O’Reilly’s agenda includes nothing less than the complete transformation of government. The internet has unleashed tremendous creativity through Web 2.0 websites, he reasons, so why can’t similar results be organized for government? The argument is presented as a chapter in an edited volume published by O’Reilly Media last may titled Open Government. The chapter, titled “Government as a Platform,” is also available online, and summarizes the argument he’s made in many blog posts and lectures:

Web 2.0 was not a new version of the World Wide Web; it was a renaissance after the dark ages of the dotcom bust, a rediscovery of the power hidden in the original design of the World Wide Web. Similarly, Government 2.0 is not a new kind of government; it is government stripped down to its core, rediscovered and reimagined as if for the first time.

And in that reimagining, this is the idea that becomes clear: government is, at bottom, a mechanism for collective action. We band together, make laws, pay taxes, and build the institutions of government to manage problems that are too large for us individually and whose solution is in our common interest.

Government 2.0, then, is the use of technology—especially the collaborative technologies at the heart of Web 2.0—to better solve collective problems at a city, state, national, and international level.

For too long government has been nothing more than a vending machine, O’Reilly argues, dispensing services to citizens in exchange for taxes. When we didn’t like what it produced, we resorted to shaking the machine — political protest. What we should be doing, O’Reilly argues, is creating a government which enables collective action, and captures the energy and innovation of the marketplace. In short, government should be a “platform of greatness,” coordinating and empowering individuals to serve the public interest.

The concept has caught on in some circles, embraced by groups like New York City’s Open Planning Project, a nonprofit dedicated to open source mapping software, open data, and democratizing the planning process, who included O’Reilly in a recent film about the value of publishing transit data. O’Reilly showed this film during his opening remarks at this year’s Gov 2.0 Summit, which concluded earlier this month. However, the opening began with a sober tone. After the enthusiasm of the first event, achieving Government 2.0 is “harder than it appears,” he conceded. However, O’Reilly said he still believes “Gov 2.0 answers the debate we’ve been having whether government is too big or too small … and creates the possibility of doing less and getting more.”

Indeed, technical innovations are slowly filtering into government. With open standards and the growth of sophisticated free and open-source technology, more and more proprietary and difficult-to-use vendor products are finally feeling healthy competition. Government data has the potential for improving journalism, access to services, and the evaluation of policy.

However, if we are to follow the metaphor to its logical conclusion, to truly reinvent government along different lines, what are the obstacles might we face? How might the lessons of Wikipedia, Facebook, and Youtube be applied to the ancient art of government? Unpacking these reasons may help explain why the path of government reform is a difficult one.

1. What’s a “Platform” Anyway?
In his thoughtful recent article “The Politics of ‘Platforms’” Tarleton Gillespie argues web companies use the word platform in a variety of ways. To regulators, they’re merely neutral platforms not responsible for the views expressed by participants and exempt from regulation. To users, it’s a privildged platform subject to detailed terms of service and censorship of offensive content. To other media companies, they’re lucrative platforms for profit. He concludes, “in other words, [these examples] represent an attempt to establish the very criteria by which these technologies will be judged, built directly into the terms by which we know them.”

In addition, all the private “platforms,” have some kind of internal governance who set the rules for participants. Whether groups of editors on Wikipedia or a corporate board, none institutionlize a type of governance anywhere near the complexity of real government. In fact, most are basically benevolent dictators with CEO’s held accountable by market forces. And if they can establish a monopoly, they’re only restrained by goodwill (such as “don’t be evil”) and any applicable laws. This issue brings us to the second obstacle.

2. The Federalist System
From outside of government, it’s easy to assume government has the power to do whatever it wishes so long as the elected officials agree and can obtain sufficient funds. Not true. Public power is carefully and deliberately divided between a bewildering array of states, agencies, municipalities, districts, quasi-public entities. As an example of this, some of the best ways to curb harmful externalities (like carbon dioxide emissions) are through taxes. In Massachusetts, cities cannot create new taxes without the approval of the state legislature. Period. The federal government often seeks to reform education. The only problem? Schools are run by local school boards. Federal education policy does have a variety of carrots and sticks at its disposal, but only local school districts control every aspect of schooling, or implement radically innovative new programs. This brings us to the next obstacle: who’s in charge.

