Obama might transform the press before he transforms the government

Recently, I wrote about how Obama’s pledge to open up government is likely to empower the new wave of amateur journalists, bloggers and students to actually break news in a way that has been pretty rare until now. Turns out, Obama’s drive to transform government is having an impact on many aspects of the press.

Just today, two posts dropped into my Google Reader feed, from different news sources, but both promising the same thing: Tell us what question you want answered, and we will ask the president. This probably isn’t the first time a news organization has offered to do this, but seeing these two on the same day, in conjunction with all that’s going on, seems like the start of a trend rather than a blip.

On the one hand, this isn’t enough to constitute a leap forward for open government. After all, former press secretaries have openly acknowledged that a press conference is rarely anything more than theater, a carefully choreographed dance between reporter and press secretary. Even with all of Obama’s promises, this has remained true, as Robert Gibbs has proven to be just as adept at avoiding meaningful answers as Bush’s press secretaries were.

Beyond that, it’s also hard to say if reporters will end up asking better questions as a result of this “poll the public” approach. True, there’s something satisfying about hearing someone ask the question you voted for, but I bet it’s not very satisfying hearing Robert Gibbs or President Obama give a non-answer and call on the next reporter (did you really think that Obama would actually give a thoughtful answer to your question about legalizing pot or prosecuting Bush administration officials?). They already dodged answering plenty of direct questions voted to the top of the “Open for Questions” feature.

On the other hand, I do see some real value in this, and I believe Obama sees it too.  If all of his new open government initiatives depend on his administration’s actions, then it can all be washed away with a changing of the guard. Someone with a different attitude towards transparency gets elected, and we are right back to the Bush years. However, if Obama can raise the public’s expectations of journalists, and give journalists the opportunity to provide news reporting of a higher caliber, those changes can’t be undone by a secretive president in the future (at least not as easily).

This is why Obama’s rhetoric on transparency is so important. Even before his new policies take hold, he is changing the public’s expectations, and ultimately, this is the only way to break out of the vicious cycle created by low-quality “journalism”.

The same effect comes into play during change efforts in the business world. Long before new programs and policies have begun, the leadership will take about the exciting culture changes on the way - “empowerment! accountability! teamwork! customer focus!” This is not just a sell tactic, it’s part of creating the culture change. It’s important for two reasons: first, it creates a perception of culture change which eventually transforms into real culture change (fake it till you make it). And second, it creates the expectation for the change among the rank and file of the company, and now the management is locked into to delivering.

Obama is probably going for both of these effects here. He wants credit for creating transparency now, even if there haven’t been substantial changes. And he is creating a demand for transparency, which has created some new trends in journalism that will keep his administration on the hook to deliver.

Transparent government will transform journalism (sorry, newspapers!)

Lately, I’ve been thinking about who is going to use all this wonderful data and information that will become available as Obama’s team works to open the floodgates of transparency and access. Pretty clearly, at least one audience is going to be the bloggers and developers on the web.

Many blogs right now are simply forums to expound on current events. The worst blogs regurgitate the same news that has already been reported a hundred other places; the best blogs add value to the news by providing analysis – sharing their expertise, giving additional context, tying stories together to create a bigger picture, or using raw statistical ability to find insights that others missed.

Then there are the rarest blogs that can actually break news. This might mean having sources like a traditional journalist. It might mean having the tenacity to pursue a story that no one else cared about. It might mean crowd-sourcing an huge mass of work to your audience. But it is a rare blogger that can accomplish any of these things.

That’s about to change.

Eventually, we will reach a day when the transcript of every non-secret meeting is shared online, when every government report is available to the public and reams of data in standardized format are accessible to all. This will be the death blow to the already beleaguered newspaper industry, but it will also be the birth of a new wave of journalism.

I’m not certain that this new journalism will be better or more effective than traditional journalism. But the journalism we have today is not up to the standards of tradition. As budgets get slashed and ad revenue falls, newspapers are cutting their editorial staff and relying on pool services like AP and Reuters for more and more of their content. We’ve seen the trend towards stories which are nothing more than the talking points given to the press. And cable news networks have blurred the line between information and entertainment so thoroughly we needed to create a word for it.

We may be losing the professionals, the people who get paid to do the investigating reporting, but fortunately the solution is just around the corner. The coming wave of transparency and access (and whether Obama makes it happen or not, it’s coming soon) will empower amateurs, bloggers, developers and students to take over the soon-to-be-foreclosed fourth estate.

If you want to read more about this topic, you can get some “future vision” thinking from TechPresident here.

Interaction is a crucial component of involvement

There is no question that Obama has already overhauled the way the White House communicates with the public. The website is far more user-friendly and modern than the website of the Bush White House. Obama's web videos have allowed him to build a relationship with the American people unlike what any President has ever had. And while his commitment to a five-day comment period for legislation got off to a rocky start, they got things working in time for people to comment on the truly critical "DTV Delay Act".

Though Obama's administration has provided plenty of new tools and initiatives to improve transparency, I have been a little disappointed when I consider the actual implications. While I do appreciate the enhanced communication coming from the White House, I certainly don't feel as though the government is interacting with me in a way that is very different from the past.

