By Martina Welke & Bolot Bazarbaev
Re-Vision Labs Fellows

Bolot Bazarbaev

Bolot Bazarbaev, a Humphrey Fellow at the University of Washington and an intern at Re-Vision Labs, has been captivating us for the past ten days with his knowledge and perspective as a revolution unfolded in his homeland of the Kyrgyz Republic.

Since traditional media was slow to react to the Kyrgyz crisis, Twitter was the first place Bolot went for news.  He learned about events as they unfolded by following hash tags like #freekg,  and handles like @kg_news, @Baisalov, @Otunbayeva.  Even when the Internet was temporarily shut down within Kyrgyzstan, citizens could still access Twitter from their mobile phones and continued to share information.  Websites like diesel.elcat.kg also played a crucial role in sharing information and helping to dispel false rumors.

The strategy leading up to the overthrow of Kurmanbek Bakiyev’s administration was so well-coordinated, primarily via social media, that even when the leaders of the opposition movement were jailed, the movement continued successfully.  As our colleague Brett Horvath astutely observed, “As soon as [Bakiyev] lost control of the information, he lost control.” (Last night Brett spoke on the subject at the TEDx Mission in San Francisco, which you can view here)

Now the Kyrgyz interim government has a unique opportunity to start with a “blank slate” unencumbered by previous bureaucratic systems.  It could become the exemplar of open government: transparent and collaborative with high level civic engagement.  Or it could be a cruel repeat of history, and fall back on the same systems that brought the demise of the previous administration, which came into being after a similar revolution only five years ago. 

Krygyz President's desk, Before (2005) & After (2010).

At a  press conference in Bishkek on Thursday, Robert O. Blake, Jr.,  the Assistant Secretary, Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs announced that the United States was committed to assisting in the development of open Kyrgyz governance:

The United States believes that the provisional government and the people of Kyrgyzstan have a unique and historic opportunity to create a democracy that could be a model for Central Asia and the wider region.

In all my meetings I emphasized the importance of the provisional government working transparently and in an inclusive manner with Kyrgyz civil society to ensure the provisional government has the benefit of the views and advice of the Kyrgyz people as Kyrgyzstan moves through this important transition. I look forward to meeting with members of Kyrgyz civil society later today.

At this crucial moment in history, the Kyrgyz Republic could leapfrog into a new kind of democracy by building itself around an open information platform, and help usher Central Asia- and the rest of the globe- into an era of open governance.

Before & After photo from Elena Skochilo.

By Nick Spang
Senior Associate & RVL Fellow

In many respects, Australia is the world leader in creating a democracy that is the most representative of its people. That’s because it is lowering the barriers to entry for citizen participation in large-scale civic planning processes.

In contemporary democracies across the globe, the system for public engagement assumes that citizen participation in civic process is based on people’s satisfaction with their living situations.  Barriers to participation, therefore, serve as a way to moderate input from citizens based on how much they care.

In other words, the harder it is to give input, the more likely it is that input primarily comes from people with extreme views.

Public meetings on proposed projects, laws, or regulations are generally either boring- because no one shows up and the speakers can’t orate- or they are tense- because angry people are using heated rhetoric to make their points.

The other way to give input is to write a letter or send an email, essentially in a vacuum of information. If citizens want more information they have to download a large report, request a paper copy, or go online in search of commentary.  The end result is that high quality public comments are minimal for most public engagement processes because they are a pain to deal with.

While most government agencies try to keep public input to a reasonable minimum- because interacting with lots of the public is expensive and time consuming- municipal governments in Australia are taking another approach: actively trying to get as much high quality public input as possible.  Enter Future Melbourne.

Future Melbourne is a Wikipedia-style platform that supports an online community of citizens that are concerned about Melbourne’s long-term plan for the future.

