, affect our credibility or ability to influence policies abroad?

Ross: It has a very big impact. This is why the Obama Administration's opposition to SOPA and PIPA was so very, very important.

As you know, the U.S. has developed offensive capabilities online, in terms of the DoD, and, as reported by the New York Times, and deployed code that affected Iran's capabilities. Our intelligence agencies are ingesting massive amounts of electronic communications. How did that reality affect your ability to advocate for "Internet freedom" and engage in digital diplomacy around the world?

Ross: Without commenting specifically on any alleged cases of America's use of malware, I will say that "Internet Freedom" and cyber conflict are viewed as separate domains by most intellectually mature audiences.

We've talked about a number of different digital projects you've worked on or at least been involved in. Where do we stand on "mesh networks" or "Internet in a box?"

Ross: So far, so good. I can't get into operational details but these projects are out there and we're seeing good data. They work.

What about digital circumvention technologies or hosting to protect sites against DDoS attacks?

Ross: Circumvention technologies are being used by huge numbers of people abroad. Most of them can thank the State Department for their support of their ability to access an open internet. Re: hosting to protect against DDoS, that is tough and getting tougher. It is getting easier and easier to conduct offensive cyber operations. DDoS attacks are but one example. The power of states and ad-hoc networks of hackers-for-hire to engage in DDoS and other forms of cyber attacks is only going to grow.

What came of the project to use mobile phones along the U.S.-Mexico border?

Ross: Big success. It's entirely run by Mexican government entities now. These "denuncia anonimas" are now a key part of the fight against the cartels in northern Mexico.

You've talked a lot about the dynamic between being "open and closed." "Cablegate," where Wikileaks published many diplomatic communiques, dominated a lot of discussion about the State Department and technology for years. What are the limits to "openness," in the context of government, society or diplomacy? How do you strike the right balance?

Ross: It only dominated discussion about the State Department within the small community of open government advocates. I bet 80% of American diplomats haven't given an ounce of thought to Wikileaks in a year. Wikileaks had its 15 minutes and not a minute more. This is an area where my views differ from many in the progressive technology community.

28 months after the release of the State Dept cables, here is the headline: "Wikileaks reveals massive rightdoing by American diplomats." They showed our private actions matched our public policies. They showed our diplomats are very, very good at their jobs.

Wikileaks set the open government movement backward. It wasn't whistle-blowing because whistle-blowing reveals acts of official wrong doing. What the cables revealed was rightdoing. 28 months later, the State Department looks good and Assange and Wikileaks look silly. Their view, that there should not be secret information of any sort, is beyond naïve.

I think the default setting for government information should be open instead of closed. However, that does not mean that no information should be closed. I think I've been a strong advocate for open government going back to the drafting of the Obama's campaign's first policy in the spring of 2007, but that doesn't mean I believe in hypertransparency. I don't. And I don't know anybody who has fought in big dogfights in the foreign policy realm who thinks otherwise.

What did you learn from that experience? How did it affect internal operations, practices or your work on innovation? How did it affect American diplomacy? Did we lose key assets or relationships as a result?

Ross: I didn't learn anything from the experience.

If anything, it increased the resolve of the State Department to be "Internet smart" because it helped prove the power of networks. Certain relationships were strained and certain were damaged beyond the point of repair by the release of the cables. Our outstanding Ambassador to Mexico had to leave his post because the President of Mexico could not get past what he read in the cables.

I think most of the storm has passed, but it undermined our ability to have confidential communications with our interlocutors. No good was served by the release of those cables, other than demonstrating that our diplomats are really good at their jobs.

Are you going to continue to be engaged with these issues at @AlecJRoss? What are the most important issues to you, as you transition, that we should be focusing on as a nation or as individuals concerned about a global polity?

Ross: I am going to stay at it. The single most important issue for me is the creation of an innovation-friendly marketplace at home and abroad. This means immigration reform. It means smarter IP policies. It means data sovereignty and privacy policies that are market-friendly but put more power in the hands of individuals -- and no more power in the hands of regulators. I am obsessed about what it will take to unleash the next generation of value creation and economic growth in America.

Look for that and my continued push against the attempts of dictators to take control of the internet.]]> The Empire State Strikes Back: New York Launches New Open Government Website tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1562838 2012-06-04T11:42:06-04:00 2012-08-04T05:12:12-04:00 Alexander Howard http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alexander-howard/ NYOpenGovernment.com, a new website that his office touts as a means for "voters, the media and government watchdogs to hold state government accountable" by providing the public online access to government data on campaign contributions, lobbying, and state contracts.

"Secrecy breeds corruption, while transparency generates confidence," Attorney General Schneiderman said, in a prepared statement. "New York Open Government will help the public keep an eye on what their government is doing in order to deter corruption and increase confidence in the public sector. This site is a one-stop-shop for New Yorkers demanding up-to-date and comprehensive information about their government."

The launch of the new site fulfills a commitment that Schneiderman made as a candidate for Attorney General. NYOpenGovernment.com is an expansion of Project Sunlight, which went online in 2007 under then NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo.

The citizens of New York could use a boost to confidence about their state government. According to a release from the New York A.G.'s office, at least 20 current or former elected members of the legislative and executive branches of the New York State government were either accused or convicted of crimes per the last decade.

"It's hard not to be enthusiastic about this launch," said Laurenellen McCann, national policy manager for the Sunlight Foundation, when asked for comment. "NYOpenGovernment.com demonstrates a genuine commitment to public oversight that more states should seek to emulate. Without the online release of information about campaign contributions, lobbying, state contracts, and other "influence data", no government can really claim to be fulfilling its promise to be open or to provide open data."

The data on the new website is sourced directly from the relevant state agencies. Campaign finance data come from the Board of Elections, lobbyist data from the Joint Commission on Public Ethics, state contract data from the Comptroller's office, state corporation data from the Department of State, and bill information from the legislature. According to the attorney general's office, the AG receives raw data, in different formats, from the agencies when they update their own respective websites.

"What's worth noting about New York's new platform is that it not only releases this important accountability data, it also provides contextualization for it, allowing citizens to access the info through centralized searches," said McCann. In fact, this is the primary approach behind sites like Ethics.gov, or Sunlight's InfluenceExplorer.com and one that we consider a best practice."

If media and citizens have requests for data or questions about quality or accuracy, the AG's office established a primary point of contact: Jason Ortiz, the director of special projects, and provided an official phone number (212-416-8743) and email address: Jason.Ortiz@ag.ny.gov.

The introduction of site was parsed by numerous members of New York's good government community:

"With New York Open Government, Attorney General Schneiderman is showing clear leadership in making to government more transparent and accountable," said Andrew Rasiej, founder of Personal Democracy Media and Chairman of the NY Tech Meetup, in a prepared statement. "By updating New York Open Government online tools and features A.G. Schneiderman is demonstrating that in the 21st century, the public's access to information regarding how their government officials act must be easily searchable and accessible online."

