Last week, Andrea DiMaio pointed out some similarities in the “open government” ideas being submitted to federal agencies through their IdeaScale pages, indicating that the similarities are symptomatic of a flawed approach to public engagement.

Luke Fretwell at GovFresh called Andrea out (among other critics) for not offering any alternative approaches along with their criticism. Luke has asked all interested to offer their ideas, and this is my submission.

It’s worth noting that this first round of idea gathering isn’t even over yet, and it’s far too soon to judge its success. I do, however, have a blog, and it’s an excellent way to pass premature judgements on others’ work, so here goes…

These dialogs are too big #

Normally, I’m against big things. I think the world’s going to be solved by millions of small things.
— Pete Seeger

This quote has been bouncing around my head for the past year or so, ever since I first heard it around Obama’s inauguration. It came to mind when I read the Open Government Directive in December because the directive is a big thing that asks agencies to do big things, and I’m skeptical of big things.

That said, I consider the Open Government Directive to be a good big thing because it’s a needed big kick in the pants. It’s great that so many people in Washington are excited to respond to it, but make no mistake: most agencies wouldn’t be opening up without the directive.

Also, despite any limitations of IdeaScale, most agencies wouldn’t have such a robust tool without it or the guidance of the Citizen Engagement and Participation team at GSA. As Andrea has since pointed out, IdeaScale is an excellent—and low cost—way for agencies to experiment with openness. If it doesn’t work, awesome. We’ll learn from it and move on.

Oh yeah, ideas. Here:

#1 – Stop talking about “open government” #

We do ourselves a disservice when we talk about open government or transparency as if they were goals in and of themselves. They’re not. They’re means to accomplish greater things, like faster innovation or higher quality service.

Additionally, terms like “transparency,” or “open government” are probably lost on “the public.”

Agencies will get better submissions (and ultimately do better work) if they explain what aspects of their mission they’re trying to improve through openness. This will allow them to engage specific expert communities around their agency rather than the relatively small group of people who know what “open government” means.

The USPTO started using Peer to Patent not because it was open, but to improve the patent approval process—it just so happens that Peer to Patent is a great application of openness.

This approach isn’t the agencies’ fault, but is probably the result of instructions to allow the public to “provide input into the creation of the agency’s Open Government Plan.” Telling agencies to open up to the public to allow the public to tell agencies how to open up is probably too meta for most people to grasp.

#2 – Shine light on individual public servants #

Agencies should recruit or appoint staff to sort through ideas and publicly discuss the merits and faults of the ideas. I’m not suggesting that agencies publicly respond to every single idea (this would be paralyzing), but rather respond to trends or common themes among ideas. This is going to require a lot of work and will subject agency staff to some scrutiny, but I think it’s worth it for a number of reasons.

1. It gives citizens names and faces to identify with when presenting their ideas.

   I imagine many citizens are dissuaded from offering their ideas up to the “crowd” that IdeaScale or Google Moderator purport to harness. If they know that Jeffrey Levy (for example) is going to read and consider their idea, they may feel a little more encouraged.

   This idea, however, is not mutually exclusive from IdeaScale. It could easily sit on top of IdeaScale as a reminder that, “Yes, there is a real person at the agency reading your ideas. This is his name, email address, LinkedIn profile, Twitter account, etc.”

   Without disclosure like this, tools like IdeaScale can enable public servants to hide behind an algorithm. That’s hardly transparent.

2. It forces agencies to pick up where IdeaScale will leave off.

   IdeaScale works (in theory) because people can understand, more or less, how it works: you submit an idea and people vote it up or down; ideas that people like float to the top, burying the bad ideas. If the algorithm behind it were much more complicated, it would confuse users and they’d never use it.

   This simplicity is a double edged sword because it makes the tool easy for people to game, particularly by people willing to beg for votes on their ideas. Others have pointed out how the simplicity of its design also creates a bias toward early idea submissions. My point is that we should not rely solely on these tools to identify the best ideas.

   If staff at agencies were required to vet and respond to submitted ideas in public, we would get more insight into what kinds of ideas the agencies can use, allowing us to provide more informed ideas in the future. Talk about the benefit of transparency! It also would require the agency to publicly defends its decisions.

3. It will inevitably foster stronger relationships among public servants and interested citizens—increasing the potential for future collaborations, idea sharing, and happy hours.

#3 – Do more, smaller things #

Openness should ultimately be baked into everything we do. We shouldn’t rely on dialogs or directives to talk to the public.

If a person ever asked me to join a “dialog” with them, I’d probably think I was in trouble; it sounds like something involving a lawyer, and that it’d take a long time.

I don’t have any research to back this up, but I don’t think that most people have time or interest in talking about policy making or bureaucratic operations; I think people are more likely to have ideas about how to shorten the lines at the DMV, or feel safer on planes, or make tax filing easier.