3. Politicians
It’s easy to think Federal agencies are out there advancing, say, transportation or health and human services, in a general way. To the contrary, they operate under specific legislative guidelines . At the local level, although more policy entrepreneurship is possible, it always occurs under the watchful eye of lawyers and generally subject to legislative intervention. In fact, in theory elected or appointed officials run the whole operation of government. Implementing Government 2.0 therefore must involve the hard work of crafting detailed proposals, lobbying, and promotion used by any interest group. Which leads to the most incorrigible force of resistance of all.

4. We the People
O’Reilly is confident his vision of Government 2.0 transcends ideology. I’m not so sure. Any proposal for how government should operate is inherently ideological. His is no different. It includes a celebration of the market, belief in the power of individual creativity, and a desire to get government out of the business of providing direct services. In these ways it can be said to resemble neoliberalism quite closely, although perhaps with an assumption collective action outside of the market is necessary. This ideology may seem appealing to technologists, but a host of Americans may think otherwise. Leftists may prefer the old vending machine (where we can ensure the quality of public services), and conservatives may want to continue to shrink government. Even if it costs less, they might argue, we shouldn’t be tackling some problems through government at all.

The goal of this post is not to deflate the momentum of Government 2.0 advocates, but temper their enthusiasm with some realism. Publishing open data about transit service does seem somehow new for government. Yet we should never lose sight of what’s happening: a marginal increase in convenience for citizens, and some modest profits for software developers. Organizing a distributed, crowdsourced alternative to the subway? If it were even possible, this would require the cooperation of multiple government agencies, breaking union contracts, re-writing state law, and convincing everyday citizens an alternative to the existing one-agency system is desirable.

The term government 2.0 is a deliberate reference to the term “web 2.0,” coined by publisher Tim O’Reilly to refer to interactive, social websites like Wikipedia and Facebook, which have revolutionized how people use the web. Before delving into the meaning of government 2.0, we should consider government 1.0, the government analogue to web 1.0. Although less common now, the term most often used for this initial approach to technology in government is e-government.

The Center for Technology in Government defined e-government as having three components: e-management, e-services, and e-democracy. The first two have been largely realized. Governments have adopted, to varying degrees of sophistication, internal information technology systems such as networks, databases, and intranets. As we will see, government 2.0 practices often rely on these underlying systems. Governments have long provided e-services to constituents through websites, email, or APIs, including tax payments, service requests, and digital applications and paperwork. The last component, e-democracy, has been more elusive. In the web 1.0 world, this has most often meant emailing elected officials or signing petitions on topics. These activities have grown, although in the U.S. context exist mainly outside of government websites or structures.

At a lecture hosted by the Kennedy School Government 2.0 Professional Interest Council this fall, Nicco Mele suggested we adopt Tim O’Reilly’s web 2.0 principles as a starting point for government 2.0. My essay builds on his interesting lecture.

1. Government as Platform

O’Reilly’s first principle is “the web as platform,” adjusted for our purposes to be “government as platform.” The most obvious examples of this are where government agencies provide data or host competitions to encourage creative ideas that serve the public interest. The “apps” competitions in Washington, D.C. and New York and sponsored by the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, are a start to this trend. In these competitions, government provides the data, and an ecosystem of third party developers and tools helps unleash the value for the public, creating new tools, resources, and analyses.

Another example where government acts as platform is the phenomenon of participatory budgeting, pioneered by cities in Brazil and now has spread to a number of cities around the world. This approach puts budgetary decision-making, or some part of it, directly in the hands of citizens, bypassing existing representative models of decision-making. The technical dimensions of this are only now being explored, and in the Brazilian case above deliberation and voting online complemented conventional public meetings.

