US 13 articles

113_1356_medium Paul Johnston

Civic Participation made too simple?

last updated 6 months ago, 1 Comment

It does seem barely possible that civic participation could be made too simple, but that thought certainly arose from a rather cool app I was just alerted to - http://2gov.org/ Basically if you tweet and include the tag @2gov, the app will send your tweet to your local representative. Currently, it seems to be being used mainly to say either that obama's healthcare reforms are great or that they suck. So to what extent will all those messages help anyone? Even rather more meaningful...

posted in twitter US civic_participation

113_1356_medium Paul Johnston

Ask the President - Raising or Lowering the Debate?

last updated 10 months ago, 2 Comments

Thanks to Norm, I came across the new Ask the President site that Community Counts are hosting and a range of media organisations including the Nation and the Washington Times are supporting. The idea is to bring a new voice to traditional Presidential news conferences by allowing citizens questions pulled from the net and voted on by citizens. Its a great site and very easy to get involved since you can vote without logging in. Obviously that means that non-US citizens like me can vote (and ...

posted in Obama US Transparency Media askthepresident

Headshot_medium njacknis

HackingCongress

last updated 10 months ago, 1 Comment

A newly created website -- http://www.hackingcongress.org/ -- of interest. Their self-description follows: HackingCongress is a new hub for projects at the intersection of civics & technology, fostering civic engagement and education, advancing government transparency, and supporting communication with government. ("Hacking" has a dual meaning in the computer world and in this case it is positive slang for creative programming.) The focus of this site is on projects related ...

posted in citizen participation US

Bw_medium Tiago Peixoto

The Price of Transparency

last updated 10 months ago, 9 Comments

The use of websites by governments as a means to increase budgetary transparency by providing easily accessible information doesn’t stop growing. The Center for Fiscal Accountability does a great job by periodically tracking these initiatives across the United States and its latest update, in March, provides a listing of 26 websites that have gone live since 2007. More impressive is the growing number of legislative initiatives across the U.S. aiming at increasing and deepening the i...

posted in Transparency US

113_1356_medium Paul Johnston

Who should run the U.S.?

last updated 10 months ago, 4 Comments

Here's another interesting one from the techno-democrats - I don't mean President Obama's team but rather those who like the idea of marrying technology and direct democracy. This time it is in the US and it looks like a good platform - http://whitehouse2.org/ I still think, however, that it is going in the wrong direction - the point is to transform our democracy, not to pretend it does not already exist! In my view the value of this kind of thing is that it increases pressure on g...

posted in US Obama Collaboration Consultation

Headshot_medium njacknis

How And Why Public Officials Blog

last updated 10 months ago, 1 Comment

Peter Orszag started blogging when he was the head of the Congressional Budget Office.  Now working for the President, he has continued.   You can see this on his latest blog about tax hikes, at http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/blog/09/02/26/Clearingupamisconceptiontaxhikesduringarecession/.  His general website, http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/ , provides great prominence to the blog as well.   He has also provided an explanation of the value he sees in...

posted in Blogs US video

Bw_medium Tiago Peixoto

When Desperate Times Call for Participatory Measures

last updated 10 months ago, 2 Comments

41 U.S. states currently face budget gaps, and judging by the forecasts of even the most optimistic specialists, such a situation is far from being substantially changed in the near future. In this context, it is particularly interesting to highlight the few ICT mediated initiatives that are starting to take place at the subnational (state) level in the United States, aiming – at least supposedly – to get citizens involved in the budgetary process. For instance, in Novemb...

posted in ParticipatoryBudgeting US engagement

113_1356_medium Paul Johnston

U.S. follows UK lead on transparency!

last updated 10 months ago, 0 Comments

Ok. I am deliberately being a bit provocative, but its great to see a couple of US organisations creating a site called http://www.showusthedata.org/ where US citizens (and probably anybody) can suggest US federal data sets that should be publically available and people can vote on which ones they think would be most helpfully make public. So its a bit like showusabetterway but with a direct focus on data sets rather than interesting uses of data sets plus use of direct voting to highlight th...

posted in Obama Transparency US UK

113_1356_medium Paul Johnston

Mass Citizen Input

last updated 10 months ago, 5 Comments

Now Obama is President the Change.gov site is now longer active and vistors are encouraged instead to go to the official whitehouse site. However, it is still (at the moment I write this) possible to look at the interesting experiment on mass citizen input which was the citizen briefing book. This enabled citizens to input ideas and comment on and vote up or down the suggestions of others. The most popular suggestions make interesting reading: 92970 points for ending marijuana prohibition 7...

posted in Obama US Consultation

113_1356_medium Paul Johnston

Advice on embracing social media

last updated 10 months ago, 0 Comments

The US Federal Web Managers have made a plea for greater use of social media by US public agencies and work through systematically the barriers that are currently holding this back and how to overcome these barriers. A useful list (and quite a few barriers that would not have immediately occured to me). http://www.usa.gov/webcontent/documents/SocialMediaFed%20Govt_BarriersPotentialSolutions.pdf

posted in social media US

Martin_medium msweeks

Obama is coming...but are we ready?

last updated 10 months ago, 0 Comments

I was struck by this piece about the looming collision of the Obama world of connected campaigning and the often rather less connected government machinery he will be inheriting... "President-elect Barack Obama has offered up a compelling vision for how he’d like information technology to transform government. Citizens would be able to view agency policy and regulatory meetings via Webcast. They could chime in with their concerns about a pending bill awaiting his signature. They could...

posted in US Obama

Martin_medium msweeks

The Obama Stats

last updated 10 months ago, 0 Comments

Many will be familiar with these Obama campaign stats, but they are astonishing not only for what they reflect on but for what they promise... 3 million donors made a total of 6.5 million donations online adding up to more than $500 million. Of those 6.5 million donations, 6 million were in increments of $100 or less. Obama's e-mail list contains upwards of 13 million addresses. In total, more than 1 billion e-mails landed in inboxes....To put this in perspective, John Kerry's '04 ca...

posted in Obama US

113_1356_medium Paul Johnston

e-Democracy - Alive and Kicking!

last updated about 1 year ago, 0 Comments

Today I participated in e-Democracy 08, the annual e-democracy event in London. There was an interesting opening presentation by My Society’s Tom Steinberg who assessed progress over the last 12 months. Not surprisingly, his initial focus was the recent US elections and to my outsider’s eyes I thought his analysis got it just right. He highlighted President-elect Obama’s success in securing mass participation, but noted that much of his online campaign was about usin...

posted in e-Democracy MySociety Obama US Blogs