Instead of inviting citizens to help us by inviting them to dialogs, we should ask for their help at the point of interaction, when they’re already thinking about us. By opening ourselves up to feedback on discrete things, we’ll get more actionable information to use to improve those things. A flaw of large scale dialogs is that they tend gather a lot of unfocused anecdotal information that’s difficult to quantify and apply.

Every government web page, service, tool, brochure, and program should come with an invitation for citizens to help us make it better. In my perfect world, these invitations would even include names and contact information of a public servant accountable for the quality of the web site or service in question.

This might sound preposterous, but I prefer audacious, like hope. For the Open Government Directive to accomplish real change, it will require a dramatic shift in how we do business and interact with the public. I’m not recommending this because I believe in openness for openness’s sake, but because I believe that closer interaction with the public and more accountability from agencies will help us build a better government.

Writing about the iPad got me thinking (again) about why I care so much about technology. I’ll write another post about that, but I want to explore a tangential idea first: the idea that any form of government is a form of technology.

I started thinking about this after reading Anil Dash’s post wondering why we’re so much more interested in the iPad announcement than the State of the Union. I confessed to Michael that, while I share Anil’s concern, I was actually much more interested in the iPad than the State of the Union; the iPhone has made a noticeable impact on my daily life and I imagine an iPad could as well. The actual effects of the State of the Union are harder to pinpoint (which is not to say that the government doesn’t have an impact on my life).

Then Slate posted an article inspired by the iPad v. State of the Union debate asking “Which is more important: politics or technology?” with a dizzying list of examples of how technology is creating new markets, empowering jihadists, and otherwise enhancing or undermining the role of governments around the world. It’s really good.

But why politics or technology? Technology, broadly defined by Wikipedia “can…encompass broader themes, including systems, methods of organization, and techniques.”

Using this definition, any system of government is simply an application of technology.

Indeed, a legislative body is akin to an algorithm that receives inputs (votes, analysis from technocrats, etc) and produces outputs in the form of legislation. I’ve been having fun thinking of DC as an immensely buggy piece of software.

If you’re worried about how technology is impacting the government (I’m referring generically to the various levels of government in the United States), there might be some value in thinking of our government for what it is: a remarkable innovation that has effectively governed millions of people for over 230 years. It’s accomplished this by empowering its citizens (or at least making them feel empowered), informing them, defending them (or at least making them feel safe), building infrastructure, etc, etc, etc.

Now, look at how new innovations are doing these things better than the government (note that I’m not saying how “technology” is doing these things better).

I don’t believe that many governments will be able to innovate as rapidly as the private sector, and they will continue to become irrelevant in the face of more compelling technologies. This isn’t a bad thing per se, but it could make us more dependent on non-democratic organizations that have no incentive to serve the people who can’t afford their services. That would be a terrible thing.

Arnold Kling wrote a piece called Why the U.S. is Ungovernable in which he argues for a greater distribution of power among state and local governments to stoke more government innovation. He frames the problem:

The theory is that there is a discrepancy between trends in knowledge and power. Power in the United States is remarkably concentrated. We are creating increasingly specialized knowledge, which means that the information needed to make good decisions is located outside of Washington, D.C. And yet we have a central government attempting to do for 300 million people what governments in places like Singapore, Hong Kong, Denmark, and Switzerland do for many fewer people.

Kling’s argument makes sense to me. One of the major takeaways (for me) of all the “Government 2.0″ events and chatter of 2009 was that smaller governments can benefit the most from applying new citizen-facing technologies. I’m looking forward to the fruits of city-centric initiatives like Code for America and CityCamp.

Oh, and I’m trying to figure out how to make San Diego more innovative. Let me know if you have any ideas.

At least five (5!) people have asked me what I think of the iPad, and—while I don’t want to be a tech pundit—it turns out that I think a lot of things about it. Here are some of them.

I will not buy an iPad when it comes out

I’d probably enjoy having an iPad, but I’m not planning on buying one any time soon. I’ll probably get a few chances to play with an iPad over the next year, and I’ll probably be blown away by it. I’ll then hold out until I can buy a 2nd generation and laugh at all the suckers with the far inferior 1st generation.

Plenty of people have complained that the iPad is missing some feature, but I’m confident that the overall experience of using it is compelling enough without whatever feature they’re talking about. People who complain about missing features are thinking in terms of products that already exist; I’m pretty sure that Apple designed the iPad to be unlike anything that already exists.

By many accounts, the iPad’s speed, touch navigation, and large screen create a truly novel computing experience. I think the iPad will be a big deal.

I’m most interested to see how easy it is to type on the iPad while in bed. If it’s easy, the iPad would probably help me blog more.

I’m not worried about the iPad

If you’re a geek, you’ve probably come across a few blog posts expressing dire concern about the iPad. Alex Payne worries that the iPad may spells an end to the “hacker era” of digital history. Rafe Colburn wonders if the iPad is a harbinger of doom for software development as we know it.

I think Alex is wrong, and I think Rafe is probably right, although I think “doom” makes it sound like ending software development as we know it is a bad thing.