The stated goals of Future Melbourne are:
•    Engage citizens in creating a vision for the future, setting priorities and contributing to decision-making.
•    Value and utilize local networks.
•    Focus on people and place that requires a more flexible and joined-up approach to policy and service delivery.
•    Connect the top-down and bottom-up policy processes that influence resource allocation.

Future Melbourne is designed to replace the current City Plan 2010. It sets out six high level Goals for the city, then Pathways that lead to achieving these Goals. Under each Pathway, there are a range of Outcomes to be achieved over the decade to 2020.

1.    People
2.    Creative
3.    Prosperous
4.    Knowledge
5.    Ecocity
6.    Connected

Based on input from the public, the plan envisages Melbourne to be a bold, inspirational and sustainable global city and one of the top ten most livable and sustainable cities in the world.

But Future Melbourne is not without issues.

For example, many people in Melbourne have never heard of Future Melbourne, and participation rates are not stellar.  Once on the webpage it is unclear how to participate or how the information generated will actually get used. The web design generally lacks an interactive look and feel, and is not as inviting as it could be.

Criticisms aside, Future Melbourne is a bold step in the right direction. It’s hard for a government agency to be on the cutting edge of social media and Melbourne is the first city to take on such an effort.  The real difficulty is not that the tech is lacking or budgets are tight, but that the pace of IT innovation is so much faster than government agencies and citizens can keep up with.

For a citizen, having constantly changing modes of providing input can be very confusing and off-putting. For agencies, investing in something that doesn’t work is an embarrassment at best and considered waste, fraud, and abuse at worst.

Another way to think about it is by looking at how many consumers avoid buying the first generation of new gadgets because they are generally more expensive and don’t work as well as later generations.  Similarly, most agency decision makers are looking for the sweet spot where they can invest in something that is innovative and also refined.

Therefore, having chosen the Wikipedia-style approach makes sense, because that is a proven concept for crowdsourcing based on the success of Wikipedia itself.  I hope that soon we will see other government agencies following suit, and using best practices for communications and data display, as well as the new set of proven crowdsourcing techniques for ranked voting, content analysis, and comment moderation.

Until that time, we will be following in Australia’s footsteps.

Wheel and Skyline, Melbourne photo by stephenk1977 on Flickr.

A couple weeks after helping to host the first OpenGovWest conference in Seattle, Re-Vision Labs members Brett Horvath, Nick Spang, and Daniela Vasquez discuss the Gov 2.0’s present challenges, opportunities, direction, and why they would be smiling from their municipal office in 2060 if all goes as hoped.

Q: WHAT CHALLENGES DO YOU SEE IN THE GOVERNMENT 2.0 MOVEMENT IN 2010?

Full Responses to Opportunities and Challenges MP3

Brett Horvath at OpenGovWest conference. Photo by Lawrence Leung: curiousangle.com.

BRETT:  The biggest challenge right now is that the open government movement is not a social movement; it’s a movement of technocrats and innovators, and therefore the conversations are really limited in scope.

NICK: I think the challenges are mainly twofold:  One is from the citizen’s side.  It’s hard to get citizens engaged and to invest the time that it takes to learn about issues and then share their thoughts.  People are too distracted.  There’s a lot of ways to occupy your time, and spending it getting involved in policy is a huge investment that I don’t think a lot of people are willing to make right now.

The other challenge is administrative.  The changes that are coming about with the IT revolution are requiring a complete re-thinking about how you share information with constituents and retrieve it from them, and those changes are meeting a lot of resistance from people who don’t want to spend the time taking the risks to try out new systems and learn new things.

DANIELA: One, leadership, and two, engaging the citizens.  You can have a very committed leader and it’s going well, but elections change the leader and you have to start again.  It is very difficult to trigger the movement of the citizens.  How do we create a way that is really meaningful for them?  The government tries to use push technology – it needs to engage people and really listen to what they’re saying.