In years past, I've complained that the federal budget is simply too immense for an average citizen to read through it and understand where our money is really going. Here's what was provided in 2009. This year, I was hoping for something radically different. What we got looks pretty similar to what we had last year: a PDF that is so long that it will deter most people from reading it, summaries of each department (also PDFs), and a series of fact sheets which are sheer boosterism of the President's policies.

Even some of the widely touted improvements are merely new spins (and better packaging) on the way things were done in the past. After all, the Bush budget team also claimed to focus on programs that produced effective results, and also invited the public to give feedback and share ideas. Sure, the new website places much more emphasis on these things, and seems more earnestly committed to the concept, but even with a prettier website, the Obama's invitation for feedback seems just as hazy as Bush's. After all, once you submit your thoughts on a bill, where does it go?

What is the missing ingredient here? I believe that we are missing interactivity. When you communicate with someone you know personally, you typically have round after round of iteration (think of the email chains you've had with friends or project team members). When you communicate with a large, impersonal entity, you usually have one or two rounds of iteration (writing a letter to a company, receiving automated company email updates, or browsing a company website).

Achieving interactivity is an enormous challenge, and even Obama's most impressive transparency initiatives have fallen short on this dimension. Open for Questions was a step in the right direction - you could submit a question, then vote on other's questions, then view question rankings, then the transition team provided an answer to questions - but I still wanted to see more. If the tool had a way to ask tough follow-up questions, this would have given the public a way to interact with the goverment that had never existed before.

The scale of this whole undertaking is what makes the goal of interactivity so tricky. The usual way to manage idea development with a group on this scale is through sub-teams and representation, but this already exists and hasn't been very satisfying. We have Representatives and Senators to represent us along geographic lines, we have lobbies and interest groups to represent us along issue lines, and we have the press to represent us when we have questions. But even the sub-groups that are represented here are so large that an individual probably doesn't feel like the process is interactive.

And why should the government really want to interact with the entire public, anyway? There are hundreds of thousands of people who have made the decision to work in government, or become influential experts in their field, or to lobby government organizations for their issues. If I am just an average citizen, I probably don't have much to offer to the discussion except an uninformed opinion.

Yet all of this work is founded on the premise that simply getting more people involved wil lead to better government (a significant assumption that I'll explore in a future post). Obama's team has taken the first step, and increased the volume of one-way or two-way interactions. The next step is to figure out how to have true multi-way interactions, because that will lead to a connection between people and goverment unlike any we've ever had.

President Obama shows us how hard it is to hold a press conference

This post isn't necessarily about new transparency policies, but watching Obama's press conference tonight, I was reminded that even the old-fashioned forms of government communications are extremely difficult, so maybe we should cut the administration a little slack as they find their footing.

Have you ever been in an argument with someone and accidentally said something a little different from what you meant, only to lose the entire argument due to that tiny slip-up? Now imagine how hard it is if people are asking you questions about challenging, controversial topics, there are millions of people who are watching who will catch any mistake, and the repercussions of a mistake could change the course of history.

You want that job?

You can point to a thousand little pauses and word choices throughout the press conference to see how challenging this job is. One in particular that I noticed was on the question about A-Rod and steroids. He began to make the joke that hearing about A-Rod was one more piece of bad news in a week that already had a lot of bad news - but then mid-sentence, realized that even as a joke, it wouldn't play well to compare bad news about baseball to the losses and pain that people are feeling as a result of the economy. He changed course in mid-sentence, and in the end, said that the news was bad news on top of a lot of bad news...in major league baseball in recent years.

When he finally got off the stage, and I was trying to sift out the key points in my head, all I could think was how relieved he must be to get out of there. I felt my anxiety levels drop when he finished, and I was just watching!

So what have we learned after watching President Obama's first press conference?

• Press conferences are not the venue for complexity. It's just too hard to talk about a truly complex issue in real-time, with cameras rolling and millions of people watching. You can't deviate from your notes because the risk of saying something a little off is just too high.
• The press asks the right questions, but we need a forum to really push on follow-up questions. Obama has the ability to cut off a reporter anytime, and move on to another question if he wants. This is totally fine by me, because I can see that holding a press conference is so damn challenging that he needs to be able to move on when he's done with a subject. But in the bigger picture, we do need a way to push for nuanced answers to hard questions, and to keep pushing until we get a real answer.
• Commitment to transparency or not, even Obama isn't going to answer yes or no questions on the spot. You know what? I wish he would. One of the best moments in the Change.gov "Open for Questions" responses,  was when the now-press-secretary Robert Gibbs gave a one-word answer about "don't ask, don't tell."
• Obama doesn't seem willing to challenge the format, at least for now. Obama could try to make the argument that press conferences are a case of gotcha journalism, and that noone is really looking for answers, they are looking for mistakes. The only way he can have a complex discussion is by first making it ok to make mistakes. Instead, we saw a pretty standard press conference.
• He comes across as pretty stubborn when he gets worked up. It was great to see Obama admit a mistake on the Tom Daschle front this past week. After all, admitting mistakes is a sign of self-awareness and careful thinking. However, I was a little disappointed that today he was unwilling to admit that getting zero republican votes in the House was due to mistakes on his part. Instead, he blamed Republicans, which isn't going to make them any more likely to become "bipartisan".
• He did call on the Huffington Post, which is a good sign for engagement with new media journalism

How much longer can Obama claim "transparency"?