I think the iPad will successfully broaden the market for smallish devices optimized for a few common applications (Internet browsing, email, IM, music, photos, video, etc), and this will create an entirely new space developers to work in. It’s too early to tell if this is all bad or not. At the very least, it’s different, and that makes people uncomfortable.

That said…

I don’t like the App Store

Because the iPad is based on the iPhone OS, the only way to create a native iPad application is by submitting it to Apple for approval before they make it available through the iTunes App Store. This is a bad thing; I’ll try to explain why.

With the App Store, Apple has conjured a marketplace for 100,000 apps for the iPhone OS in a remarkably short period of time. 3 billion apps were downloaded from the App Store within its first 18 months. This happened because the iPhone is an extremely compelling product. People love it, and they love using it. They want things to do on it.

Developers love that the App Store makes it easy for them to charge for their software, and Apple shareholders are fine with the App Store because it makes enough money to pay for itself.

Consumers could not care less about how their software is made as long as it’s cheap and easy to get, and Apple deserves a lot of credit for training consumers to feel safe spending a few bucks on digital consumables. The iPad will likely add to the App Store’s success.

This success, however, is what has some developers so concerned. Alex Payne even claims that “[t]he tragedy of the iPad is that it truly seems to offer a better model of computing for many people – perhaps the majority of people.”

I fail to see the tragedy in developing a better model of computing for the majority of people.

The concern shouldn’t come from the fact that Apple’s model is better, but that it has sucessfully compelled many developers to hand over a bit of creative freedom to Apple in exchange for distribution. They didn’t have to do this before, and it’s unclear why it’s necessary now. It certainly doesn’t prevent developers from selling terrible (albeit awesome) applications.

Requiring all iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch apps to pass through the App Store allows Apple to throttle—however gently—development of software for the platform; it hobbles the wild and organic innovation allowed by unrestricted software distribution.

Apple says the approval process is intended to ensure a better user experience by preventing bugs and protecting user privacy, but it’s not clear why Apple is better at doing this than the market. More concerning, it puts Apple in a position to stifle competition as it may have done when it blocked the Google Voice app.

Developers are afraid that the success of this model will embolden other organizations to get in their way and act as arbiters in the software distribution process. It looks like it’s already happening, although with varying degrees of control (see Apps.gov, Intel’s AppUp, Roku’s Channel Store, and Samsung’s pending HDTV App Store).

The Internet is an open App Store

Regardless of the App Store’s gentle throttling, the iPad isn’t going to kill software development for at least three reasons:

1. The iPad will probably be awesome and developers will want to build software for it
2. Apple does not have a monopoly on tablet computers or mobile devices
3. The Internet exists

Even if the iPad dominates its market, there are many other platforms open to developers. There will be plenty more netbook/tablet/whatever platforms as Apple’s competitors inevitably launch their iPad killers. And regardless of how many mobile platforms spring up, the Internet will still exist and developers will be able to develop for it.

As irritating as Apple can be, it is undoubtably a powerful champion for an open Internet—Webkit being one of the more obvious examples.

Perhaps one of the less obvious examples is Apple’s consistent refusal to support Flash on their mobile devices. I interpret this as a really gutsy kick in the pants for the web standards community make HTML5 video truly competitive. People (myself included) are constantly frustrated by the iPhone’s lack of support for Flash, but Apple keeps snubbing it because it’s a proprietary format and it should not be considered a standard component of the web alongside HTML, Javascript, or CSS.

This reminds me of their decision to release the first iMac without a floppy drive. Talk about gutsy!

Of course, this is assuming that I know what I’m talking about (highly unlikely) and that Apple’s motivations are so noble. If I’m right, Apple deserves some credit.

Don’t forget also that Apple was mocked for insisting that developers could use JavaScript, HTML, and CSS to develop applications for the first iPhone. Granted, web standards could not, and cannot, take full advantage of the iPhone/Pad OS, but there is plenty of evidence of convergence between web applications and desktop applications. This will continue.

Web developers can already access a device’s GPS, and I’m sure they’ll eventually be able to easily hook into microphones, speakers, cameras, accelerometers, compasses, and other features of mobile devices.

Developers who want to build for the iPad, but aren’t willing to deal with Apple’s approval process, should feel motivated to work on the vanguard of web apps. The web is where I think software is headed, and this, ultimately, is a very good thing.

One more note: It would be nice if Apple made it clearer to users that they can can add links to websites (or web apps) to their iPhone home screens. It’s a great feature, and putting icons for bookmarks alongside icons for apps helps drive home the fact that web apps are “real” apps.

Google has been really good about this. Adding a link to Google Reader to the iPhone home screen creates an icon that looks exactly like any other app. And now Google is making Google Voice available, not through the App Store, but as a web page optimized for the iPhone’s browser.

Behold! The Internet is a vast app store!

Many thanks to Ted for sharing many of the articles that inspired this piece and to Dave Dayton for spurring me to write it.