BRETT: The problem is most governments are run like loose confederations of org charts.  Each one of those departments fights for their budgets.  The informational revolution has not treated institutions well.  So many of those departments get their validity– their reason for being– by controlling information.  And there’s an INVERSE relationship between freedom of information, and command and control hierarchies.  The more free that information is, the less control that institution has.  And the first thing the institution does is fight for its own survival.

You get this really weird dynamic where people working in government who have really innovating instincts… well, the system is actually working against them.  And that’s a major problem.

DANIELA: Because you need people with vision and courage.

Q: WHAT OPPORTUNITIES DO YOU SEE IN THE GOVERNMENT 2.0 MOVEMENT IN 2010?

Daniela Vasquez on Open Gov Policy panel. Photo by Lawrence Leung: curiousangle.com.

BRETT: The Gov 2.0 movement is about to get very Darwinian. Unlike the federal government who can print new money, state and city governments are

revenue-based businesses.  People in department of commerce and economic development are hungry, and they will do anything to cultivate economic growth and the Gov 2.0 movement will be the core driver of it.   The last 30 years it has been a regulatory race to the bottom. Where you see states in the south making it easier to pollute so businesses will come, the opposite will happen.  It’s going to be “what are the government structures and regulatory frameworks really cultivate econ growth in the 21^st century?”

NICK: This is indicative of a sea change that’s occurring within our govt slowly around IT.  In the old system, we elected “wise” people to make decisions for us.  The government’s responsibility was to collect all of the pertinent information and then to be the wizened decision maker and come up with the right solution that represents everyone.  If they didn’t come up with the right solution they wouldn’t get re-elected.  And that’s the concept of government as “Solution Provider.”  And that’s why under the traditional system the government has a monopoly on all the information, and operates under the idea that the more you let citizens get involved the more it just slows down the process of the wise public servant coming to their conclusion.  I think we still operate very much under that paradigm.

But in the new paradigm, these people become BROKERS of the information coming from the citizens.  The citizens are given equal access to information and are able to understand that information for themselves and respond to it with their thoughts, opinions and values, and deliver those to the decision-maker who has to weigh and balance and create a transparent solution that meets the needs of the people, as opposed to the traditional way where input from the people is just a distraction to the wizened public servant making their decision.

Q: CAN YOU CLARIFY THE CONNECTION BETWEEN OPEN GOVERNMENT, CITIZEN PARTICIPATION, AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT?

NICK: Part of the connection is in this concept of an Innovation Ecosystem where you can create a whole body – a whole platform – where decision-makers, citizens, and businesses go through processes much more quickly than traditionally.  A lot of time the bottleneck is around information.  The business needs to get the information to the agency, the agency to the public, the public to the agency, and etc. If you make all of that information flow instantly to all parties, and you don’t need these stepwise processes, I think you can quadruple the speed by which you can make equally informed decision.

BRETT: To piggyback on that, data is a stagnant concept in people’s minds.  But data is not linear.  You think of data, you think of 1s and 0s, charts, spreadsheets.  Data is more expansive and non-linear in the way that once it gets out there and it’s put in the right format, it spreads through different mediums, it gets re-purposed, re-packaged.  And government may put out one open source piece of prime data that might completely change the dynamics at the other end– in whether a business wants to locate there, how a neighborhood thinks about itself and engages in problem solving, and so forth.  Getting data out there effects citizen engagement and economic development. Governments have thought that the data is theirs – they own it, they control it – and it’s not.  It’s the people’s data.  And it’s the government’s moral obligation to make that data useful and available in real time.  And if it doesn’t, then it’s going to hold itself back, it’s going to make it harder to activate citizens, for business to interact with the government.

DANIELA: Open information and collaboration help to ensure governments don’t duplicate so many things, which is inefficient and ultimately hinders progress, economic or otherwise.

NICK: Right.  For example, millions of dollars get spent every year on administrative disputes and lawsuits between agencies and agencies and citizens.  In the Forest Service where I worked, the budget was about $1 million a year, but 95% of that was spent on attorney fees because every project proposed ended up getting appealed by citizen groups.  And if the citizen groups ended up winning, under law the Forest Service had to pay all the attorney fees for that battle.

