A juicy tidbit of info over at the Sunlight Blog and ABC News: Stimulus Bill to go Web 2.0?

They’re planning a Google-like search function to show every program funded by the stimulus package, whether it comes in under or over-budget, whether it is meeting its intended purpose, and how many jobs it is creating.

Sounds interesting! Let's hope they follow through.

A report by the Federal Web Managers Council provides some useful suggestions about how to make government information more useful.

• Putting Citizens First: Transforming Online Government A White Paper Written for the 2008 – 2009 Presidential Transition Team by the Federal Web Managers Council, November 2008.

Among their findings and suggestions:

There are approximately 24,000 U.S. Government websites now online (but no one knows the exact number).

Only a minority of agencies have developed strong web policies and management controls. Some have hundreds of "legacy" websites with outdated or irrelevant content.

We have too much content to categorize, search, and manage effectively, and there is no comprehensive system for removing or archiving old or underused content.

Agencies should be required and funded to conduct regular content reviews, to ensure their online content is accurate, relevant, mission-related, and written in plain language. They should have a process for archiving content that is no longer in frequent use and no longer required on the website.

The report solicits comments, so I wrote the following to one of the co-chairs, Sheila Campbell:

Ms. Campbell,

Thank you for your thoughtful report. I hope these comments help.

Attempts to reauthorize the E-Government Act of 2002 (116 Stat. 2899, Public Law 107–347, Dec. 17 2002) are being held up, apparently because of an amendment that would require federal agencies to conduct privacy impact assessments before using outside contractors to manage personal information.

• Amendment likely to prevent e-gov act reauthorization, By Andrew Noyes, CongressDaily, 12/11/2008.

The bill would also add language to ensure government information is accessible via commercial search engines. (See also: Much Government Information Still Not Searchable on Google, etc.)

Ok, Mr. President...fulfill your technological promises! I am very excited about some of his proposals, especially in regards to government information transparency and access.

Mashable.com posted "A Final Look at Presidential Technology Policy" earlier this week and they had this to say about Obama vs. McCain's plans:

Rather than focusing on anti-trust and and subsidies, as Barack Obama intends to do, what would be better would be focusing on creating an environment where corporate taxes were lowered, and other tax incentives were emphasized for start-ups who focus on better information infrastructure. Senator McCain’s tax plan is moderately favorable towards this theory, though it is likely simply a coincidence convenient to this argument rather than a well thought out technology policy.

When it comes to the basics, both presidential candidates are generally on the right track, and are generally in agreement as well. I’ve outlined above where they differ, though, and I think history has shown that Barack Obama’s desired policy directions would be more detrimental to innovation and growth for the tech sector.

Interesting that they believe Obama's desired policies may be detrimental to technology. I'm not well versed enough on the issues of Broadband/Anti-trust & subsidies to know whether or not I agree. What do you think?

Mashable also has a great blog post on "Government 2.0: The Presidential Transition". I agree with the author's sentiment that the new President must look to the needs of the entire nation, and we need to giver our input too.

...citizens should be engaged in the transition process,...In an increasingly fragmented media and information society, that level of engagement requires more than a press release and newspaper coverage. It means full multimedia engagement using blogging, speeches, informal gatherings, mobile technologies, podcasts, online video, and widgets. The outreach should also use social tools that allow bidirectional conversation, increasing citizen participation and interest in government.

There is a great blog post over at the Center for Democracy & Technology's Policy Beta Blog:

"Innovation, the Open Internet, and the Next President".

It gives an overview of what our new President should do (or not do!) in regards to encouraging innovation and openness of the internet. Some points include:

One of the new president’s first tasks will be to select top officials for executive branch positions. The FCC, the FTC, DoJ, NTIA, and the new Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (created by recently passed legislation) all will have a hand in policies with potentially significant impact on the Internet...

The president also should avoid new copyright policies that fail to protect emerging forms of free expression in the digital realm...

If the next president wants to encourage innovation, preserving the open character of the broadband Internet should be a top priority, right up there with the commonly cited goal of continuing to improve the nation’s broadband infrastructure.

I would also add that our new President needs to support digital preservation technologies and standards, as well as digital authentication of documents online.

Here is another post on a similar vein: "Next President Has 'Open' Opportunity".

The Center for Democracy & Technology also has a page entitled "The Internet in Transition" with a blueprint for keeping the internet open, innovative, and free.

Your opinions are needed! Head on over to USA.gov's Gov Gab Blog and read their latest post on Government and Social Media. They want you to take this survey and let them know what you like in regards to social media (web 2.0) and the government. USA.gov is working on a "strategy to use social media tools to better engage in conversation with the public and to deliver information and services the way you want to get it". So give them feedback and spread the word!