For more informed perspectives on the iPad, please read:

• Rafe Colburn’s Is the iPad the harbinger of doom for personal computing?
• Yehuda Katz’s The Irony of the iPad: A GREAT Day for Open Technologies
  
• Alex Payne’s On the iPad
• Joe Hewitt’s iPad
• John Gruber’s The iPad Big Picture
  

Well over a year ago, I wrote about how I wanted to read more books and fewer blogs. My rationale was that the long form of books allows me to fully absorb their subjects, whereas I don’t live with blog posts long enough for them to leave a lasting impression.

I’m pretty sure Nicholas Carr talked about this in his article Is Google Making Us Stupid?. I’m not sure because I haven’t read the article because it’s too long; I plan to hold out on reading it to maintain this irony.

More recently, Robin Sloan artfully illuminated how the economic concept of “stock and flow” applies to writing; the idea being that writers benefit by producing little bits of ephemeral content continually (flow) while simultaneously working on larger, more permanent, works. I think the metaphor applies to content consumption as well as production.

I haven’t kept track of my efforts to read more books, but I know that I still want to read more books and fewer blogs. To that end, here are 12 books that I want to read this year. This is a New Year’s resolution for my brain, while my other New Year’s resolution is for my body.

I hope that writing them down and publicly announcing my goal will encourage me to put the iPhone down and pick them up.

These aren’t in any kind of order.

1. The Organization Man — William H. Whyte Jr.

   This was a landmark book when it was published in 1965, and I’m hoping it’s still good. I put it on my Amazon wish list on a whim, and my mom gave me a first edition printing of it for Christmas as a result. I love her.

   I’ve become very interested in organizations (particularly the creative destruction of organizations) since grad school, and I’m curious to learn about how post WWII organizations were perceived as they came about. Also, check out Whyte’s steez.

2. Nudge — Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein

   This is tangentially related to my interest in organizations and policy making, as it examines the most vexing component of organizations: the rational human being.

   I’m a few chapters in. It’s a fun book. It’d go nicely with some Camus.

   Finished on Feb 10th. Overlong and sometimes boring, but very worthwhile. Its ideas are settling in nicely.

3. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

   Finished sometime mid January

4. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
5. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
6. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

   J.K. Rowling deserves every penny she’s earned. I’m glad Shan convinced me to read these books. I love them.

7. Started: Information Dashboard Design — Stephen Few

   Marti Hearst recommended this to me. I don’t expect anyone to want to read it with me, but Few deserves credit for the cheeky intro to the book’s acknowledgements:

   Without a doubt I owe the greatest debt of gratitude to the many software vendors who have done so much to make this book necessary by failing to address or even contemplate the visual design need of their dashboards. Their kind disregard for visual design has given me focus, ignited my passion, and guaranteed my livelihood for years to come.

   Ha!

8. The Ownership of Enterprise — Henry Hansmann

   This was a suggested text from a class I took in grad school called, simply, Organizations. I didn’t buy it until over a year after graduation, when I realized that I continued to think about Organizations more than any other class I’d taken.

   Hansmann “explains why different industries and different national economies exhibit different patterns of ownership forms.” I’m especially interested in (finally) reading this because the 2009 Nobel Prize for Economics was awarded for similar research.

9. Let My People Go Surfing — Yvon Chouinard

   A memoir by the founder and owner of Patagonia, the company. I like surfing, I like business, and I admire Patagonia—both the place and the company.

   Finished on Feb 20th. A major surprise. I expected it to be a fluffy memoir, but this is a serious book about business, craft, the environment, and morality. Very inspiring. Highly recommended.

10. Started: Understanding Comics — Scott McCloud

    A comic about how comics work. I’m 50 pages in, and it’s one of the most enlightening books I’ve ever read (no hyperbole).

11. Here Comes Everybody — Clay Shirky

    I tend to think of Shirky as an Internet media guy, but I’m approaching this thinking of him has an Internet organizations guy.

12. The Design of Everyday Things — Donald A. Norman

    This has been on my stack for years. It’s time I developed a theoretical basis to support (and occasionally quell) my design instincts.

PS – You should read some of these books with me.

My pants don’t fit. I finally admitted this sometime around Christmas. This won’t do, so I’m going to lose some weight. I’m about six feet tall and I’ve weighed somewhere around 185 pounds for about the last seven years. As I write this, I weigh 203.

2010 has brought the realization that I can’t take my health for granted. I officially need to start paying serious attention to my lifestyle—indeed, I’ve joined the group of people who resolve to lose weight at the beginning of the year.

This doesn’t mean that I can’t also make the same high minded resolutions I have for the past two years. I’m still trying to do those enlightened things, but I want to do something measurable, too.

I want to weigh 180 pounds or less on my 32nd birthday in May, so I’m going to lose a little over a pound a week between now and then.

Here’s how I plan to do it.

