bottom up change

Andrew Rasiej, Founder of the Personal Democracy Forum

At the Personal Democracy Forum conference last week, Andrew Rasiej was not only hosting the event, he was also advocating for what he called the “Public Means Online Act.”  The basic idea is explained in this interesting discussion with Scott Simon on NPR’s Weekend Edition.  Rasiej also discusses the way that the concept of citizenship and the powers of citizens are changing because of the internet.  It’s worth a listen.

“The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works” -President Barack Obama, January 20, 2009

One of the Obama administration appointments that has not received enough attention by the traditional media is Vivek Kundra as the first Chief Information Officer of the federal government.  Out of all of the President’s appointments, this one may be the most significant.  Yes, perhaps even more significant than Secretary Geithner at Treasury, who has the dreary responsibility of pulling us out of the banking crisis which is at the core of the recession.  Why is Kundra’s position so important?

First, let me make a brief digression.  From my first post on this blog, I have often expressed my view about the need for fiscal responsibility in the Obama administration.  My view about government spending is that liberals need to be even more careful about how they spend money than conservatives.  That’s because it is much easier to stigmatize all of liberalism as a view that engenders wasteful spending and inefficient bureaucracy.  Liberalism’s greatest strength, in my opinion, is also its greatest weakness.  By having a more open view about the role of government than conservatism allows, liberals are more likely to have a guilt-free conscience about spending taxpayer money.  Whether this money goes to education, health care, or any number of areas where liberals believe government can play a constructive role, spending taxpayer money is seen as a necessary means to a noble end.  If some money is wasted along the way, the attitude sometimes seems to be that the ends justify the means.  While I have a lot of sympathy with a more open view of government, I also really, really hate spending taxpayers’ money on ineffective projects or inefficient beauraucracy, not to mention fraud and abuse.  I also believe that conservatives’ most potent weapon against liberals is when government wastes taxpayer money.  When this happens, the public comes to see liberals as not being trustworthy stewards of government.  It may well be true that the most powerful argument that economic conservatives have against liberalism is the DMV.

All of this is to say that the Democrats are very lucky to have Vivek Kundra in their ranks at this time.  Kundra previously served as the Chief Technology Officer for Mayor Adrian Fenty’s administration in the District of Columbia before he went on to serve as CIO for President Obama.  During his term in DC, Kundra was widely recognized as one of the most effective and innovative CTOs in the country.  This Washington Post profile of Kundra describes how he is bringing some of the “kinetic” energy and innovation of tech companies like Google into the public sector.

What is most impressive about Kundra are the accomplishments and promising innovations that his energy has produced during his brief tenure in the Fenty administration.  Kundra’s “Apps for Democracy” initiative allowed tech-savvy citizens to submit applications for computers and cell phones that would enable DC residents to easily access city data.    Data on anything from construction projects, dates for fixing potholes, crime rates by neighborhood, and more would be organized and easily searchable with these apps.  Those who invented the most popular apps would win a monetary prize.  Here is how Kundra described the result:

“I expected to get maybe 10 entries, but we got 47 apps in 30 days,” Kundra said. He said he spent $50,000 for the contest and prize money, and estimates he saved $2.6 million over what it would have cost to hire contract developers.

In addition to the money saved, I wonder how much time was saved with this project.  The entire contest was completed in October, 2008.  The People’s Choice Award winners from the contest included the “Carpool Mashable Matchmaker,” which allows people to easily find carpools and conserve energy, and the “DC Bikes” app, another program that promotes green transportation by giving DC residents bike paths in the city and warning them of high crime areas.  There were also Medal Winners.  Kundra’s Apps for Democracy project was so successful that Sunlight Foundation started a similar contest, “Apps for America,” through its Sunlight Labs project.  I’ll write about Apps for America in a future post.

A side benefit of Apps for Democracy is that it allowed citizens to feel engaged with their government in a new, futuristic way.  Kundra described his underlying Government 2.0 philosophy in a brief essay, “Building the Digital Public Square”:

In ancient Athens—the model for the democracy envisioned by the framers of our Constitution–citizens met, face to face, in the agora—the public square–to conduct business, debate civic issues, and drive the decisions of government. Gone are the days of daily meetings at the agora. Today, citizens know government as red tape, long lines, and cold, distant bureaucracies. The reins of government have slipped from “we the people” to inaccessible government officials.

