Perhaps the most basic way to think about institutions is that they are concentrations of certain kinds of expertise, within stable incentive structures. Democratizing communications through digital technology normalizes both incentives and membership, by permitting participation on the basis of any sort of incentive, by anyone with any kind of expertise. As the Cluetrain Manifesto says, “hyperlinks subvert hierarchy”.
Merely clearing a space for participation isn’t necessarily enough to produce more constructive collaboration however, since people communicate with different specialized vocabularies and with different goals, and since online communities often suffer from the ’spiral of silence’, whereby under-represented minority views express themselves less.
This leads me to think that deliberative processes designed in online spaces should take into account the excesses and deficiencies that existing institutions suffer from, and alleviate them by introducing new areas of expertise, and new incentive structures.
I wish the Open Access movement were further along, and academic publications were posted in public online, because that would make it easier to share some of the things I’ve learned in the last two days at the Digital Government Society Conference. Since I can’t link to most of the research I’m learning about, I’ll have to just offer my basic reactions:
I approached this gathering initially from the perspective that there is an unfortunate disconnect between public policy and academic research, and my suspicions have been confirmed. The research and technological development I’ve seen so far have exceeded my expectations, despite their overall absence from the congressional policy sphere. Here are some of my observations so far: (many more available via twitter)
Natural Language Processing appears poised to soon become far more relevant to public administration and policy creation. Political problems from e-government services providing to portals creation to text annotation to policy deliberation are all seeing significant attention from developers and theorists working from a semantic processing perspective. By extracting entities from text and then applying various processing techniques, developers hope to highlight new connections between data sets, suggest solutions to problems like emergency response systems and disaster management, identify dispositions among participants in deliberative contexts (labeling arguments as vitriolic, clarificatory, diplomatic, etc), allowing similar concepts to be linked automatically (by detecting all legal references, all members of Congress, or all cities), or even detecting the position or ideology of a speaker. While these technologies haven’t gotten much of a presence in our daily lives so far, the sheer amount of convergent semantic development suggests to me that there will soon exist an emergent political semantic web. Technologies like “active learning” and socially constructed ontologies promise to only accelerate these developments.
Social research into IT coordination and policy makers’ motivations reminds me of social media commentary from blogs: sometimes revelatory and entirely valuable, sometimes speculative and of questionable value. Clearly many of the discussions about staff and administrators’ motivations could use a greater pool of examples to draw from, just as the administrators could probably benefit from more abstract reflection (what are the implications of this exclusive contract I’m about to sign?) One set of researchers presented a grid explaining the types of options presented to governments when choosing to release public data. While some options were missing (like “sell to the public”, like some GPO products), the examination gave concrete explanations of the decisions and evaluations that public administrators deal with when facing public access decisions.
The Center for Technology in Government from the University at Albany’s Center for Technology in Government seems full of things I/we should read. They’re heavily involved in researching and developing inter and intra-governmental collaboration, working with both e-government implementation and trans-national research projects. I’m looking forward to reading more essays like this, or this. One of their researchers gave a great presentation about the ways governments define “borders”, which has implications for immigration, social policy, and economic policies like subsidies or tariffs.
Apparently some areas are using the detectable density of cell phones within an area to detect traffic patterns. This is neat.
Anyone working on web traffic and social visualizations should check out SIOC, or the Semantically Interlinked Online Communities project, providing an RDF framework for visualizing blog and website relationships (as far as my basic understanding reaches, that is–it probably does more than that description gives it justice). This is one of those things that I come across and say “Josh Tauberer should check this out”.
One commenter drew a parallel between two panels that everyone enjoyed: Privacy advocates suggest (apparently) that “it’s not the technology, it’s the policy”. This was apparently bolstered by the example of some new Canadian food handling practices, where cows and eggs and other food sources are labelled individually with codes or RFID tags, rendering each food item and distribution and production site very trackable. I’m not sure what the conclusion is from the two examples, but the privacy experts seemed quite amused by the cattle-to-human comparison.
I saw a project that tracked the three dimensional shape of individual tree’s canopies, to help local governments decide which to cut down and which to leave standing. The charts showing 3d rendered versions of more or less desirable trees seemed emblematic of the way digital technology is enabling new kinds of evaluations to be made on governmental decisions. They’re also quite pleasing aesthetically. Here are some screen-caps.
That’s all for today, I should have more tomorrow, or check out the twitter stream for more live commentary.