This is getting out of hand.

Slate is running a great article about how Obama has blown a few critical opportunities to demonstrate his dedication to transparency by disclosing troublesome tidbits about some of his nominees. The latest instance, Tom Daschle's back-tax-induced imploding nomination, is truly outrageous as an example of failed transparency.

I have to believe that Obama's team knew about the tax problem before the press did. At the very least, we know that he stood by Daschle even after the information was out. I'm pretty frustrated that Obama decided to play this one close to the chest. I can understand his feeling that political nominees should not have to step down at the first sign of trouble; I also believe that Daschle's nomination probably could have gotten through if he had stuck with it.

But look, when you institute the toughest ethics guidlines the White House has ever had, you can't allow exception after exception in your first few weeks. I was a big proponent of Obama's "it's not about the principle, it's about what works" attitude, but I'm starting to worry that he is so intent on getting the job done that the principles may be left behind.

Back on track with blogging

Thanks for being patient the last few weeks as my blog has been pretty much idle. I've had to focus on my job and it was taking up a lot of my free time. Thank you to many of my readers for sending me tidbits and suggestions for posts; it was great to know that people are following the events in bringing transparency to government (or not).

A lot has happened during the time when I wasn't posting, including the inauguration of our new president, Barack Obama. Here's a quick update on some of what has happened:

• No five-day window for commenting on new laws. (thanks to Eitan for this link) President Obama has signed his first bill into law as president, the Lilly Ledbetter fair pay act. Whatever you think of the law, we should definitely be disappointed that Obama did not handle his first signing in the way he promised. During his campaign, Obama promised to post all non-emergency bills on the White House website for comment from the public before signing them - and this promise is even repeated on the White House website (see the last line of the "Participation" paragraph). Frustratingly, there doesn't seem to be any place on the website where such bills are actually posted! (PolitiFact has the full story here). I understand that they just got the website up and running, so I'm hoping this is a failure of organization, not a change in principle. It will be interesting to see how they handle the potential stimulus legislation.
• A not-so-transparent stimulus proposal. The House has passed a stimulus bill with a price tag of over $800 billion, and Obama is calling for the stimulus to speed through the senate so he can sign it into law. The prospect of this kind of spending has Americans debating the the best way to try to save the rapidly deteriorating economy. Here's the catch - no one seems to know the facts, myself included! The House bill is 647 pages long (and it took a few minutes of google searching to find it), so I think it's safe to say few citizens have read it. The House website doesn't even mention it on the hope page. Neither does the White House! I managed to find a website: http://www.recovery.gov/ which will be used to track the spending, but only after the bill is passed! I will write more about this soon - it's such a critical opportunty for transparency and we just aren't getting it!
• The bizarro White House website. (thanks to Ian for this link) Some people aren't waiting for Obama to lead the way on citizen participation. Jim Gilliam has taken matters into his own hands, and created White House 2. You can check out his introductory video here, and it sounds like a great idea. He tries to solve the problem of swarming an issue by requiring people to force-rank their priorities. You can make medical marijuana your number one issue, but you can't shout louder to get more attention. And you can't have a dozen issues all as your number one, you have to make tradeoffs. The website then summarizes all the input that people have given into a list of national priorities. There's even a tool to show how Americans rate the spending items in the stimulus plan. I wish the real White House site had such great tools!
• White House tech hiccups. Obama's young and web-savvy team arrived in the White House to find it was a little more old school than expected. No facebook, no IM, no myspace and even no WiFi! On top of that, they even had their email services go down for a while. For the big man himself, it appears he will get to keep his BlackBerry (though not a version you could buy for yourself) and may even have a computer on his desk in the oval office.
• Obama launches Organizing for America. I have to admit that I haven't yet had a chance to read up on the details, but this post by Marc Ambinder explains the basics: Obama and his aides have launched a group to encourage Americans to get involved and promote his agenda. They will use email, texts, house parties and all the usual campaign tools to get the job done. I'll give this a full post later, once I know more.
• Restoring science's place in society. More on this later, but it was really amazing to hear Obama talk about this so firmly in his inauguration.
  

OK, I'm sure that I've missed a lot, but hopefully this helps everyone get a little bit caught up on all the exciting developments.

John Mayer: Apparently not the leader of the free world

New York Times has a great article about how Obama is so committed to keeping his Blackberry in office that he's essentially giving the biggest celebrity endorsement in history to Research in Motion, the Canadian company that makes Blackberrys.

The article mentions that while RIM has no relationship or contract with Obama, they have managed to get John Mayer to shill for them. But as NYT perceptively points out, John Mayer is "a popular guitarist but hardly the leader of the free world."

So true.

Open for Questions Round 2: The good, the bad, and army of gay soldiers

Change.gov has wrapped up Round 2 of the Open for Questions feature, and the results are...interesting. There are definitely some issues left to be worked out, and some decisions the transition team is making that lead me to be a little skeptical of their commitment to transparency and openness. Still, there are some great highlights as well. The numbers are way up. Round 1 had roughly 20,000 people casting 1 million votes. Round 2 has blown this away with 100k people casting nearly 5 million votes.