When it comes to service delivery, it is less clear what “government as platform” means. It may echo a broader political agenda that has sought to re-define the role of government through systematic privatization of formerly government functions, such as education or public services. After all, when governments provide educational or housing vouchers, aren’t they acting as the intermediary, or a platform? The political implications of shifting government from a service provider role to a facilitating role deserves consideration. This issue is connected to a host of issues surrounding contracting and public private partnerships. Governments may want to retain some types of service delivery if the good cannot be contracted for, or the public wants to enforce certain service standards.

2. Harnessing Collective Intelligence

The second principle is “harnessing collective intelligence.” Obama’s Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government identified collaboration as a policy goal for the federal government. In fact, Obama’s Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government Beth Noveck experimented with collaboration tools to create an open government policy last summer. In other areas there are limited successes of citizen-government collaboration. The Peer to Patent program pools expert opinion to speed the patent process. The Next Stop Design project in Salt Lake City, Utah used crowdsourcing to select the design for new bus shelters. One of the people involved in the project, Daren Brabham, is writing a PhD dissertation on the application of crowdsourcing to public problems. In Melbourne, the consulting firm Collabforge ran a wiki as a component of a conventional planning process to generate the new city plan.

Fundamentally, this trend will face several types of powerful resistance.

First, it can run counter to traditional concepts of representative democracy, where elected officials work “down” through an expert bureaucracy to create and implement policy. Archon Fung has proposed “empowered participation” can be deployed as a governance method for specific issues, such as Chicago’s school committees or neighborhood policing committees. However, creating these structures depends on modifying existing forms of governance. Existing projects have avoided this in several ways. The apps competitions aren’t about creating policy, and the government hosts can always disavow responsibility. Idea-generation contests usually reserve final decisions to designated juries. Policy-creation projects retain the final decision-making power with conventional authorities. However, pushing this further into what Beth Noveck calls “wiki government” will require addressing this tension with existing practices.

Second, a host of public problems require technical expertise to analyze or solve. The question of how to integrate technical forms of knowledge with citizens is far from resolved. The cutting edge involves putting modeling tools in the hands of citizens, who use them as “decision support tools,” but this runs counter to existing models of professional practice and the very real need for significant expertise to complete complex analyses.

Lastly classified data and national security, a major governmental function, may never be opened to the public. Interestingly, Department of Defense has been interested in the collaborative potential of internal communication across their vast bureaucracy through wikis, for example launching a wiki to improve the Army Field Manual.

3. Open Data Standards

The third principle is the use of data standards. Expanding access to government data is a major trend, with initiatives underway at the federal, state, and local level to create data portals. The concept of linked data, emerging out of the Wikipedia project, seems poised to move into government datasets. In fact, greater linking and cross-comparison among the expanding amount of available government data will create a positive pressure to ensure cross-compatibility. Within Massachusetts state government, for example, town-level data has become a standard for comparison and analysis. With the federal government in setting metadata and other standards already, this may happen slowly but some signs are already in place. Using this to evaluate government may be misleading: the primary purpose of government isn’t to create data, although it is an important one. The technological viewpoint threatens to be reductionist, viewing the government as primarily engaged in collecting and hosting data. In reality, most money and effort in government is spent on delivering healthcare, education, national defense, grant programs, and regulatory actions, where data can play a supporting role (perhaps as indicators) but is not even always a mandatory input to governance.

In Boston, the author of a recent major report studying the city’s transit agency said in November he wouldn’t ride the busy Red Line due to serious maintenance issues that threaten to cause a train derailment. At roughly the same time, data enthusiasts were demanding real-time data about bus and train arrivals at the MassDOT developers conference. When our transit systems are in real danger of catastrophic failure, shouldn’t we spend all available funds preventing disaster for the existing riders, rather than inventing technology to make use more convenient? How can these important goals be balanced properly?

4. Customer Service

The last principle discussed by Nicco is customer service, based on O’Reilly’s “rich user experience.” An emphasis on customer services is undeniable at all levels of government. Cities have launched successful 311 systems for managing citizen requests, and governments have been subscribing to the “plain language” movement make government information more understandable and usable to citizens. However, just like “government as platform,” this principle too often reduces government to a consumer-producer relationship where the government provides services just like private firms might in the marketplace. Customer service is important, but so is engaging with citizens to generate ideas and implement solutions. In exchange for expecting service, citizens have the responsibility to understand the resource and legal limitations of government.