"We're excited by Attorney General Schneiderman's New York Open Government website," said John Kaehny, Executive Director of Reinvent Albany, in a prepared statement. "We applaud the attorney general's efforts to harness the immense power of the internet to increase government transparency and accountability. We look forward to working with A.G. Schneiderman to help New York Open Government achieve its full potential as a potent tool for restoring trust and confidence in our state government."

"New York Open Government is an important resource for New Yorkers who want to know how their government works," said Susan Lerner, Executive Director, Common Cause/NY, in a prepared statement. "We applaud Attorney General Schneiderman for helping to bring New York's information services into the 21st century, and significantly improving access to publicly available data. Government transparency is essential to an engaged electorate."

"In the information age, New Yorkers want and expect access to the hard data that shows what their government is up to," said Russ Haven, legislative counsel for NYPIRG. "Attorney General Schneiderman's New York Open Government website provides a 'one-stop shopping' place for average New Yorkers as well as sophisticated researchers to find information about elected officials and those seeking to influence them. The features will make it easier to access, organize and ultimately make sense of information as never before. This is an important resource for New Yorkers trying to keep tabs on government."

There's an additional bright spot here, with respect to cost to taxpayers: no expensive contract to a systems integrator was involved. The office of the Attorney General built the site in house, with no consultants. According to the NY attorney general's office, hat they're committed to sustaining and enhancing the site, including adding more datasets, improved search and a trackers for the most viewed data.

If, in the future, it may be possible for citizens to share information about government programs, practices or officials into the their social networks, it will a step ahead for networked accountability. "We've seen the power of social media for democracy movements around the world," said NY Attorney General Schneiderman, in a prepared statement. "By making this tool compatible with multiple media platforms, we hope to empower our own citizens to hold their government accountable."

The AG's office looks at the website like an example of "living, breathing and evolving public accountability," and emphasized that they will listen to its users and implement their suggestions "when it makes sense" to do so.

Here's one suggestion, from this native of upstate New York: set up a data.nyopengovernment.com so that citizens, media, developers, advocates and state employees can see, browse and download the data in bulk. Currently, a user can search for an individual and then view all the relevant records, as for Mario Cuomo, with the capacity to download the data as a .CSV, Excel file or XML.

While New York should and is being lauded for this step forward to make open government data available in open, structured form only, its public officers could help to enable an ecosystem of networked accountability through enabling the creation of web services, not just new websites. The next evolution in open government is not to encourage citizens to visit a website but to release the data that site is built upon so that it finds them, when they use search engines, social networks, media websites or civic applications like OpenStates.]]> US CTO Looks to Scale Agile Thinking and Open Data to Improve Citizen-Centric Government tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1553927 2012-05-31T15:11:38-04:00 2012-07-31T05:12:17-04:00 Alexander Howard http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alexander-howard/ In the 21st century, federal government must go mobile, putting government services and information at the fingertips of citizens, said United States Chief Technology Officer Todd Park in a wide-ranging interview this week: "That's the first digital government result, outcome, and objective that's desired."



To achieve that vision, Park and U.S. Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel are working together to improve how government shares data, architects new digital services and collaborates across agencies to reduce costs and increase productivity through smarter use of information technology.



Park, who President Obama chose to be the second CTO of the United States in March, has been (relatively) quiet over the course of his first two months on the job.



Last Wednesday, that changed. Park announced a new Presidential Innovation Fellows Program, at TechCrunch's Disrupt conference in New York City, in concert with VanRoekel's new digital government strategy. Both men then spoke (more formally) about digital government at the headquarters of the Interior Department in Washington, D.C. On Friday, Park presented the U.S. CTO's team's agenda to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.



"The way I think about the strategy is that you're really talking about three elements," Park said in our interview. "First, it's going mobile, putting government services at the literal fingertips of the people in the same way that basically every other industry and sector has done. Second, it's being smarter about how we procure technology as we move government in this direction. Finally, it's liberating data. In the end, it's the idea of 'government as a platform.'"



In the video below, Park explains how "open data" specifically relates to the things that Americans care about, from access to health care to reducing energy bills to giving kids more educational opportunities, and job creation. In his view, open data is about much more than the consumer-facing apps that are created from it, although the creation of health care apps does matter for entrepreneurs and citizens.





A new iteration for White House fellowship



The idea of the Presidential Innovation Fellows Program, Park said, is to bring in brilliant people from outside government to work with talented innovators inside the government on agile teams that work together within a six-month time frame to deliver results.



The idea of such fellow is not novel -- President Lyndon Johnson established the prestigious White House Fellows program in 1964. President Jimmy Carter created the Presidential Management Fellows (PMF) in 1997. President George W. Bush amended the PMF program with an executive order in 2003.



The highly competitive White House Fellows program offers "exceptional young men and women first-hand experience working at the highest levels of the Federal government. Selected individuals typically spend a year working as a full-time, paid Fellow to senior White House Staff, Cabinet Secretaries and other top-ranking government officials." The program has attracted extraordinary young Americans, year after year, for decades. The 14 individuals in the current 2011-12 class of Presidential Fellows, for instance, are accomplished physicians, lawyers, academics and distinguished members of the military. Those diverse faces offer a compelling snapshot of some of the best talent the United States has to offer.



The fellowships are basically scaling up the idea of "entrepreneurs in residence," Park said. "It's a portfolio of five projects that, on top of the digital government strategy, will advance the implementation of it in a variety of ways."



The biggest challenge to bringing the five programs that the U.S. CTO has proposed to successful completion is getting talented men and women to join up to join his team and implement them in a short time frame. At week's end, there was good reason for optimism, with respect to the candidate pool: Park shared vie email that "within 24 hours of TechCrunch Disrupt, 600 people had already registered via Whitehouse.gov to apply to be a Presidential Innovation Fellow, and another several hundred people had expressed interest in following and engaging in the five projects in some other capacity."



The White House Innovation Fellows will be working on the following five projects: a new "Open Data Initiative," Blue Button for America, RF-PEZ, The 20% Campaign, and MyGov.



A federal government-wide Open Data Initiative



In the video below, Park talks about the Presidential Innovation Fellows program and introduces the first program, which focuses on open data:





Blue Button for America





RFP-EZ





The 20% Campaign





MyGov is the U.S. Gov.uk





For my complete interview with Park, which explores each of these fellowships in more detail, read the O'Reilly Radar feature on how US CTO seeks to scale agile thinking and open data across federal government.

]]> With New Funding and Fellows, Code for America Looks to Scale Civic Innovation Across the Country tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1297533 2012-02-24T19:43:18-05:00 2012-04-25T05:12:01-04:00 Alexander Howard http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alexander-howard/ Code for America is working on a 21st century recipe for urban renewal: Find half a dozen cities struggling to deliver services to citizens in the context of reduced resources. Add a handful of civic coders, a heaping serving of open data and foundation support, start incubating a civic accelerator for startups on the side, and then fold in a brigade of engaged citizens. Mix in of civic pride and then serve on mobile devices with a side of technology-fueled optimism.



As with any recipe that has, however, your results may vary --- and preparation is critical. The fledgling nonprofit -- in of itself a new kind of civic startup -- learned any number of important lessons in its inaugural year, as Nick Judd documented in his feature on Code for America, one year on, from culture classes to procurement issues to data availability.