So this command and control structure where controlling information flow might have worked in the past for some projects is clearly failing now and costing taxpayers money and slowing things down drastically.

Q: SO WHERE IS THE GOV 2.0 GOING?

BRETT: The Tea Party Movement is just the beginning.  These people that are not necessarily against abortion or gun rights, they’re just mad at the government.  It is not working for them.  And I think you’re right– when you have trans-national corporations that are as powerful as they are, they’re literally pitting governments against one another and seeing who can get the best deal, and exploiting all over the map.  Usual boundaries aren’t going to be able to confront that and protect citizens.

The other thing I think is that the division between citizens and government is going to start evaporating.  Grover Norquist, one of the titans of the conservative movement over the past 30 years, famously said that, “I want a government so small that I can drown it in the bathtub.”  I want a government so porous that I can’t tell where it ends and the rest of society begins.  And that is where we’re going to be pushing towards.  Obviously there’s always going to be experts, institutions, and things I want to get done that I don’t want to think about.  But you’re going to be living, and swimming, and breathing government all the time.  You already do right now but people just don’t realize it.  That is going to get further extended in some ways that are… well, kind of mind blowing.

NICK: We’re moving away from a system where public servants are expected to be the wise decision-makers who unilaterally make the most long-term balanced decision for everyone, and toward crowd sourcing to citizens.  The whole nation will eventually be deciding what to do with nuclear waste from Hanford.  It’s almost direct-citizen voting.

DANIELA: People will be more involved because the tools will make it more easy to do so.

Nick Spang and Bolot Bazarbaev.

Q: IT’S YEAR 2060 AND YOU’RE SITTING INSIDE YOUR MUNICIPAL OFFICE AND SMILING.  WHY ARE YOU SMILING?

Full Responses to Smiling in 2060 MP3

DANIELA: To know that you have more equity.  Basic needs are met so people can do whatever they are best at doing — to release everyone’s potential, unfettered.

NICK: Because there’s a thriving community of people below.  Sustainable.  People feel they’re part of a cohesive community.  There’s growth.  All of the basic needs are taken care of.  Nobody is hungry, shelter, warmth, clean air and water, feel they can express themselves and have above all the opportunity to express their strengths and abilities.

BRETT: I’m in a bathtub (laugh).  I would be smiling because I would know that if I had to solve a problem in my geography, I could work with anyone on earth, in government and society to solve that problem.    We could share resources and infrastructure, adapt and be flexible,  instead of year 2010 when I had to work with people in the municipal tower with the budget I had and the info I had on spreadsheets.  And CD ROMS.

By Georgina Allen
Global Development Intern

The more deeply I become involved in the global development community, the more I can’t help but think of The Four Stages of Learning.  In psychology, this theory describes the stages through which one passes when learning a new skill.  It goes something like this:

Unconscious incompetence > conscious incompetence > conscious competence > unconscious competence

I have been feeling overwhelmed at the prospect of progressing past the stage of “conscious incompetence” when it comes to learning everything there is to know about global development.  What do I mean by this?  Technology has made information on this topic readily available, inspiring a whole wave of new activists in this community who inevitably become eager to share their own perspective.  Reviewing all of this material online is an impossible task, so finding a strategy to sift through it all is a crucial element of effectively combating global development issues.

In a June 2009 speech in Cairo, Obama stated “There must be a sustained effort to listen to each other; to learn from each other; to respect one another; and to seek common ground.”  While this statement was made in the context of a discussion on U.S.-Arab relations, it seems to have resonated with the global development community.  Last week, USAID launched Global Pulse 2010, a 3-day online discussion marathon for people working in the field of development in an effort to aggregate great ideas from around the world.