Eat well

I’m not a believer in diets designed to shed pounds quickly (what Rafe Colburn calls “metabolism hacks“). I’m a believer in consistently eating the right amounts of the right things, but I’m in the habit of eating some combination of the wrong amounts of the wrong things. What I consider to be “right” is summed up in these two adages:

• Eat food, not too much, mostly plants. This comes from Pollan’s 2007 article Unhappy Meals, which has influenced my thinking about food more than any other writing. I highly recommend it. When Pollan says food, he mean things that humans have eaten because they encounter them in nature—things that our bodies are designed (by evolution) to ingest. Skip to the end of the article for further explanation of what he means by “food.”
• Treats should be treats, meaning that I should only eat things like cookies and ice cream on special occasions. I’m extending it to apply to eating out as well. I’m pretty sure I came up with this one myself, but Pollan has some insight on this one too:
  

  When we let corporations do the cooking, they’re bound to go heavy on sugar, fat and salt; these are three tastes we’re hard-wired to like, which happen to be dirt cheap to add and do a good job masking the shortcomings of processed food. And if you make special-occasion foods cheap and easy enough to eat every day, we will eat them every day. The time and work involved in cooking, as well as the delay in gratification built into the process, served as an important check on our appetite. Now that check is gone, and we’re struggling to deal with the consequences.
  — From Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch

Exercise

I was very good about exercising in grad school, especially whenever I felt pressured by coursework. I was convinced that my brain and overall happiness would be better off if I took care of my body. I seem to have forgotten that. Just as good food should be part of my life, so should exercise.

My plan for the coming months:

• I’ll be running the Carlsbad half marathon on the 24th of this month. I will run the La Jolla half on April 25th and the America’s Finest City half on August 25th, completing San Diego’s half marathon Triple Crown. Registering for these events motivates me to run regularly. I’m aiming to run six days a week. Join me if you want.
• Thanks to Shan, I’ve been working with a trainer once a week. I’ll keep doing that.
• When I’m not seeing the trainer or taking my weekly day off, I will go to yoga or complete the daily workout on the Workout of the Day iPhone app—none of these workouts requires a gym or weights and they’re extremely effective.
• I also have vague plans to go on a long backpacking trip on the Teton Crest trail sometime in the fall. And as always, I want to surf more often (although surfing isn’t great exercise other than the paddling).

Track my progress

This part is inspired by Rafe Colburn’s post on “the line diet”, which simply requires people to plot their daily weight on a chart over time. This gives the dieter timely feedback on how he should adjust his diet and behavior. I’m going to plot my weight weekly rather than daily. Shan has convinced me that weekly weigh-ins are better. I want to change my behavior broadly, and daily weigh-ins may foster ad hoc adjustments rather than general adjustments.

The main point here is the acknowledgement that I’m trying to lose a particular amount of weight rather than simply “eat better” or “exercise more.”

My progress can be seen in the chart at the top of this post, and will be updated continually over the next few months. I’ll revisit my goal on my birthday, deciding then if I should keep shedding pounds or maintain.

Apply social pressure

As if publicly embarrassing myself with this post weren’t enough, here’s how you can guilt me into keeping at this help me reach my goal:

I’ve created a campaign at The Point in which I’ve pledged to donate $100 to San Diego Roots, an organization that works to “educate, cultivate and empower sustainable food communities in San Diego County.” I will not actually donate the money unless I reach my goal.

If you’d like to encourage me to reach my goal, you can also pledge money to San Diego Roots through by joining the campaign. Your money will not be donated unless I reach my goal. That is, if I don’t reach my goal, I will effectively withhold your charity from this noble community group. I don’t want that on my conscience. Beth Kanter came up with this idea a few years ago; I’m happy to take it from her.

Let’s hope I never have to post something like this again.

I’m answering the question here because my thoughts won’t fit well into a single comment, and I want to provide plenty of links to the thinkers who have inspired me and informed these thoughts. That said, if you have thoughts about USA.gov, I strongly encourage you to share them on the dialog website.

In the interest of openness and transparency (and because they asked), it’s time to say what I really think about USA.gov. As a government contractor, I feel like I occupy an awkward space between public servant and taxpayer—not as noble as a real public servant, and not qualified to be an indignant taxpayer because I’m paid with tax dollars. Nonetheless, I am inclined to public service (I’m just extremely disinclined to living in DC), and I can’t help being indignant.

USA.gov and GobiernoUSA.gov, here are five things I think about you. This is from the heart, by which I mean the opinions expressed here are my own and do not represent those of my employer. Also, when I say USA.gov, I mean “USA.gov and GobiernoUSA.gov.”