"I'd say the most important thing we learned is that, despite the commonly portrayed caricature of uncaring government bureaucrats, there are many, many truly innovative, risk-taking public servants who work in government," said Jennifer Pahlka, the founder of Code for America. The Huffington Post named Pahlka one of the ultimate gamer changers in business and technology in 2011.



"It's not because they couldn't get a better job but because they believe in this institution that serves us all.  It's been inspiring.  There is a lot wrong with the systems in which our public servants work, but there's a lot right in the community of people working to change how our tax dollars are spent and provide better outcomes for the citizens they serve.  We're honored to get to work with more of them next year, both through the fellowship program and through efforts like the Civic Commons Marketplace."



After a year in which its first fellows spread out across the country, breaking new ground in a new kind of public service, Code for America is now expanding the scope of its efforts with the infusion of $1.5 million dollars of funding from Google.org.



"Google's funding will help us expand the fellowship," said Pahlka. "In 2012, we'll go from three cities to eight, and from 19 fellows to 26.  The Google grant joins with grants already committed from the Knight Foundation and others who are making this expanded scope possible in the coming year."



Google's donation also will provide the initial funding for two new programs, she explained.  "The first program is a seed accelerator, a bit like Y Combinator or Tech Stars, but specifically for civic startups. The second program is what we're calling the Code for America Brigade."



A Way for More Citizens to Code for America

While Code for America has been getting great press and huge interest from potential fellows -- it was harder to get into the non-profit's second class than Harvard last year -- there have been some challenges. One of them is figuring out how to scale to work with more of the general public around the country.



"The problem is essentially that way more people want to 'code for America' than our program can currently accommodate," said Pahlka. "The CfA Fellowship had 550 applicants this year, and we were only able to accept 26 fellows. That's in addition to all the amazing developers and designers who want to be able to bring open data and civic apps to their communities in their spare time without leaving their jobs and families to come do our year-long fellowship program.  While eight cities next year is a huge jump from three last year, there are over 10,000 municipalities in the country. Each of them could have a team of involved digital citizens working to stand up applications that make their communities each a better place to live: transit apps, open government apps, public art apps, apps that make it easy to find and use government services.  Now that we're several years into this movement, a large number of these apps already exist, so no community needs to start from scratch. The CfA Brigade will encourage individual civic hackers and community leaders to get together and start by reusing apps already built by their peers in other communities."



The brigade and Civic Commons, which recently was folded into Code for America after its leadership left for other pursuits, could act as an important connective tissue for the nascent civic Web in the United States and beyond,
particularly with respect to building upon the foundation of civic applications that currently exist.



"We look at some of the great apps that the 2011 Code for America fellows developed, like a mobile app that takes you on a walking tour of the public art in your city,and some of the great apps that have come out of contests like Apps for Communities and various hackathons, and we ask why these apps can't be available in every community in the U.S.," said Pahlka. "The Code for America Brigade will not only enable these apps to spread, but support the development of strong civic coding communities everywhere."



Code for America made an important hire to coordinate this work: Kevin Curry, the founder of CityCamp. "Kevin has been running CityCamps, unconferences for local governments and communities to collaborate around open data and civic apps, for the past two years," said Pahlka. "He already understands the dynamics of communities following this path, and the CfA Brigade is really a platform to accelerate the work he's already been doing. Kevin's just getting started but we're really excited to see what he and the team will make happen."



The first big effort from Curry and his compatriots will come this weekend, when Code for America is convening a nationwide "Day of Civic Innovation." On February 25, CfA will host "Code Across America, coordinating 15 events for "urbanists, civic hackers, city reps, developers, designers and anyone with the passion and motivation to improve their city" all around the country. 



"People with web talent and a sense of civic duty can be found throughout the country. If every city could orchestrate such enthusiasm and willingness to participate to improve one's community then American cities would be more tech-savvy than the Silicon Valley," said Kevin Curry, program director for the Code for America Brigade. "Code Across America joins hundreds of people working together to deploy applications that will improve our cities and our society, to build a civic web."



Information and registration for events during this week of civic innovation, is available at codeforamerica.org/code-for-america.



A Civic Accelerator and the Next Killer Civic App

As James Temple reported for the San Francisco Chronicle, the 'civic accelerator' in San Francisco was officially announced in January. The Kauffman Foundation also provided financial support for the accelerator. Angel investor, Ron Conway, who was an early investor in Facebook, Twitter, and Google, will advise the program and provide mentorship to startups in it. While the details about how San Francisco's civic accelerator will work in practice are still evolving -- not least figuring out who will be hired to lead it: apply here -- Pahlka sees an opportunity beyond civic coders: She's encouraging civic entrepreneurs to help make government work better for citizens.



"For government to get back on the innovation curve with the rest of society, we need startups to innovate and even disrupt the government ecosystem," she said.  "Entrepreneurs have the opportunity to provide real value and build successful businesses in this market, but many need help understanding the opportunities and building the right business models.  The Code for America Accelerator makes not only entrepreneurs but also investors aware of the opportunities, selects a few companies to bring through the process, and will get a small number of civic startups off the ground in 2012."



Last July, Pahlka gave a talk at the Future of Web Apps conference in Las Vegas, embedded below, where she explained more of her thinking on this theme:





In our interview, Pahlka highlighted how the software made by a more well known company are providing a useful service many citizens during tax season. "You might not think of something like TurboTax as a civic venture, but that product took a confusing interface to a government process and made it simpler and easier to use for citizens," she said. "Later, it had an impact on the efficiency of government itself as it drove the adoption of e-filing by the IRS. We think of it as an early example. Some [civic startups] will have business models in which government is the customer, some will have citizen-side revenue models, others might even rely on advertising, but what each civic startup should have in common is the potential to disrupt the government ecosystem and create a better experience for government and its citizens."



Pahlka noted that the market for startups focusing on the government customer is sizable but comes with some caveats, particularly with respect to procurement. "Total annual IT spending in government is estimated at $140 billion," she said," and governments at all levels are under pressure to find more cost-efficient solutions. There's significant opportunity, but entrepreneurs need to be willing to understand the needs of public sector clients, which can be harder to discover than enterprise or consumer demand." Pahlka thinks that an accelerator program that leverages advisors who understand the government market can make a significant different from entrepreneurs and investors alike.



"Some of these startups will follow the TurboTax model, which essentially bypasses government as a client and creates a better interface for citizens," she said. The market here is as large as you want to define it.  The question we have for entrepreneurs is 'What interface can you improve?' SeeClickFix and CitySourced are doing this for issue reporting. Who will step up to fix business permitting, or other onerous government processes?"



Given the economic pressures and challenges that confront hundreds of millions of Americans, the need for a killer civic "app for that" may never have been greater. By the end of the year, a majority of citizens are likely to own smartphones, making them full participants in a new app economy that is set to reach into the tens of billions of dollars worldwide. Given the explosion of mobile devices, cloud computing and wireless broadband, as more spectrum is released in the coming years, there's a clear opportunity to apply open data for the public good in industries that span healthcare, finance, transportation and education -- and to create some jobs and profits along the way.