The District of Columbia, however, is at the forefront of a new era of governance, one in which technological advances now allow people from around the world unfettered access to their government. Through these advances, constituents can hold their government accountable from the privacy of their own homes. The District of Columbia is bringing people closer to government through collaborative technologies like wikis, data feeds, videos and dashboards. We’re throwing open DC’s warehouse of public data so that everyone—constituents, policymakers, and businesses—can meet in a new digital public square.

It remains to be seen whether Kundra can bring the kind of groundbreaking innovation to the vast federal government in which agencies are known for bitter turf wars.  But now, perhaps more than ever, an effective CIO is needed.  At a time when the government is preparing to spend trillions of taxpayer dollars for economic stimulus and President Obama’s budget priorities, waste of taxpayer money is a real danger.  One big scandal of fraud, waste, or abuse of stimulus dollars, for instance, could do serious damage to President Obama’s ambitious agenda.  The technology is now being developed to make government more transparent than ever, giving citizens the tools to be more vigilant watch dogs of their government.  Hopefully apps will be created that will allow us to monitor spending more carefully so that a major scandal does not occur.  So, I expect to see big things from Kundra over the next few years.  One good place to start may be to work with the Treasury department and the Congressional Oversight Panel to allow citizens to track exactly how the banks are using TARP money.

Continuing the theme of transparency from my last post, there’s an interesting piece in the Washington Post today about the use of crowdsourcing to monitor the spending of stimulus money.  Crowdsourcing is a notion that was developed by an article in Wired a few years ago and it seems to be spreading in popularity.  The basic idea is that, using the internet, we can outsource work on a task or project to a large group of unknown people.

While “crowdsourcing” is one of those trendy buzzwords that is being thrown around a lot on the internet,  Stimulus Watch is an example of how the interactive nature of the web can increase transparency.  Stimulus Watch is not tracking the specific projects of the stimulus–at least, not yet.  Instead, it is seeking input from citizens around the country about the list of “shovel ready” projects that were proposed recently at the US Conference of Mayors.  The website asks its users to identify local projects and then allows them to comment on them and rate the projects in terms of their perceived importance.  The hope is that, as a result of this kind of citizen feedback, when Mayors do receive the stimulus money it will be spent on those projects that are viewed as being most critical by the public.  Here is how the site’s co-founder, Jerry Brito, describes the significance of crowdsourcing as a means for allowing citizens to keep on eye on government spending:

“You don’t have to hire an army of auditors, because it’s impossible for them to follow every single dollar and every single transaction,” Brito said in an interview. “However you can augment their work with citizens, who can keep tabs on things that go on in their neighborhood.”

There are many useful features at Stimulus Watch.  First, projects are divided into categories such as “Most Expensive”, “Most Critical,” and “Least Critical”.  There is also a search function so that users can easily find proposed shovel-ready projects in their area.  Finally, using a Wiki, the site provides users with a description of each project and a chance to offer more qualitative feedback in the form of comments and a discussion thread.

One question that I have with a site like this is how it prevents users from gaming the rating system.  I can imagine a city administrator seeking federal funding for a project sending an e-mail to employees asking them to rate the project favorably when, in fact, most citizens in the community would oppose the project.  It is unclear how a website like this can prevent bias and manipulation from distorting the results.  But that seems to be one problem with the idea of crowdsourcing in general.

Beginning with this post, I’m going to start featuring organizations and individuals that are doing innovative work to achieve progressive change from the bottom up.  Since it’s Sunshine Week, the first feature in this series is The Sunlight Foundation (SF), an advocacy organization committed to making government more transparent by using social media and online tools in new ways.  This is a must-go-to site for anyone interested in a more open, less secretive government.  It is worth reading its About page in full, but here is a snippet of what it’s up to:

Through our projects and grant-making, Sunlight serves as a catalyst for greater political transparency and to foster more openness and accountability in government. Sunlight’s ultimate goal is to strengthen the relationship between citizens and their elected officials and to foster public trust in Congress. We are unique in that technology and the power of the Internet are at the core of every one of our efforts.