I think USA.gov needs to recognize its inherent value #

Every way I look at it, USA.gov—as an organization, as a domain, and as a brand—is poised to be immensely successful. What stands out to me:

• Its staff is skilled, passionate, and recognized across government for its leadership and knowledge.
• USA.gov is probably the best URL on the Internet. I’m serious. USA.gov is:
• Easy to say, spell and remember
• Authoritative (.gov!)
• Descriptive
• Flexible (extends nicely to GobiernoUSA.gov)
• Intuitive (worldwide)
• Short
• It represents the government as it exists in most people’s minds—that is, as “the government” rather than a series of agencies and individual governments (This is a common assumption, and I have no research to back it; if anyone can support or refute this statement, please let me know)
• PageRank of 10 (for what it’s worth)

I think USA.gov should stop being a portal #

Despite all of the above, USA.gov risks becoming irrelevant because of its insistence on being a portal. It’s structured to work as a citizen’s starting point to find government information online. This is problematic because it assumes that people will look to the government as the best source of the information they need. That is, if a person is trying to figure out how to buy a house, we hope he will go to USA.gov before asking his parents, searching Google, or asking friends on Twitter. That’s unrealistic.

Andrea DiMaio announced the irrelevance of government portals back in 2001, recognizing that people do not interact with the government very often and that they are more likely to look to commercial portals that include “government” information alongside other services and information. Why would you look for swine flu info at USA.gov, when you can get it from Yahoo! and get the 411 on celeb tattoos at the same time?

The viability of a government portal is further eroded as people continue to look to social media outlets as their primary source of information. Betaworks’ Andrew Weissman has astutely observed that real time social distribution is conditioning people to assume that “if something is important, it will find me.”

I think USA.gov should embrace search #

Confession: I rarely use USA.gov. I almost always use Google. I spend several hours each month looking for useful government information to distribute through USA.gov and GobiernoUSA.gov’s Twitter and Facebook accounts. I Google “[search term] site:.gov” and instantaneously get a list of quality .gov resources in return, complete with descriptive blurbs.

The preface to Marti Heart’s Search User Interfaces says that search engines are the second most frequently used online computer application, behind email. There’s a reason for this: they work. Search engines work so well that they’re obviating almost every earlier system designed to organize information—including USA.gov’s system of compiling, categorizing, and organizing lists of links. Josh Levy told me to read Everything Is Miscellaneous to grasp the significance of this.

Because it’s so convenient, search is undermining the government’s attempts to create an online mirror of its byzantine structure (~24,000 .gov URLs and counting) and USA.gov’s attempts to explain that structure.

For USA.gov to compete with the convenience of Google, its links would need to lead to the Internet’s most awesome websites that are unavailable through Google. Furthermore, unlike on search engine result pages, most links on USA.gov do not include descriptions or any clues about where they lead, creating an uncertain browsing experience.

One solution to this is to turn USA.gov into a content site, making it more likely for people to visit it via search engines. Which brings me to my next point…

I think USA.gov should be a content site #

Currently, visitors to USA.gov are guided through lists of links until they’re handed off to another site, where we hope they find what they were looking for. This precludes us from finding out if our visitors found anything useful where we sent them—we can’t ask them to come back and tell us if we guided them to the right spot. The way around this is to create useful content on USA.gov.

USA.gov lists 10 topics that its visitors search for most frequently on the What’s on Americans’ Minds page. Here’s the list as I write this:

• Grants
• House Resolutions
• Green Card
• Passports
• Jobs
• Taxes
• Public Records
• Unclaimed Assets
• Unemployment
• Energy

These top topics don’t change very often. We should start by creating a pilot content strategy and write a brief series of explanatory articles for these topics. They should be written in plain language. They should be search engine optimized. They should each have a distinct URL, which will make them easy to share on Facebook, or Twitter, or IM, or email, etc. None of them will require mashups or anything fancy.

We should include opportunities for users to provide actionable feedback on these articles using a tool like 4Q (which is free). And we should continually optimize and refine those articles until we’re getting consistently positive feedback.

This doesn’t have to be a big thing (I just offended all my content strategist friends). There’s no need for a public dialog to enhance these articles. Rather, invite users to complete a brief survey specifically about the content they’ve encountered, and make sure someone is tasked to analyze and act upon the results of the survey. We could start piloting this in a month (as long as we dutifully ignore the Paperwork Reduction Act and existing cookie policy). If we’re successful, we could add more articles.

For a more in depth look at this approach, read Avinash Kaushik’s Web Analytics Success Measurement For Government Websites.

Candi Harrison’s post Time for a Re-Think of USA.gov argues the need to create content as well. Candi goes further and recognizes that this is an opportunity to “start downsizing the inventory of government websites and consolidating government web content.”

There’s a chance that this effort would displace traffic from other government sites. That would be great. Competition for traffic among sites could foster the creation of better content, or a successful USA.gov may free up agencies to focus on their missions rather than maintaining duplicative websites.

I think USA.gov should put citizens first, zealously #

Google’s first article of faith is “Focus on the user and all else will follow.” The Federal Web Managers Council echoed this sentiment when they published a white paper titled Putting Citizens First: Transforming Online Government (pdf) last November. If any team within government is poised to create the bold vision outlined in Putting Citizens First, it’s the team at USA.gov.

