Re: Against Transparency

Larry Lessig, in his wonderful New Republic essay Against Transparency begins with

We are not thinking critically enough about where and when transparency works, and where and when it may lead to confusion, or to worse. And I fear that the inevitable success of this movement–if pursued alone, without any sensitivity to the full complexity of the idea of perfect openness–will inspire not reform, but disgust. The “naked transparency movement,” as I will call it here, is not going to inspire change. It will simply push any faith in our political system over the cliff.

Please do read the whole essay before weighing in.

Jon Udell has a good posting collecting some of the links Contextual clothing for naked transparency.

Open innovation tools

Manor, TX uses an online tool to accept ideas for enhancing or improving municipal services. There is a simple and clear process that all ideas undergo on their way to either acceptance or not. The online tools is Spigit.

Better Policy Making

The UK Government Cabinet Office, in their Better Policy Making report, and outlined 9 features of modern policy making:

1. Forward Looking - Defining policy outcomes and taking a long term view
   
2. Outward Looking - Taking account of the national, European and international situation; learning from the experience of other countries; recognising regional variations.
   
3. Innovative, Flexible & Creative - Questioning established ways of dealing with things, encouraging new and creative ideas, identifying and managing risk.
   
4. Evidence Based - Basing policy decisions and advice upon the best available evidence from a wide range of sources; ensuring that evidence is available in an accessible and meaningful form.
   
5. Inclusive - Consulting those responsible for implementation and those affected by the policy; carrying out an impact assessment
   
6. Joined Up - Looking beyond institutional boundaries; setting cross-cutting objectives; defining and communicating joint working arrangements across departments; ensuring that implementation is part of the policy process.
   
7. Review - Systematic evaluation of the effectiveness of policy is built into the policy making process.
   
8. Evaluation - Existing/established policy is constantly reviewed to ensure it is really dealing with problems it was designed to solve.
   
9. Learns Lessons - Learning from experience of what works and what does not.
   

We should expect no less from South Kingstown's councilors. Unfortunately, we have no evidence that this is in fact the case.

Live and On‐Demand Video Streaming RFP

Here is the RFP for South Kingstown's MEETING MANAGEMENT SYSTEM: Live and On‐Demand Video Streaming, Agenda Management, and Minutes Automation. I found out about it only by listening to the broadcast of Monday's Town Council meeting yesterday (Wednesday) on the public access channel. The document was not on the Town's web site: That is, separate searches for "streaming", "video", and "rfp" did not result in any relevant page or document.

Re: Data.gov.uk Newspaper

It’s a prototype of a service for people moving into a new area. In our exercise we imagined you might receive it after paying your council tax for the first time. ¶ It gathers information about your area, such as local services, environmental information and crime statistics.

More at Data.gov.uk Newspaper

The Three Laws of Open Government Data

The Three Laws of Open Government Data:

1) If it can’t be spidered or indexed, it doesn’t exist
2) If it isn’t available in open and machine readable format, it can’t engage
3) If a legal framework doesn’t allow it to be repurposed, it doesn’t empower

More at the three laws of open government data.

The City of Nanaimo has been pushing the envelope on open data and open government for a number of years now.

"At first blush the site seems normal. There is the standard video of the council meeting (queue cheesy local cable access public service announcement), but the meeting minutes underneath are actually broken down by the second and by clicking on them you can jump straight to that moment in the meeting. [...]

"Given Nanaimo’s modest size (it has 78,692 citizens) suggests they have a modest IT budget. So I asked Chris McLuckie, a City of Nanaimo public servant who worked on the project. He informed me that the system was built in-house by him and another city staff member; it uses off-the-shelf hardware and software and so cost under $2,000 and it took two weeks to code up."

How to Engage Citizens on a Municipal Website...

Update: It looks like the City of Nanaimo made the wise choice to use a comprehensive content management solition with elementCMS rather than waste their citizens' money building in house a feature-poor equivalent.

City of Vancouver's open data and information motion

“On May 21st, 2009 the City of Vancouver passed a motion that directed City Staff to begin sharing the data and information the city collects, to share this data in open standards and to place open source on an equal footing with proprietary software.

“Below is a simple version of the motion - one that could serve as a template for other cities.

“Consequently, this page is designed to be a place where interested citizens, politicians and public citizens other cities can suggest changes, propose edits, copy and repurpose the template. If your city has passed a motion that addresses open data, open standards and/or open source, let us know and we will post the motion to this website so other cities can leverage the work of others.”

open city motion v.1.1

Suggestions on best practices for school web sites

I was asked for some guidance or suggestions on best practices for school web sites, specifically for a K-8 district. The demographics of the town are such that about 64% of the kids in the public schools are hispanic with a significant number of those students coming from homes where only the children speak English. Additionally, the website would be part of a larger strategy of trying to get out the message that the public schools are way better than most tax-payers/parents would tend to believe. [...]

The full posting is at Suggestions on best practices for school web sites

Citizens for a Better Providence

"Our mission is to promote effective, efficient and transparent governance in the City of Providence that fairly serves the best interest of all of the city's residents. We will • Hold elected officials accountable • Educate the citizenry • Mobilize citizens, promote participation • Work collaboratively w/ government"

Citizens for a Better Providence

MediaBugs rethinks corrections by taking a page from programmers

"Scott Rosenberg, best known as the co-founder of Salon, has been mulling this idea for a while, and last week, he received a $335,000 grant from the Knight Foundation to build MediaBugs, the first correction-tracking system for news outlets in the San Francisco Bay Area."