Dr. Mark Drapeau writes a wonderful series of posts on Government 2.0 ("from an insider's perspective") at Mashable.com.

Dr. Drapeau is the 2006-2008 AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow at the Center for Technology and National Security policy of the National Defense University in Washington. He also has his own fun blog and tweets at Twitter under the name "Cheeky_Geeky". How cute is that?

Here is an excerpt from his Mashable Government 2.0 blog post about his attendance at "Government 2.0 and Beyond...Harnessing Collective Intelligence," a conference hosted by the Department of Defense’s Information Resources Management College:

It had all the makings of a public relations boon: High-profile speakers like David Weinberger...corporate sponsorship, media coverage, and a new auditorium to show off. Alvin Toffler, the author of Future Shock, was even there. But what I didn’t see among the people in the room was urgency.

Much lip service was given to welcoming new technologies, openness, information sharing, transparency, and collaboration. But there was no talk of a strategy, a plan, or a roadmap. Frankly, there was no talk of anything concrete in the way of actual progress towards Government 2.0, as the title of the event would lead one to believe. And while I am certain that DOD Deputy CIO David Wennergren was genuine when he spoke about the future of command and control being a more agile system of “focus and converge,” I am also certain that people in my workplace have Dell laptops so old they have time for a power nap during boot up.

...As the event was winding down, I heard a line not unfamiliar to me at this point, about everyone in the room being an “agent of change” that had to help. I became a bit frustrated with this and Tweeted the following:

"I am growing very tired of rooms full of 'agents of change' - Let's CHANGE. I want DOD [Dept. of Defense] MySpace access TODAY. Let's GO. Stop talking. DO IT".

Amen to that!

Over the weekend of Sept 27-28 and on into the following week computers at the House of Representatives were overwhelmed by citizens attempting to reach Congress, email their representatives, and read copies of the proposed Wall Street bailout bill. (See: Scaling house.gov).

An article in Infoworld sheds a little more light on the events of last week, but also leaves a number of questions unanswered.

• House struggles to deal with bailout-related e-mail deluge, By Jaikumar Vijayan, InfoWorld, October 02, 2008

One cause of the overload was people trying to use the embedded "Write Your Representative" program, but there is also some indication that there was a huge spike when the text of the proposed Wall Street bailout bill was posted online Sunday and people were attempting to read the text of the bill.

The descriptions of how user traffic "clogged the servers," and how the House.gov web site was "inaccessible for lengthy periods," and how, in an attempt to deal with the problems, site administrators shut off an email access program, and how, "users were completely locked out of the site by Monday afternoon" are disappointing, but should not really surprise us. In designing its digital e-government interface to the public, the House apparently underestimated potential use of the site and did not invest the resources necessary for high citizen use of the web site.

According to the House Office of the Chief Administrative Officer, the timeline of the bailout bill was so abbreviated that "we had a surge of people who wanted to read it and download it." The same spokesman is quoted as saying that the Write-Your-Representative application "was never meant to handle the enormous load" of messages it began receiving on Sunday.

Surprise! Democracy in action, and Congress was not ready for it.

As late as Wednesday last week, house.gov was "accessible but only after a delay," was "responding slowly overall," and parts were "sluggish or completely unresponsive."

At least the House is trying to fix some of the problems. It is now testing what "appears to be load balancing technology." But is that enough?

This experience reinforces what we at FGI have been saying for a long time: the "problems" with digital government are not technological, they are social, political, and economic. The technical solutions exist, but too often we find that the will is not there to pay for and implement those solutions. It is easier to build systems that scale to the past use of systems than it is to build systems that anticipate growth and new users and new uses. The use of house.gov last week may have been "unprecedented," but it should not have been unanticipated.

Citizens and government information specialists should be asking questions of the government:

• Is the government switching to digital delivery of information to save money or to enhance communications?
• When the switch to digital costs more than staying with paper, will the government fund the costs?
• When experts express the need for more infrastructure to meet growth and new uses, will there be funding, or will Congress wait till systems fail as they did last week?
• Will the government seek to "share the load" by depositing digital government information in the Federal Depository Library System so that users have many choices of where they get and use that information?

See also: The Technical is Political, by Jim Jacobs and Karrie Peterson. Of Significance..., 3(1) 2001, p.25-35. Association of Public Data Users.

Did you know that the first announcement of the discovery of ice on Mars was by NASA on Twitter.com? Did you know that the Joint Forces Command and the Office on Women's Health in the Health and Human Services Department are using twitter to announce speaking engagements and deliver medical news and advice?