5. Incremental Policy

O’Reilly has several additional principles: end of the software release cycle, lightweight programming models, and software above the level of the single device. Of these, I think the principle for government is the advent of more iterative forms of policy making. The field of planning has developed theories of incrementalism or “muddling through,” to reflect the real-world pace of change. The web supports both short bursts of activity but also long-term archiving, and professionals are only now learning how to use the tools to develop sustained interest and engagement through ongoing conversations and communications.

Conclusion

What do we learn from this exercise? First, I’m not sure government 2.0 is yet a new type of government, instead a collection of promising trends. The adoption of new social and technical approaches of idea creation and governance don’t resolving age-old questions about what government should be doing, and how it should approach principles of equity and justice. In fact, what could emerge is a new, technically-enabled model of in the tradition of the “developmental state,” the concept that the state itself is engaged in economic and community development. This is perhaps the most important lesson of these trends: existing government processes should be examined and where they are not working be re-invented to take advantage of the ability of technology to expand the activity of governance beyond the institutions of government.

Inspired by the project, Steve Clift asked “what web feeds should government websites provide?” on the Democracies Online listserv.

Steve suggested:

1. What’s New – Comprehensive feed of all new pages/documents across
the site/agency posted/updated online.
2. Upcoming Public Meetings – Meetings coming up with links to
available meeting documents
3. Press Releases

I added a few more, from the perspective of urban planning more specifically:

- 311 service requests
- Geocoded feed with project proposals at various stages of the development review process (site plan review, zoning variance, etc)
- Feeds specific to the process of creating certain plans or policy documents (feed for comprehensive plan, or downtown revitalization plan, etc)
- Geocoded feeds of recently issued permits, by type (building or construction permits, parade or public space use permits, liquor licenses, etc)
- Real-time data on urban systems such as traffic or transit alerts.

Dan Knauss thought the question itself was off-base: “What is needed is a querying syntax like Apache’s Lucene with output options in a number of different XML schemas. Then you can pull whatever you want from a database in any format that’s provided.” He points to this project in Milwaukee that works off a dataset fed by government email lists, because they don’t offer RSS.

What data feeds do you think the government should publish?

Today, the three individuals charged with creating the Open Government Directive launched the Open Government Initiative to �experiment with mechanisms for effective citizen participation� while developing the government�s policy, dividing the task into three parts: brainstorm (now), discuss (starting June 3) and draft (starting June 15th). The process includes �From the Inbox,� a collection of contributed comments, and �Listening Sessions,� or notes or recordings of meetings. Already in the inbox is collection of interesting documents mostly from established interest groups like GWU National Security Archives, Harvard�s Kennedy School of Government, and AmericaSpeaks.

Also today the White House launched Data.gov, an effort to provide a central repository of government data, and the start of a forum on improving Regulations.gov.

Reviewing the suggestions from the Kennedy School�s Transparency Policy Project, this suggestion (PDF) for an experimental project caught my eye:

The Departments of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Transportation could create a customizable platform to allow cities and towns to quickly deploy web sites that allow residents to report local problems (e.g. broken streetlights, abandoned vehicles, potholes, tunnel and bridge problems) in a geo-coded database and display system with mark up features. Cities and towns could deploy the platform on a voluntary, and perhaps incentivized, basis and integrate it with their 311 (non-emergency) incident reporting systems.

The project idea raises several issues. First, despite the fact the initiative is for the federal government as a whole, this suggest leaps all the way to the hyperlocal level. There seems to be something intrinsic about Internet technology that makes it particularly well suited for local initiatives, perhaps due to some of the factors I discuss here. Second, it raises the issue of to what extent government should attempt to create new technology. There actually already is a website that does more or less what the Harvard folks describe that I�ve been meaning to write about � SeeClickFix. In fact, here�s some potholes, broken streetlights, and other problems already reported on this private website:

Some have argued the government should focus on data sources nearly exclusively, but I�m more of a moderate on the issue. After all, the private sector may not develop technology that suits the unique characteristics of government. Lastly, this local suggestion implies the subtle ways the Obama Administration�s innovation in transparency, participation, and online engagement could trickle down to state and local government.

