Gov2 Prelude- 3 Cool Gov Technologies

Next week, the Gov2 Summit begins here in Washington, DC. As such, I thought I’d throw out three technologies I wish government was using today. The list isn’t comprehensive— there’s a lot of great technology out there I wish the government was using. But these three all can help government reduce costs, provide better services, and break down the barriers between government and citizens…

Manage Pixels, not Monitors

My How to Focus article got a lot of people thinking about attention fitness and how they could use interval training to increase their attention spans. One thing I mentioned was quite controversial— that I got rid of a second monitor. A lot of people disagreed — People love their multiple monitors, and we’ve been told over and over again that multiple monitors “boosts productivity.”

Let’s shine some light here on the multi-monitor setup. Just where do these productivity claims come from?

Making Petitions not a Sham

In my last post, I talked about why online petitions are a sham, and I singled out the Progressive Change Campaign Committee’s “Don’t Be Evil” petition as one that most recently came to mind as, well, “shammy.”

In it I also recommended ways where you — the citizen — could take your political action and belief formulation to a more honest and probably mentally healthier place. Boiled down, my complaints with online petitions is that they’re usually inauthentic (mostly an excuse to get your email address not to actually affect change) and unreliable (they often don’t get delivered, and when they do are not read.)

What I didn’t do is recommend to the online organizers ways they could make their petitions more honest and ethical. My suggestions hold true for the PCCC petition that I singled out in the last post, but you can also find many similar petitions that fall into this trap. Just Google “Stand with Obama”, and you’ll find a bunch of them.

So here are three things that every petition ought to have that the PCCC petition didn’t have, and that none of the “Stand with Obama” petitions have…

Online Petitions are a Sham

The truth is, online petitions to Congress and others are pretty much a sham. Most of the time, the organizers don’t follow up on the petition, some of the time the vendor has some kind of bug and they don’t end up being delivered. If and when they do go end up getting delivered, members don’t read them. There’s no possible way they could — according to the Congressional Management Foundation, the House of Representatives got 99,053,399 messages via the Internet in 2004. That’s 227,708.9 messages per member of Congress. If a member took an average of 30 seconds to thoughtfully read each email they received in 2004, it’d take them 79 days solely to read their mail from the Internet. For a member of the Senate it’s worse: 288 straight 24-hour days worth of constituent communications at 30 seconds a piece. Most people don’t spend that many hours awake in a year.

In short — sometimes the mail doesn’t even get there and when it does, it rarely gets read. So why do organizations tell you to write your members in the first place?

How did Weather Data Get Opened?

Weather data is one of the datasets the current administration loves to talk about. Indeed, it’s proof that transparency goes beyond accountability. The data from the National Weather Service supports a huge industry. According to the American Meteorological Society, the total size of the private sector weather market is greater than 1.5 Billion Dollars. Keeping in mind that it isn’t its core function to support industry, a federal agency that has a billion dollar annual budget is supporting a more than billion dollar private industry through the release of its data is a great lesson in the power of open data.

If we’re going to use this as an example for why government should open data, we should take a look at how it got to be open in the first place…

Agribusiness and Infobusiness

The premise of Infovegan.com is that we have to start looking at information consumption like we look at food consumption. We’re suffering from new problems our species hasn’t dealt with before — problems of abundance rather than scarcity. Our brains, like our stomachs, are finite in throughput. As such, we need to start being selective about the information that we consume before we consume it. This is the beginning of what I’ll call, for now, the case for conscious information consumption.

The second part I want to talk about is the how we get our information and the business behind it. What’s interesting is how our information suppliers share so much in common both in terms of history and in terms of structure with our food suppliers. Here’s an overview of their similarities…

Don't Let the Municipal Crisis Go to Waste

There’s a crisis coming. Chicago is running a half-billion dollar deficit. New York City’s FY2011 deficit is nearly five billion dollars. Two months ago, Warren Buffett reduced his exposure to municipal bonds. According to the Pew Center on the States, there’s a trillion dollar gap between what states can pay for retirement benefits, and what those retirement benefits cost.

Municipal employee job losses are approaching 500,000 according to the National League of Cities and services are getting cut. Here’s the President of the National League of Cities and Mayor of Riverside, CA from last week:

“For local governments, unemployment and foreclosures resulting from the Great Recession translate into too few revenues making it increasingly difficult to fund or satisfactorily maintain many basic services—not only parks, libraries, and public works projects but also public safety, police and fire services.”

If cities aren’t already in a widespread crisis, they’re about to be. As Rahm likes to say, you never want a serious crisis to go to waste. So let’s prepare…

Open Data needs Open Source tools

The biggest problem many data-driven apps contests have is that it’s too hard to get started. A developer has to download some strange dataset off of a website like data.gov or the National Data Catalog, prune it, massage it, usually fix it, and then convert it to their database system of choice, and then they can start building their app. It reminds me of being a Linux user before APT existed. While fun, it was still a hassle to get all dependencies and compile everything from source.

It’s also too difficult to put data onto the web. You can put source code on a web site like Github or Bitbucket. With data, sure, I can ftp or scp something to a server — or, as I did with my obesity and partisanship data, just stick it in dropbox. But that doesn’t do half of what I get out of publishing my source to Github .

It’s too hard to put data on the web. It’s too hard to get data off the web. We need a Github for data…