]]> International Data Journalism Awards Recognize a Crucial Field tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1263536 2012-02-08T18:22:14-05:00 2012-04-09T05:12:01-04:00 Alexander Howard http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alexander-howard/ Andy Carvin, processing a late night data dump, or looking for the best way to visualize water quality for a nation of consumers. As we grapple with the consumption challenges presented by this deluge of data, new publishing platforms are also empowering us to gather, refine, analyze and share data ourselves, turning it into information.

In 2012, there will be a
Pulitzer for " href="http://www.editorandpublisher.com/Headlines/Article/Pulitzer-Prizes-for-Journalism-Move-to-All-digital-Entry-System--Revise-Definition-of-Local-Reporting-for-Breaking-News">real-time
reporting" and, fittingly, the href="http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/12/data-journalism.html">growing
importance of data journalism will be recognized in the href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/jan/19/global-data-journalism-awards-google">first
ever international Data Journalism Awards.



The Data Journalism
Awards are organized by the Global Editors Network, Google, and the European Journalism Centre, a Netherlands-based nonprofit that has been running data journalism
workshops for years.



"Data journalism is a new, exciting part of the media industry, with at present only a small number of practitioners," said Peter Barron, Google's director of external relations, as href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/data-journalism-awards-now-accepting.html">quoted on Google's official blog.



"We are convinced that there is a bright future for journalism," href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/data-journalism-awards-now-accepting.html">said Bertrand Pecquerie, CEO of the Global Editors Network, speaking at
the announcement of the awards at Google's offices in London. "This is not just about developing new hardware like tablets. It is above all about producing exciting new content."



The jury that will choose the best data journalism of the year includes representatives from ProPublica, the New York Times, Thomson-Reuters, the Sunlight Foundation and La Nacion. Judges will select a winner for local/regional and national/international work from each the following three categories.



  • data-driven investigative journalism

  • Data visualization & storytelling

  • Data-driven applications



A total of €45,000 (EUR) (or about $57,000) is up for distribution to the winners. The deadline for submissions is April 10, 2012. Any data journalism submitted must have been published or broadcast between April 11, 2011, and April 10, 2012. The winners of the data journalism awards will be announced at the Global News Network's World Summit in Paris on May 31, 2012.



To learn more about data journalism and the emerging newsroom stack, read more in the O'Reilly Radar.

]]> What You Need to Know About the Stop Online Piracy Act in 2012 tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.1166214 2011-12-23T12:55:52-05:00 2012-02-22T05:12:01-05:00 Alexander Howard http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alexander-howard/ anti-piracy bills that could cripple Internet industries and harm digital innovation. The thing is, that post is about 6,000 words long and is now a month out of date. So here's the briefing I sent back.

First, you should know the major players in the House of Representatives: Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX), chairman of House Judiciary Committee. His staffers had a major hand in drafting it. He supports it. So do Reps. Goodlatte and Berman. Rep. Mel Watts is the congressman whose remarks about not understanding helped to fuel headlines like "Dear Congress, It's No Longer OK To Not Know How The Internet Works" and "Dear Internet: It's No Longer OK to Not Know How Congress Works," by Clay Johnson.

Who else supports SOPA? The RIAA, MPAA, big Hollywood and big labor. Ergo, there's bipartisan coalition of 39 co-sponsors that supports it in the House or Representatives. Why? As always, follow the money. Oh, and all of these companies support SOPA too.

Who's against SOPA? Reps. Darrell Issa (R-CA), Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), Jared Polis (D-CO) and most of the Internet industry. These four representatives introduced dozens of amendments during the markup of the SOPA that would have addressed the most damaging, controversial, vague or problematic aspects of the bill, post-manager's amendment. (There's a lot of those.) By raising them, they catalyzed two day's worth of debate during the markup, effectively filibustering SOPA's progress during the waning days of the legislative calendar. They essentially ran out the clock on the year at a time when the rest of the House was focused on other issues. See: payroll tax cut extension.

Rep. Michele Bachmann is the only GOP candidate I've heard talk about it, which is notable. I think there should have been a debate question about it and the Internet -- but those aren't up to me.

Key counterproposal: An "OPEN" bill from Rep. Issa and other opponents of SOPA. You can learn more about it keepthewebopen.com. There's a lot that's interesting about that site, including the text of both SOPA and OPEN enabled with public markup. The site hosted an embedded livestream of the markup hearings that drew hundreds of thousands of visitors.

Prospects for SOPA: mixed. On the one hand, it's looking likely that it will pass out of committee. Most of the proposed amendments were voted down 2-1 in HJC when the manager's amendment was marked up. Unless something changes, expect SOPA to pass through the committee and emerge largely unamended, particularly with respect to the provisions that relate to search engines and the use of the domain name system for enforcement, the most controversial aspects of the bill for the tech community.

On the other hand, there have been significant cybersecurity concerns raised about the bills because of what it would do to DNSSEC, including by DHS officials. The committee might take a classified briefing so that the government's own geeks from Sandia Labs, the Department of Homeland Security and other "Three Letter Agencies" could explain to the legislators) who somehow neglected to bring in any technical experts before the committee to testify) why SOPA won't work and why it's a terrible idea to try to DNS for enforcement. If that happens before markup, it could change the bill that heads to the House floor -- and House leadership might want to address security concerns before bringing it to a full vote.

There's going to be a month ahead before the companion bill to SOPA, the Protect IP Act, is brought to a vote on the Senate floor. During that time, U.S. senators will be hearing about how unpopular these bills are. It's unclear if public option will turn enough against them if the broadcast and cable TV networks (which are all quietly for SOPA) don't cover it. FOX News did do a spot, featuring the Cato Institute's Jim Harper, so that may be changing.

If Mythbuster Adam Savage decided to to a show about how SOPA could destroy the Internet as we know it -- as opposed to "just" writing about it on PopularMechanics.com, it also could change the dynamic.

Whether the broadcast networks choose to cover it or not will matter less next year than it would have even a decade ago. The Internet will drive awareness of these bills in 2012 in a way that simply wasn't possible before this moment in history. The reaction from tech companies and their leaders is in of itself news and it's much harder to miss the discussion around SOPA online now. Google, Facebook and Wikipedia still haven't changed their homepages to protest SOPA. While Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt and Jimmy Wales have expressed concerns about the bill, as written, Mark Zuckerberg has not written a "status update" himself like Brin about it yet himself. Those are 3 of the top 10 sites in the world and places that nearly 100 percent of online citizens hit daily. If Zuck or more Internet executives came out that publicly against SOPA, it would affect the debate in D.C.

Need to stay up to date on SOPA? The single most prolific blogger has been Mike Masnick at Techdirt, who has shifted much of his output to the issue over the past month. Masnick is ardently against the bill. I think Declan McCullagh at CNET and Gautham Nagesh at The Hill have produced some of the the best sourced coverage around right now and understand both the politics and the technology (a regrettably rare combination). If you want to keep up to date and can afford to pay to get the news earlier, Politico's tech policy team is all over it at Politico Pro (paid) and Morning Tech.

