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The Federally Financed Dilemma

2011-10-04T00:00:00Z

It’s likely that the Occupy Wall Street movement will turn to corporate influence in politics as its single demand. After all, lobbying and corporate money are really messing with the priorities of Washington. It’s remarkable, for instance, that we’re prioritizing BP’s rights to drill in the ocean over the average American lifespan going down as a result of obesity. One of these things is a vastly more important discussion than the other.

If money is speech, and speech (through the purchase of advertisements) is political power, let’s agree that the top 1% of the country have a lot more political power than the remaining 99%. Let’s further agree that what’s desirable (interestingly enough, by both the Occupation and the Tea Party) is a government that’s more accountable to “the 99%” and less accountable to “Wall Street.” Finally, let’s agree that the status-quo way to do that is through a constitutional amendment that federally finances elections. Here’s Dylan Ratigan’s proposal to do that:

“No person, corporation or business entity of any type, domestic or foreign, shall be allowed to contribute money, directly or indirectly, to any candidate for Federal office or to contribute money on behalf of or opposed to any type of campaign for Federal office. Notwithstanding any other provision of law, campaign contributions to candidates for Federal office shall not constitute speech of any kind as guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution or any amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Congress shall set forth a federal holiday for the purposes of voting for candidates for Federal office.”

So if our goal is to empower the 99% and disempower the 1%, does this amendment (or any of the other amendments proposing the restriction of campaign contributions and federally financed elections) actually accomplish this?

I suspect it does not. Corruption doesn’t work that way — when you turn the lights on in a roach infested apartment, it does not kill the roaches. It sends the roaches to the shadows to organize. Restricting campaign contributions does not “take the money out of politics” it takes the money out of campaign committees. The money will find a new place to go.

What I think would happen is, instead of you seeing advertisements saying “I’m Jefferson Smith, I’m running for Congress, and I approve this message because I support America’s energy independence,” you’d see advertisements saying “I’m T. Boone Pickens, and I support Jefferson Smith in his run for Congress because he supports America’s energy independence.” The influence will change from where it is now: Corporation –> Lobbyist –> Candidate –> Advertisements & GOTV program to 1%er –> Advertisements & GOTV program on behalf of candidate.

While candidates will likely have to spend less time on the phone talking to prospective donors, and likely spend more time currying favor with the super-wealthy who can finance the tremendous operations themselves, using the veil of the first amendment to do it.

So then your instinct is to say: Well, we have to ban that then, too!

Easy there tiger. That’s where we start running into really rough territory — not only with the first amendment, but also with the foundations of democracy. What’s the difference, for instance, between T-Boone Pickens running an advertisement and putting it on television for our metaphorical Mr. Smith, and you organizing your neighborhood to put up signs supporting Ms. Doe? You’re spending money on signs and time organizing them and getting them up, and Mr. Pickens is doing the same with an advertisement. By banning the right of T. Boone Pickens to do that, you’re starting a really slippery slope that could end with people not being able to act for their candidates.

So if a ban on campaign contributions, and federally financed elections won’t solve the problem, what will?

It’s a really tough question, and one that deserves some thoughtful considerations. One interesting way to do it would be to make it so that it requires less money to get elected.

Today, campaign managers sit behind desks with spreadsheets, using soft formulas based on polling data and sample focus groups from their pollsters and media consultants. They think to themselves: “if I run this advertisement in these areas at these times, I can push my 30% of my soft supporters into hard supporters” or some other outcome. Major campaign decisions and major campaign money gets spent on advertising because that’s what a candidate needs in order to reach the vast number of people that it takes in order to win an election. Political candidates spend most of their time dialing for dollars because they need money, and nothing costs those candidates more money than television advertisements.

In other words, candidates aren’t addicted to money — they’re addicted to advertisements. So one interesting way to solve this problem is not through the FEC but through the FCC — the federal agency that regulates television advertisements. If the FCC mandated, for instance, that every local broadcasting station had to set aside a small amount of inventory for political advertisements, and that inventory was extremely finite, and price regulated you might solve the problem.

It’d at least start solving the obesity problem. Without being able to use the television for their primary method of messaging, candidates would have to find new ways to get into your living room: by actually going to your house and knocking on your door rather than sending hyper-produced electrons your way. They’d likely spend more money on the Internet too, maybe even spend most of their money on internet advertising. I see no problem with this — the Internet is coupled with fact-checking mechanisms that empower skepticism in ways that television cannot. And a candidate that can truly leverage the Internet is one that directly connects with her or his constituents online — again, getting as close as they can to your living room.

Another way of solving the problem is by increasing the number of representatives and by taking politics out of drawing districts. Today, our districts are drawn to win political battles and entrench political interests — not allow for a representative to best hear from a district. When a district is drawn like this it isn’t for the convienence of the legislator to be able to talk to their constituents better — it’s so that legislator can more effectively retain power. I’d say, let’s turn the power of drawing districts over to computers entirely. Let’s have a debate over how an algorithm ought to better draw a district, and let the algorithm do its job. Instead of drawing districts every 10 years after a census, let’s debate the algorithm every 10 years and go from there.

Now, for those of you saying “oh, but this won’t pass constitutional muster” — one last thought: we began this argument with a constitutional amendment. My claim here isn’t that this stuff is constitutional, rather that if we’re going to pass a constitutional amendment for something, let’s have the amendment treat the actual problems rather than be solutions that may or may not make them any better.

No Mustache For Me

2011-10-04T00:00:00Z

Cancer is really awful. I hate it. The reason I came to Washington, DC in the first place was in part to fight cancer. So please, to those of you suffering from cancer or have family members that are fighting for their lives, I don’t want to take away from our need to find preventative measures and cures for the many cancers that kill so many people.

Part of what I talk about in my book is the need to look beyond the slick presentation and deep into the data that’s driving our society. So when “Movember” came across my social streams, I went to take a look. The Movember website is gorgeous, and I hope that whoever made it donated it — because it’s definitely the kind of design work that isn’t cheap. And it comes with its own iphone app? That’s neat.

But let’s look beyond the marketing. Where’s my money actually going?

In the United States every non-profit has to file an IRS Form 990 that reports how that charity spends its money and how it compensates its executives. While some non-profits make their 990s available online, GuideStar makes 990s available for most other large foundations and non-profits. So let’s take a look at the 990s.

In the case of Movember — it’s an independent organization called Movember Inc. They have their 990s online here. In 2010, Movember was able to raise nearly 7.5 Million dollars, costing them about 2 million dollars (about a half million for its employees, and 1.5 million for program expenses) to get. It’s CEO — a man named Adam Garone, compensates himself $78,958 for what seems to be basically a half-time job there, working 14 hours a week. Looking at the total compensation he gets in the organization’s supplemental materials, it looks like he receives $223,767 for full time compensation on the project. Which is a little high for this kind of organization’s size, but not entirely out of line.

In 2010, Movember gave the bulk of its money to two other non-profits: the Prostate Cancer Foundation, and the Lance Armstrong LiveStrong foundation. And here’s where I made my decision not to grow my moustache.

In 2009, the Prostate Cancer Foundation, according to its 990s brought in about 30 Million dollars, and paid its CEO Jonathan Simons, $850,188. By comparison, the highest compensated executive at the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation (an organization that brings in about 5 times the money) is paid $468,255 according to its 990. The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s (who I’ve run a marathon for) CEO makes 568,610 dollars a year and LLS brings in nearly 10x the amount of annual revenue than the Prostate Cancer Foundation.

The Lance Armstrong Foundations seems to have executive compensation of a more reasonable level. Their highest compensated employee makes $308,629.

Now whether or not that $850,188 compensation package causes you to not grow a mustache — that’s up to you. Executive compensation obviously isn’t the whole picture of the efficiency of a charity. But for me, its enough of a red flag that his compensation is so far out of line with his peers. I’d suggest that if you’re interested in the causes behind Movember, look deeply into the charities trying to prevent and cure prostate cancer, see how they’re spending their money, and give to the ones that give you the most bang for your buck.

Again I’ll stress: executive compensation isn’t the whole picture. But this is an example of how you can quickly use some data to evaluate what charities are worth your time according to your values. For me, it means no mustache. But I’ll give to the Lance Armstrong Foundation.

Engagement on the Three Social Networks

2011-07-22T00:00:00Z

Yesterday my Google Plus follower count eclipsed my Twitter follower count after just a few weeks of operation. I believed It couldn’t possibly be entirely real, so I asked the question on Google+: how many of you are real and why are you following me. I got minimal response, leading me to question whether Google+ was any good for social engagement. Perhaps my former affiliation with robophilic Sunlight Labs was drawing more bots to me than anyone else?

This morning I decided to run a test. At about half past 9, I stated on Twitter, Facebook and Google+: “Doing a bit of a responsiveness test. If you’re reading this and feel inclined, it or reply. Thanks!” ( was replaced for the various network verbs for Facebook and G+: Plus or Like). Every 10 minutes, I counted the number of Likes/Favs on Plus/Facebook as well as all the Twitter replies in an effort to measure the short and long term engagement of my followers on each network. For Facebook and Twitter, I took the combined number of Likes/Favs and replies and defined them as interactions. Because Twitter’s primary interaction with a tweet is a reply, I only asked for replies in Twitter, but also would have counted retweets and favs(there were none). I then calculated an engagement score for each network by dividing the total number of interactions by the total number of followers/friends.

While I’m still getting data in, I think the first few hours of a social media engagement are the important ones. This isn’t like email where it can take days for people to read, click or reply. With these three networks, the content tends to bury itself after a few hours — only keeping itself alive through regular participation. The majority of the lessons one can learn from this data are from the first 3 hours. If you’d like the data itself, you can grab the Google Spreadsheet here.

Before I dive into results, I’d first like to exclaim that the study is not scientific! There’s tons of problems with looking at this data and making any critical decisions based on it. First, my followers are likely a self-selecting group because of the tech-heavy crowds I hang out with. Second, I launched this test in the morning on the East Coast, when the West Coast was comfortably in bed. Third, I’m not a statistician or pollster and this little analysis probably doesn’t sit well with an academic in either profession. Fourth, I’ve got a bit of Google Bias. I just had lunch at Google’s DC office this afternoon, and while I have friends that work for all three companies, I probably have more social ties to Google than the other two organizations. I’m no fanboy, but as a guy whose career has been about transparency, there’s one thing I’ve learned: you never know where you pick up bias, and rarely do you even know you’ve got it.

As of writing, I have 1,239 friends on Facebook, 4,840 followers on Twitter, and I’m in the circles of 5,194 people on Google+. While initially counterintuitive, Facebook won out handily with the total number of interactions despite having by far the least number of connections. There were 77 interactions in 200 minutes for Facebook, 69 for Google+ and 39 for Twitter. In terms of engagement, not surprisingly, my Facebook numbers were by far and away the highest. Throughout the 200 minutes, I got a 6.21% response rate whereas G+ and Twitter were 1.33% and 0.81% respectively.

There are a lot of very obvious reasons behind these numbers. My Facebook network is mostly comprised of only people that I’ve met (or believe to have met, or claim to have met). Because of Facebook’s symmetric approval model, there’s a smaller signal to noise ratio in the network. Because of Facebook’s algorithms of personalization, I’m carted away to the people in the network who interact with me most automatically — this kind of stuff has significant impact on overall engagement.

The second thing I learned was how fast Google+ and Twitter are at getting responses compared to Facebook. In the first 10 minutes, followers had 30 interactions with the content on Google+ and 13 on Twitter compared to a measly 4 on Facebook— that broke down to a 0.58% response rate for Google+, a 0.27% response rate for Twitter, and a 0.32% response rate for Facebook. Nearly half of all of Google+’s and Twitter’s interactions in the first two hours came in the first 10 minutes. Facebook on the other hand, seemed to take a bit of time to gain traction with the post. Facebook, on the other hand, took about 50 minutes to surpass Google+ in the total number of interactions and about an hour to reach its halfway point. Facebook’s growth was nearly linear for the first hour, gaining 4 then 8, 9, 8, and 8 interactions in the first five 10 minute segments.

Google+ and Twitter content tend to die a lot faster than Facebook content, too. In just 70 minutes, the question all but flatlined on Twitter and 90 minutes on Google+. At the same time, 40% of Facebook interactions came through in the last 90 minutes of the test (and they’re still coming in at about 2-3 per hour), compared to G+’s 10% and Twitter’s 5%. Again, this likely has to do with the amount of time the Facebook development team has spent fine-tuning its feed to promote the right content to the right people based upon its popularity. As the content got more responses in my Facebook network, it became available to more people. Google+’s rules for this seem far less aggressive, and Twitter’s are completely non-existent, instead relying on the retweet to broadcast content through a network.

Twitter is almost an unfair comparison though because it doesn’t have the socially negligible concepts of a +1 attached to it. My Twitter question didn’t ask users to favorite the content or retweet it, but rather to reply — something that has a more significant social cost. If we’re to take the plus ones and likes out of the equation and count replies on each network only, you end up with a different scenario. Overall, Facebook is still the winner, but Twitter and G+’s ranks flip. Facebook’s at 2.02%, whereas Twitter is at 0.81% and Google+ is at 0.54%.

It’s clear that each network has its own interesting properties. The moral of the story I learned is, if I’m being held hostage and need the police to come immediately, Google+ and Twitter are probably the best mechanisms for me to light up the bat signal and get help. The speed at which these networks operate is remarkable. Facebook, however, is number one with number of interactions and total engagement. I wonder how that’ll change as Google conducts its field test. It’s probably too early to make specific engagement decisions around Google+ right now because they’re iterating on it so frequently.

Anyhow, if you’re able to learn anything that I haven’t from the test, please feel free to drop a line in the comments!

An Open Letter to CIO Vivek Kundra

2011-07-19T00:00:00Z

Dear Vivek,

I’ve worked with you from the outside for several years now — from when you were doing Apps for Democracy here in the District, to launching Apps for America and Design for America in tandem with the great resource you built called Data.gov. At Sunlight, I was thrilled to watch you launch data.gov, the IT Dashboard, and make needed improvements to USASpending.gov. From my view outside and yours inside, I think we’ve both come to the same conclusion — our procurement system is broken and it’s actually killing America.

It’s why I wasn’t too sad, and didn’t step up to “Save the Data” alongside my Sunlight compatriots. It’s not because those programs aren’t valuable, but rather because they shouldn’t cost so much. While not part of the E-Government fund, just take a look at Recovery.gov’s price tag and you have to cringe: outside of government, these things don’t cost that much and they tend to work much better. When we at Sunlight tried to bid on Recovery.gov we were quickly told not to bother — that we, a community of at the time about 800 developers, weren’t even eligible to apply. If we were to have a chance at even working on the project, we’d have to pay the tolls to the Alliant Governmentwide contracting cartel which consists of just a handful of giant corporations. Federal IT needs to be put into overdrive to build a more open, honest, and accessible government but that’s not going to happen with the status quo.

This isn’t right, it’s not fair, and more than that: it’s breaking us. It’s widening the gap between the technology that government has to operate, and what people expect. Given time it will cause people’s faith in government to collapse more than it already has. Today that gap represents itself with the eyes rolling when people have to deal with government data or government websites. But as that gap grows, without technology that the people outside the government take for granted, government itself will become the equivalent of an infant in a world of mature adults. It will be the governmental consequence of Moore’s Law — that gap is growing exponentially while Government’s access to it and to the people that understand it is often shrinking. The status quo isn’t just making things difficult, it’s asphyxiating government’s ability to serve.

You and I both know that this isn’t just a “big problem,” but often it’s the problem. It’s the problem that makes the Air Conditioners in Afghanistan cost more than NASA’s entire budget, and it’s the problem that makes it so WhiteHouse.gov cost about 10x what BarackObama.com did. It’s the reason healthcare costs more than it should, and it’s the reason CityTime costs close to the value of the entire AppStore economy. It’s a giant, secret tax that the taxpayers are handing over to a select few contractors, and it’s a problem that needs to get solved.

As you’re packing your desk, settling your affairs, and preparing to move to Cambridge I wanted to take a moment to thank you for your service to us. You’ve done a great job and probably more than we could have ever asked. From where I sit, you and your team have done more to open up government than anyone else could have expected. You don’t just deserve a pat on the back, you deserve a medal. So Thank You.

As you think about what to do next, please consider starting an organization to fix the problem of procurement. I think that from the outside you’ll find allies on both sides of the aisle who want to help you solve this problem. You’ll find allies all across America too who, when they hear about the problems of procurement, want these problems solved. As long as you stay out of Reston, you should find few people interested in maintaining the status quo of the FAR. Please, when you say that there’s an IT Cartel, also say that when you’re outside, you’ll be willing to step up and lead the charge from the outside to help change it. It’s only someone that has the experience that you’ve acquired in pushing these changes from the inside that can lead the charge from the outside to do it.

If you do choose to do this, then sign me up for whatever you need me to do to help out.

Thanks for all that you’ve done, and I hope you continue the fight.

Clay

Rebooting Public Notices

2011-05-10T00:00:00Z

Public notices and inquiries should be moved from the newspapers and the bowels of the web online to where we are: networks like Facebook and Twitter.

In 1933 Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal created a bunch of new federal agencies as part of his New Deal platform to bring the United States out of the Great Depression. These agencies got pretty powerful and — because they had many powers of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government — Congress sought to contain the threat and created the Administrative Procedure Act which outlines how agencies can propose and make rules, how those rules get reviewed, and most importantly, specifies how agencies should notify and solicit input from the public. It’s the law that mandates that congress publish regulations in the Federal Register, and how the FCC ought to behave when soliciting input for the AT&T T-Mobile merger.

Fast forward to today. We have magical things like Television and the Internet that engage the public and have empowered media to communicate with people. Yet the law that dictates how the federal government communicates with people hasn’t changed. Douglas Adams wrote a book called “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” where the protagonist, Arthur Dent, loses his apartment because he failed to read a public notice on display in the cellar of the government’s display department. Our public notification and inquiry system is based upon the postal service and print newspapers when our public has moved on from this technology.

But the problem isn’t just a nuisance or a failure to communicate with the public about what’s going on. The real problem is regulatory capture, the fancy-shmancy phrase academics use when they mean “special interests took over an agency”. See — if the public has effectively moved on from print publications and the postal service, then the only people that give input are paid professionals — lobbyists and special interest groups. If those are the majority of public inputs that an agency gets, that begins to limit the scope of the agency’s ability to understand public will.

Take, for example, the aforementioned AT&T and T-Mobile merger. Here are all the comments that the FCC has received regarding the merger. As of writing, there are 4,747 comments. Comments have been opened since the 14th of April. It’s the most they’ve gotten in a very long time, by an order of magnitude, and yet still, it’s only 4,747 comments. There are 303 million wireless subscriber connections in the United States, representing 96% of the population, and only 4,747 people have bothered to comment. Something tells me more than .0015% of American wireless subscribers have an opinion on the matter. If the FCC only hears from .0015% of consumers, it could be regarded as, well, statistically insignificant.

At the local level it’s even more strange — local laws require public notices to be placed in the local papers. It equates to large subsidies going from government to the press. It’s an awkward loop where money flows from government coffers to the papers who endorse candidates. It isn’t chump change either. According to one study from the USC Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership & Policy, the State of Pennsylvania may spend upwards of $25 Million a year on public notice advertising.

There’s been a big push to move this stuff to the web, but I’m not sure that’s good enough. Moving a notice from a publication with a circulation of 100,000 to a website with 500 visits a day is a reduction of notifications. In 2009, the Obama administration sought to move its asset forfeiture public notices onto forfeiture.gov to save the government about 6 million dollars over five years. The problem is, nobody knows about or goes to forfeiture.gov. This blog, for instance, is infrequently updated and has a very niche audience, but it still beats forfeiture.gov in terms of overall public exposure. The net result of simply moving public notices online is often less public notification. And when there are notifications, they are PDF files that look, amazingly, like this.

Putting the public notice online is the digital equivalent of printing the public notice and taping it to the front door of the federal agency. If nobody’s walking by, nobody’s going to see it. The spirit of the APA is such that public notices ought to notify the public. This worked with newspapers because newspapers had circulations. It doesn’t work with federal websites because more often than not, they don’t. The right answer is to move the public notice and the public inquiry online, but it’s not to put it in a virtual basement. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, there are about 109 Million newspaper subscriptions in the United States. Facebook claims to have more than 500 million active users, about 30% of which are from within the United States. Doing the math, Facebook has about 150 Million users — 37% more than all United States newspapers combined. Newspaper circulations are headed down, while Facebook subscriptions are headed up — up past where a majority of the United States population has Facebook accounts. Twitter and others will likely soon follow.

Right now, the FDA is looking for comments on nutrition labeling of menus in restaurants. You can comment on this regulation and view comments by others. What if, instead of just using the FDA’s Facebook Page as a vessel for press releases, they also asked the question: “Should restaurants be required to label their menus with nutritional information?” They’d be able to not only see comments, but see who these comments were coming from. People who were registered nutritionists and physicians may have a different point of view than, say, owners of Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises and it may be important data to the regulators who are making the rules to see this.

These kinds of public interactions are more in the spirit of the APA than the old methods because they come bundled with identity and methods for practical, cheap, and direct communication. With a social network, you can see identity, networks of influence, occupation, and expertise. If, in an inquiry about regulating a company, an agency is able to filter through all the employees' comments about the regulation, and all the competition’s employees— that may yield to smarter regulation. If they need to follow up with people, well, that’s built into the network inherently.

It ought to be the case that we’re pushing the government to publicly deliberate online in the places we’re at rather than to continue the trend of public notice obfuscation via the web. It means more access, more input, and the ability to build better tools to handle the volume — tools like ThinkUp — to find better solutions to the public. It also means more ethical government with less opportunity for regulatory capture and more opportunity to hold serious dialog between the various interests an agency has to balance.

The New Outsiders

2011-05-09T00:00:00Z

There has always been a lot of politically charged talk about “our government” and “taking our country back.” In the 03-04 campaign, Howard Dean’s catch phrase was “you have the power to take your country back”. From 2004-2008, Campaign for America’s Future ran a conference called “Take Back America” that organized progressives during the Bush administration. Since 2009, the Take Back America metaphor crossed partisan lines and went to conservatives. In 2010, Sarah Palin went on a Take Back America tour and Dick Morris published the book “2010: Take Back America: A Battle Plan.”

It’s an age old political trick. Media consultants make you feel a sense of disconnection from your government, get you really pissed off about it, and convince you that it is your patriotic duty to elect their candidate so that you can restore America to the greatness it once was. The reality is that the past is just about as real as the future — it’s easy to embellish and believe times were great — and it’s really easy for a television ad to fill you full of images that prove this to be the case. Maybe it was, maybe it was’t, the results seem to be the same every time: you vote for the person, and they don’t live up to what they told you they were going to do. The problem is a conflation of skills. It takes a different skill to get elected than it does to govern. We elect people who are very good at getting elected but rarely have any experience at governing. It happens Every. Single. Time.

The truth is: there is no taking our country back. Doc Brown’s flux capacitor isn’t going to save us by taking us back to a better time in America where our government bodies were somehow more representative. The more realistic way to solve our problems is to move our country forward — to try and solve the problems that we’re facing at the governmental, representative, and local level. Expecting an insurgent DC outsider to come to DC and change it is about as effective as appointing her or him to lead the Washington Nationals and expecting them to go and win the World Series.

I’ve written a lot about why developers are important — and I’ve also written about the crisis that a lot of our municipal bodies are in. These two things are only quasi-related. The thing is — cities are running out of money, and government bodies tend to spend a lot — too much money — on IT related products. Government bodies aren’t just running up huge debts because they’re spending too much money on IT related products, they’re also running up huge debts because providing services to people is expensive. At the inception of our republic, there were no venture capitalists or political advisors asking James Madison how “scalable” the bill of rights were.

It’s time for a new kind of government outsider. Developers who can shake themselves out of the shackles of Washington’s media culture can change how government works far more than the brightest lawyer or the most charismatic politician. Because the internet and mobile devices allow affordable connectivity at a local and federal level, and because developers control the architecture, development and construction of that medium, we’re left with an opportunity to develop new services. All the sudden, a lot of potential energy has been placed in the hands of the tinkering developer.

Let the politicians be politicians and run Washington. Developers don’t need to take back America when they can invent better future. Contests like the Knight Foundation and the FCC’s Apps for Communities and organizations like Code for America provide an opportunity and incentive to turn this potential energy into kinetic energy. Tim O'Reilly puts it best when he talks about competition on the web. Used in the context of startups, Tim means: to compete with Google, don’t build another search engine. Instead, think of the larger problem that Google is trying to solve, and solve that. Developers have a way to do that with government that very few others do: they can use their skills to effect government change by building software that disrupts the standard way of providing effective services to citizens.

To date, contests like Apps for Communities have been held in large tech-dense cities like San Francisco, New York, and Washington, DC. Only cities with decent budgets can afford to bring an organization like Code for America in to help out. What makes Apps for Communities special is that it’s targeted towards rural communities and communities in need. These communities have a higher chance of actually adopting the technology that’s built as their own. The little guys are always the ones who move the ball forward because they have the least amount of bureaucracy built up to mitigate risk. Whether it be Dean’s insurgent and out of nowhere 2004 Presidential Campaign, New Haven, Connecticut’s SeeClickFix, or Manor Texas' QR Code Experiment, America’s small towns and rural communities are the places where innovation isn’t just welcomed, it’s required.

Thoughts on the Hacking Education Contest

2011-04-13T00:00:00Z

A few months ago, DonorsChoose.org came to me and asked if I’d like to help design their apps contest. I didn’t hesitate— DonorsChoose.org is one of my favorite non-profits, and I’ve been itching to see if the same shenanegans I pulled off with Apps for America and Design for America would work somewhere other than Sunlight Labs. We launched the DonorsChoose.org contest yesterday, and I’m very excited about it.

At Sunlight, we played a lot with payment structure but found that dollar amounts for prizes don’t really affect app submission or user acquisition that much. Apps for America 1 had a 25,000 prize (more than half of it going to the grand prize winner), Apps for America 2 had a differently distributed $25,000 (there were more low end prizes). Design for America was a different beast altogether, with lots of $5,000 prizes across many categories. All three contests got between 45-55 entries.

If you look out of Washington, DC you’ll see that’s where the most successful contests are happening. Check out the number of contestants for the Rails Rumble as an example. While app quality isn’t something I can judge in the time I have to write this blog post, I’d say they’re good, and the contest definitely received more than 45 submissions. Same thing happened with the Node.js competition, Node Knockout. Neither contest had a giant dollar amount for a prize purse— the prizes for both the Rails Rumble and the Node Knockout involved no cash prize— they were all in-kind contributions from sponsors, including original items like these boxing gloves.

Now, part of difference in quality and quantity is because of the breadth of the concept. Obviously with something like Apps for America, the contest has to be about a certain dataset, keeping the number of “lunch finder” apps to a minimum, but also limiting the creative constraints of the project. But I think there’s something to this non-cash prize thing as well.