I didn't cover it when it went live, but there were also some changes to the way Google Moderator was used to handle all these questions. This time around, there were many categories of questions like education, national security, economy, and the open-ended "Other issues. And the answer format is different as well; we get to hear our answers directly from Robert Gibbs (soon to be the White House press secretary) in video form, rather than getting boilerplate policy notes like we got in round one.

My favorite moment in the response video is when Gibbs answers a citizen's question "Is the new administration going to get rid of the 'don't ask don't tell' policy?" to which Gibbs gives a wonderfully succinct answer: "Yes". This is a well-handled political move by Obama's team. They've taken a lot of flack in the last few weeks over the decision to invite Rick Warren to speak at the inauguration, due to his anti-gay views, and the decision to answer this question so clearly is definitely an attempt to give something to the gay community.

(Incidentally, Obama is also positioning himself ahead of Bill Clinton with this move. Clinton famously promised the gay community equality in the military, but then compromised to settle on the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy. Many in the gay community felt this was a betrayal of sorts, so Obama is trying to send a strong signal here that he will do one better.)

But it's not all roses and gay soldiers in this round of Open for Questions. There are some definite concerns as well.

Unlike after Round 1, it appears that you can't access the submitted questions in their original format anymore for Round 2. This is a major breach of trust and failure of transparency in the implementation of this tool, so I hope I'm wrong and that someone can provide me with a link to the original submitted questions.

Why is this such a big deal? Because now we can't see the questions that Gibbs didn't answer. We also can't see if the team is truly answering the top-voted questions, or if they are picking and choosing.

This all leads to a slightly depressing take on the feature - it's not really open or transparent, it's just using the web to gather comments from the public to create the illusion of public support for the administration's goals. There were plenty of questions in there that were not so supportive of Obama's goals, but we didn't get to hear the answer to those.

On the one hand, this is fair and reasonable, and we can't expect the transition team to seek out antagonistic questions and highlight them in a video. On the other hand, Obama has talked about moving beyond partisan politics and into a new era of elevated discussion. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday that will require engaging people who disagree with the administration's views and giving them a respectful and persuasive response.

But hey, the economy is crashing, inauguration is less than two weeks away, and the Middle East is dealing with a bit of a conflict. I can understand how Round 2 of Open for Questions might not have been the most important item on the transition team's list this week.

Changing with the Times

If I had to name the single industry with the most urgent need to adapt to the rise of the internet, it's definitely print news. Newspapers in particular have been falling apart across the country, and the decline has only accelerated with the economic downturn. The Chicago Tribune company has filed for bankruptcy, the New York Times company's debt has been downgraded to nearly junk bond ratings, and small papers across the country are cutting back staff and relying more on outsourced content.

This is bad news for them, but good news for everyone looking for cues on what it really means to "innovate or die." The movie and TV industries have been able to stay decently ahead of the internet curve by watching the total disaster that the music industry experienced when they failed to adapt.

Here is a great piece that the New York Times is putting together. It's a multimedia composite piece about debt in America. What really stands out to me is how easy and accessible it feels. They could have taken the lazy way, and simply offered a series of articles, perhaps with links to a few photos spread throughout.

This is a different beast entirely. You can browse through it with no effort and no commitment. You can choose the type of media experience you prefer: photo essays, articles, interactive graphs and of course, videos. This venture into new media tools doesn't mean that the level of journalism has dropped off, either - almost every component of the piece includes new information uncovered by Times reporting. And it's so beautifully tied together, it truly goes far beyond what we could have expected from a newspaper even 2 or 3 years ago.

Now take a look at the website for the House of Representatives, or even the White House. These websites are not too bad, and certainly have come a long way in recent years, but don't invite exploring and interactive discovery the way the New York Times piece does. No question, creating that sort of feature took a lot of work from staff dedicated to improving the online experience. The Times is forced to devote that energy to their online experience because they have no other viable path forward. The government doesn't have that kind of pressure, but perhaps they can learn from watching others, and stay ahead of the curve.

Change.gov's latest "Join the Discussion" has been hijacked by the web

Well that didn't take long.

As I've noted before, one of the big challenges that Obama's web team will face is that once you open up a forum to the broader web community, you give up a great deal of control about your message. In some cases, a small but passionate group will rally and swarm the forum (e.g. Ron Paul supporters during the primaries, or pillow-fighting flash mobs...anytime). In other cases, individuals will bait each other and engage in trolling behavior until the forum has completely lost focus and become a series of personal attacks.

This past week, less than two months after Obama was elected, we got to see exactly these events unfold on Change.gov. The latest installment in the "Join the Discussion" feature was a question posed by transition team member Paul Schmitz: "What social causes and service organizations are you a part of that make a difference in your community?"

It's a great question, and very aligned with Obama's change agenda and efforts to engage a broader community to take action and make our country a better place. But check out the number one response in the discussion forum, which is featured prominently on the page:

Dear Obama Inauguration Team,

Not only has Pastor Rick Warren compared gay relationships to pedophilia and given vocal support to Uganda's criminalization of homosexuality, but he has also had abusive "ex-gay" progams at his church.

As I'm sure you know, the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatrist Association do NOT approve or advocate these "ex-gay" therapies as being gay/homosexual is not a disorder and is an innate orientation.