If you prefer your analysis free and in real-time, follow Julian Sanchez, who has been following SOPA closely for the Cato Institute, Nate Anderson at Ars Technica and Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing. The EFF and Center for Democracy and Technology have also been watching the progress and provisions of the bills on a daily basis, including livetweeting the hearings (@EFFLive).

What's the date of next markup? Unclear as of today. It might well be when the House comes back into session in 2012, in the third week of January. Expect Rep. @Darrell Issa to share it on Twitter. He's been breaking a lot of the news on SOPA there.

Other key date: Jan. 24. That's when the Protect IP Act (PIPA) is set to go before the Senate. Senator Reid has said he's going to bring it up on the first day the Senate is back in session. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), who put a block on it, says he filibuster it. Key ratio, as with any bill there, is for/against in Senate. It will be interesting to see how other senators line up. That 60+ for or 40+ split is what to ask political analysts about -- I don't know that count as of today.

To learn more about where Senator Wyden stands on the Protect IP Act, watch my interview with him from this year's Web 2.0 Summit.

]]> Internet Companies and Lawmakers Speak Out Against the Stop Online Piracy Act tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.1095477 2011-11-15T21:19:10-05:00 2012-01-15T05:12:01-05:00 Alexander Howard http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alexander-howard/
As the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) highlights in its new summary of the problems and implications H.R. 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act, "SOPA sweeps much more broadly and would chill online innovation and expression by creating major new litigation risks for service providers currently protected by the DMCA safe harbor."

SOPA is "really a Trojan horse that might be better named the Social Media Surveillance Act," said Leslie Harris, CEO of CDT, in a press conference today. "Expect it to have a devastating effect on social media content and expression."

That the proposed bill has advanced with significant bipartisan support, along with PROTECT IP Act in the Senate, shows that online innovation and freedom of expression still need strong defenders against 20th century institutions whose quest for copyright protection would leave collateral damage in the form of human right defenders and entrepreneurs. "Any kind of online communication tool that allows users to post and share material" online are included under this bill, said David Sohn, senior counsel at CDT. "The definitions are so broad that any general purpose platform can be declared 'dedicated to theft.'" It is "basically a new hunting license for copyright trolls," he said.

There are also significant cybersecurity risks posed by SOPA and the PROTECT IP Act that policy makers should consider, writes Allan A. Friedman, a fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution. There are "very real threats to cybersecurity in a small section of both bills in their attempts to execute policy through the Internet architecture. While these bills will not "break the Internet," they further burden cyberspace with three new risks. First, the added complexity makes the goals of stability and security more difficult. Second, the expected reaction of Internet users will lead to demonstrably less secure behavior, exposing many American Internet users, their computers and even their employers to known risks. Finally, and most importantly, these bills will set back other efforts to secure cyberspace, both domestically and internationally. "

The House Judicial Committee will hold a hearing on H.R. 3261 on Wednesday, November 2011. Many people and websites around the Internet will be participating in "American Censorship Day" during the hearings.

Internet giants awake



As the Washington Post reported this morning, the MPAA, RIAA and U.S. Chamber, who all support the bill, are now publicly aligned against Internet companies like AOL, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Twitter, eBay, LinkedIn, Mozilla and Zynga on the "Stop Online Piracy Act."

The letter those Internet companies sent to Congress today is embedded below.

Tech Companies Letter to Congress

As Declan McCullagh reported for CNET today, the SOPA copyright bill's backers include the Republican or Democratic heads of all the relevant House and Senate committees, and groups as varied as the Teamsters and the AFL-CIO." Civil liberties groups like the EFF have strenuously opposed SOPA on the grounds that it is a "war on software freedom and Internet innovation which would be an "utter catastrophe" for the free and open source software community that has sustained the growth of seminal technologies like Linux or the Apache Web server.

That said, there are representatives in Congress who are opposing the bills. In the Senate, Senator Ron Wyden has been an outspoken opponent of the PROTECT IP Act. I spoke with him this fall about the issue at the Web 2.0 Summit in the interview below:



In the House, Representatives Issa and Lofgren sent a 'Dear Colleague' letter opposing SOPA to Congressional leaders. Today, Representatives Eshoo, Lofgren, Paul, Doggett, Honda, Miller, Thompson, Matsui, Doyle and Polis sent a letter opposing SOPA to the leaders of the House Judiciary Committee.

Congressional Letter to HJC on SOPA

A grave threat to the Internet commons



To put some of the issues here in perspective, look back to an interview with Harvard Law professor Yochai Benkler from March this year. While we talked then about the eG8 Summit, his observations are no less relevant when it comes to SOPA. What's at stake for the open Internet today?





It's "what's been at stake for over 15 years: the possibility that a coalition of forces who are afraid of the internet will shut it down," said Benkler. "There is still a very powerful counter argument, one that says both for innovation and for freedom, we need an open Net. Both for growth and welfare, and for democracy and participation, we need to make sure that the Internet remains an open Internet, remains a commons we all share, remains neutral at all layers, the physical layer, at the logical layer, at the data layer, at the content layer - at all of these layers, we must have an open Internet.

"That's still very strong, but it seems more threatened today than it has been for five or six years. We seem to be closer to the risk we were at in the late 90s, than the risk we were at five years ago."

I saw Harvard professor Yochai Benkler again at the Club de Madrid annual conference this past week and talked more with him about the challenges to the Internet as we know it today. In particular, we talked about the Stop Online Privacy Act and the PROTECT IP Act before Congress. He mentioned that his paper on the latter bill had been receiving more attention and was more relevant in the context of the introduction of the former bill. The paper compares the attack on Wikileaks to key elements of PROTECT IP on a deep level.

To what extent do politicians need to understand the relationship of politics and an open Internet? "The primary reason we need to support the Net is because it is a foundational part of how we have our democracy," he said in France.

If this is an issue that matters to you, you can learn more and contact your Congressional representatives using the PopVox widget below.

]]> Apps for Entrepreneurs Looks to Accelerate Startups With Open Data tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.1090060 2011-11-12T15:48:38-05:00 2012-01-12T05:12:01-05:00 Alexander Howard http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alexander-howard/ Apps for Entrepreneurs.

If you're unfamiliar with the idea of challenges, read up on collaborative innovation in open government. The big question that such contests are helping to answer is whether the vision of participatory democracy outlined by Thomas Jefferson, where citizens collaborate with government to solve the nation's most difficult problems, can be updated to the 21st century. Over the last year, agencies have been trying to crowdsource their way out of problems. Now, the Small Business Administration is trying the mechanism.

"The goal of the Apps for Entrepreneurs is to give small businesses and entrepreneurs those better tools through this challenge format," Ahson Wardak, senior advisor within the Investment Division at the Small Business Administration, told me via email.

"For most entrepreneurs and small businesses, the federal government has useful programs and services, but it can be hard to identify, engage and navigate federal websites," he wrote. "Often, small businesses do not know that the Federal government already offers a program that they would find useful. Entrepreneurs and small businesses need better tools to navigate the federal government's vast resources -- including programs, services, and procurement opportunities."

