“We will see,” they say…
It happened again. Two days since the inauguration and three people have uttered the words “We will see,” in regards to Barack Obama. They appear to speak from a place of doubt and dread, as if the hope for drastic change was too much to ask for.
I feel the same forces.
But let’s look at what this Administration has done in these 2.5 days in office, shall we?
- Launched whitehouse.gov on an open community platform with updates, RSS feeds and more.
- Created the space on whitehouse.gov where non-emergency executive orders will be available for five days of public comment before signing
- Called for a suspension to the trials at Guantanamo Bay
- Signed an executive order for the closure of Guantanamo Bay.
- Created an inter-agency task force to identify lawful options for how detainees are handled and treated.
- Halted the use of torture by America and it’s agents.
And last, but certainly not least, he wrote a manifesto in memo form for open government that caused me to break into tears. It is based on three principles: Transparency, Participation, and Collaboration.
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.”
An Open Government Directive. Within 120 days. Holy bat farts. But it gets better. He then directly attacks those who have worked to weaken the Freedom of Information Act.
should not keep information confidential merely because public
officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and
failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract
fears. Nondisclosure should never be based on an effort to protect the
personal interests of Government officials at the expense of those
they are supposed to serve..”
I’m assuming this is legitimate. It’s not yet posted to whitehouse.gov (ironically). Source: http://www.dowire.org/notes/?p=451
I started this post in answer to this urge to wait and see. For how long, I have to ask? Barack has done more in his first few days than I could have ever dreamed possible. But if we think this is about him, then he will fail. This is about each of us around the world, regardless of our citizenship, and whether we will choose to take action and make our community a better place.
This global crisis affects us all. And not all of us are so lucky as to have a leader with such moral strength and conviction.
cross posted from craphammer.ca
ChangeCamp: Pulling people and creativity out of the public policy long tail
ChangeCamp is a free participatory web-enabled face-to-face event that brings together citizens, technologists, designers, academics, policy wonks, political players, change-makers and government employees to answer one question: How do we re-imagine government and citizenship in the age of participation?
What is ChangeCamp? It is the application of “the long tail” to public policy.
It is a long held and false assumption that ordinary citizens don’t care about public policy. The statement isn’t, in of itself, false. Many, many, many people truly don’t care that much. They want to live their lives focusing on other things – pursuing other hobbies or interests – but there are many of us who do care. Public policy geeks, fans, followers, advocates, etc… we are everywhere, we’ve just been hidden in a long tail that saw the market place and capacity for developing and delivering public policy restricted to a few large institutions. The single most important lesson I learnt from my time with Canada25 is that it doesn’t have to be that way.
Did Canada25 get a new generation of Canadians, aged 20-35 engaged in public policy? I don’t know.
What I DO KNOW is, that at the very minimum, we harnessed and enourmous, dispersed desire of many Canadians to participate in, and help shape, the public policy debates affecting the country. Most importantly, we did this by doing three things:
- we aggregated together the people who cared about public policy, we gave them peers, friends and a sense of community
- we provided a vehicle through which to channel their energy
- by combining 1 and 2, and by using simple technology and a low costs approach – we dramatically lowered the barriers (and costs) to entry for credible participating in these national debates
Today, the technology to enable and aggregate people their ideas, to connect them with peers and to create community, is still more powerful. Our capacity to challenge, push, help, cooperate, leverage and compete with the institutional public policy actors has never been greater. This, for me, is the goal of ChangeCamp. What concrete tools can we build, what information can we demand be opened up, what new relationships can we build to reimagine how we – the citizens who care – participate in the creation of public policy and the effective delivery of public services. Not to compete or replace the traditional,institutional actors, but in order to ensure more and better ideas are heard and more effective and efficient services are created.
Individually, none of us may have the collective power of a government ministry or even the resources of most think tanks. But collectively, linked together by technology and powered by our energy and spare capital, the long tail of policy geeks and ordinary citizens is bigger, nimbler, more creative and faster than anything else. Do I know that the long tail of policy can be set free? No. But ChangeCamp seems like a fun place to start experimenting, brainstorming and sharing ways we can make this country better.
Cross posted from eaves.ca
What can we learn from Obama’s first days?
The BBC reported Wednesday that Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystems co-founder, has been asked to prepare a paper for the Obama administration on how Open Source software can help government save money and be more secure. While saving money is great when governments are thinking of blasting through previous deficit records, governance and citizen engagement can benefit more from open information and free data from governments. In this regard, Obama’s early actions to make his administration open and transparent, and to have a general presumption in favour of providing rather than witholding government information, are more what Canada should be adopting.
Canadians need to build on earlier successes in improving government transparency and accountability by re-thinking government processes designed for a pre-Internet age so that citizens are enabled to do more.
Current government procedures for releasing information under FOI laws are much more like Bush than Obama. Requests from journalists and activist citizens are flagged for special time consuming treatment, and the political pros and cons of releasing stuff along with communications strategies are prepared for political staff who make final determinations on releasing stuff. When political rather than legal considerations dominate disclosure decisions, and illegal delays regularly prevent releases in time to help citizens participate in and evaluate upcoming government actions, it’s bad for all of us. Well, maybe there are some short term advantages to the party in power, but it’s bad for society and bad even for that party in the long term.