Upon its conclusion, the staff of Global Pulse selected “hot ideas.”  Many of these emphasized the importance of building community and communication.  My favorite suggestion was in the “Inspiring a New Generation” forum, where one person advocated for the use of video conference capabilities in classrooms around the world.  Some responded with information on organizations who are already working to make this a reality, such as One Laptop per Child and Global Nomads Group.

In this discussion, other websites working to break down communication barriers and build community were also mentioned.  Panwapa.org offers a space where young children can connect with other children from around the globe based on their interests, for example, soccer.  Children can select from a list of pre-translated messages to send to other members.  On news.meedan.net, links to news articles in English and Arabic can be posted and instantly translated, making alternative perspectives on current events available to those without the necessary language skills.

The World Bank is another organization who has recently taken on the task of strengthening the global development community with their new Urgent Evoke website, which is promoted as “A crash course in saving the world.”  Each week, a “mission” is released to all members.  For example, this week’s mission, which is related to “empowering women,” gives members points for a blog entries summarizing related news stories, personal efforts to empower women and their vision for the future of women’s’ empowerment.  All of this user-generated content is shared on the site, and active members are given priority in contests for mentorships, scholarships and even investment money.

While some of these innovative organizations and websites use community and communication to inspire a sense of responsibility, by aggregating and streamlining information they are also facilitating my quest to learn about effective solutions to global development issues and overcome my “conscious incompetence”.

Photo by Avant Game on Flickr.

By Martina Welke
Communications Fellow

What Motivates You?

At a professional development seminar in a previous life, I was introduced to David McClelland’s Theory of Motivation, which locates the impetus of human action in three basic needs: the need to influence, the need to achieve, and the need to affiliate.  I’m always skeptical of theories that seem to be overly simplistic—particularly when they attempt to taxonomize something as unpredictable and complex as human behavior—but  something about McClelland’s trifecta resonated with me, and I’ve since found it to be useful for reflecting upon my own choices and the actions of those around me.

I recently found myself ruminating on two themes that routinely occupy my mind—microfinance and communities—and realized that the needs trio provides a great framework for discussing some of the exciting community building strategies that two of my favorite microfinance organizations are beginning to employ.  OikocreditUSA and Vittana are both engaging their lenders in a variety of ways that feed our “basic needs” and incorporate us into an interactive, international microfinance community.

Influence:  Both Vittana and Oikocredit share client stories with investors and offer updates on the impact loans have made.

Vittana, which partners with microfinance institutions in Latin America and Asia to offer student loans, provides a biography for each student listed that includes their goals and the projected earning potential the investment in education could facilitate.

Oikocredit’s new Community Hub features a Meet the Entrepreneurs section where investors can read detailed stories about individual clients and browse through profiles of Oikocredit’s partner organizations in order to better understand the influence their loan could have.

Achievement: Both sites have plenty of information to help illustrate collective and individual achievements.  Vittana’s Community Page includes an update summarizing the total amount loaned through the website and the total number of community members.  A summary of individual’s loan history is listed on the each lender profile page.  In the spirit of friendly competition, Vittana organized a March Madness lending contest, during which lenders were encouraged to organize groups and compete with other Vittana groups for the most members and dollars loaned.  The leading groups were highlighted on Twitter and in comunity e-mails to recognize their achievement.

Oikocredit also updates lenders on the total amount loaned and allows lenders to track individual loans.  The site clearly outlines 5 Levels of Engagement for community members, so that those motivated to become increasingly involved in the organization might map their progress.

Affiliation: The opportunities to affiliate with other community members through both on and offline activities are abundant after joining OikocreditUSA or Vittana.  As I alluded to earlier, both websites offer users the chance to create and populate lending groups. The OikocreditUSA hub allows members to create blog posts, share photos, and even video chat with other community members.  Additionally, members can download a toolkit with materials to host a Community Organizer Toolkit that inculdes materials for developing local groups and hosting informational houseparties.

