eGovernment – Part 1
How (and why) elected and appointed officials are using digital technologies to communicate with the electorate. What does this mean for citizens and public officials? Specifically, how has Washington employed these technologies to enhance citizen deliberation?
- Guest Speaker: Sarah Schacht, Founder, director of Knowledge As Power & Open Gov West, @sarahschacht
- Discussion leader: Gary
Lecture/Discussion
- Sarah Schacht, guest speaker (KAP, @SarahSchacht, @openGovWest, Sarah’s OpenGovList)
- Gary : What Does Engagement Look Like?
* seeclickfix.com
* parkingmobility.com
* civicstack
* VanTrash
* OneBusAway
* Robert Steele - oss.net
Some sample sites:
- data.gov
- thomas.loc.gov
- oasis-open.org (not-for-profit consortium that drives the development, convergence and adoption of open standards for the global information society)
- akomantoso.org (XML : Akoma Ntoso is a set of simple, technology-neutral XML machine-readable descriptions of official documents such as legislation, debate record, minutes, etc. that enable addition of descriptive structure (markup) to the content of parliamentary and legislative documents.)
- govtrack.us (GovTrack.us is a tool by Civic Impulse, LLC to help the public research and track the activities in the U.S. Congress, promoting and innovating government transparency and civic education through novel uses of technology)
- it.USAspending.gov (tracks IT spending and effectiveness across projects and departments)
- track.dc.gov (“track the performance of individual agencies, learn more about agencies Key Performance Indicators, Budget, Spending and News, access agency Data and Connect to the agency”)
- federalregister.gov
- open.georgia.gov
- Open Gov at NASA
- @OpenGov
- OpenGov hackathon winners (Aug 2010)
- Open Gov and Next Generation Democracy (Tim O’Reilly – Nov 15 2010)
- Government As A Platform – Tim O’Reilly (2010) – example of feedback technology
Reading posts:
- Andrea: excellent perspective in being of an age where the Net has always been like air
- Shane: “For most people, government isn’t something to interact with (except around elections) but something to either get something from or give something to.”
Do folks look for political info online? Case study: Social Security Administration
This report shows search terms for the industry 'All Categories', ranked by largest increase for week ending 11/06/2010 compared with week ending 10/30/2010.
From The Myth of Digital Democracy:
[O]vertly political Web sites constitute a much smaller part of the online universe than do news Web sites — only 0.13 percent of nonadult Web traffic, or roughly 1 in 750 site visits… According to Hitwise, political Web sites as a category received 26.2 percent of their traffic directly from search engines in November 2005.
Hitwise Data For Search Engines : November 06, 2010
Post-mortem: Initiative campaign
- Andrea: I-1105
- Betsy – I-1107
- Dan – I-1100
- Gary – I-1082
- Paolo – I- 1098
- Shane – money recap
- Thor – I-1098
Discussion
- Why the difference in FB and Twitter use/followers?
- What does it mean to have no/limited YouTube presence?
- Why campaigns still spend $$$ on TV and direct mail?
- What was the impact of money?
To Do
- Short bios on about page per 2008 class
- Recap election results on top level page of each initiative
- What else would make the site useful to future analysts?
Looking At National Races
- Arkansas Senate : Blanche Lincoln (D) lost to John Boozman (R)
Lincoln: FB likes, 11,024 ; Twitter followers, 1,674 ; YouTube channel views, 9,254, total upload views, 169,953; Flickr
Boozman: FB likes, 12,691; Twitter followers, 1,132 ; YouTube channel views, 3,025, total upload views, 20,453; Flickr - Wisconsin Senate: Russ Feingold (D) lost to Ron Johnson(R)
Feingold: FB likes, 35,200; Twitter followers, 13,337; YouTube channel views, 11,345, total upload views, 343,117; Flickr
Johnson: FB likes, 41,351; Twitter followers, 2,128; YouTube channel views, 19,731, total upload views, 198,952; Flickr
- Incumbents lost renomination in Alaska (write in), Pennsylvania, Utah
For Next Week
- Discussion Leaders: Betsy, Shane
- TheModerateVoice – seeking guest voices
