May 22, 2013
Following the Conversation: Can Silicon Valley Change the World?

Recently, the chattering class has turned it’s attention to Silicon Valley’s efforts to impact the political and civic worlds in which it exists.  As someone who works at a company founded in Silicon Valley, on a team which is working to improve civic discourse, I find the conversation absolutely fascinating.  

I’ve compiled a list of the pieces I find most interesting.  

George Packer has a long story (pay-walled) out this week in the New Yorker about Silicon Valley and the impact it is (and isn’t) having on the American civic and political discourse.

“The industry’s splendid isolation inspires cognitive dissonance, for it’s an article of faith in Silicon Valley that the technology industry represents something more utopian, and democratic, than mere special-interest groups.”

Catherine Bracy wrote about the issue months ago, and I think she has a better handle on the issues involved.  She explores “the tension between Silicon Valley’s impact on democracy and its utter lack of interest in or understanding of the institutions and systems of government its companies do business in.”

Hamish Mckenzie responded to George Packer in PandoDaily calling his piece “kind of unfair.”

Today, the New York Times printed a piece, Lessons for Silicon Valley from Capitol Hill. 

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February 24, 2013
"Operational excellence is not a sustainable competitive advantage.
In a business context this means it is foolhardy to believe that your company will maintain a superior position vis a vis your competitors, because you are “excellent” (e.g. competent, efficient, smart) at doing what you do. There are a lot of smart people in the world. If you make enough money off being excellent, other smart, competent people will come along and copy what you are doing, and whoops, there goes your advantage."

— Hallie Montoya Tansey: What I learned in my MBA Strategy class, as applied to campaigns. 

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February 8, 2013

(Source: nevver)

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February 8, 2013
"The impact of Everyblock goes far beyond the traffic to the site itself. Everyblock is one of those ideas that bent the world in a new way when it came around. One of those ideas that felt both so obvious and so ingenious simultaneously, that it looked *easy* when it was anything but. Back when it launched in 2008, the idea of arcane civic data being of use to regular citizens didn’t really exist. The idea of geolocation-based information gathering didn’t really exist. The idea of (shudder) “hyperlocal” information at the street-level didn’t really exist. And yet today, five years later, these ideas are commonplace thanks in large part to Everyblock proving that they were possible and vital."

— daniel sinker: We’re all living in an Everyblock world 

(Source: sinker)

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February 3, 2013
Some Thoughts on Investing in Data Infrastructure for Civic Technology

Any civic technology project is made up of two parts. 

  1. The application that surfaces data and contextual information to the user and perhaps allows the user to interact with that data in different ways.
  2. The dataset, often published by the government or sourced through scraping, hand collection and crowdsourcing, which the application queries.

The application piece is important.  It’s the public face of civic technology and already receives quite a bit of attention.    The work of developing healthy data infrastructure, however, can be overlooked, and requires just as much thought and attention.   As a community, we should concentrate on new ways to develop access to the data sets users need, and acknowledge that the costs to government to publish data may require trade offs.

 In order to publish high-quality data, government officials must change the way data is stored, collected and audited—often a costly endeavor.   Public servants have a duty to spend resources only on projects that advance the public interest.   While there is real value in making almost any data set publicly available, and the presumption should always be to publish public data sets, we often depend on the argument “transparency is better” without spending the time and energy to flesh out the case that a particular dataset is worth the cost to the public of publishing it.  

As the cost of publishing data trends towards zero, it will become harder and harder to plausibly argue that the associated costs are higher than the value to the public of an accessible dataset, but for now, we must recognize the trade-offs involved.  Developing sharper arguments will require us to better recognize what data sets will be valuable to users, and build stronger relationships with civil servants, helping them to reduce the costs associated with publishing data.

There’s a lot of excitement in the civic technology community.  2013 promises to bring a flood of investment and attention to this space.  As we work towards building tools that help citizens access government information and access the pathways for influencing their communities, let’s keep in mind the importance of the data infrastructure and ensure we’re being as thoughtful about building interoperable, user-centric datasets as we are about the applications resting on top.

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January 27, 2013
Political Innovation vs. Civic Innovation - Let’s Not Hate on the Campaigns

On Friday, Google, the Knight Foundation and Bloomberg Philanthropies brought together a small group of practitioners, funders and academics to talk and think about the technological lessons from the 2012 cycle and how they can be applied to civic engagement as a whole. I am so grateful to the attendees for their willingness to participate honestly and openly in thoughtful reasoned debate.  
 