Therefore, "ex-gay" therapies can definitely be viewed as psychological abuse. There are many ex-"ex-gays" who return to identifying as gay because while they temporarily changed their behavior they never changed their innate feelings and attractions.

They usually report that the "ex-gay" experience caused them severe emotional trauma and some even consider suicide over it. Some spend years and a lot of money in these abusive programs.

Despite what he sometimes says, he is against our very existance. He pretty much said as much when he was in Uganda.

Sincerely,

-Josh

I'm going to try and be careful not to get into the politics here, but regardless of your view on the issue, you probably agree that this topic has become a fairly prominent and controversial one. And now, it has been voted up to the top of the official forum for communication with the transition team. This is not the only issue to get major attention on Change.gov - there have also been many up-voted comments about legalizing marijuana and demanding more transparency from Obama about the Blagojevich scandal (Blagogate? Blagola?).

On the one hand, I'm sure that the transition team, and Paul Schmitz specifically, wish that Americans could stay on topic. On the other hand, maybe they can see this as a fantastic opportunity to demonstrate what openness, inclusiveness and transparency are all about. These are complex issues, and many of the people voicing their opinions are extremely passionate (and likely a bit partisan). But still, they have risen to the top of the heap, according to the rules that the transition team defined for the message boards.

To the transition team's credit, they have not censored or deleted these off-topic messages. But I'd like to see them take it a step further and at least acknowledge that these topics are important to people. Obviously Obama isn't going to change his stance on gays, weed or paying for senate seats just because a lot of people on the internet have voted for the topic, but the team could at least acknowledge the topic and remind Americans to stay focused on the question they asked.

House parties to solve the health care crisis promise to be the lamest parties ever

Just a quick post here, but I noted last month that Obama should continue to use "old-fashioned" tools alongside the new technology, using them to enhance each other. Now I'm glad to see they are doing exactly that, asking people who were involved in the campaign to host house parties to talk about the health care crisis and provide ideas back to the transition team.

I might try to do this, since many of my friends are very passionate about politics and it would be an interesting learning experience to see how involved people actually want to get. If I do, I'll be sure to write about it here!

"Open for Questions" is already the best interface the public has ever had with President, but I want more!

We've got the first round of responses to the new Open for Questions feature on Change.gov, and it looks like we have ourselves a legitimate new tool to interact with the government. I love the idea of being able to ask the government tough questions. At the same time, I already can't wait for this tool to get better, because it has loads of problems right now.

Let's start with the good:

• They answered the top five questions, with no skipping. This is pretty cool, that when they ask us to vote on questions, our vote actually matters! It's also refreshing to see that the top five questions were all nicely worded and free from partisan vitriol. One good sign for the future - they even answered the marijuana question that made it to number one on the list. Obama's answer is pretty safe politically, but it's great that he is directly addressing an issue outside the mainstream if it makes it to the top of the list.
• The answers are not evasive. They are not quite as direct as we might like, but that's understandable. The real trick will be if they can find a way to expand and provide more detail on questions that surely deserve it (the transparency and education questions especially need more space to be answered properly).
• The participation was pretty good! I don't have a point of reference, but 20,000 participants casting over a million votes is a pretty good start. I can't wait to see where this will go when news really gets out about it - and I can't wait to see how they scale the system up.
• As a proof of concept, it looks like the tool is effective. Though many issues still remain, I'm pretty optimistic that this tool will evolve and grow quickly as participation picks up. I stand by my previous post that this tool will be a real game-changer.

And what needs improvement? There are some technical points:

• The system still has the potential to be swarmed. As we saw throughout the primaries, dedicated supporters of a candidate or issue are capable of harnessing their web-wide community to flood polls and social news sites like Digg to reflect their views. Ron Paul supporters were famous for this, but the most entertaining incident is definitely this one. I have mixed feelings about this issue. On the one hand, democracy means letting people have a voice, and if you can assemble a massive crowd that should count for something. On the other hand, a crowd on the internet is different from a crowd in real life, and we need to protect against abuse as the system grows.
• Google Moderator is not really scalable to the levels needed. Due to the issue above, and the fact that people can submit questions about anything at all, it's hard to see how Google Moderator (the tool used for the job - what? you didn't realize Google was involved?) will have a hard time keeping up. Even at this scale, I had a hard time finding if the question I wanted to ask had been posed previously. And though they present random questions for you to vote on, it's hard to see how you can get your question to the top without being one of the first, or using swarm tactics.
• There are some legitimate privacy issues that need to be resolved. Jon Pincus, a social networking technology expert, writes on his blog about the need for better privacy considerations on Open for Questions. I usually think privacy concerns are overblown, but this is a little different. Pincus quotes an email he received that really got me thinking: "Google could (conceivably - and especially for those of us with gmail addresses) use a record of this data to really get involved in people’s personal political predilections." It raises frightening thoughts of McCarthyism or even scarier scenarios involving political imprisonment. Now, I don't think we have to worry about that any time soon, but if the government is able to build a database of all your political views, that is a loss of privacy I get a little worried about.

