{"id":1258,"date":"2009-02-21T11:36:27","date_gmt":"2009-02-21T19:36:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alevin.com\/?p=1258"},"modified":"2009-02-22T14:29:05","modified_gmt":"2009-02-22T22:29:05","slug":"government-20-in-early-beta","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/?p=1258","title":{"rendered":"Government 2.0 in early beta"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Last week I went to the &#8220;government 2.0&#8221; session sponsored by the <a href=\"http:\/\/upcoming.yahoo.com\/event\/1774404\/\">Social Media Club<\/a>.  One sign that the space is in a very early stage is that the panelists were very different:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li> a local elected official: <a href=\"http:\/\/davidcanepa.com\/blog\/\">David Canepa<\/a> is a City Councilmember in Daly City<\/li>\n<li>a PR person for a well-funded national agency: Veronica McGregor is the behind the <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/marsphoenix\">Mars Rover twitter account<\/a><\/li>\n<li>a journalist, Evan Ratliff, who&#8217;s written about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/politics\/onlinerights\/magazine\/17-02\/ff_obama\">the new presidential administration online<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The story that moved me the most was David Canepa. A thirty-ish former staffer for Leland Yee, Canepa keeps a blog and a facebook profile. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=chr8AohyuGM\">A local tv campaign interview was posted to YouTube<\/a>.\u00a0 David isn&#8217;t following a playbook, he&#8217;s just trying to reach out to consitituents.<\/p>\n<p>Recently, David got into hot water when he invited Facebook friends to a local African-American community event.\u00a0 Apparently the event had a fee, and some people were concerned about impropriety.\u00a0 He&#8217;s working to get the policy clarified so he can continue posting to Facebook.\u00a0 David would love to get more comments on his blog, and to figure out how to use the net to get feedback on local development issues.<\/p>\n<p>Interestingly, David is getting stuck in a different place than local officials in Menlo Park, where I live.\u00a0 Local folk don&#8217;t seem to have a problem with Facebook. My favorite local Facebook status update: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/event.php?eid=51845241983#\/profile.php?id=643292337&amp;ref=ts\">Heyward Robinson is the mayor<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0 However, the local government in my town have gotten legal advice that they can&#8217;t host public discussions online because of an interpretation of the Public Records Act.\u00a0\u00a0 Another local elected official, <a href=\"http:\/\/terrynagel.com\">Terry Nagel<\/a>, helped build her reputation by hosting a site to report frequent power outages in her city.<\/p>\n<p>David was a bit nervous about being on the panel. Individual local elected officials are breaking ground on their own. David wished that the session would have more interactive advice. I think there&#8217;s an unmet need to get some of the early champions of social media in local government in the same room to build on what each is doing well, and overcome the obstacles people are finding.<\/p>\n<p>Where David Canepa&#8217;s concerns in Daly City are about building a local constituency, NASA PR folk are doing outreach to a national and global community of people fascinated by space. Instead of fielding the same two simple questions from mass media interviewers with soundbite answers, Veronica McGregor is finding an audience of educated, passionate fans, eager to understand the details of NASA technology and science.\u00a0 Her staff wonders how long they&#8217;ll need to continue parallel efforts to feed the traditional media and the growing community of fans.\u00a0 One of the key signs of an early market is the same case study used again and again &#8211; NASA is the poster child for social media in government.<\/p>\n<p>Even NASA gets stuck. Ariel Waldman&#8217;s story is funny and sad. She was hired by NASA to help with social media, through a government contractor whose contract has a firm policy against employees using social software on the job. Oops.\u00a0 Undaunted, she&#8217;s now doing <a href=\"http:\/\/spacehack.org\">SpaceHack<\/a>, and indie site for space science hackers.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.atavist.net\/\">Evan Ratliff<\/a> was the quietest panelist. His article on Wired describes the hurdles in opening the federal government for online communication.\u00a0 Efforts to provide access to citizens are slowed by well-meaning policies like the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cio.noaa.gov\/itmanagement\/pra.html\">Paperwork Reduction Act<\/a>, which requires a laborious approval process for gathering information from more than 10 citizens.\u00a0 Bev Godwin, one of Obama&#8217;s egovernment staffers, comments in Ratliff&#8217;s article that &#8220;Agencies tend to avoid doing these kind of surveys&#8230; Would having users submit information to a social network or wiki count as a survey? Nobody knows.&#8221;\u00a0 Ratliff reports that some federal government sites are forbidden to link to nongovernmental sites, because a link is seen as a government endorsement.\u00a0 One Wired article barely scratches the surface.<\/p>\n<p>The takeaway from the panel &#8211; &#8220;government 2.0&#8221; is in very early beta. The most advanced people are learning every day.\u00a0 There is plenty of opportunity to adapt lessons from the public internet and the private sector to improve democratic governance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last week I went to the &#8220;government 2.0&#8221; session sponsored by the Social Media Club. One sign that the space is in a very early stage is that the panelists were very different: a local elected official: David Canepa is a City Councilmember in Daly City a PR person for a well-funded national agency: Veronica &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/?p=1258\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Government 2.0 in early beta&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[20,25],"tags":[33],"class_list":["post-1258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-social-software","category-unite","tag-unite"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/prDRq-ki","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1258"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1258\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1262,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1258\/revisions\/1262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}