Even more important than projects related to improving freedom of information are those about liberating government data stores. It’s crazy that data that would help citizens communicate with their government representatives, like StatsCan tables correlating postal codes with ridings, cost thousands of dollars. Significant economic and social benefits could come from the innovations that would be sparked by shifting from cost recovery for data towards free data. Halting progress in small areas is being made on this – for example, developing and releasing wind maps for Canada that help identify good locations for wind power locations.
Openness. Transparency. Engagement. Innovation. All good things. All enabled if we free more government information, liberate government data, and create more tools with open source software.
the l-word
Whoddathunkit? ChangeCamp blogger expectedly expressing love of transparency and, plot twist of all plot twists, turns out to be a lobbyist. Yeah, I just dropped the real taboo L-word.
So I’m @withoutayard, meegs to my friends & a registered lobbyist in the province of Ontario. And you may ask yourself-well…how did she get here?
Living in Austin during the last not-quite-as-amazing American federal election, led me to blogging & playing with online communications tools to affect change, raise awareness & spread awesome. Returning to Canuckistan, I served a tour at the Pink Palace, but never quite mastered the mysterious machinations of political parties. Unlike @dchartier, I couldn’t cut it in the civil service, even though sound recording policy at Heritage Canada was pretty darn close to a perfect policy-wonkette fit during a brief federal foray.
Combine the forces (read: career failures & bad-fits) & it sort of makes sense, right? Witnessing the Dean machine go off the rails as a viral video trainwreck, seeing Meetup’s potential beyond UT Japanese exchange & making campaign donations as easy as Amazon blew my mind in ’04 (& broke my heart the night of November 2nd). True patriot love of responsible government, parliamentary democracy & social justice/equity brought me home & hoping to see these transformative tools used in a Timmy’s.
I doubt I’ll ever get to geek out in a war room or a party HQ. Partisan politics brings out the agnostic in me. The thought of hundreds of thousands of dollars spent during a campaign on balloons, signs, buttons & miscellaneous paraphernalia drives me absolutely bonkers. Working within the system, keeping abreast of legislative issues, regulatory nerdery & jealously eyeing the open source enthusiasm, technological progress & federal government’s paradigm shift to the South is a great fit for now.
Blogging about the last provincial & federal elections, especially the creative campaigns on provincial electoral reform & federal vote-swapping was encouraging. A taste. But not enough.
Enter ChangeCamp. Citizen-initiated, non-hierarchical, collaborative & generally all things old-school civics. We have the tools, skills & thanks to some shindig yesterday in DC, the enthusiasm & momentum. So let’s do some heavy lifting & make our standards for transparency and engagement the new status quo. Liberate APIs, wiki-fy policy docs, de-PDF the whole shebang. Easy.
ChangeCamp: The Ad!
Thanks to Mark McKay for producing this great little ad that explains ChangeCamp. Please pass it on and embed!
ChangeCamp ’09 from Mark McKay on Vimeo.
changecamp – a wonk’s perspective
hi everyone, i’m @dchartier, a self-avowed geek and policy wonk who is extremely excited for our upcoming changecamp. my day job puts me in a place where i’m always considering how the internet is changing society, and how government needs to change with it. for changecamp though i am first and foremost attending as a citizen.
for the record i assure you i know how to capitalize a sentence, however i prefer to write like this when writing outside of my professional capacity. it helps maintain a psychological difference in my mind between the _real_ me vs. the work me. this difference, between the professional me and the personal me, is crucial to my participation in changecamp.
as a professional i cannot attend changecamp without some explicit authorization, anything I said could be taken as the “Official Policy”, and in a democracy the right to create “Official Policy” rests firmly with our elected officials. what we do in the bureaucracy is take this “Official Policy” created by our elected officials and try to make it real. this process is long, hard, and due to the risk adverse nature of large bureaucracies, often very difficult for normal people to understand.
as a citizen i feel i must attend changecamp. i can’t speak as Darren the Analyst, but i can speak as darren the guy who has worked as an analyst. i hope that by being there i can provide some insight about our public institutions from an insiders perspective and how we, as citizens and Canadians, can engage productively with these institutions to make the system better.
that’s what i hope to give, what i hope to take away is a renewed sense of my own civic engagement, and some ideas of where best to apply my own energies into improving our system. in the United States they have Obama, carrying the hope for a solution to the profound set crises in politics, the economy, the environment and culture. in Canada we have our own crises, overlapping and interconnected with what is happening in the USA, but different. the Canadian way isn’t the American way, but we can learn from Obama. i doubt we’ll have our own charismatic leader in the near future to guide us with a steady hand, but that should not stop us, regardless of leadership in a democracy it’s alway’s going to be up to all of us to solve our crises.
that’s what i hope at least, i think we can make it happen. will you join me for changecamp? bring your ideas and an open mind, it’s going to be a great, productive, day. more registration spots open on thursday at 9am, but if you can’t attend in person keep an eye on this site for information on how you can participate.
d_c
[edit: minor grammar fix and formatting snafu]
Welcome to ChangeCamp!
This is a blog by and for the ChangeCamp community. We are citizens, technologists, designers, academics, policy wonks, political players, issue groups, and government employees who are curious about the potential for the technologies of the social web and the methods of citizen participation to re-imagine the relationship between citizens and government.
