civicsgraph

What if McCain donated his social graph to bipartisanship?

TechCrunch had an article today ("Is Obama Ready to be a Two-Way President?") that addresses, in broad strokes, many of the issues that civicsgraph.org seeks to cover.  I will blog more about some of the ideas in that post soon, but as I read it, it sparked an idea:  what if John McCain made the goodwill effort of "linking-in" Obama to his social graph?

One of the biggest challenges of transitioning from campaigning to governing using social technologies is the fact that Obama's starting point (barackobama.com, his Twitter, Facebook & MySpace followers, etc) is overwhelmingly his partisan supporters.  It's one of the reasons that Twitter and Facebook are better as retention and community building tools than marketing tools - you're preaching to the choir.

So, what if John McCain donated his 618,000 Facebook fans, 191,000 YouTube fans, 4,856 Twitter followers and the rest of his social-graph to a new community (maybe hosted at change.gov) in order to seed a bi-partisan civics graph?  It could be as simple as a message from McCain to his followers with instructions on how to follow the new joint community, but it would be an extremely powerful message.

Don't worry, change.gov won't store your login or password

There has been quite a buzz today about twitterank.com.  ZDnet's Oliver Marks has a quick article called "Gullible Twitter users hand over their usernames and passwords - did you get your Twitterank yet?!" @ryanirelan had two timely posts (one simply "suckers" with this link), with the most interesting one being a link to this article:  The password anti-pattern, by blogger Jeremy Keith.

The gist of the article is that the common social network "feature" of letting users import contact lists from other services may be a useful feature for rapidly expanding the network, but asking users to input their email address and password from a third-party site like GMail or Yahoo Mail teaches people how to be phished.

Enter change.gov.  A key feature of "sharing your vision" on change.gov is that you can, you guessed it, enter your email address and password for your mail account, and change.gov will suck-up all of your contacts (they do say "Don't worry, we won't store your login or password").  Earlier, I questioned whether a government (or quasi-government) website should have all my contacts (quick decision: no), but I think I missed the more important question:  should a government website have, or even ask me for my e-mail log-in credentials?  I think not.

So, what's the solution?  Jeremy recommends OAuth, "an open protocol to allow secure API authorization in a simple and standard method from desktop and web applications."  But there is a principle here:  social networks related to the government shouldn't ask citizens to hand-over their secret credentials.  They need to find another way.

Vote at obamacto.uservoice.com

The guys at Front Seat, a civics software company, launched a UserVoice forum to suggest priorities (and then vote on them) for the Obama administration's CTO.  Many of the suggestions have to do with social technologies, and some of them are very compelling:

Open Government Data (APIs, XML, RSS)

Ensure the Internet is widely accessible & network neutral

encourage adoption of Agile software development practices (a nod to my RoR friends)

Public online bidding process for government projects

rely on open standards, open devices, OS where possible

Introduces Social Media Inside Government

Gov to be ran on 100% free software

Make all non-classified taxpayer-funded software open source

And my personal favorite... Richard Stallman ... yes, just Richard Stallman.  Vote people!

Change.gov wants to know who you (and your address book) are

Don't get me wrong... change.gov represents a sea-change in government as usual.  It's vibrant, exciting and inspiring - the very antithesis of institutional.  It seeks to be open and collaborative, soliciting people to share their stories about the campaign and Election Day and their vision for the future.

But there's a problem:  under the very title of "Open Government", there is nothing "open".  In order to submit a story or an idea, you have to give your identity (e-mail, name & zipcode).  And then, when you actually submit your comments, it asks you to Load Your Contacts from your Email Account and spam your friends to submit their comments to change.gov.

Why does change.gov need to know who I am for me to submit an idea?  What is change.gov going to do with all of my contacts?  Where is my idea or story going to end-up?

If I sound like a conspiracy theorist, it's probably because it's getting late into the night and I'm a bit punchy.  However, this example just illustrates how identity and transparency are going to rear their heads as we try to figure out how to use the web and social technologies to help govern this land.

Campaigning and governing are different.  In a campaign, people identify themselves with a candidate (much like you identify yourself with a cause).  But in day-to-day governing, the unidentified and unidentifiable are important too.

Obama's CTO and the boat-anchor of legacy issues

The Obama administration's new idea to appoint a national CTO is already getting messy.  Is the national CTO a bureaucrat? A visionary?  A technologist?  Remains to be seen.