Never underestimate the power of a party.  Over the weekend, I attended a Seattle party that Vittana hosted in partnership with SeaMo to celebrate passing the $100K loan benchmark (which happened in early March) and the great success of their March Madness campaign (they exceed their goal of $50K in loans and fully funded every student listed on the website).  As I mingled among a few familiar and many new faces, I happened to bump into OikocreditUSA’s new Northwest regional comunity organizer.  I chatted about all the great developments on the OikocreditUSA website and the exciting potential for growth.  I toasted to Vittana’s wonderful achievements.  I met other people with an avid interest in microfinance (and even someone who shares my enthusiasm for cupcakes!).  At the end of the night, I left feeling well-fed–in McClelland’s terms–and very motivated to do more.

• ReadWriteWeb “the cloud”
• GovLoop
• Australia G2 Taskforce
• Berkman Center for Internet & Society
• ZDNet
• Open 311
• G2 Radio
• Hinchcliff
• USNowFilm
• Andrea Dimaio

Tweets, innovative discourse and nerdy humor abounded at Seattle City Hall on Friday, where government officials, software developers, educators, and private sector professionals gathered for OpenGovWest. Over 200 conference attendees from the west coast of the United States and Canada, as well as special guests from as far away as Chile, took part in panel discussions, breakout sessions, and a participant-driven “unconference” in order to share knowledge, draft best practices, and set new goals for Gov 2.0: a more transparent, collaborative, and efficient system of governance than ever before.

Day One Conference Highlights:

•    After a welcome from conference convener Sarah Schacht of Knowledge as Power, Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn took the podium to give opening remarks.   McGinn described how social media and online collaboration tools influenced his campaign and ultimately helped make him successful.  He then announced the launch of the Lab for Civic Innovation, a public-private partnership designed to facilitate innovative democratic processes.

•    During a discussion of Open Gov Policy, Skip Newberry, an Economic Development Policy Advisor  to the City of Portland, stressed the need to collaborate across jurisdictions in order to establish best practices.  He also suggested using community oversight to mitigate risk and increase civic ownership in the development of public data tools.  The Assistant Attorney of Everett, WA, Ramsey Ramerman, made an important distinction between “transparent vs. translucent” government; i.e. open data is not just about information, but also developing the tools to allow the public to effectively access that information.

•    Bibliana McHugh of TriMet gave a brief summary of her pioneering work in transit data standards, and pointed out that those standards continue to evolve and improve because of the kinds of discussions that took place at OGW.

•    Minister Ben Stewart of British Columbia summarized the success of Vancouver’s social media campaign during the recent Olympic games and announced an Apps 4 Climate Action Contest.

•    In his keynote address, Andrew Hoppin explained how his team has transformed the New York state senate from “worst to first” in the Gov 2.0 race.  Early in 2009, he prioritized the creation of a truly 2.0 website, the radical expansion of access to public data, and the improvement internal collaboration tools.  Hoppin then dismantled the archaic NY senate system and replaced it with a highly interactive, easy to navigate, extremely transparent model that now serves as an archetype for other governments to build upon.

•    Bill Schrier, Seattle’s Chief Technology Officer, introduced data.seattle.gov and outlined a strategy for advancing open data initiatives in government.  His suggestions included deputizing private organization to help governments keep up, engaging citizens in solutions to common problems such as crime, combating naysayers by using crowdsourcing, and demonstrating strong leadership to encourage widespread participation and comfort.

•    After a series of breakout sessions, the entire group reconvened to report findings and recommendations.  Brett Horvath, Re-Vision Labs founding partner and head of Seattle’s Government 2.0 Task Force, announced a proposal drafted in his session to unite Vancouver, Seattle, Portland and San Francisco— “The West Coast Four”—in an agreement on one data project to develop a crime-based application to share across jurisdictions.

Sarah Schacht addresses over 200 attendees.

We’ll be posting interviews and further coverage of OpenGovWest on The Lab over the next few days.