> White House Open Government Initiative
> Data.gov
> SeeClickFix

Represented at APA:

• Accela – Business process automation, GIS, transactions, permitting.
• CRW – Permitting, code, licensing, GIS
• enerGov Solutions – Process automation, GIS, permitting
• GovPartner – Citizen request management, permitting and planning, facility reservations
• InfoVision Software – Permitting, records and content management
• Infor Public Sector – Permitting, planning, asset management, request management, more
• MSGovern – Permitting, tax and billing, reports, service request management
• Municipal Software – Property information, permitting, inspections, licensing, transactions
• PermitSoft – Permitting, planning, code enforcement, licensing
• Software Consulting Associates – Code enforcement, permitting, property assessment, utility billing, tax collection

Although not at the conference, there are at least a couple others that seem worth mentioning:

• CitizenServe – Permitting, code enforcement, planning, request tracking, business licensing
• Interlocking Software – Permitting, code enforcement, business licensing, animal licensing

I have previously mentioned these:

• Adobe LiveCycle – Document management, form management
• Limehouse Software – Plan creation and consultation, some mapping and CMS functionality
• Microsoft Citizen Service Platform – CMS, request management, GIS, intranet
• Village Manager – Free property, people, and business database

In addition to the lack of good reviews of all of these tools, I have a couple additional observations. First, I am struck by the wide range of functionality. Although the vendors have tried to package their products in logical ways, clearly almost all are customized to the unique functions of local governments, which vary widely according to local law and practice. Second, although many claim to function as permit tracking systems, for all except LimeHouse Software the public participation and engagement is a secondary function, if they support it at all. As I have written previously, part of the reason this type of software has been slow to mature is that they must meet the unique needs of governments different from the private sector, among them transparency and civic collaboration. I think there remains a need for sophisticated software designed exclusively for civic engagement and collaboration in planning, ideally linked to administrative databases.

I should note that as part of a larger report on best practices in expedited permitting, the State of Massachusetts compiled a document on “Automated Permit Tracking Software: A Guide for Massachusetts Municipalities” (PDF), if readers are familiar with similar resources they are invited to post them below.

Best Practices in Local Government

An employee of an independent government agency, the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, I took particular interest in the representatives from local governments. Representing the City of Toronto’s Public Consultation Unit were Mike Logan and Robert Davis. Their unit has evolved since its creation in the late 1980s into the city government’s go-to resource for public involvement. I think this is a model that could be replicated elsewhere: one office maintains the expertise about all the approaches to involve the public, and works with the project sponsors to create and implement an appropriate and resource-efficient approaches. It also creates one central place at the city for citizens to approach with questions. They presented on some of their work to use Facebook to reach communities (it required special permission from the IT department), and discussed the unusual challenge of working in Toronto’s highly multicultural environment, which requires extensive translation. Public consultation coordinator Mike Logan even handed me a business card with the information imprinted in braille on it, which itself was a statement to their commitment to excellence in accessibility.

Another particularly noteworthy presenter was Mark Elliott, whose consulting firm Collabforge set up a wiki for a recent planning process in the City of Melbourne, Australia. As you might expect from someone who earned a PhD with a dissertation on “A Theoretical Framework for Mass Collaboration,” Mark impressed me with his thoughtful approach to integrating collaborative technologies to planning. In general I think advocates of wikis underestimate the technical complexity of the technology, as well as the limitations to a radically flattening technology. Mark’s work on FutureMelbourne was apparently successful and he’s definitely someone to watch.

Also attending was Seattle’s Chief Technology Officer, Bill Schrier, who blogs about technology and government at his blog Chief Seattle Geek. Mark Bosworth, a GIS expert from Portland, Oregon’s regional planning agency Metro gave a whimsical presentation on the history of GIS and highlighting some of their many customized web applications including a bicycle trip planner (of course), and a “build your own” transit system tool.

