Peter Jones is founder of Redesign Research, and spends time in both the US and Toronto. He’s a visiting scholar at U of T, a senior fellow of OCAD’s Strategic Innovation Lab, and has figured out the secret to making these commitments work: time travel. See Peter’s blog at Design Dialogues.  We are grateful for this guest post …

A week ago 150 people in Toronto started a movement called ChangeCamp, a rapid-response unconference of tech, design, and policy/government people who engaged the question:

How do we re-imagine government and citizenship in the age of participation?

I drove up from Dayton, Ohio the day before ChangeCamp and showed up at 9:00 ready to go. We do not create these types of opportunities for engagement in the US – we mostly work through issue groups, or local citizen activist groups. With the monstrous problems in the US over the last 8 years, we have been fighting for peace, justice, human rights, civil rights, and fair elections (I’m from Ohio and what you heard is all true). And we have celebrated the Obama era with hope, expectancy, and mostly relief.

But ChangeCamp was in my new hometown of Toronto, and I was delighted to be a supporter and to lead a session (co-led Citizen Participation in Policy Making with Karen Smith).

Just a few days later, back in my US homeland I was alerted to this news on the NCDD (National Council for Dialogue and Deliberation) list:

“Barack Obama has yet to announce who his chief technology officer will be. But he has hired a Silicon Valley exec for another role: Google product manager Katie Jacobs Stanton will be the new President’s “director of citizen participation,” starting in March, sources tell me.”

http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090128/obama-gets-a-google-vet-but-not-for-cto/

Comments show respondents are quite disappointed that the pick has no bona fides in civic sector organizations. Critical responses were showing up elsewhere to rebut this appointment already.

“Stanton, sources say, will be part of the White House New Media Team headed up by Macon Phillips — putting “citizen participation” under the White House communications umbrella, it seems.”

It’s great to know such an office has been established at the WH, but hiring a technology expert without any evidence of commitments in social justice and civil society may be telling us that participation is considered to be – let’s be charitable and call it “scalable communications.” I find it an interesting paradox – the Google veteran probably stands for open government and can certainly coordinate technology efforts to engage mass citizen responses. But the need to engage citizen participation is social and cultural, and the social technology design should follow the values and vision of participatory democracy. Not enough info to go on, I know, but let’s consider this a new move for us to track and learn from.

I’m on the board of a US non-profit, the Agoras Institute, that organizes design and decision making for civic sector and policy making stakeholder groups. We are currently holding a progressive (and voluntary) virtual session of structured dialogue (SDD) on the inhibitors to Obama’s vision of participatory democracy. As we are able to understand it, of course. We have conducted one round with about 15 international participants, with the online wiki for the dialogue at: http://obamavision.wikispaces.com/

Our inquiry may be relevant to this White House office. Responses to the focus question of:

“In the context of Obama’s vision for engaging stakeholders from all walks of life in a bottom-up democracy employing Internet technology, what factors do we anticipate, on the basis of our experiences with SDD, will emerge as inhibitors to the actualization of his vision?”

Show in the root cause mapping: http://obamavision.wikispaces.com/Round+5-Root+Cause+Map to include one of 3 deep driver inhibitors as: Corporate Control of the means of Democracy.

Most of my consulting is in the corporate sector, so I’m not anti-corporate. But I do believe we need a better champion, and Canada might learn from this mistaken selection. It’s not enough to just create a new role for citizen participation and then expect it to be a large-scale social network for contribution management. If government is going to be open, they must signal their intention to really listen. We need a citizen-centered policy advocate to be at the gov table, especially where our official representation via Congress or Parliament is weakened by years of the megaphone voice of corporate lobbying.

Citizen participation in the US may be emerging from a long consumerism-induced slumber and it’s got a weak voice – we need to be sure we’re being heard, not being managed by just more scalable social technologies.

First, thanks again to Rahaf for turning us on to ChangeCamp, it has been amazing to be part of this group from the first meeting on December 31st through Saturday’s frenetic day at MaRs.

Let’s open this post with a little announcement … our experiment here at www.redliberals.ca is being extended.  We had originally planned to can our learnings on January 27th and switch our focus towards engaging within the party on the issues of change.  After the first ChangeCamp event, we feel that we can learn & share more by staying engaged in this movement.

We are still going to focus our efforts here on coming up with a Liberal 2.0 Manifesto as quickly as possible and we hope that everyone who participated in ChangeCamp as well as those broader circles that we have connected with over this short time will help us.

Our main motives for launching www.redliberals.ca was to connect with great people & ideas in the drive to embrace change.  Check out all of the discussions and people who were contributing at ChangeCamp. It is all irresitable!  www.redliberals.ca and our twitter stream @redliberals is the best place to channel our enthusiasm.

Now a more focused reflection ..

There has been a lot of focus on the creation of a new software application that will emerge from ChangeCamp and that will be exciting.  I think that is part of the heritage of applying the “Camp” approach, which has its roots in social technology to public policy and governance issues.