There are also some improvements I'd like to see that are not technological:

• The answers should come from Obama himself. I've said this before, and I still think it's true. The answers from the staffers definitely open up a new kind of interaction with the office of the President-elect, but nothing would be as powerful as hearing the answers from Obama himself. This could mean that he incorporates answers into his weekly address, or just that the answers written on the website were signed by him. Either way, I hope we get that sort of interaction later.
• We need follow-up questions! What can I say? Give me an inch and I want a mile. This is already pretty exciting, but I want to be able to push back when the answers don't quite satisfy. We should be able to give feedback on the answer, maybe in two dimensions: agree/disagree and complete answer/want to hear more.

It seems to be the way I end every post, but all I can say is that this is exciting stuff, and I can't wait to see what comes next!

Change.gov's "Open for Questions" could be a dream come true

It's too early to judge if this will live up to expectations, but Change.gov has unveiled a potentially game-changing new section called "Open for Questions." It's basically a press conference between the public and the transition team, moderated over an internet message board with a Digg-like voting feature to bring the most popular questions to the top.

I can't even wrap my head around how impressive this could be as a display of open government. There are still plenty of unknowns: will the transition team actually answer these questions in any more depth than a typical press release? Will there be a forum to ask follow-up questions? Will the whole concept be overrun by a partisan mob on the web?

But even with these unknowns, this strikes me as biggest step toward transparent, open government we have see so far. Part of the brilliance is in asking for questions - it takes a little bit of the partisanship out of the submissions, since most everyone wants to hear answers to these questions (even if they have very different ideas about what those answers should be).

It will be interesting to see how quickly they start answering questions, and what format they use. The State Department introduces a similar Q&A idea, where spokesperson Sean McCormack answers questions once a week, live on video, unrehearsed.

I liked that format a lot, but in this case I think it is very important that the answers feel like they are coming directly from Obama. Even if a spokesperson presents the answers, we need to know that they have the full weight of the next President behind them.

The vicious cycle of crappy newspaper movie reviews - and what Obama can learn from it

Roger Ebert wrote a depressing column last week about the wide-spread trend of newspapers laying off their film critics, replacing intelligent movie reviews with more celebrity coverage and teen gossip. Reading this column, I couldn't help but see a reflection of the same problem I've discussed in this space: the vicious cycle between low public standards and the groups that feed those low standards.

Roger Ebert is far from the first person to mourn the passing of the intelligent American consumer of news. Everyone from NPR to the New York Times to the Atlantic and on have blamed everything from cable news networks to the internet to low-quality "news magazines" for the steady downward trend in reading in America. Still others take the stance that none of these are to blame, only the lazy American citizen. After all, who makes the decision to veg out in front of the TV? The media are only providing the content that the public demands, and they can't be blamed if the public demands content devoid of meaning and conveyed at a level suitable for 12-year-olds.

We heard plenty about this during the last campaign cycle, too. We all complained about the inane coverage on the 24-hour cable news networks, but we all watched it anyway. We knew that the hologram gimmick on CNN added nothing to the news coverage, but we talked about it anyway. Sure, plenty of us are relying more and more on the internet for news, but we are kidding ourselves if we think the internet alone is going to raise the level of discourse in the country. Visit any news aggregation site like Digg or reddit, and count the number of intelligent stories against the number of funny pictures and YouTube videos. When I check my Google Reader feed for news, half of the items my friends have shared with me are LOLcats (thanks Ben).

It's not just the news coverage either. Even the candidates themselves, both of whom pledged to elevate the campaign above the petty issues of the past, fell into the same patterns of petty politics and playing to press sound-bites. And many people are quick to remind us that all of this is because the reporters have dropped the ball, forgetting that their job is to investigate and report.

So now we've blamed pretty much everyone. It's no surprise Roger Ebert wanted to get in on the action.

Fundamentally, all of these problems have the same underlying structure, and it's one that occurs across all aspects of society. Essentially, it comes down to this: how do you motivate a group to want what is best for itself?

Behind that question are questions that are also difficult: "what is best for a group?" and "when people have different ideas about what is best for a group, who is right?"

Ultimately, because we have a democracy, these two questions of content are decided in a de facto way, by whoever manages to answer the question of motivation. If we had a dictatorship, we would answer the questions in a different order - first deciding what is right, then deciding how to implement it (and this last question would have a very different answer than the answer in a democracy).

Problems of this type arise not only in communities and governments, but also in businesses. From what I've learned in consulting, acting as a bottom-up democracy is generally the preferred way for a business to initiate organizational change. But even in those cases, the prime movers are usually top management, who then try to rally the workforce and harness their energy and ideas.

This is the tactic that Obama is taking, and it's very different from the blaming and complaining that has pervaded every corner of the media, from consumers to newspapers to film critics. It's easy to blame, but it will take a commitment from top management (in this case, the President) to make a dent in any of these problems.

So if you think that Obama's plan is hopeless, or if you believe that the "new politics" will turn out to be more of the same, then you have a very pessimistic view of the future of American politics. Because if this doesn't work, nothing will.

If the government moderates a message board, isn't that a lot like censorship?

Along with the brand new comments section of Change.gov comes the brand new Comment Policy. The policy itself is completely reasonable, and contains nothing that you wouldn't expect to see in any comment policy for any other website.

But this isn't any other website.