Private Sector Innovation

Several consultants attended, presenting on a wide range of topics. Edward Andersson, from the UK consulting firm Involve, gave a thoughtful presentation on the history of participation in the UK and their firm’s approach. The company’s website PeopleandParticipation.net is a rich resource on the topic. Rhiza Lab’s Josh Knauer and Jeff Christensen presented on their firm’s powerful online data and mapping tools. It was a wonder they made it since Josh explained they’ve been working nearly around the clock on their FluTracker website. Lastly Jocelyn Hittle and Jason Lally from PlaceMatters displayed some amazing touch and light-sensitive technology made using two Wii remotes and a lot of ingenuity.

View from the Academy

The academic speakers provided interesting perspective and a glimpse of their latest research. Ohio State’s Jennifer Evans Cowley presented on her research analyzing the use of social networking in urban planning, and has even created a Facebook group dedicated to the topic. Hunter College’s Laxmi Ramasubramanian presented on the theoretical context for public participation, and Iowa State’s Chris Seeger presented on his extensive background in participatory GIS.

Out of the Box

Of course, some of the presenters fit none of these categories. Adrian Holovaty, founder of the totally unique Everyblock.com, presented on his work harnessing the web’s geographic data to create a hyperlocal news source. Although I missed the presentation, Matthew Golas from PlanPhilly.com described that website’s civic mission to foster dialogue on planning in Philadelphia. Also presenting were John Geraci, from DIYCity, a project to imagine a new interactive “DIY” urbanism, and Nick Grossman from the invaluable Open Planning Project, the folks behind Streetsblog. (Aside: We need a Boston Streetsblog) The Sunlight Foundation’s John Wonderlich and Ali Felski are working hard in D.C. to improve government websites and access to data. (My friend Tom Lee is also with their lab).

For much more see the #ccisummit Twitter tag. The sessions were also recorded, and they will be eventually posted to the conference website. Attendees: what did I miss?

I’ll be posting Twitter updates at @rgoodspeed, along with several other users including this official account. Technology consultant @Ryan_Link is involved with a group that set up a recently launched Ning APA Social Network and a conference blog.

It will certainly generate some blog posts over the coming weeks and months on e-government software, federal transportation policy, social indicators, etc, etc. Starting on Wednesday at the City Planning, Civic Engagement, and the Internet Conference at Princeton University, where I will participate in the Thursday night opening discussion.

When I first heard about Baltimore’s CitiStat program, which uses city data to “provide timely, reliable services to Baltimore’s residents,” I envisioned a public sector version of an executive dashboard. The mayor (the program started under Martin O’Malley, it continues under Sheila Dixon) would have data at their fingertips through a computer interface or screen of some type to evaluate the performance of city government, sending directions off to the various city administrators.

I was wrong. The award-winning program is less about technology and more about creating the management approach to directly link timely data to decision makers, and hold administrators responsible for performance. It’s remarkable how little technology it actually involves. According to a Center for American Process briefing “CitiStat uses basic Microsoft Office programs — such as PowerPoint for presentations and Excel to gather data — as well as geographic information system, or GIS, mapping software from ESRI’s ArcView unit, which costs less than $1,000.” The program cost $285,000 to set up and around $400,000 a year to run (mostly salaries), but has estimated to save the city over $350 million since its creation in 1999.

Facing a declining population, limited financial resources, and rampant absenteeism and inefficiency in city government when he took office, former Mayor Martin O’Malley told a conference he didn’t create CitiStat to win awards, but simply “to survive.” Adapting a system called CompStat invented by the New York City Police department, the city create a special office and hearing room (right). Every two weeks, participating city agencies submit data on predetermined metrics, such as days employees were absent or potholes fixed. City analysts write a 8 to 12 page memo for the mayor and cabinet, using the reported data, field research, and interviews of key staff. At the hearing (above) photos, charts, and data illustrating problem areas are displayed and discussed with the agency head responsible. In the program’s parlance, the tenants are:

• Accurate and Timely Intelligence Shared by All
• Rapid Deployment of Resources
• Effective Tactics and Strategies
• Relentless Follow-up and Assessment

The CitiStat model has inspired many similar efforts around the country. O’Malley, since elected governor of Maryland, is busy developing systems for Maryland state government and management of the Chesapeake Bay. And told a conference recently “It’s my belief that the lessons we are learning in Maryland can be applied to any government, at any level, anywhere in the world.”

