Notes from Personal Democracy Forum

Posted by Jennifer Bell on 2009-07-02 12:06:34

Top Stories

  • Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York City, announced a BigApps contest for applications based on open NYC data.
  • Vivek Kundra, US CIO, unveiled a dashboard showing metrics for US federal IT expenditures, including per-contract timelines and performance indicators. While there is no stated plan for this sort of metrics-based interface for the rest of US government expenditures, it can only be a matter of time.
  • Sunlight Labs launched Transparency Corps, a mechanical-Turk application for breaking up transparency tasks that only humans can do – such as tabulating the over 9000 ways the US govt. refers to Walmart in its contract listings -- into small, bite sized chunks so that anyone can participate.

Favourite Quotes

  • “I have to say I’m feeling pretty good right now.” – Ellen Miller, Sunlight Foundation E.D. after Vivek Kundra’s demo of an IT spending dashboard .
  • “They [the govt.] actually do look at these things when they exist. “ -- Mike Mathieu, FrontSeat founder, talking about how many of the points voted up on ObamaCTO ended up on the president’s implementation list.
  • “Technology brings power to the edges.” – Ellen Miller, Sunlight Foundation
  • “We’ve got to make government by default searchable and linkable.” – Jeff Jarvis
  • Alec Ross speaking to how a Columbian rally organized by four unknown young men on Facebook did more to damage the govt. than 10 years of military action.
  • “Does the average person believe they can have an effect? If not, you don’t have a representative government.” – Tom Crowl, at the ‘Hacking the City’ BOF
  • “You actually don’t need to regulate that much. Create software that makes it cheaper and easier for governments to publish standards compliant data, and agencies will use it. “ -- suggestion from the floor at “Redesigning .gov for Transparency and Participation” panel session
  • “One of our problems is just that we have too much content. Some of our sites have over a million pages, and a team of maybe four people.” -- bracing honesty from Sheila Campbell at USA.gov, the agency that oversees US federal websites, at the “Redesigning .gov for Transparency and Participation” panel session. An EPA webmaster added during Q&A that his organization had over 500,000 pages of hand-coded HTML to manage.
  • “It’s not about ‘embracing technology’, it’s about embracing people.” – Joe Raspers, on why the Obama08 internet campaign was successful.
  • The hoots of applause during Jim Gilliam’s presentation on ‘Imagining White House 2.0’.
  • Esther Dyson somehow ending up with a ‘Hello My Name Is’ Meetup sticker on her back.