Perhaps more exciting was the intensity of having almost 200 people together, most of them not part of the paid political clique or bureaucracy, all of them locked in deep, action oriented collaboration about what is wrong and how to drag our country into the 21st Century.  #ChangeCamp was a breath of hope of freedom from the closed social networks of political parties, entrenched interest groups and faceless government institutions.  It was an adhocracy at work.  Robert H. Waterman, Jr. defined adhocracy as “any form of organization that cuts across normal bureaucratic lines to capture opportunities, solve problems, and get results.”

That potential heritage of #ChangeCamp deserves as much attention focus.  Who & where will the next ChangeCamp be hosted within the next 30 days is big question in my view.”

MEMORANDUM FOR THE HEADS OF EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENTS AND AGENCIES

SUBJECT:      Transparency and Open Government

My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government.  We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.

Government should be transparent.  Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing.  Information maintained by the Federal Government is a national asset. My Administration will take appropriate action, consistent with law and policy, to disclose information rapidly in forms that the public can readily find and use. Executive departments and agencies should harness new technologies to put information about their operations and decisions online and readily available to the public. Executive departments and agencies should also solicit public feedback to identify information of greatest use to the public.

Government should be participatory. Public engagement enhances the Government’s effectiveness and improves the quality of its decisions. Knowledge is widely dispersed in society, and public officials benefit from having access to that dispersed knowledge. Executive departments and agencies should offer Americans increased opportunities to participate in policymaking and to provide their Government with the benefits of their collective expertise and information. Executive departments and agencies should also solicit public input on how we can increase and improve opportunities for public participation in Government.

Government should be collaborative.  Collaboration actively engages Americans in the work of their Government. Executive departments and agencies should use innovative tools, methods, and systems to cooperate among themselves, across all levels of Government, and with nonprofit organizations, businesses, and individuals in the private sector.  Executive departments and agencies should solicit public feedback to assess and improve their level of collaboration and to identify new opportunities for cooperation.

I direct the Chief Technology Officer, in coordination with the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Administrator of General Services, to coordinate the development by appropriate executive departments and agencies, within 120 days, of recommendations for an Open Government Directive, to be issued by the Director of OMB, that instructs executive departments and agencies to take specific actions implementing the principles set forth in this memorandum. The independent agencies should comply with the Open Government Directive.

This memorandum is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by a party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.

This memorandum shall be published in the Federal Register.

BARACK OBAMA

January 21, 2009

nice work … what does “responsible government” mean to you?

If you have not already registered, do it now.

This is going to be the start of something …

Great work by Mark MacKay.

More change has come to the White House! Continuing the push toward a more open and accessible government, the Obama Administration has revamped the White House Website and from CNN (source):

“The new design includes more interactive features, a prominent photo gallery displayed across the top of the site, the ability to get e-mail updates, and a White House blog. The site’s “briefing room” also includes places for a weekly video address, slide shows, proclamations, and executive orders as well as news about nominations and appointments. Visitors to the site are invited to e-mail the president and his staff, although — perhaps in a nod to the Twittersphere, where brevity is key — comments are limited to 500 characters.”

www.whitehouse.gov

This type of openness brings in a new era with regard to government accessibility. As we are becoming more technologically savvy, and the younger generations want more connectedness with their leaders, this administration is setting the precedent, established the benchmark, and wrote the playbook on how to use technology to reach and leverage the electorate.

Rahaf Harfoush is a Canadian who was a member of the team that planned Obama’s social media grassroots campaign.  Thank you Rahaf for this timely, non-partisan guest post …

With President-Elect Obama’s inauguration only a few hours away, I’ve been reflecting on the campaign and the profound changes that I have already seen in American Politics. Seeing our American neighbors using technology to unite and mobilize for a cause they believe in renewed my hope in the political process.

What struck me most is how fast these changes happened. From redefining social media’s role within a political campaign to creating unprecedented channels of fundraising and grassroots mobilization, I for one learned it doesn’t have to take decades to transform old systems.

Change can happen fast and it can happen now. We are welcoming the world’s first Internet President, and as Canadians we should definitely be taking note.

In the last few months we have seen Obama’s transition team introduce weekly Youtube addresses, online policy brainstorms via Change.gov and a nation wide survey encouraging people to meet and discuss the changes they would like to see in their country. Notably, the emphasis is and remains to be on PEOPLE impacting change. It sounds so simple when you say it, but it is something that is so often overlooked: we have to bring the changes we need to government.

The Obama campaign showed us what was possible, but it is up to us to carry the spirit of his message forward especially to Ottawa. We have become too lax in our own governance. Parliament is on the brink of dissolution and we have a Prime Minister who seems to be more concerned with hoarding power then acting in the best interest of the Canadian People.

So what do we do about? A lot. Get involved. There are several initiatives like this site being launched to provide Canadians with a platform for new ideas to push us forward.

My good friend, Mark Kuzniki has created a collaborative crowdsourced event called ChangeCamp which will help bring members of the public and members of political parties together to examine where our system is failing and how we can help fix it.

Let’s get involved. Right now.