The copycats are trying to do exactly that, and with varying degrees of success. In the Boston area, the Rappaport Institute sponsored an event in 2003 titled “Bringing CitiStat to Massachusetts,” and some cities to adopt the program most completely since then have been Somerville, Springfield, and Amesbury. The two major limitations of Baltimore’s CitiStat are the lack of any technical infrastructure for internal information management and and the lack of public transparency through the Internet. Technically, the system requires emailing spreadsheets back and forth (there are templates on the website) and the resulting data and meetings are not shared online in a timely way (the most recent agency reports are from October and the all-important analyst memoranda are not posted.)

The cities of Boston and Washington, D.C. are innovating in the areas of performance indicators and data availability, but neither has put the whole package together: CitiStat’s management intensity combined with robust and transparent data architecture.

The Boston About Results (BAR) program compiles quarterly performance measures drawing from a database of electronic records:

BAR collects data on hundreds of performance measures from a wide range of departments in a centralized system that integrates a department’s mission, strategies, measures and resources. The data is used by city officials to identify trends, raise questions and devise new management practices to constantly improve city services.

Absent are any independent city employees scrutinizing the data and conducting investigations, or any description of the management mechanism whereby Mayor Thomas Menino holds anyone accountable for performance. A dry PDF published quarterly means the data is not as timely as Baltimore’s bimonthly review, however does provide an interesting window into city agency performance:

Washington, D.C. has become a leader in publishing data in multiple formats including XML files ready for real-time publishing and analysis by third-party software. The Office of the Chief Technology Officer data portal contains over 274 datasets, which they hope will prove a “catalyst ensuring agencies operate as more responsive, better performing organizations.” In order to encourage the development of creative use of all this data, the OCTO recently wrapped up an “Apps for Democracy” contest for the best mashups that use city data sources. Presumably some of these data sources could be used to evaluate city performance (service requests and police reports are published, but not evaluated for trends) by the city or a third party.

The use of specially defined data metrics to measure government performance is necessary because government cannot readily be measured in the terms used by the private sector: profitability. The systems must be unique because what is measured — the specific services offered and associated performance expectations — are defined by the voters.

One potential pitfall to this management approach is the limits of quantitative data. (That is, if you can avoid the typical pitfalls from this brief) Although the absentee rate and number of potholes fixed can be counted easily enough, a host of government functions are not easily counted. Looking at the city of Boston’s performance data, it struck me one of the agencies missing from the system was the Boston Redevelopment Authority, the planning and urban renewal agency for the city. If it was included, what metrics should be measured? Plans produced? Property values increased? The quality of plans produced? How should the success in coordinating private investment to create quality neighborhoods be evaluated?

Urban development is certainly not the only partly qualitative function of urban government, just one of interest to me. It should be remembered an earlier generation of reformers also sought to make government more efficient, and Robert Moses himself even concocted a scheme to evaluate the performance of city employees early in his career. The danger is that the drive for performance or efficiency can sideline worthy yet difficult to quantify government functions, or create a management framework where normative issues, such as the values informing goal setting itself, remain unexamined.

> Baltimore CitiStat
> D.C. Office of the Chief Technology Officer
> Boston About Results
> Rappaport Institute: “The Seven Big Errors of PerformanceStat”

What city attempted the bold program? Perhaps Portland, OR? Maybe one of the rustbelt strivers like Pittsburgh, PA? Try Belo Horizonte, capital of the state of Minas Gerais in Brazil. The innovative 2007 project is described in detail in a recent working paper by e-democracy researcher Tiago Peixoto, who speculates the case may just be an example of the long-discussed potential for local e-democracy.