Did you know that you can receive Twitter messages on your cell phone, or your instant messaging client, or by e-mail, or via other Web 2.0 applications, such as Facebook?

Welcome to the new world of government communication.

• Psst! Are you Twittering yet?, By Heather B. Hayes, FCW, August 25, 2008.

See also Government Agencies Tweet @ Twitter, and Twitter Fan Wiki USGovernment, and Members of Congress who Twitter.

My previous post got me thinking about how other countries are handling e-Government and comparing it to our situation. Then I started reminiscing about my recent travels to London. While I was there, I paid a visit to the Parliament Bookstore and browsed their shelf of "Daily Parliament Publications". It made me smile to see how similar it was to the GPO Bookstore! So when I returned home, I did some investigating online to see how they handle printing of their official government publications and what e-Government initiatives they are working on.

According to the Brookings Institute study, Great Britain's e-Government status ranks 35 out of 197 which I find hard to believe. I would've ranked them much higher, but then again, I'm not an expert and didn't conduct the study. The study praises their government web portal, Direct Gov, which puts "public services all in one place" according to their logo. Their promotional video cracks me up but it makes some great points! In some ways it's quite similar to USA.gov.

I also enjoy looking at their Parliament homepage and the online Bills and Legislation section. To learn more about Great Britain's progress in e-Government, go to governmentontheweb.org and read the status reports by the National Audit Office. The report states that "The Office of the e-Envoy (OeE) should be more active in monitoring and reporting departments' progress in putting services online, their take-up by the public, and the quality and use made of departments' websites" and "Digital certificates are used by some organisations for authentication but they can be costly and time-consuming for citizens and business to obtain. The OeE should work with IT industry to ease this process". Surprisingly, there is little mention of digital preservation of government information but there is a whole page devoted to the issue at the UK National Archive's site.

Also, the nearest British equivalent to GPO would be the Office of Public Sector Information(formerly known as Her Majesty's Stationary Office) and The Stationary Office Not sure if they have a depository library system like we do though...but they mention that "all local authority funded public libraries are eligible to receive a subsidy on official publications. The subsidy is given to facilitate public access to legislation, Parliamentary and Government materials".

Anyway, I just thought that was interesting and wanted to pass the information along. Do you know of any other countries that have spectacular e-Government initiatives? I want to check out what the German government is doing online...thank goodness Ich spreche Deutsch!

...the U.S. is not the leader in e-Government...at least according to a study released last week by the Brookings Institution. However, we do rank third, but we are "falling behind other countries in broadband access, public-sector innovation and implementation of the latest interactive tools to federal Web sites".

Two other articles I read this morning also got me thinking about where we stand as a nation with digital government information: "Old-school Recordkeeping Meets the Digital Age" and "Government Data and the Invisible Hand". The first article made me feel quite frustrated with our lack of digital preservation progress, especially after reading this quote:

"...lacking a statutory prescription for maintaining electronic records, most agencies print and file [records] as they would paper documents, according to a recent investigation by the Government Accountability Office...Under current regulations, NARA does not require agencies to maintain records in their native formats. So for now, many agencies still print e-mail messages and file the paper versions.Although the filing process is relatively easy, the practice has a major weakness: It eliminates the searchability of digital documents". (Gee, ya think?!)

Envisioning all those emails being printed by government agency employees makes me think of Google's April Fool's joke: the "Google Paper" service!

I hope the next President and his administration will take the issue of e-government and digital preservation/authentication very seriously. Obama and McCain have touched on the issue a bit, including Obama's vague vision of online government transparency:

"I want people to be able to know, today, this issue is going on...Today, President Obama talked about his proposal for $4,000 student college-tuition credits. It’s going to be going to this congressional committee, these are the key leaders in the House and Senate who are going to be deciding on the bill, here are the groups that support it, you should contact your congressman. The more that we can enlist the American people to stay involved, that’s the only way we can move an agenda forward."

The second article touches on this issue as well, and urges the next Presidential administration to "embrace the potential of Internet-enabled government transparency [by reducing] the federal role in presenting important government information to citizens". A profound statement, but read the rest of their argument as stated in the abstract:

"Today, government bodies consider their own websites to be a higher priority than technical infrastructures that open up their data for others to use. We argue that this understanding is a mistake. It would be preferable for government to understand providing reusable data, rather than providing websites, as the core of its online publishing responsibility.

Rather than struggling, as it currently does, to design sites that meet each end-user need, we argue that the executive branch should focus on creating a simple, reliable and publicly accessible infrastructure that exposes the underlying data. Private actors, either nonprofit or commercial, are better suited to deliver government information to citizens and can constantly create and reshape the tools individuals use to find and leverage public data. The best way to ensure that the government allows private parties to compete on equal terms in the provision of government data is to require that federal websites themselves use the same open systems for accessing the underlying data as they make available to the public at large".