Every initiative carried out under the USA.gov name should be created with the interests of citizens in mind, based on what we know about them from research. In some instances, this will require writing in clearer language. In others, it will mean not creating a mashup just to create a mashup or starting a blog just to start a blog. This should be governed, as Putting Citizens First recommends, by USA.gov’s editor in chief.

I often feel like government agencies are caught in an arms race to have the glossiest blog, the most fans or followers (Mark Drapeau wrote a great piece on why focusing on fan numbers is misguided), or the most engaging transparent streaming citizen feed widget. This competition has created an explosion of opportunities to interact with the government online. This is probably a good thing, but it’s becoming overwhelming and I often feel that the average citizen (who Andrea DiMaio calls Joe Smith) is forgotten in all the excitement.

USA.gov has an opportunity to drop out of (or rise above) the arms race and be the sensemaking arm of government—the brand citizens recognize as the best source of official government information that matters to them, that makes sense, and that they can apply to their lives. I believe that if we can do that, all else will follow.

• Percentage of Americans who believe in angels: 55 (Washington Times article)
  Source: Baylor University “survey of 1,648 adults, who were asked 350 questions on their religious practices [in fall of 2007].”
• Percentage of Americans who believe in evolution: 39 (U.S. News & World Report article)
  Source: Gallup poll “based on telephone interviews with 1,018 national adults, aged 18 and older, conducted Feb. 6-7, 2009.”
• Percentage of Americans who believe in anthropogenic global warming: 36 (Guardian UK article)
  Source: Pew poll “conducted Sept. 30-Oct. 4 among 1,500 adults reached on cell phones and landlines.”
• Percentage of Americans who believe in ghosts: 34 (MSNBC article)
  Source: Associate Press poll, “conducted Oct. 16-18, involved telephone interviews with 1,013 adults”
• Percentage of Americans who believe in UFOs: 34 (same MSNBC article as above)
  Source: Same as above

Most of the responses to the post I’ve encountered across the web have involved some variation of alarm or disgust at how stupid these Americans are. Some people are ashamed. Others are scared!

Come on.

My take: no one can comprehend the entirety of the human experience and not everyone is convinced by empiricism.

These are cosmic topics—difficult for almost anyone to grasp. Because I haven’t dedicated years of scholarship to evolution or anthropogenic global warming, my belief in them is buoyed mostly by faith in the scientific community. I’m ok with that. There’s plenty of evidence for me to trust science (like the computer I’m using to write this).

Other people place faith in other communities—perhaps ones that believe in angels or are skeptical of global warming. I’m ok with that too, even though I think they’re probably mistaken.

There’s value in considering how much these people want to believe in angels, and how much they want to believe that they’re not destroying the planet by living the way they always have. I say there’s value in this because it helps us understand a bit more about why people believe what they do. This understanding is essential if you’re interested in making policy and persuading people to support it.

This is, ultimately, my problem with the elitist responses to Foreign Policy’s post: scoffing at people who disagree with you will not help you win them over. It seems defeatist (if not dogmatic)—if you care about global warming, you should think seriously about how to persuade people to change their behavior. It’s hard—much harder than scoffing.

Also, I really want to believe in UFOs.

Bonus reading:

Scientific American published a great little article by Michael Shermer in May called Why People Believe Invisible Agents Control the World that posits that the human mind may be predisposed to believe in supernatural forces like angels or “the government.”

You really should read the article, but the idea is summed up in two parts:

1. Humans often identify patterns where there are none. Shermer calls this “patternicity,” and he explains it’s origins like this:
   

   The problem is that we did not evolve a baloney-detection device in our brains to discriminate between true and false patterns. So we make two types of errors: a type I error, or false positive, is believing a pattern is real when it is not; a type II error, or false negative, is not believing a pattern is real when it is. If you believe that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is just the wind (a type I error), you are more likely to survive than if you believe that the rustle in the grass is just the wind when it is a dangerous predator (a type II error). Because the cost of making a type I error is less than the cost of making a type II error and because there is no time for careful deliberation between patternicities in the split-second world of predator-prey interactions, natural selection would have favored those animals most likely to assume that all patterns are real.

2. Humans also tend to assume that the patterns we observe (whether real or not) are the result of some intentional action. Shermer calls this “agenticity:”

   As large-brained hominids with a developed cortex and a theory of mind—the capacity to be aware of such mental states as desires and intentions in both ourselves and others—we infer agency behind the patterns we observe in a practice I call “agenticity”: the tendency to believe that the world is controlled by invisible intentional agents. We believe that these intentional agents control the world, sometimes invisibly from the top down (as opposed to bottom-up causal randomness). Together patternicity and agenticity form the cognitive basis of shamanism, paganism, animism, polytheism, monotheism, and all modes of Old and New Age spiritualisms.

Foreign Policy’s statistics reveal how patternicity and agenticity may be problematic for policymakers who try to base their decisions on empiricism—particularly in a democracy.