Our work is committed to helping citizens, bloggers and journalists be their own best congressional watchdogs, by improving access to existing information and digitizing new information, and by creating new tools and Web sites to enable all of us to collaborate in fostering greater transparency.

What really makes this organization unique is its creative use of the internet for online organizing.  The first thing you notice about SF’s website is its attractive design and the ease of navigating the different pages.  But a closer look at this site reveals a truly impressive range of content and interactive features.

First, co-founder Ellen Miller and a talented group of writers are the primary contributors to the blog, which has become regular reading for me.  I frequently find new information there about surprising ways that our government doesn’t provide the public with critically important information.  The writing is high quality as well.

Another feature of SF which makes it stand out is the way that it is using social media to promote its advocacy.  SF is on Facebook, though that is not much of a breakthrough.  And, like an increasing number of advocacy groups, SF is on Twitter @sunlightnetwork.  But just being on these social media sites doesn’t mean much in itself.  It’s all about how you use these tools and combine them with traditional media.  One example of a two-pronged media approach to advocacy is its work on Senate bill 482, the “Senate Campaign Discosure Parity Act,” sponsored by Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) and introduced on February 26 of this year.  @sunlightnetwork encouraged its nearly 1,900 followers to tweet their Senators to support S.482, and Senator Barbara Boxer of California responded favorably:

@Barbara_Boxer: Thanks to all who tweeted me about e-filing of campaign finance reports. I was a cosponsor of S. 482 before and will do so again.

So, does this mean we’re leaving the era of letter-writing and calling one’s Senator, and entering the era of Twitter advocacy (I just barely resisted writing “twadvocacy”)?  Not quite.  SF combines this kind of “new advocacy” with the old methods, such as writing op-eds, which Ellen Miller did today in an insightful piece in USA Today.  Most interesting to me was her take on how the internet is supplementing (overtaking?) traditional journalism as the watchdog of our government. She has some terrific examples of the ways that citizens have been using the internet to discover what their government is doing in their name.

Perhaps the coolest (and I use this term loosely) internet tool on SF’s website right now is its system to track calls to Senators to prod them into passing S.482.  The purpose of these calls is also to encourage Senators to defeat an amendment offered by Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS) that would kill the bill.  The page very clearly explains how to lobby one’s Senators, and it allows users to enter the results of their lobbying directly on the site.  Awesome!

Sunlight Foundation has many more projects and government transparency issues that it is working on.  One project that I think is extremely important and worthy of mention is Readthebill, which is a petition to demand that Congress post legislation online 72 hours before it is debated so that legislators and the public have a chance to actually READ the bill that might become law.  Please sign this petition.  If you remember, the Patriot Act was read by no one except Sen. Feingold, and he was also the only legislator to vote against it.  We all know how that turned out.  Another very important and useful SF project is EarmarkWatch, which allows citizens to search for earmarks in bills to find out if they are worthwhile projects.  As regular readers of this blog know, I hate the current earmark system and I believe it is especially harmful to liberals when they participate in it.

There are many more great projects and innovative uses of social media that the Sunlight Foundation is taking the lead on.  One fun project called Capitol Words allows you to search for words spoken by legislators and see who repeated them most often: words like, health, energy, tax, education, etc.  The idea is to try to call out hypocrisy when we find it.  It turns out that in the past year, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) uttered the word “oil” 534 times and “health” 478 times.  He’s clearly concerned about these topics.  What is he doing about them?  So, if you only visit one site for information on government transparency and reform, this is it.

Recovery.gov launched today as I’m sure you noticed. Nancy Scola has a pretty good summary of the site at techPresident. I think this is a decent start, but the site is pretty empty at this point. What will be worth watching is how much transparency will really exist here. Will they post the bad stories in addition to the good?

One thing that stood out to me was that the same data on investments provided is in two different graph styles: bubbles and bars. I’m more of a bar graph man myself: