I spent last weekend in DC at Transparency Camp, which turned out to be one of the best cultural mashups I’ve attended in a long time. If we can get federal policy wonks and Silicon Valley tech geeks working together in the right ways, there’s good reason to hope that our government can become not just more transparent, but also more effective, more collaborative, more democratic.
A central theme was access to the operational data of government. What kinds of structured or narrative data exist, or could exist? When government doesn’t publish the stuff, how can activists extract it? When government does publish it, how can that be done most usefully? When the information is made available, one way or another, how can citizens, journalists, and government itself make use of it?
In my own work, I’ve been asking and trying to answer these questions. The event validated my efforts, and connected me to a flood of relevant people, ideas, tools, and techniques. That’s what you hope to get out of a conference, and it’s what this one delivered in spades.
But it also brought something else into sharp focus. To explain, I have to revisit 1994. In that seminal year, Microsoft famously “got” the Web. As BusinessWeek reported two years later:
The Web-izing of Microsoft begins in February, 1994, when Steven Sinofsky, Gates’s technical assistant, returned to his alma mater, Cornell University, on a recruiting trip. Snowed in at the Ithaca (N.Y.) airport, he headed back to the Cornell campus. That’s when he saw it: students dashing between classes, tapping into terminals, and getting their E-mail and course lists off the Net.
The Internet had spread like wildfire. It was no longer the network for the technically savvy — as it had been seven years earlier when Sinofsky was studying there — but a tool used by students and faculty to communicate with colleagues on campus and around the world. He dashed off a breathless E-mail message called “Cornell is WIRED!” to Gates and his technical staff.
Fifteen years on, the Net is as pervasive as air, as fundamental as gravity, as nourishing as sunlight — at least for the billion of us lucky enough to be online.
But while the architecture of the Net is firmly established, the architecture of communication and collaboration enabled by the Net is still very much up for grabs. Key principles, best practices, and effective patterns are still emerging.
For many years I have been a discoverer, early adopter, and explainer of those principles, practices, and patterns. And I’ve wondered: What would it would be like if you didn’t have to discover, adopt, and explain this stuff? What would it be like if you could just take it for granted, and just use it, in an environment where everybody else was using it too?
It would be like Transparency Camp 09.
This wasn’t the first event I’ve been to where Twitter was pervasive. But it was the first I’ve been to where tech geeks weren’t the only ones Twittering. The policy wonks were too. Everyone was tuned into the #tcamp09 channel. And, in fact, everyone still is. The conference “ended” on Sunday, it’s Thursday, but a half-dozen new items appeared on that channel since I started writing this essay. I particularly like this one:
Funny. Someone from #tcamp09 lives in my building. She says, “Didn’t we meet this weekend?” “No.” “You’re…cheeky something?” “OH…yes”
That’s a nice example of manufactured serendipity. I coined the phrase in another era. Back then, the new phenomenon called blogging was the realm in which we were discovering, adopting, and explaining the crucial principles, patterns, and practices. Now the action has moved to Twitter. But they’re the same principles, patterns, and practices:
- The principle of conserving keystrokes
- The pattern of publishing and subscribing
- The practice of narrating your work
In 1994 Steve Sinofsky saw the arrival of the Net, and sent email to tell Microsoft about it. In 2009 I see the emergence of a transformative way of using the Net. I could try sending email to tell Microsoft about it, and that would still be the preferred method. But email is no longer the engine that will drive radical improvement. What’s more, it often subverts the right principles, patterns, and practices.
So how does Microsoft, or any large enterprise — e.g., the government — embrace a new architecture of communication and collaboration? Slowly at first, but inexorably, and with profound effects in the long run. I can’t alter the timetable. But this is an interesting moment, and I simply want to observe, mark, and note it.
Jon, thanks again for sharing your thoughts. Serendipity, like inspiration, is a key word today. How could gov include serendipity in its innovation policy? that is what I’m working on. Also, I organise this workshop next week which we’ll livestream, in case you’re interested. best, david
http://www.epractice.eu/workshop/40
I had been reading during and just after the election that a group of like minded transparent government types were part of or going to be part of the Obama government. This sounded a lot like your crime data experiments and the whole idea of open analysis of government statistics. I’m so glad this group convened in D.C. and you got to partake in it. Keep up the momentum, no doubt some big things may come out of this.
> http://www.epractice.eu/workshop/40
Have you decided on a tag for the event? Won’t have much time for the live stream, but would happily pre-subscribe to the tag so I can be at least peripherally aware by scanning tweets and blogs.
Thanks for the interest. eups20 is tag, twitter and hashtag. Audio/video streaming and donwloadable on futurgovconsultancy.com
look forward to further exchanges and keep listening to you great interviews with innovators.
> eups20 is tag, twitter and hashtag
OK. Fave new trick: Here is combined feed for eups20:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=d4529aab6d88a333bab8e438c4e7ca48&_render=rss&tag=eups20
Flickr + Technorati + WordPress + Delicious + Twitter
all i can say is a heartfelt thanks. i’ll spread the feed.
> i’ll spread the feed.
BTW you or anyone can make a new instance of this aggregator by just rewriting tag=eups20 to tag=YOURTAG at the end of that feed URL.
The one thing I haven’t figured out: How to make YOURTAG show up in the feed’s title. Because now, if you monitor several of these, they all have the same title in the feedreader, e.g.:
Tagosphere
vs
Tagosphere (eups20)
I deal with this by editing the title locally, but would be nice to have the Pipes service write it into the feed so that would not be necessary.
used your pipe, changed it in gov20 and added to our pageflakes http://www.pageflakes.com/eups20/. In this way, I add the US debate on government2.0 as peripheral contribution to our workshop. it works well I think
“manufactured serendipity” and Radio – wow, yea. that brings back some memories.
Jon,
Thanks for sharing your tag aggregator!
Is there instrumentation to track it’s use?
Happy St. Patrick’s day!
It’s not mine, I got it from the comments here:
http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/10/10/combining-tagspaces/
Dunno if Pipes provides tracking, don’t think so but you could of course interpolate your own auditing filter if you needed to.
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