It’s also fun to watch parties on both sides of the global warming debate create “agents” out of each other—i.e. how the skeptics decry “the scientists” while global warming defenders fret about “the rubes,” as if either group were a cohesive and intentional entity.

Also, Nudge is a very fun book that examines why humans make poor decisions in the face of evidence and even past experience.

Shannon and I visited Austin last week to go to the Fun Fun Fun Fest with our friends Paige, Kevin, Michael, and Chris.

Destroyer (Dan Bejar) headlined the “Yellow” stage on the first night of the festival. He performed unaccompanied, singing and playing an acoustic guitar while hospital helicopters flew overhead. I interviewed him after the set:

What is your favorite Destroyer song?#

Bejar: I’m fond of “Certain Things You Ought to Know”

What is your favorite city?#

Bejar: …Lisbon is an amazing city.

Big thanks to Paige for getting us into the fest.

Listen to “Certain Things You Ought to Know.”

As I walked home with some friends from a Radiohead concert in 2006, I asked a girl what she thought of the show. “It was great!” she said, “I love live music.”

Her answer bothered me, and I never forgot it.

The concert was great, but I wondered if she would have said the same thing if we were walking back from a Matchbox 20 or Pussycat Dolls or Animal Collective concert. I had to wonder if she “got it.”

The next year I went to the SXSW music festival. I was walking down 6th street with my friends Paige and Kevin when we heard a hackneyed blues solo float from the windows of a nearby bar. It prompted me to exclaim “This is great! I love live music!” and we all had a good laugh. Paige and Kevin got the joke—they both have a deep understanding and appreciation for music, and they know that some of it is better than the rest.

I don’t know how many times I’ve made the “I love live music” joke since, and I’m writing this essay largely to explain that I don’t keep repeating it just to get some laughs (in case any members of my vast readership are getting bored with it). I keep pulling it out because it’s the safest way I’ve found to reveal my particular brand of snobbishness—that is: I admire quality, I believe that quality is rare, and I like it when people recognize quality. Inversely, I’m leery of people who don’t seem to care about quality, or even know it exists.

The joke is a litmus test that tells me if I’m talking to someone as snobby as myself. When people get it, I know I’m in good company. When people don’t, I’m simply embarrassed and slightly ashamed by my pretentiousness—it’s a small price to pay, but I think it’s worth it.

P.S. I acknowledge that taste in music is relative. I know and respect people for whom listening to Radiohead is a form of torture. I’m glad these people acknowledge a preference for something over something else. I’d be just as leery of a person who claimed to love movies, restaurants, or paintings, etc.

So I did some research. It turns out that I really like Carl, and no matter the results of his campaign, I’m eager to participate in the conversation he’s starting.

It is, of course, not a new conversation. Countless people are trying to influence the sea change affecting government domains across the country (a bunch of my colleagues are talking about it right now at Transparency Camp). However, what I like about Carl’s version of the conversation is, for lack of a better term, his style.

He’s a printer

He might not be a trained printer, but the fact that he’s running for National Printer indicates a healthy regard for the craft. As an amateur screen printer, I am obligated to recognize the value of a good printer: a person dedicated to a complicated craft, who does a job requiring exceptional attention to detail, who produces the media that educates, informs, and inspires us.

There is evidence of a printer’s touch on Carl’s various websites, all of them easy to read and elegantly laid-out. This isn’t trivial. I wish more websites were built with the care of a printer.

He gives librarians the props they deserve

The #2 issue that Carl wants to address in his campaign is librarians, saying that “librarians are the bedrock of the public domain and the defenders of our fundamental right to access knowledge.” I almost fell on the floor when I read this. Ever since my tenure trying to wrangle the world’s event information at Eventful, I’ve been convinced that librarians hold the key to the future. There is no way the Internet, .gov or not, is going to reach its full potential without tapping into the long-term and profound thinking of librarians.

The rising generation of Internet librarians are the people who are going to guide the world through the necessary changes required to organize our data and make it useful. Adrian Holovaty gives an excellent explanation of what kinds of changes I’m talking about in his piece A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change.

He’s doing the right thing

Carl’s been publishing government information on the Internet for over 20 years, but he got some press recently by mobilizing a small army of volunteers to download roughly 19,856,160 of federal legal papers from the Federal Judiciary’s outdated Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) system for him to repost for free at his site, Public.Resource.org. He didn’t do anything illegal by doing it, but it freaked out some people at the Judiciary and, more importantly, it got some press.

The solution on Public.Resource.org is not ideal (it raises some important privacy concerns), but his work highlights the fact that voters are beginning to expect a lot of the Internet, and the government needs to rise to meet those expectations. Imagine how much more he could do at the helm of the Government Printing Office!

What really has me convinced that Carl’s doing the right thing, however, is this quote: “If [appointed as Public Printer], I will certainly serve. But if not called, I will probably serve anyway.” I consider myself very lucky to be able to work as a pseudo-public servant (are consultants public servants?), but Carl’s work is an inspiring reminder that I can always serve no matter what.

Let’s get to work!