This is the government we're talking about, and I wonder if they don't have a higher standard than other websites for transparent moderation. If they are trying to create a forum for Americans to share their views, but they retain the right to remove some of those views, it raises a concern. I don't suspect that anyone running this project has even the tiniest glimmer of interest in using message board moderation as an excuse to remove dissenting views, but the possibility for this abuse exists.

Change.gov could use a few tricks to assure the community that the message boards are only moderated as truly needed to remove comments that don't adhere to the comments policy. For increased transparency, they could continue to show a line for each removed post, including the name of the original poster and a brief line explaining that it has been removed (many message boards do this currently). They should also make it a policy to email users if one of their posts is removed, which would help reduce frustration in cases when users feel their post is removed unfairly.

Probably the best way to ensure transparency of the moderation will come from the users themselves. If people begin to feel that their posts are removed unfairly, you can bet we will see them submitted to sites like Digg and reddit and run right up to the top, since those communities are quick to pounce on failures of government transparency.

In the end, I'm not too worried about this issue, but it is a concern that is implicitly raised as soon as you start moderating a message board. Furthermore, it might become a bigger issue if we begin to see a lot of flame wars and disrespectful comments and the moderators need to play a larger role to keep the conversation civil. Let's hope we can keep it civil on our own.

Holy crap! Change.gov becomes a big deal

Whoa.

After a few weeks of small changes, Change.gov takes a huge leap forward this week. They have added a "Join the discussion" section and enabled a commenting system to allow citizens to get involved and share their views. You watch a brief video about the importance of fixing health care in the US, and then you can jump right in and give your take.

So far, there are 1531 comments, and the number goes up every time I've gone back to check. And even more amazing, the comments are respectful and thoughtful!

What happens from here? It's hard to say, but there are a lot of good options to explore. Here are a few suggestions:

• Summarize the main streams of discussion. The good news is that they have over 1500 comments. The bad news is that no one is going to read over 1500 comments, and even with the Digg-style rating system, it's hard to get a feel for the full scope of the discussion. The Obama team should identify the main points that people are making and pull together a summary of the most valuable comments on each point (with links of course). You could then start a discussion forum centered around these points, where people could add new comments and provide links to relevant research or references. After all, "solving health care" is far too big a problem to tackle in one piece.
• Post an official response. Let us know our voices have been heard, and then guide us to what comes next. Explain how your team is going to make decisions about what to tackle first, so that we don't feel ignored if some of our pet projects are left out of the plan. Challenge the audience to think more deeply - push back on the "old politics" ways of thinking which are evident in some comments.
• Bring more people into the discussion. It's very exciting to see so many people posting comments on Change.gov, but let's be honest: most people don't even know the website exists. Obama has many tools available to reach more of the American public. He already has millions of phone numbers and email addresses (though there is significant discussion about how he will be able to use these lists as president) and that is just the first step. If he uses Change.gov as an outlet for significant announcements, he can force the press to cover the site and massively raise awareness of the process (the coverage is already beginning now). And of course, as the range of issues widens, so will the audience.
• Ask for expert opinions. This one will be tricky, but it could be a very exciting way to engage Americans in policy. Right now, it seems that Obama's goals are first to make people feel more engaged and possibly as a distant second, to gauge where Americans stand on an issue. But let's be honest: this process is not really about Obama getting help from the public on setting policy. You could argue that this is a good thing, since we'd like to think he's already got a team of pretty damn good experts. Even if Obama doesn't exactly need more expert opinions, he still makes a strong statement by asking for them. He shows the American public that being elite isn't a bad thing, and that it's important to involve smart people on complex decisions.
• Build a fact base together. Many people say that they don't feel entitled to give their opinion on policy because they don't have time to do the research and learn the facts. Other people go to the opposite extreme, and have no qualms about taking a strong stance on a topic without doing the research. Still others want to do the research, but don't know where to find information they trust that is untinged by bias. Obama could address all of these groups by using Change.gov as a place to build a common fact base for issues. He could engage experts (see above) from the American public along with non-expert volunteers to bring together research and facts to help people understand the issues. Though this would certainly be plagued by bias, you could have experts from both sides of an issue offer comments on research to call attention to possible "slanted" results.

I seem to say this at the end of every post, but I'm certain that this is just the very beginning of an exciting national experiment. Let's just keep watching, and keep participating!

I might have to change the name of my blog

As you've probably noticed, my blog seems to have triggered a Terms of Service violation bot and Google has flagged my blog for removal. I have no idea what caused this, and Google doesn't seem very eager to answer. Just because I'm not sure what else to do, I'm trying to rename the blog and see if that changes anything (since the TOS violation started when all I had was a name, so maybe that's the problem). If this gets fixed, it should also let me set up an RSS feed (as many of you have requested).

We'll see if Google decides to unlock my blog, or if they continue to believe that I am robot with a spam blog full of stolen copyright material. Thanks for reading, and thanks for being patient.

Sam

MIT's advice to the Obama Administration on Science Policy

I went to a talk last week put on by MIT Center for International Studies about the future of science policy under the Obama administration. Marc Kastner, Dean of the School of Science, gave the talk and he was supported by Eugene Skolnikoff from the Political Science department. The talk was so-so, but it was followed by one of the best question and answer sessions I've ever seen at a talk like this.