The Process
The city administration, in consultation with local elected officials, created four possible public work projects costing roughly $1.2 million each in each of the city’s nine wards. (The projects listed in Portuguese, and a machine English translation) The winners would receive funding from the total pool of $11 million in available funds. The project built upon the city’s grassroots-driven participatory budgeting program, which has allowed citizens to allocate resources through participatory decision-making since 1993. During a 42-day voting period, registered voters could log on and vote for one project in each ward, as well as post comments in an Internet forum. In order to maximize availability of the voting system, the city established 178 voting points around the city, including a mobile unit consisting of a bus with Internet access and carried out an extensive public relations campaign.

Results
After voting closed, 172,938 people had registered votes in the system, 9.98% of the city’s registered voters. (Voter registration is mandatory for adults) The forum received 1,210 posts. Peixoto’s paper compared the average number of votes per capita from each district and the average income per capita, and found there was no relationship between the two. Sadly, the case study does not discuss the nature of the public works projects, the nature of the winners, or evaluate whether the government actually followed through and built them. (The results seem to include parks and sports facilities.)

In one of the most provocative findings, Peixoto claims a minimum of 30% of the votes came from other cities, states, and countries. Assuming it was not caused by security problems, this pattern of remote voting raises interesting questions, namely, should democratic participation require physical presence? In the U.S., many college students retain voting registration in their home towns, traveling home to vote while students or young professionals. Although a majority of the visitors to Rethink College Park were local, we were interested to find many committed readers who lived far away, yet retained personal or emotional attachments to the place, or commuted there occasionally for work or pleasure. Should they have a formal voice in local politics? Are our highly spatially fixed political structures obsolete in a mobile world?

After the successful 2006 experiment described in Peixoto’s paper, the city ran the program again in 2008 (participatory budgeting happens every two years). The openness of this city to creating innovative, democratic processes for urban investment stands in stark contrast to the budgeting process in the U.S., where all to often special interests, politicians, and bureaucrats wage battle in drawn-out power struggles to implement their favored projects. Also interesting is how the online process emerged from a carefully calibrated conventional (offline) participatory budgeting process, which allocates funds according to a detailed 9-step process that provides more resources to neighborhoods with lower quality of life ratings. Although conventional participatory budgeting allocated $43 million in the same year the Internet vote spent $11 million, many more voted online than attended the participatory budgeting meetings. It seems clear the key to the programs success lie not simply in the proper technical design, but the overall program design and history of engagement in the community.

> Belo Horizonte: Orcamento Participativo Digital (E-Participatory Budgeting)
> e-Democracy Centre: e-Participatory Budgeting: e-Democracy from theory to success?

Any presidential initiative that excites both Mother Jones Magazine and the Cato Institute must be unique indeed. Although the Cato bloggers griped that similar transparency is often not applied to budget matters, they should remember that as U.S. Senator, Barack Obama was a driving force behind USASpending.gov, whose sole mission is to let Americans “see where their money goes.”

The new initiative raises many questions — who will process the comments? How will they be recorded for history? How is the transition extending the dialogue to Americans who cannot — or prefer not to — engage with their government on a website? Are there any meetings where the briefs cannot, or will not be posted? These questions aside, the experiment fundamentally transforms the usual input process for government policy by allowing some conversation to occur between individuals. Some of the most exciting technology in this area are new social feedback tools like UserVoice or GetSatisfaction that attempt to create a technical framework for a collective discussion, without the prohibitively high technical barriers to entry (and problematic lack of user restrictions) of wikis.

This type of social feedback software is exactly the type of technology the fuels the other new tool, “Open For Questions” the campaign unveiled today, which “lets you ask the Transition team any questions you have about the issues that are important to you” and also “browse through questions other folks have and check off the ones you think are the most interesting.”

Fundamentally, both of these technologies of are applicable to policy-making at the local level, which unlike for the presidency suffers a lack of participants, and a need for better ways than public meetings to bring people together across time and space. If the Obama Administration can demonstrate their practicality at the national level, perhaps it will serve to debunk skepticism and resistance at over levels of government. What will remain is to extract the technical machinery behind Change.gov and make it available to local governments, overcome the political, cultural, and policy barriers to enhanced transparency and dialogue, and develop the expertise to deploy them in constructive ways.

> Change.Gov – Your Seat at the Table and Open for Questions