I went and spoke with Eric Gundersen of DevelopmentSeed about it. Eric’s firm has won some apps contests before, but never competed in an Apps for America event. When I asked him about the upcoming DonorsChoose contest, he provided some clarity. When you put a cash prize on the table, the owner of a firm or a consultant is immediately going to do the math, and probably not spend $50,000 worth of staff time to win a $15,000 prize from a non-profit. There’s frankly more glory involved in winning something like the Node Knockout because at least then you get to tell your clients that you won it and it might help seal a deal. For the independents, it may get you that job you always wanted.

Another thing that makes contests like Rails Rumble and Node Knockout successful is that they target communities of developers around their natural communities. While the tech manager in me strongly wants the best product and the best language to develop that product, the fact is that it’s relatively unlikely that a bunch of PHP developers are going to care if Chad Fowler is a judge. But Ruby developers will care a lot. These contests succeed because they target native, close knit communities of people who are passionate about their language.

All of this thinking went into the design of the DonorsChoose.org contest. That’s why it’s structured loosely by language— that’s how developers transparently affiliate. And that’s why the grand prize has a lot of glory to it. Someone like Eric may compete in the DonorsChoose.org contest because having a picture of his team on a wall with a trophy and Steven Colbert will boost morale and close more deals than a $15,000 prize ever will.

In the end though, it’s neither about the quantity or quality of apps submitted. It’s always about building a community. That’s the part I think we get so well. The grand prize isn’t the end, it’s the beginning. For me and for DonorsChoose.org this is about getting developers and designers to take a serious look at education data. It’s not about who can make the best app — it’s about building a new community that can make education great. DonorsChoose.org has taken a noble first-step in opening its data up for anyone to see. Hopefully more will follow so we can all have a better idea of what’s effective, what’s not effective and what’s happening inside our schools.

I hope you’ll join us.

The Costs of FOIA

2011-03-23T00:00:00Z

FOIA is one of those transparency things that sounds like a good idea, but in the end turns out to be kind of stupid. In 1974 when the law was put together, the House Committee on Government Operations said that FOIA’s cost should not exceed 100,000/yr — that’s about $450,000 in today’s dollars. Talk about gross underestimation. According to the new FOIA.gov from the Justice Department — the costs of FOIA are strongly outpacing both the growth of government and inflation.

In 2010, we spent nearly a half billion taxpayer dollars* spent on processing FOIA requests. Since 2008, we’ve added an extra 50 million dollars to our FOIA costs. For scope sake, that’s the roughly the same number we’re spending on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. It’s nearly double the FTC’s 2010 Budget Request, and way more than what we spend on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. FOIA costs you and I more than six times the budget of the Federal Election Commission — the agency that’s supposed to keep our elections on the up and up.

More costly though is the information that government has not put out to the public because FOIA exists. Over the years, that’s cost us millions of dollars and thousands of jobs.

A company like BrightScope built itself, not on top of freely available information on data.gov, but rather on top of more than 50 Freedom of Information Act requests at considerable costs. Had FOIA not existed and rather a more cogent transparency policy been in place in 1974, maybe our rising FOIA costs would have been curtailed and maybe BrightScope could have spent more of their precious seed money on creating jobs rather than paying FOIA fees.

Why then do budget sensitive Republicans in Congress propose to cut the Electronic Government Fund which powers things like Data.gov and USASpending.gov at the same time that Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS launches a FOIA initiative called Wikicountability bolstering FOIA requests. Wouldn’t the more fiscally responsible thing be to push all branches of government to create more policies like the White House Visitors Logs. If you’re looking to save taxpayer dollars, try mandating a Public Online Information Act, not cutting the services that are creating additional transparency. Government open data not only helps save taxpayers money, it helps create more jobs — jobs for small businesses like the 30 or so at BrightScope, or the thousands that are fueled by weather data. The Republicans, on this issue, seem to want to create additional taxpayer cost and hurt small businesses built on this data.

Of course, we know why. Washington, DC isn’t about reality, it’s about perception. Rove’s project isn’t about creating a more accountable government, and the Republican plan to cut these services aren’t about cutting budgets. It’s about scoring political wins for electoral wins. If we want to get serious about transparency, we need to start thinking about making FOIA sustainable for the taxpayer. We need to start thinking about how to create policies that reduce our costs and deliver a more honest and accountable government for Americans.

* This is subject to correction. You can run the reports by going to the FOIA.gov Data page, clicking on Advanced Report, getting a report on FOIA costs and selecting all agencies, downloading the CSV and summing the total costs column. Though it seems like the Total at the bottom of the page is different from the sum of the column. I've inquired about this with the Department of Justice. The difference is significant: $158,285,106 on the web vs. $414,049,518 by totaling columns. Still way more than what we spend on the FEC, and far more than the 34 Million we spend on services like Data.gov, USASpending.gov and the other E-Government stuff.

