On this episode of Spark: Government transparency, blogs, and vlogs
- Rahaf Harfoush explains what Obama’s campaign and change.gov can teach Canadian politicians about transparency (full interview)
- Tom Steinberg makes it easy to track elected officials using They Work for You (full interview)
- Nora mentions Visible Government
- Merlin Mann answers your questions about blogging (all of Merlin’s segments)
- Heather Gold bridges the geek/non-geek divide to explain vlogging
This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects:
- Clips from This Is Your Life Melton Berle
- “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama
- “eighteen pieces (soda)” by soda
- “Back2Mixter” by gmz
- “As Time Goes By” by Jacques Renard And His Orchestra
- “Explosions” by khidir
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[Original image by jpctalbot]
Thanks to Merlin and Nora for answering my question about when to start a second, third, etc. blog. Sound advice.
What an interesting episode! After listening to the episode and the full interviews I think what struck me most is that, while Rahaf’s ideas are definitely interesting – in terms of ways to engage people in conversations with government and encourage participation – it seems to me that are a couple of prerequisites for this, if it is to be a really useful process (and more positive than negative).
First, Canadians and our political parties need to make transparency an urgent issue. And it should be an issue because, as Lawrence Lessig suggested in discussing corruption in the US, it may not be the most important issue, but it’s the FIRST issue: It influences how other decisions are made and what policies we end up with.
Second, I think before we think about people being able to engage in meaningful discussions with government, we have to talk about how they will inform themselves for these discussions. This is where what Tom Steinberg discusses becomes interesting. But rather than having myriad NGOs and other organizations presenting the info for us, I think government needs to think about how they can make info available and useful for citizens.
I thought what Tom said about conversations with Government – that governments are already pretty good about having conversations – was interesting and I think made a good point. The most urgent failing in government is not in that it doesn’t provide opportunities for participation, it is that it is still too closed and secretive to allow constructive, informed participation. My thought was that government needs to almost move beyond “web 2.0″ to something akin to “web 3.0,” thinking about something like a semantic web concept, where citizens are able to more easily query government information in a natural way and get meaningful answers. At that point it may be meaningful to talk about the 2.0 stuff (online conversations, interaction etc).
Hi Nora,
I enjoyed episode 57, but I disagreed with something that one of your guests said. The guest seemed to imply that “government” internet services are very old-fashioned and non-intuitive. I assume she was referring to the Government of Canada, and not the services available in the UK, USA, or elsewhere. I started looking at the GC website(s) about 5 years ago, and I’ve always thought that it was among the most professional, readable, and accessible that I’ve used. The developers seem to know that the content is “serious” and not intended to be commercial. The website is easy to navigate, and has a welcome lack of images, applets, and Adobe Flash-dependent content. Therefore, most of the content can be viewed on older computers with older versions of browsers – which ensures that the content is accessible not just to those with fancy new machines. Moreover, the English on the site is concise, and the hyperlinks are put in the right spots.
I don’t work for the GC, and get as frustrated with them as anyone else, but they are to be commended for good internet services – even if they might not appeal to Twitter-smitten teenagers.
Just finished listening and thought of the situation in PEI where the government made its information less transparent earlier this week in response to a citizen having put together an easier-to-use alternative. You can read about it on Peter Rukavina’s blog: Closing OpenCorporations.org
One of the thing that most strikes me about all of the guests is the emphasis on making things “simple” or “less complicated”. I’m sorry, but policy-making actually sort of complicated sometimes. The end of result of crowd-sourcing is either a very superficial level of interaction (as I suspect is already happening in the US with Obama’s community) or really, really, really bad, oversimplified policy. Yes, it might be elitist, but the best solutions to our problems are not up-to-the-minute, poll driven and “simple”. They are long-term, based on evidence and complex.
Government websites could use some modernization, to be sure. However, in doing so we need to mindful of what government is meant to do and what democratic management really means. Democracy is based on long-standing principles – it’s a lot more than just a never-ending referendum. As it stands, there is actually a lot of content online from government. If someone either cannot read it, or cannot be bothered to read it, I’d rather policy-makers do not pay too much attention to their advice, to be frank.