Before I get into the Q&A and my thoughts on that, here's a quick overview of the talk. Kastner made 4 suggestions to the Obama administration, in order from easiest to most difficult:

• Restore the prestige of science in government
• Basic research in energy
• Research at the convergence of life sciences and physical sciences or engineering
• Stabilize funding

He gave some good background on each of these points (I hadn't realized how flat government funds for basic research outside of the NIH have been, see the chart above). But I felt the talk was lacking because it wasn't really advice - it was a wish list. It's important to articulate where you want to get to, but it's even better to think about how to get there.

And how will we get there? Just like any other issue in government, there's the old way of doing things, "Washington business as usual," and then there's the hope of finding a new way which will be more effective, transparent and open to the public. In this case, the two speakers and many of those asking questions recommended calling or writing your representative. This is great, but certainly nothing new, and not massively effective

The speakers also mentioned the importance of groups that lobby on behalf of the sciences. This is a tricky area - of course I want to see the sciences get their due representation and funding, and of course I believe that educating congressional representatives will help them see the importance of funding science research. But the problem is that everyone who lobbies tells themselves exactly this same story; the tobacco lobby has their own story that they truly believe about the importance of educating congress (watch Thank You for Smoking for a great take on this).

One of attendees used his question to make a great point about the importance of organizing at a local level (community organizing didn't become a dirty word after all!). He encouraged students to get a group together and ask their mayor or state representative to come meet with them in person. Clearly, this is a step in the right direction compared to letter writing or old-style lobbying, and it can even be enhanced by social-networking technology to scale up to larger groups than would have been possible 20 years ago.

But all of these approaches are still missing the point of what a new politics will really involve: persuading not just the people in charge, but your peers who disagree with you. Let's face the facts: the government can increase funding for science, or put new focus on basic research, but to for science to regain its former prestige in America will take a cultural change that government cannot achieve, at least not through policy and budget changes.

There's a potentially exciting movement going on right now called Join the Impact which is looking to take this bottom-up approach to changing American attitudes toward homosexuality. As Proposition 8 in California reminded all of us, you can't expect government or the courts to enact a major change if the public doesn't want to see it happen. You will have small victories along the way (and these victories may help persuade the public and become self-reinforcing), but until the public supports a change it won't be sustainable and secure.

Join the Impact has a different goal than most politically-minded action groups: to change the views of those who disagree. This is not just raising awareness, and it's not about demonstrations of support. This is recognizing that the most effective path to political change may begin from the bottom up, and organizing a political action group around that goal.

Is this really so different from what we've seen in the past? After all, we've had Darfur rallies and gay rights awareness groups for years. To be honest, I'm not sure how much of it is a different in the movement, and how much of it is focusing on the right issue at the right time. I'm also not sure if they will have any more success than past efforts.

Nonetheless, the many instances of advances and setbacks at the state level on various issues have convinced me that the advances only last if we can build the change from the bottom up. This means getting more people more involved, and that's where government can help. None of these problems will be solved by government, but if Obama can provide a kick-start (or a kick in the pants) to the public, then we may be able to achieve some pretty spectacular results.

Change.gov "Agenda" content has been modified

A couple days ago I posted about how the Agenda section of Change.gov had been removed, and then reinstated after some outcry on the internet. In my post, I asked where anyone knew if the new content was identical to the original content or not. New York Times covers it here, and clarifies that the current content is different from the original content. It has been updated to remove campaign-style invectives against Bush, and generally toned down to be acceptable to a broad spectrum of Americans.

GM uses technology to be scary - directly to the people!

Just another example of how new technology does not make something more transparent. GM has posted a video on their website and on YouTube, to help you separate "fact and fiction" about the auto crisis. Very helpful, I'm sure.

What does this have to do with open government? It's a perfect example of how wrong this whole experiment could go. What is wrong with the video that GM posted?

• It has an agenda, but doesn't make that explicit. I realize that anyone who watches that video probably can tell that GM has an agenda, the video has the feel of a negative campaign ad. It would be much more powerful if they openly asked for support.
• It tries to scare us! OMG! All of Minnesota and Virginia will be out of a job! An auto industry collapse will lead to a broad military conflict! What will we do?!
  
• It doesn't acknowledge both sides of the argument. This is the difference between building trust and making people feel like they're being taken. By establishing early on that there are two sides to an issue, you have more trust with your audience when you later need to take a stand.
• It doesn't put a person in front of the camera. Again, it's all about building trust. If GM posted a video of their CEO telling us the facts and why we need to act, it would be hard to accuse him of lying outright. In a faceless video like this, it's easy to ignore the claims because we are used to advertising lying to us.
  

Incidentally, the auto industry understood this at one point. Check out this 1984 Chrysler ad, featuring then-CEO Lee Iococca. The CEO puts himself in front of the camera, acknowledges Chrysler's failures, and makes an explicit plea for Americans to give Chrysler another chance. When you watch this video, it might not make you buy American, but it sure makes you feel good about what they are doing.

There was no new technology in that ad; it ran on TV just like any other ad. But it emboddies openness, and builds trust with its audience. Obama's team can learn a lot from the auto industry - they just have to look at the auto industry two decades ago.