The short video embedded below explains more.:



Here's the raw material for developers to use in the challenge:

  • Datasets at http://sba.gov/api include a loan and grants search API and a city/county-level government website catalog.


  • Datasets at http://sbir.gov/api and http://green.sba.gov/api include SBIR award data, SBIR solicitation data, SBA program catalogue, SBA office locations, and "green" government opportunities



The challenge opened on November 5 and closes on November 20, so you've got another week to get cracking. Full disclosure: I'm one of the judges, so I'm hoping to see some great entries.]]> In Social Media and Politics, Engagement and Influence Trumps Follower Count tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.1072798 2011-11-02T23:15:23-04:00 2012-01-02T05:12:01-05:00 Alexander Howard http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alexander-howard/ real-time disclosure, but as the Obama administration continues to step up its online engagement efforts in the real-time political debate online, we can take away some important lessons from the results.

The hyperpartisan atmosphere in Washington has replicated itself online with both predictable outcomes, like hot rhetoric on blogs and social networks, and novel scenarios, like critiques of New York Times social media reporter Jennifer Preston for asking the White House what hashtag it was using.

When Twitter exploded over the debt deal this summer, we saw something new. Both sides of the aisle pushed online to scrap the deal.

Regardless of the outcome of the vote on the deal in Congress, the volume of political communication over social networks last week offered a blistering window into what the nation can expect when the 2012 election season heats up next year.

In Washington and other capitols around the world, legislatures and executive offices now operate in a 24 hour stream of live updates and social discussion. Make sure not to be dazzled by the glitz of social media, though: Election 2012 will be about the data.

Social media has now become a complementary channel for the public to contact their government officials and elected representatives, alongside the phone, town halls, letters and email. When President Obama personally Tweeted for the second time on his campaign account, @BarackObama, he asked his millions of followers to call, email and Tweet Congress.

That Tweet-to-action capped an intense week in which the president addressed the nation on the debt crisis and called for the public to engage. After his call to action, House and Senate websites were swamped with electronic interest, resulting in many citizens turning to Facebook and Twitter to reach their members of Congress. With a majority of Congressional staffers on social media, those citizens now expect to be heard.

When the president's campaign account was used to advocate for #compromise 113 times in one day, however, the volume and nature of the updates created a backlash that extended well beyond Twitter. The widely shared headline that @BarackObama lost some 36,000 followers through the campaign, however, missed some important angles.

First, the accusations that the president's campaign was "spamming" the nation rely largely on a broad misunderstanding of spam and Twitter alike. (This is not an uncommon condition in mainstream media.) If someone opts in to follow a given account on Twitter, it's not accurate to call subsequent Tweets "unsolicited bulk electronic messaging." On Twitter, the only @spam is follow-spam and @reply spam. A given account can lodge a complaint if @mentions are abused. In this case, the @BarackObama account @mentioned Congressional Twitter accounts once, not multiple times. Followers can just unfollow, as some users did. On Twitter, using the @names of other users is like adding links to blog posts. In this case, given reported increases in the followers of the Congressional accounts mentioned, the president's campaign account may have linked up more citizens to their representatives online.

Second, as Rachel Sklar pointed out at Mediate, lost followers are a "tempest in a teapot." The lost followers represent less than 0.3 percent of the 9.4 million total. While Sklar acknowledged what many critics have pointed out -- 113 Tweets is a huge increase over the normal daily volume -- using one of the world's most-followed social media accounts as a "real-time communication node" that asked followers to do something is noteworthy.

This whole silly brouhaha raises the question of "What is Twitter for?" Is it for sharing important information -- or for jealously hoarding followers? For the President of the United States -- and for anyone in government -- it should always be the former. We're all pretty jaded about Twitter now, but what we saw yesterday was something incredibly cool: a centralized communications hub sending out actionable information quickly, efficiently and measurably. That is pretty incredible, and we are certainly going to see more innovation in how Twitter and other social media is used to campaign and message as 2012 gears up.


Finally, as Micah Sifry wrote at techPresident, the lost followers are no "big whoop" -- the account has gained 37,000 followers since Friday. In general, follower count is one of the worst statistics to use in analyzing someone's political influence online. Social media success isn't just about followers: it's about the influence and engagement an account holds on a given network. In general, amplification and engagement, measured in retweets, @mentions and @replies, and influence, measured in blogs and mainstream media coverage, offer better metrics to analyze campaigns.

For instance, after the introduction of "White House Office Hours" this summer, the @WhiteHouse account received 450 percent more @mentions than before. (You can see the #WHChats collected at the White House Storify account). In this context, it's of note that the operators of the @WhiteHouse Twitter account now routinely natively retweet other accounts participating in online chats. While some of these Tweets will leave followers without context for the Tweet, the White House appears to have shifted its online strategy to one of engagement versus the lower risk style broadcasting that most politicians adopt online. To date, many of the president's political opponents have not followed suit.

At a high level, it's unclear how much these #WHChats or the #compromise campaign are influencing the national debate on the economy or other issues, given the difficulty of parsing out Twitter versus other social media channels, broadcast and print media. After all, 75 percent of the nation is online, and of that proportion, only 10-15 percent is on Twitter.

At least one influential White House staffer, however, indicated that Twitter factored into the resolution of the debt debate. White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer affirmed to New York Times reporter Brian Stelter that email and Tweets from constituents influenced the debt ceiling deal, along with phone calls. It's also unclear what evidence Pfeiffer is basing his affirmation upon. (Requests to the White House for comment went unanswered.)

Reuters social media editor Anthony de Rosa collected anecdotal evidence based upon replies from his followers, but the sample isn't large enough to draw any conclusions. What we do know is that the velocity of political messaging ratcheted up another notch this summer, with no sign of slowing down. Given the lead that Republicans currently hold in the social media landscape, Election 2012 is going to be interesting.]]> Federal CIO VanRoekel's 'Future First' Vision for Government Focuses on Cloud, Open Standards, Modularity, Shared Services tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.1032686 2011-10-27T12:06:02-04:00 2011-12-27T05:12:02-05:00 Alexander Howard http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alexander-howard/ vision for information technology that U.S. CIO Steven VanRoekel laid out last night will be of considerable interest to anyone interested in how the federal government uses and manages its eighty billion dollar information technology portfolio. Given how important technology has become in the lives of the nation's citizens, you don't have to be interested in IT itself to know that it's important that government gets better. As ZDNet reported, VanRoekel said that "America's future depends on its ability to innovate."

How does VanRoekel plan to empower or catalyze that innovation in the federal government? (If he listened to the advice of Vint Cerf on government innovation, adding the capacity to fail would be helpful.) As the San Francisco Chronicle reported, the "White House tech boss" has adopted a "future first" strategy: when there's a decision to be made, choose the option from the future: cloud computing, virtualization or modular development. The bottom line is literally built into these decisions: in an era where cost-savings continue to be primary drivers on investment decisions, VanRoekel is emphasizing a higher return on investment or increases in productivity as metrics. He posted his remarks (PDF) as prepared for delivery at the Churchill Club on the White House blog. Video of his talk is embedded below:



The key top-line points he made are clear: do more with less, close the 'productivity gap' (a.k.a IT gap?) improve citizen and business interaction with (open) government, improve cyber security, change the way government invests in IT. Much of this will be a continuation of the White House IT reforms proposed by former federal CIO Vivek Kundra.