@Christina,
Interesting point about complexity; that was what I had in mind when I asked Rahaf about whether we actually want all these people participating. It is a question in highly complex, interconnected societies like ours, for sure, though as she says, citizen engagement may simply mean being informed. Thanks for commenting!
As always, an enjoyable episode. Big fan of http://www.mysociety.org/ they have all kinds of interesting projects including managing the online petitions by their prime minister.
There is a growing list of more interactive tools being used by government. There are at least two big federal government project’s using the open source tool http://MediaWiki.org. MediaWiki is the same software used by Wikipedia, which is certainly an interesting model for decision making in it’s own right.
Wanted to say that there are a few other Web 2.0 technologies being used by government. A growing list of them is available here:
http://government20bestpractices.pbwiki.com/
Very interesting show (as usual). I listened to the podcast on my way into my government job where I work on implementing, you guessed it, government policy.
I’d like to comment on two points: the complexity of public policy and government transparency.
It is argued that public policy is too complex to take on-line and to the digital masses. This reduces policy development, it is argued, to a process of reacting to the latest opinion polls. In so doing, public policy becomes much more partisan and politicised. Keep in mind that as a civil servant my job is to take the direction of elected officials and put this in practice in a means that best serves Canadians – that should be good public policy and it should not be partisan.
This view would see the public policy makers as merely responding to the loudest voices out there.
This is where policy becomes complex, but not in such a way that we should stop listening to those loud voices. It is complex because we must encourage everyone’s voice. This is where I love the notion of crowd-sourcing as a part of public policy development. Use every means possible to listen to as many voices as possible.
Now dealing with all of these voices heightens the complexity, but in a good way. The true complexity of public policy is that any one policy will have a multitude of impacts. If we can hear all of the voices out there FIRST when we are still developing policy, then we will be much better placed to recognize the array of impacts and design policy so we include in that array the desired impacts and exclude those that do not represent the intent of our policies.
So, what about the notion of transparency in government? I liked the notion coming from the UK – visible government. Transparency to me conveys the idea that I’m going to let you look inside the workings of government. I’ll let you know what we’re doing at all times. That’s great. It sadly doesn’t exist, but it is something to strive for.
Visible government, in my mind, takes it to the next level. To the point where we let you know what we are doing and WHY we are doing it that way. This means that we have to be responsive to those voices out there that are telling us the impacts of our policy.
If I tell you through my on-line presence that we’re working on an anti-dog walking policy in the greenbelt because someone complained about walking through an unsavoury present left behind by fido and you tell me that this will mean that the greenbelt is less safe because fewer people are walking there, that this will result in more dogs in public parks and dog owners surrounding 24 Sussex with angry miniature schnauzers, I will have to craft my policy to account for this. Now that is complex, but if I do it well, I may be in-line for an Order of Canada for saving the Prime Minister from the ravages of the day of the schnauzers (or maybe not).
So, yes public policy is complex and going on-line with it will make it significantly more complex, but that is not a good reason to avoid it.
@Peter,
Very interesting perspective. Thanks for giving us an insider view.
Hi Nora and thanks Bill for sticking up for gov’t Web sites. I’m an eComm. Strategist at the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade and I’d like to point out a few of our Web 2.0 elements that we’ve been running for a number of years:
- Zines and podcasts: http://www.canadexport.gc.ca/
- eDiscussions on foreign policy (running long before change.gov got into the game!) http://www.international.gc.ca/cip-pic/discussions/index.aspx
- Our videos with foreign policy experts (Hans Blix, Romeo Dallaire, Samantha Power just to name a few) http://www.international.gc.ca/cip-pic/video/index.aspx and video features on key Trade policies and how Int. trade can help in this time of recession: http://www.international.gc.ca/commerce/multimedia/index.aspx?lang=eng
We take a lot of pride in what we do and how we leverage new media tools to better serve Canadians. Lots more to the story, but wanted to get this out into the mix.