Rahaf

Back in 2007, Tom Steinberg and Ed Mayo published a report on the Power of Information proposing the better use and development of state and citizen-generated information in the UK. They state that their paper is an unusual review, in that it focuses on opportunities rather than problems. “When enough people can collect, re-use and distribute public sector information, people organize around it in new ways, creating new enterprises and new communities. In each case, these are designed to offer new ways of solving old problems.”

The pair came up with 15 recommendations based on a literature review, three in-depth case studies and interviews with 60 decision makers, website operators and users inside and out of government. They argue the government could grasp opportunities that exist in the creation, consumption and re-use of information, but current policy and action is not yet adequate to seize these opportunities. The report recommends a strategy in which government:

• Welcomes and engages with users and operators of user-generated sites in pursuit of common social and economic objectives;
• Supplies innovators that are re-using government-held information with the information they need, when they need it;
• Protects the public interest by preparing citizens for a world of plentiful information, and helps excluded groups take advantage.

Check out the full report and list of the recommendations - The Power of Information: An Independent Review

Garth Turner brought the system out of the dark by reaching out on his blog. This week, he’s shutting it down. What remains will be a record of what he set out to accomplish by using technology to communicate with the people of Canada. He states on his Website that he’s received 60 million hits over the past 4 years – that is a significant amount of traffic!

Our current mainstream political parties are very much about control. Everything must go through the proper channels and no one should go off on their own without expressed permission of the party leadership.

During the recent federal election, most parties used the internet in some form or fashion to communicate their message, but in most cases, it was very much a one way conversation. The Bloc and the NDP were much more engaged, but the Conservatives and Liberals did not invest much time in listening to the electorate. The Greens have connected better through technology and have made significant inroads (http://danforthgreens.ca).

The notion of Open Parliament does exactly that, it opens channels between the people and its members of Parliament. No longer are MPs required to do everything by handshake, hold town hall meetings, or spend a significant amount of time in their constituency offices. There will always be a need for some of that, but as the digital divide shrinks, there are more opportunities than ever to engage their constituents and open the channels of communication. It also means more transparency, which is not a good thing for many politicians.

Garth paid the price for doing what he thought was right, but he also stood up and said “I believe there is a better way”, which is what we want to see more of.

Here is a group that we are participating in and we think you should too, regardless of your partisan or not so partisan leanings.  Jennifer also refers to it in the prior post.

From the Centre for Social Innovation news letter:

Saturday, January 24th
8:30-5:00pm
MaRS Centre
101 College Street

ChangeCamp is a participatory and web-enabled face-to-face event that brings together citizens, policy-makers, technologists, design-thinkers, change agents and media creators to answer one question: “How do we re-imagine government and governance in the age of participation?”

This is the first ChangeCamp Canada event, which is intended to ignite a national, distributed and self-organizing movement. For more information, please visit the ChangeCamp Canada Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/changecamp. A web site for the event will be launched soon at http://changecamp.ca/

This is more excellent work by Jennifer Bell, the Executive Director of www.visiblegovernment.ca.

A couple of great quotes to focus on:

“Open Systems Make Failure Less Costly

Finding the best ways to analyze government information and collect value from public feedback is going to take a lot of experimentation. The probability of a successful solution is what author Clay Shirkey might qualify as a scalar distribution pattern: one where there’s a very large number of failures, some modest successes, and a few solutions that will do amazingly well. Being
prepared to accept a lot of failures is the key to finding the successes.

Government bureaucracies are failure-averse for very good reasons. Public scrutiny and the spectre of being accused wasting of tax payer funds make for a cautious environment, where money is only spent on guaranteed successes. By publishing data in open, standardized formats, governments can off-load the costs and stigma of failure to external organizations. Like Goldcorps, governments can take the open approach to innovation by challenging advocacy groups, the nascent community of armchair egovernment-geeks, and the for-profit market to ‘build a better way’. The government can then take advantage of the value created by the best solutions. Solutions that don’t work can die quietly, without any tax dollars having been spent.”

And why not adopt the “Camp” approach to change? …

“Ways Forward

In the last two weeks, more than one grass-roots forum has appeared to advance a new era in civic participation.  ChangeCamp[1], originating in Toronto, and Communeautique’s Forum Ouverte, in Montreal, are two such movements calling for an open exchange of ideas around using technology to re-define the role of the citizen.  The spontaneous emergence of these groups shows the demand for new ideas and tools in the Canadian government.

The non-profit VisibleGovenrment.ca seeks the expertise and participation of grass-roots groups, advocacy organizations, and citizens across the country to make online tools for civic participation based on open government data a reality.  If you share this goal, here are some concrete steps for action:

-         Host a ‘Change Camp’ or ‘Forum Ouverte’ in your city.

-         Research resources and strategies on the VisibleGovernment.ca, Sunlight Foundation, or   MySociety websites.

-         Contribute to a VisibleGovernment.ca project.

-         Start a dialogue with your public representatives on how they can be more open.”

Transparency Through Open Data and Open Source-Scribd