Here are my cleaned-up notes from a workshop on electronic rulemaking at the dg.o conference happening now. (still disjointed, but no doubt more interesting posted here than alone on my laptop)
I’m interested in the event because of the relevance of structuring deliberative processes online, developing listening tools to make governmental staff jobs easier, and because I’d like to see what sort of executive branch IT coordination and development projects are underway already, in both government and academia.
Rulemaking, the promulgation of regulations by federal agencies under congressional authorization, has the binding effect of law. Despite its fundamental legal role, agencies’ handling of the public comments on federal regulations are non-standard to a fault, with some agencies counting handwritten comments as two comments when tallying interest. This non-standardized handling of public comments leads to mistrust of administrators regulatory abilities, which hampers implementing regulations, compliance, and overall public trust.
Most rules have something like ten to fifty comments, some get up to 700,000 comments. There is a very strong parallel between public commentary and interest in rulewriting and congressional advocacy email campaigns. Just as very few rules get the majority of public comments submitted, very few people write more than one comment, and very few congressional bills get the majority of calls and emails.
It seems that federal agencies should have greater abillity to take advantage of outside email and text processing systems, as the attendees of this workshop are designing. See here for an example.
Many arguments for rulemaking’s public role are going unmade: public commentary often leads to changed approved rules, has an effect on congressional oversight staff, and affects what sort of challenges are even admissible in court later. Without critical public comment on pending rules, some legal challenges are less likely to be admissible.
Like congressional staff, agency employees “drink from a firehose” of public input on some regulations, and duplication detection enhanced with advanced natural language processing and structured data tools can save significant time in processing public input.
Comments significantly increased under the Bush administration, although the pattern of most comments coming on a few contentious rules still holds.
OSHA once told national parks rangers to stand inside kiosks to avoid snowmobile pollutants (if true, wow.)
Rubrics for what count as a comment differ from agency to agency.
“Spiral of Silence” = tendency of underrepresented groups to abstain from vocalizing concerns, especially online. Arrow’s impossibility theorem: inherent difficulty in consensus forming through representative voting.
I’d like to go over this in more detail soon, but NARA has published a new digital preservation strategy, described in more detail here. (via NARA’s RSS)
A quick post to point out something I’ve noticed. Open communications structures lead to expanded roles, which leads to unusual allegiances that form outside formalized power structures. For this reason, the Open House Project has seen alliances between all of the following despite the immensely different incentives under which they function:
The GAO has just released a report on the development of the Electronic Records Archive under the National Archives and Records Administration.
The ability to find, organize, use, share, appropriately dispose of, and save
records—the essence of records management—is vital for the effective
functioning of the federal government. In the wake of the transition from
paper-based to electronic processes, records are increasingly electronic,
and the volumes of electronic records produced by federal agencies are
vast and rapidly growing, providing challenges to NARA as the nation’s
recordkeeper and archivist.
This may be connected to yesterday’s Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee NARA oversight hearing. (whose testimony I haven’t had a chance to read yet…)
Update:Â check out the testimony from the HSGAC hearing, looks like the ERA oversight was probably requested of GAO.
Ars Technica has an article up about the “hyperconnected”–defined by the Interactive Data Corporation as those people for whom the line between work and personal has been blurred to the point that they’re “willing to communicate with work on vacation, in restaurants, from bed, and even in places of worship.”
The article offers some criticism of the purportedly overworked, suggesting offhandly that the hyperconnected will pose new challenges for IT departments, and possibly have questionable effects on workers’ personal lives.
While these concerns over productivity and relaxation are certainly valid, there’s another side of merging personal and workplace that’s ignored by the commentary: the same breakdown that leads to work email being written in bed also leads to the breakdown of the limitations on the role of the “professional”. Just as communications technology leads to more work being done at home, the Internet allows for the intellectual entrepeneurship of the online volunteer researcher, the blog-based organizer, the midnight advocate. As Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody makes clear, individuals who can organize without centralized leadershp form a new, powerful, agile force, harnessing what has been dubbed the “cognigitive surplus” to redefine the way we organize our ideas and ultimately ourselves.
While this may have some effect on the modes of our relaxation, the effects on business, government, and society will more than make up for them.
(full disclosure: I often work in the middle of the night.)
As distributed and online-based media develop into a more effective counterbalance, will the “traditional” media’s public value to decrease even further?
Via OpenCRS, here’s a new Congressional Research Service Report about CRS. It outlines basic legislative structures from an unusually thoughtful perspective.
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