This makes sense if you think of it from the context of all the mashups, RSS feeds, and other interactivity with web content that exists. The rest of the article makes some other interesting points and counterarguments, such as

"A government data provider can provide a digital signature alongside each data item. A third party site that presents the data can offer a copy of the signature along with the data, allowing the user to verify the authenticity of the data item, by verifying the digital signature, without needing to visit the government site directly".

Easier said than done? Is the "digital signature" they talk about the same as GPO Digital Authentication?

We are making some progress in e-Government and digital preservation of government information but we need to do better. Like Obama said, we can start by contacting our congressmen to voice our concerns and suggestions for improvement on e-Gov initiatives and digital preservation...because I don't know about you, but I sure don't want the government to use "Google Paper".

The Pew Internet and American Life Project has a new survey Home Broadband Adoption 2008 (PDF, 31 pages) that says "Adoption stalls for low-income Americans even as many broadband users opt for premium services that give them more speed."

NextGov looks at the report in relation to e-government initiatives. (E-Government's Tough Nut, by Allan Holmes, Tech Insider NextGov, July 3, 2008.) Some of the problems for a government wanting to interact with citizens online is that many citizens cannot or will not be able to do so. The articles picks the relevant statistics from the Pew report: the percentage of low-income Americans who have a broadband Internet connection dropped from 28 percent to 25 percent; of those that use the slower dial-up connections, almost two-thirds said they had no desire to change to broadband; 27 percent of Americans have no Internet access, with most of those being either elderly or low-income; only 10 percent of the non-Internet users have any desire to become wired. As Holmes says:

These are the hard-core resisters - and there are millions of them. That means if government wants to move ahead with providing more electronic services - including services that may require faster and more robust connections that broadband provides - a large portion of Americans may just not care. And these resisters are exactly the demographics that government tends to serve.

Nextgov reports that the Bureau of Indian Affairs is free to reconnect itself to the Internet, thanks to a Washington D.C. District Court ruling earlier this month.

Interior allowed to reconnect to Internet, by Gautham Nagesh, Nextgov, May 21, 2008.

District Judge James Robertson granted on May 14 motions filed by [Deparment of the] Interior requesting that the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Office of Hearings and Appeals, the Office of the Special Trustee, and the Office of Historical Trust Accounting be allowed to reconnect their networks to the Internet.

The BIA network was ordered to shut down in 2001 amid accusations of poor data security in the ongoing Cobell v. Kempthorne class action case.

Security questions remain, however.

[Judge] Robertson acknowledged that Interior’s IT security may still be inadequate. “The congressional and inspector general reports indicating that the Interior Department, overall, continues to receive failing grades on its IT report card are troubling, but I have no authority to act in response to them, nor do I have any colorable suggestion that the declarations before me … were made in bad faith,” he wrote.

As of this writing, the BIA site has not been fully restored. According to Interior chief information officer Michael Howell, it is expected to take a couple of months for the BIA to reconnect.

-Brian Provenzale

Recent statistics released by the University of Michigan's American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) show that consumer satisfaction with federal government websites and e-government in general have fallen in the first quarter of 2008 as compared with the final quarter of 2007. The score represents the third quarter of decline in consumer satisfaction in a row and is the lowest level of consumer satisfaction with e-government websites in three years.

There are a couple of possible factors in the decline. Consumers seem to be dissatisfied that government websites are not evolving into more than information dumps. Consumers want to see government websites that allow them to do business online, to take care of required paperwork, and to control their experiences of the website -- which is something that many commercial websites allow, at least on a limited scale. So far, that is not happening with government websites as much as consumers expect.

Another factor: presidential candidates on the campaign trail are mentioning transparency in electronic government and improving citizens' experience of e-government either minimally or not at all. Consumers aren't getting the sense that e-government is a priority, or even a secondary interest, among any of the presidential candidates.

Not sure how many of you already know about this NextGov.com website, but I just found out about it and I think it's only been around for a year. It's a spin off of Government Executive.com and provides "coverage and commentary on the management of information technology in the federal government". I'm also enjoying their Tech Insider blog.

Take a look at NextGov's recently posted news article - "Public satisfaction with e-government lowest since 2005":

"The dip in scores is due to several factors, including uncertainty about the upcoming presidential election and administration transition...rather than reflecting an actual decline in service,...the dip in scores more likely reflects users' rising expectations. For the first time, government has to keep up with the private sector in terms of service levels. They are just not used to moving at the same pace, with the same focus and intensity as the private sector."