Joining us were Democrats and Republicans, journalists and academics, but one of the most interesting ways the attendees divided was between civic technologists and campaign practitioners.  Attendees from the civic space worried about the effect campaign technology has on civic engagement, and at times seemed openly hostile to the methods campaigns have developed to win elections.    
 
However, as pointed out late in the day, campaigns are not tasked with increasing civic engagement— they are tasked with winning.  Campaign operatives have an ethical duty to a candidate and must invest resources to win the race.  It would be wrong for them to focus resources anywhere other than on winning an advantage over the opponent.  
 
I do not share my colleagues worries about the impact political technology is having on participatory dialogue.  I worry instead that structural and resource problems will prevent government from leveraging new technologies as effectively as campaigns have done.  But mostly, I worry that the civic tech space is so wary of political technology that the smartest analysts, strategists, organizers and technologists are being left out of the conversation.  If we are going to build a robust, healthy civic discourse, we need to include these folks in building a solution.   
 
Instead of criticizing political practitioners for failing to achieve full civic engagement, I would like to see the practitioner community engaged around the larger questions.  If Dan Wagner (the Director of Analytics for the Obama campaign) took his next job not at a campaign, but instead at an organization working with Alex Lundry (the Director of Data Science at Romney for President) to build consensus around a policy agenda supported by a large majority of the country, how would they use their skills in data science in support of that objective?  Could you use analytics to bring people together around policy instead of dividing them into the small number of persuadable voters and communicating only with those voters?    
 
How about asking Betsy Hoover and Mat Lira to work together to build communities that tolerate compromise and technology tools that encourage Americans to weigh in on civic discussions but preserve space for our elected representatives to deliberate and explore issues honestly?
 
The political community is full of talented, smart, knowledgeable individuals who care not only about winning campaigns, but also about the common good.  Let’s welcome them to the civic engagement space as full partners.

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January 15, 2013
"

Above all, he embodied what is best and hopeful about the Internet: its endless information, its ethos of sharing, its joy in connecting friends and strangers, its unflinching transparency about its own limitations, its promise — by no means yet delivered — of a world that is more open, more knowledgeable, and, above all, more fair … a world that reflects the values of the Internet at its best.

That is why the Internet is so wracked with sadness. That is why we will never forget Aaron Swartz.

"

— http://edition.cnn.com/2013/01/15/opinion/weinberger-aaron-swartz/index.html

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January 14, 2013

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January 14, 2013
"Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. I think a lot of what people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity. Say yes to everything… Assume nobody else has any idea what they’re doing either..few people really have any idea how to do things right and even fewer are to try new things, so usually if you give your best shot at something you’ll do pretty well."

— Aaron Swartz

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January 13, 2013
Lincoln’s Campaign Plan of 1840

 [c. January, 1840]

1st. Appoint one person in each county as county captain, and take his pledge to perform promptly all the duties assigned him.

Duties of the County Captain

1st. To procure from the poll-books a separate list for each Precinct of all the names of all those persons who voted the Whig ticket in August.

2nd. To appoint one person in each Precinct as Precinct Captain, and, by a personal interview with him, procure his pledge, to perform promptly all the duties assigned him.

3rd. To deliver to each Precinct Captain the list of names as above, belonging to his Precinct; and also a written list of his duties.

Duties of the Precinct Captain.

1st. To divide the list of names delivered him by the county Captain, into Sections of ten who reside most convenient to each other.

2nd. To appoint one person of each Section as Section Captain, and by a personal interview with him, procure his pledge to perform promptly all the duties assigned him.

3rd. To deliver to each Section Captain the list of names belonging to his Section and also a written list of his duties.

Duties of the Section Captain.

1st. To see each man of his Section face to face, and procure his pledge that he will for no consideration (impossibilities excepted) stay from the polls on the first monday in November; and that he will record his vote as early on the day as possible.

2nd. To add to his Section the name of every person in his vicinity who did not vote with us in August, but who will vote with us in the fall, and take the same pledge of him, as from the others.

3rd. To task himself to procure at least such additional names to his Section.

(Source: quod.lib.umich.edu)

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