MediaBugs rethinks corrections by taking a page from programmers

New York City is leading the way on open records

New York City is leading the way on open records. In Introduction 991, a local law to amend the administrative code of the city of New York, in relation to creating open data standards, section 23-302 reads

"All public records maintained by city agencies shall be made available for inspection by the public on the Internet through a single web portal that is linked to nyc.gov or any successor website maintained by or on behalf of the city of New York."

Let's congratulate Council Members Brewer, Lappin, Gonzalez, James, Liu and White,Jr.

Where can I play hoop around here?

Courts of the World (via) is a great example of grassroots data sharing. There is no need for municipal or school administrations to particpate but think how great it would be if every Parks and Recreation Director across the USA spent 20 minutes next week entering data about the courts under thier management. And do it again next year, same place, same time.

Establishing your identity authoritatively on the internet is almost impossible

Are you who you say you are? Establishing your identity authoritatively on the internet is almost impossible to do. Just because an email account, LinkedIn id, Twitter id, Facebook profile, Ning profile, AOL id, etc uses the letters A N D R E W G I L M A R T I N does not mean it is me. The only way to establish identity is to build a body of evidence online. So that when I search for you online I find a lot of information (bits) that link these online presences to your life of family, friends, work, and possessions (atoms). If you are a politician, administrator, candidate, or anyone with the need to have a public identity make sure you get online soon and build that body of evidence.

This posting is inspired by Twitter to verify accounts for politicians, agencies and other celebs. Which is an idea doomed from the start to failure.

You might also be interested in Geoffrey Bilder's trust tag on Delicious.

Waltham Forest's town map leads the way ahead

The town of Waltham Forest in the UK has a fine example of combining Google's mapping tools with its place data. You can use the map to find 31 categories of information including polling stations, parks, post offices, and road works. All information useful in an average person's day. Now compare this to South Kingstown's map which contains none of this information.

It is good that South Kingstown has an online map. This is a first step towards more citizen awareness but more needs to be done. More data is needed. More browsers need to be supported (Macintosh users can't access it with Safari). More standards and de facto standards need to be adhered too. And, above all, the "GIS Web Site Disclaimer" needs to be removed.

Geeks Invade Government With Audacious Goals

"Within both the government and large businesses, there is a huge cultural challenge to integrating collaborative technologies into a traditional, siloed organization to create more adaptive entities. But ultimately this integration needs to occur to some degree in order for the government - and by extension, the society it governs - to behave in an anticipatory manner (emphasis added) instead of the reactive one most are used to."

Mark Drapeau in Geeks Invade Government With Audacious Goals nicely characterizes the reasons and challenges of geeks and social media types have become interested in government.

How did the Town's new website come about?

Last week I made a written request for all the records concerning the Town Administration's new web site. The administration has 10 business days to respond to the APRA (§ 38-2-8 Administrative appeals) and so I hope to receive a response around June 4. I will telephone Stephen Alfred (Town Manager) tomorrow to get a status update.

RSS feed only for home page

This morning I noticed that the RSS feed for the Town's new website did not include the agenda for last night's Town Council meeting. It turns out that the RSS feed is only for the home page. Notice of changes within the website are not available. This situation is unexpected and unacceptable for an information website released in 2009.

Digging through my email archive I found that my first email to the Town Administration about RSS feeds was in April 2006.

Use postal mail to help inform Town Councilors

I have sent the posting Connecting printed information with web information as a letter to the Town Council. I am thinking of sending others over the next several weeks. Feel free to send to them any you find useful too.

...

Town Council
180 High St
Wakefield, RI 02879

Dear Councilors:

....

Yours truly,

Connecting printed information with web information

MedaShift has the story QR Codes Connect Print to the Web. It is a good story about using a common referencing system for linking an article in print to materials on the web. We use referencing systems all the time in our daily lives to link one item to another. Examples include page numbers, citations, social security numbers, surnames, UPC codes, etc. Using QR Codes to linking items in print to items online is the wrong system. In this blog I am interested in practical tools for use today, in the USA, and not the near future.

It is an unfamiliar mental leap to link a QR code with a web page. The QR code does not look like a URL or a domain name. For most people, the QR code looks like a United Parcel Service (UPC) tracking identifier. Perhaps the greatest obstacle, however, is that the user has no existing experience of coordinating the use of their phone's camera, an image identification service (with some parts on the phone and and parts on the internet), and the phone's web-browser to access information. I think these factors will lead to too either significant technical support costs or simply being ignored.

A better identifier for print is simply a short URL like the ones offered by bit.ly and Tiny URL services. A URL shortening service enables you to print a very short URL that when used in a web-browser will automatically redirect the user to the actual URL. For example, the short URL http://bit.ly/8iOGq will redirect you to http://www.southkingstownri.com/calendars/town-meetings/town-council-regular-session-work-session-begins-645pm.

The bit.ly service also provides some usage data about the shortened URL. There is nothing technically challenging to offering such a service and so the shortened URL can be closely associated with the Town or School. For example, the bit.ly example above could instead be http://skri.ws/8iOGq.

A shortened URL service offers all the advantages of QR codes as outlined in the MediaShift article with none of the experiential and technical problems. Plus, the reader can write down the short URL for use at another time and place.

So, the next time you see a public notice in print, like this notice on a tree on Saugatucket Rd, call Town Hall or the School Administration and ask why they did not include a short URL to get more information about the notice.