What's new or notable? Look to the "Future First" vision in the latter part of the speech, which I excerpt below. Instead of projects that stretch for many years and, frequently, see billions of dollars of cost overruns, VanRoekel is advocating an agile, "lean startup" approach adapted from the startup culture that has driven the most dynamic sector of the American economy over the last decade. Much of the focus is a continuation of the perspective and approach that VanRoekel pursued at the FCC, where he led the effort to reboot FCC.gov as an open government platform, based upon Web 2.0 principles like open source, the cloud, and collective intelligence. Read on:


In the end, we can't build a 21st century government without fundamentally changing how we invest in technology...


Going forward, we need to embrace modular development, build on open standards, and run our projects in lean startup mode. We also need to work with Congress to change our approach to funding technology to better support these principles.

Given the rapid pace of change in technology, it's not enough to just build technology solutions that meet our needs today. We need to design for the future, not for the status quo.

That's why I am calling on a broad group from across industry, academia, and government - those in this room and your colleagues around the country - to help formulate a "Future First" initiative that will help us continuously architect for the future.

Much as our "Cloud First" policy changed the landscape of IT spending, "Future First" will jump- start the government's adoption of new technologies and approaches. I envision a set of principles like "XML First", "Web Services First", "Virtualize First", and other "Firsts" that will inform how we develop our government's systems. They will effectively establish a new default setting for architecting solutions government-wide, and they will be continuously updated as new technologies emerge to ensure that our government is at the frontier of advancements that yield a higher return on our IT investments, increase productivity, and improve the way the government interacts with the American people.


In his remarks, VanRoekel also acknowledged one of the most important issues in government IT: procurement. While no speech is going to simply fix an entrenched issue, articulating principles based upon the need for modularity, interoperability and open standards represents at least a breath of fresh air. If he's truly able to reform just that part of the government IT, much less the other improvements he's laid out, it would be a lasting legacy.

Read Steven VanRoekel's PARC Speech here. ]]> Open Government Data Earns Bipartisan Congressional Support in Washington tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.1001505 2011-10-09T13:37:00-04:00 2011-12-09T05:12:01-05:00 Alexander Howard http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alexander-howard/
Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA) joined me via remote webcast from chambers in Washington, D.C. Our crack video team is working on an improved version of this video in which you'll see my side of the broadcast, along with a boost in audio. Until then, the video that the House Oversight digital team uploaded to YouTube will suffice -- and I don't want to wait to share this story any longer in the meantime, particularly as interest builds behind the principle subject of our conversation, a proposed bill to standardize financial reporting data standards in the federal government and create single database for financial spending.



Daniel Schuman listened in and summarized our conversation on open government data over at the Sunlight Foundation's blog:
The Chairman focused his remarks on the DATA Act, the bipartisan legislation he introduced that would transform how government tracks federal spending and identifies waste, fraud, and abuse.

He emphasized the importance of making government data available online in real time so that innovative minds can immediately make use the information to build their own businesses. Business, in turn, would help the government identify program mismanagement and data quality problems. The Chairman specifically singled out Vice President Biden as a supporter of efforts to find a common solution to make data available in a systematic way.

...Chairman Issa explained that the private sector must step up as advocates for greater openness because they will benefit from building and using the tools made possible by greater transparency. He added when government drives down the cost of obtaining information, private individuals will derive value from the analysis of data, not its ownership.

The cost of good data


Since our conversation, the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the DATA Act would cost the government $575 million to implement over 5 years, as reported by FierceGovernmentIT:

In a cost estimate dated Sept. 16, the CBO attributes $325 million of the estimated total to requirements in the bill regarding the collecting and reporting of financial information. The DATA Act would require federal agencies, and most government contractors and grant award winners to adopt XBRL as a financial data reporting mechanism.


Left unsaid in the CBO estimate is what the impact of this kind of transparency on the federal government's finances might be, in terms of savings. House Oversight staff have estimated annual savings from standards and centralized spending database that would more than offset that outlay, including:

  • $41 million in funds recovered from questionable recipients

  • $63 million in funds withheld from questionable recipients

  • $5 billion in savings recommended by inspectors general

  • unknown savings resulting from better internal spending control and better oversight by Congressional appropriators.


The DATA Act, which would expand the role of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board to track all federal spending and make all of the information available to the public, has bipartisan support in the Senate from Senator Mark Warner (D-VA), who has introduced a companion bill there.

As NextGov reported yesterday, efforts to require government-wide spending reports have advanced on the Hill, while President Obama has begun the process of establishing a similar board by executive order.

You can read more letters of support that extend from well beyond an Open Government Coalition online over at Scribd, including:

Open government as a bipartisan issue



Given the White House's embrace of the mantle of open government on President's first day in office, the executive branch has gathered a lot of the press, attention, praise, scrutiny and criticism in this area.

That looks to be changing, and for the better. As Clay Johnson pointed out at the beginning of 2011, any competition between the White House and Congress on open government is likely to be a win for the American people.

Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the Cato Foundation and webmaster of WashingtonWatch.com, wrote then that the GOP can eclipse Obama on transparency. "House Republicans can quickly outshine Obama and the Democratic Senate," he opined. "It all depends on how they implement the watch phrase of their amendment package: "publicly available in electronic form."
The GOP House leadership must make sure that this translates into real-time posting of bills, amendments and steps in the legislative process, in formats the Internet can work with. It's not about documents anymore. It's about data. Today's Internet needs the data in these documents.

There are no technical impediments to a fully transparent Congress. Computers can handle this. The challenges, however, are institutional and practical."


Johnson identified the moment in history as an important inflection point, and one that, if the White House rose to the challenge, could legitimately be seen as an open government win for the American people and a smarter, more accountable government.

The White House may hold the considerable advantages of the bully pulpit and the largest followings of any federal entity or politician on Twitter, for now, but that has to be balanced against the considerable new media prowess that the GOP has built up over their Democratic counterparts in Congress, where Republicans hold an edge on social media.

While some projects or choices continue to cast questions on commitment in the rank and file to open government principles, with the GOP bending new House rules, there's progress to report. The leadership of the House of Representatives has supported the creation of open, online video archives, like House.Resource.org. The House revamped its floor feed recently, adding live XML. And House leadership has recently venerated the role of technology in making Congress more transparent, engaged and accountable.



Rep. Issa, in particularly, appears to have taken on open government as a cause and, for the moment, its rhetoric. He even tweets using the #opengov hashtag. When it comes to the legislature, "the American people have a right to all the data from Congress. They have a right," he said at a recent forum on Congressional transparency, as reported by Diana Lopez.