From Dan Farber @ News.com:  Obama's CTO: Watch-out for the turf wars

Infoworld's take:  Google-enabled government starts with Obama's CTO (do we really want that?)

Eric Schmidt's take, from Reuters:  No thanks

Curt Monash from NetworkWorld debates CTO vs. CIO

This is a big job that could easily get bogged down in such enormous IT infrastructure issues that it misses the opportunity to dramatically change the way government and its citizens use technology.  This is one of the differences between campaigning for president and governing as president:  when you are campaigning, you get to act like a start-up - you don't have to worry about "legacy" problems.  When you are president, however, you inherit the legacy issues of enormous infrastructures.  Can Obama push forward the vision of change in the face of managing "legacy" issues?  Can his CTO separate the new social initiatives from the necessary legacy, and adequately invest in both?

Michael Tiemann: Obama, Open Source & The Bazaar

When Alex Castellanos of CNN invoked Eric Raymond's book The Cathedral and the Bazaar on election night, the Twitterverse lit up.  Castellanos compared the US government to the Cathedral, and asked insightfully if an Obama administration would govern more like the bazaar - where bottoms-up involvement and openness are the keys to solving problems.  If the Obama campaign is any indication, this new administration certainly has aspirations to continue its grass-roots ways.

But can effective grass-roots campaign tactics translate into effective grass-roots governing?  Can I expect (or do I want) to get an e-mail-a-day from the White House, like I did from the campaign?  Will President Obama really tweet his daily meetings? Doubtful.

Michael Tiemann blogged about this recently, with some insights into the role of open sourc and how it enabled delivery "ahead of schedule and under budget".  Check it out.

A black Suburban at my dinner party

I was having a dinner party last week, and all of a sudden a black Suburban screeches up and out pops a couple of grey-suited bureaucrats.  Suit 1 says:  "Hi, we're from the US government, and we were wondering if we could talk to you about your thoughts on healthcare reform."  Suit 2 says:  "Mind if I have some bean dip?" 

Okay, not really... but herein lies the challenge ahead of us:  governing is different than campaigning, and while it was cool to see the candidates Tweet from the campaign trail, I'm not any more interested in the government crashing my Facebook/Twitter party than I am having them crash my dinner party.

But I am interested in a more transparent, more collaborative and more open government, that makes intelligent and respectful use of new social technologies.  The purpose of civicsgraph.org is to host an open discussion about what the "civics graph" online should look like, by answering the question:

How can a democratic government and its citizens best use social technologies to effectively do the business of the nation?

What's the role of identity in the civics graph (will I submit my best ideas if everyone is going to know who I am)?  What security issues need to be addressed?  What place in the civics graph does open source software play?  What about proprietary software?  What role do existing commercial social networks, like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and others play in the civics graph?  What about the robustness of the network infrastructure?  What about the 25% of Americans who are offline - what role does the civics graph need to play in order to include them?

These are just some of the issues.  I'm certain you can think of more that deserve discussion. Are you ready to join the discussion?  Great.  Here's how you can participate.

How to participate in civicsgraph.org

Civicsgraph.org is essentially an open-source content project, so we've tried to make participation as easy and open as possible.  Here's how to participate:

1. WRITE:  Pick an issue (like identity, security, OSS, or anything else that you think is related) and blog about it on your personal or corporate blog (if you don't have a blog, write-up a post and e-mail it to civicsgraph@gmail.com, and we'll post it).  MAKE SURE you set-up a tag called "civicsgraph" on your blog, so we can link to it permanently.

2. LINK: Reference and link to civicsgraph.org, to show that you are part of the discussion and to help publicize civicsgraph.org  (for maximum affect, download the widget graphic below and post it at the bottom of your blogpost, linked to civicsgraph.org).  Then, e-mail civicsgraph@gmail.com or DM twitter.com/civicsgraph with a link to your blog-post, and we will link to it.  By notifying civicsgraph.org, we'll assume that we can re-post or post excerpts from your post, with attribution and a link back to your blog.

3. READ, RATE & DISCUSS:  Visit civicsgraph.org often, to see what others are writing about.  You can also follow us at twitter.com/civicsgraph,and become a fan at the civicsgraph Facebook page.  Read, comment and rate the posts to your heart's content!

That's all you have to do. Together, we can create a vibrant and thoughtful resource to help a new administration define the online relationship of a democratic government to its citizens.