Change America with Dev Skills

2011-03-14T00:00:00Z

I’ve talked about why developers are important before, and I wanted to mention two specific places I’d like to see developers really taking a serious look at.

The first is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is building a great tech dream team. Because a lot of former Sunlight Foundation folks have made their way over there, I’ve met with a lot of the team, and they’re absolutely incredible folks. I’ve worked with a lot of their staff in previous occupations, and it’s full of people I’ve always wanted to work with. They’re setting up a labs type environment where data can be at the heart of making decisions inside of a government agency. And they have an agency head who gets it. This is the kind of team you’ll want to tell your grandkids you were on. If you’re interested, drop a note in the comments. I will make sure the CFPB team knows it.

The second is Code for America. Code for America’s mission is to great developer and design talent into municipal governments. The training, contacts and support that you, as a developer, get out of this program is incredible. They’re now accepting applications for their 2012 Fellowships. If you want to get exposure to great people, leave with great contacts and start something new, being a Code for America fellow is about as good as it gets.

So there’s a public service announcement for you. If you’re a developer consider going into public service or just want to spend a year giving it a shot, these are great opportunities.

Better Headphones

2011-03-09T00:00:00Z

When the first census drew to a close in 1790 here in the United States, there were a little under four million people in the United States. For comparison’s sake, that’s roughly the same population as the urban Washington, DC metro area today. When that first census wrapped up, we had 65 members of Congress. Divide the numbers, and you’ll see that each member of the House had just about sixty thousand people to represent*.

Tradition was, new census would come out, the population would grow, and new representatives would get added to the House of Representatives. Concerned that congress was getting too unruly (and concerned that it was getting more difficult to make quorum), the congress of 1911 passed Apportionment Act of 1911 (Public Law 62-5) that fixed the number of members of Congress to 435. The ratio of members of Congress to Citizens was 1:212,000. And ever since then, it’s been growing. We’re now at about 1:717,000.

Looking internationally, the United States has the greatest number of constituents per representative amongst the G8 countries. We’re more than twice the ratio of our nearest neighbor, Russia (with a ratio of 1:315,000), and more than Russia, Japan, and Germany combined. Looking at the top ten most populous nations, the US is second only to India, with no other countries coming close to our level of representative scale.

As a result, American citizens no longer feel like their Congress is representing them. And for good reason— you try representing the interests of 717,000 people — one fifth of the population of the United States when the framers wrote our Constitution. While innovations in technology and transportation have made it easier for Representatives to represent more people, our representative democracy is having a significant scalability problem.

Adding to the complexity, the Internet has given people the ability to send their member of Congress a message (or all members of Congress) at a negligible cost. As if representing 717,000 people wasn’t hard enough, those people no longer need to write a letter and mail it— they can call or email cost-free. Not only that, we’ve built entire industries tools that effectively communicate with Congress. Finally, we keep inventing new mediums to communicate with members of Congress. Just four years ago, it was novel to have Ted Kennedy posting on Daily Kos— now we have members hustling their talking points on Twitter, managing their Facebook pages, and playing with their iPads on the floor of the House. Once heralded as a social media maven, John Culberson now has just about had it and staffers on the hill are calling social media a “pain in the a—”.

Plug your headphones in, turn them up to 11, and your instinct isn’t to turn the volume down, it’s to take them off. We’ve been building louder and louder megaphones without building better headphones. MoveOn.org, Blue State Digital, and Salsa Labs have spent hundreds (if not thousands) of hours working on their tools that allow people to send messages to Congress, but if walk into a hill office you will see ancient enterprise tools being used to process them.

It’s time to start building better headphones. That’s why I’m joining the ExpertLabs team as their Director of Engagement. We’re building ThinkUp. It’s a big part of the solution — to help governments listen better. It’s platform independent— not dependent on just Twitter or the Web or Facebook— but extensible so that it can help our government agencies better scale their ability to listen. It’s my job to help people inside governments get it, use it, and make sense of it. As great new platforms for communicating with government get developed and adopted, they can be incorporated into ThinkUp. That’s the right model.

I’m joining an all-star team with a great concept and a great mission. I look at it as a natural extension of what I’m trying to do at Big Window Labs— injecting Washington with new ideas and technologies that solve problems inside of Government.

* It should be noted that blacks only counted for 3/5ths of a "person" in censuses until the 14th amendment. I have no ideas about how to accurately fold these numbers into historical population estimates. No matter how many times I hear it, still causes me to blink and shake my head.