Government secrecy and transparency are, in theory, non-partisan issues. In practice, they are often used a political bludgeons against an opposing party, particularly by a partisan minority, and then discarded once power is gained. For government transparency to outlast a given White House or Congress, laws and regulatory changes have to happen.

Open government has to be "baked in" to culture, practices, regulations, technology, business practices and public expectations. Needless to say, that's going to take a while, but it looks like both the administration and some members of Congress are willing to keep trying.

As these efforts go forward, it will be up to the media, businesses, nonprofits, watchdogs and, of course, citizens to hold them accountable for actions taken, not just rhetoric.]]> USAID Goes FWD With Open Data and Open Government for Famine Aid tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.970031 2011-09-19T19:13:52-04:00 2011-11-19T05:12:01-05:00 Alexander Howard http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alexander-howard/ Social Good Summit, Dr. Raj Shah, the administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) will launch a new public engagement effort to raise awareness about the devastating famine in the Horn of Africa. USAID is calling it the "FWD campaign" and it includes some interesting uses of open data, mapping and citizen engagement. USAID launched USAID.gov/FWD today and a text to donate initiative up and running in time to be amplified by the reach of the Social Good Summit. You can txt "GIVE' to 777444 to donate $10.

FWD stands for "Famine, War, Drought," the unfortunate combination that lies behind the crisis in the Horn of Africa. "It also stands for our call to action," writes in Haley Van Dyck, director of digital strategy at USAID, with an eye to getting people involved in raising awareness and "forwarding" the campaign on to friends, family and colleagues. Each of the components of the page includes the options to share on Twitter, Facebook or "FWD" on to people using email.

"Frankly, it's the first foray the agency is taking into open government, open data, and citizen engagement online," said Van Dyck. "We recognize there is a lot more to do on this front, but are happy to start moving the ball forward. This campaign is different than anything USAID has done in the past. It is based on informing, engaging, and connecting with the American people to partner with us on these dire but solvable problems. We want to change not only the way USAID communicates with the American public, but also the way we share information."

Van Dyck was particularly excited about the interactive maps that USAID has built and embedded on the FWD site. The agency built the maps with open source mapping tools and published the data sets they used to make these maps on data.gov.



The combination of publishing maps and the open data that drives them simultaneously online is significantly evolved for any government agency and will serve as a worthy bar for other efforts in the future to meet. They've done that by migrating their data to an open, machine-readable format. In the past, we released our data in inaccessible formats - mostly PDFs -- that are often unable to be used effectively, wrote Van Dyck.

"USAID is one of the premiere data collectors in the international development space," wrote Van Dyck. "We want to start making that data open, making that data sharable, and using that data to tell stories about the crisis and the work we are doing on the ground in an interactive way." ]]> Live Streamed Coverage of the Open Government Partnership Launch Events on September 20, 2011 tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.968750 2011-09-18T16:16:12-04:00 2011-11-18T05:12:02-05:00 Alexander Howard http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alexander-howard/
Events will include day-long multi-stakeholder discussion, "The Power of Open," that brings together governments, civil society, industry leaders, academics and the media for a series of panels and networking events focused on the role of openness in improving responsiveness, fostering accountability, creating efficiencies, promoting innovation and growth, fighting corruption, improving performance, and capturing dispersed knowledge in support of smarter policies.

You can view the most current version of the "The Power of Open" agenda here

Watch the "Power of Open" event on September 20, 2011 live streamed at the OpenGovPartnership Youtube Channel.

There will also be a separate high-level OGP Launch event that afternoon, where the eight OGP Steering Committee governments will deliver their OGP action plans, sign a declaration of principles and welcome a new group of countries into the effort.

This event will also be live streamed -- details to follow soon.

As we approach the formal launch of OGP on September 20th, we are pleased to announce that the following countries have formally expressed their intent to join the Partnership. OGP looks forward to working with these governments as they advance their own efforts to improve governance in the 21st century. We will update this list as we receive letters of intent from more countries who are committed to this important work in the coming days.

  1. Albania

  2. Azerbaijan

  3. Bulgaria

  4. Chile

  5. Colombia

  6. Croatia

  7. Czech Republic

  8. Dominican Republic

  9. El Salvador

  10. Estonia

  11. Georgia

  12. Ghana

  13. Guatemala

  14. Honduras

  15. Israel

  16. Italy

  17. Jordan

  18. Kenya

  19. Latvia

  20. Liberia

  21. Lithuania

  22. Macedonia

  23. Malta

  24. Moldova

  25. Mongolia

  26. Montenegro

  27. Peru

  28. Slovak Republic

  29. Spain

  30. South Korea

  31. Sweden

  32. Tanzania

  33. The Netherlands

  34. Turkey

  35. Ukraine


Check back regularly for more information and updates!
]]> Progress and Setbacks for Open Government on Eve of Historic Global Partnership Launch tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.968578 2011-09-18T15:27:39-04:00 2011-11-18T05:12:02-05:00 Alexander Howard http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alexander-howard/ White House open government "status update" capped a historic week for open government in Washington. The Blue Button movement now has a website: BlueButtonData.org. Federal CTO Aneesh Chopra challenged the energy industry to collaborate in the design of a "green button" modeled after that Blue Button. White House director of digital Macon Phillips answered questions about "We the People" and the White House e-petitions. The Department of Transportation held a public consultation for the its Digital Transportation Exchange (DTE) open government initiative. President Obama signed the America Invents Act into law.

Progress and Setbacks



Quiet successes have been matched with setbacks to open government in Washington over the past three years, including two from this past week. Several journalism organizations have protested the U.S. federal government taking down doctor discipline and malpractice data from the Web. The Obama administration also faces an uncertain future for funding for its Office of Management and Budget's open government initiatives after theU.S. Senate appropriations committee shortchanged the Electronic Government Fund by some $10 million dollars this week.

Global Open Government Partnership



While neither of those stories are good data points for the state of open government at the federal level, they are both part of a much larger narrative where some 40 countries (including the founding 8 members) have reportedly now submitted letters of intent to join this unprecedented international open government partnership.

Next Tuesday, I'll be in New York on the same day that President Obama introduces the U.S. National Plan for open government as part of its commitment to the Open Government Partnership As John Wonderlich observed at the Sunlight Foundation on Friday, preparing for the U.S. National Plan and then delivering upon whatever is contains will be a "complex, ongoing effort that takes dedicated effort and attention," adding to the progress towards a more transparent, participatory, collaborative or innovative government made to date.

In 2011, some of the most dynamic changes may be found the state and local level in the United States. After next week, the eyes of many more people will be open to the broader sweep of a global movement towards transparency. The world can watch the live streaming coverage of the "Power of Open" at Google's YouTube channel from 9-10:30 AM and from 1:30-4:30 PM. Event details are available at OpenGovPartnership.org">, including agenda, participants, presentations and other materials. I'm looking forward to telling that story using Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr and next Tuesday, where I'll be liveblogging at the O'Reilly Radar all day. techPresident's associate editor, Nick Judd, will be tweeting and liveblogging. Follow the #OGP hashtag for the real-time conversation about the Open Government Partnership:


]]>