At this pace, 2010 will be an even better year. This year is a major election year, with the entire House of Representatives and a third of the Senate up for election. In addition, 37 states and two territories will hold gubernatorial elections. This blog hopes to pay close attention to the government 2.0 promises made by candidates. Of course, our coverage will remain nonpartisan and unbiased.

So with an exciting year ahead of us, here are some predictions, in no particular order.

1. More and more state and local governments will embrace government 2.0 technologies. In 2009, we largely saw long-standing stigmas erased at the federal level as agencies continued to effectively integrate social media into their Web presences. Cities such as San Francisco and Washington were leaders at the local level. In 2010, we’ll see these state and local governments expand their presence on Twitter, and turn hard-to-use Web-based GIS systems into user-friendly Google Map mashups. But with budgets facing a crunch at all levels of government — especially at the state level — development will be at a slow pace.


Craig Newmark

2. Government 2.0 will receive more high profile endorsements. Craig Newmark, best known as the founder of Craigslist, is an exuberant government 2.0 supporter. While I don’t anticipate this being the top political issue of our time, more pressure from outside government will bring more attention to the cause.
3. More companies offering government 2.0 products will be on the ground in Washington. In 2008, Google opened their Washington office. Last year, Facebook followed suit. Lobbying for the adaption of government 2.0 across the federal government will lead to results. Will we see Twitter add a D.C. presence this year?
4. Improved outreach to state and local governments will take place. While I don’t expect Google to open a Juneau, Alaska, office and Facebook to open one in Tallahassee, Fla., companies will step up efforts to court these smaller sectors of government. We might see special Web sites created especially for this purpose, and possibly some new hires as well.
5. Any remaining barriers to government 2.0 at the federal level will be removed through the legislative process. While we pretty much saw this happen last year through the rulemaking process, the antiquated laws on the books preventing the adaption government 2.0 will be repealed in Congress. Why not?
6. Open source is open for business in D.C. and at all levels of government. Following the lead of the White House in choosing the Drupal content management system to power their Web site, government Web sites from D.C. and all across the country will recognize the benefits of open source: cheap, easy and fully customizable. Open source is budget-friendly and comes with a large pool of developers. Of course, security is always concern with open source, and could be a barrier to open source CMS deployment throughout government. But if it’s fit for the White House, it’ll probably work elsewhere.
7. “Ghost tweeters” will be unmasked. With more public officials using social media tools than ever before, the public will demand to know who is actually Tweeting, writing the blog posts and updating the Facebook statuses. Throughout government, there’s a mix of authentic tweeters (like Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo.) and people who have ghost tweeters (like President Obama, who publicly acknowledged that he had never tweeted before). Officials should be required to disclose if they’re really the ones tweeting. It’s a form of government accountability.
8. More officials will do the tweeting, blogging and Facebooking themselves. Tacked on to the previous item, constituents will demand to hear directly from their public officials in social media. It does not take long to send a 140-character tweet or a short Facebook update, and it’s very easy to teach people how to do it. Really, I can find little excuse here.

Happy New Year! This blog is back for 2010, and will be celebrating its first birthday at the end of the month. Here’s to a great 2010.

Image of Craig Newmark by Sierra Communications

I would argue that transparency 1.0 is the ability for citizens to see what is going on in their government. In 1966, President Johnson signed the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) into law. In 1994, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., became the first member of Congress to launch a Web site. And just last month, California launched a platform to post statements of economic interest and travel expense claims for heads of state departments.

These are all advancements in transparency 1.0, allowing citizens to understand their government and access information about it. Non-governmental organizations have also played a crucial role, from the 1979 launch of C-SPAN to the launch of opencongress.org in 2007.

But the idea of transparency in government has evolved. This became apparent with a memo issued by President Obama on his second day of office, which instructed the still to-be-named chief technology officer to work with others heads of agencies to develop an Open Government Directive in 120 day’s time.

Within this memo emerged what I would identify as transparency 2.0: the ability for citizens not only to be able to see what’s going on in their government, but their ability to participate and interact with it. The memo said that government should not only be transparent in the traditional sense, but also participatory and collaborative.

“Public engagement enhances the Government’s effectiveness and improves the quality of its decisions,” reads the memo.

NCoC writes, “The way the government operates is only half of the transparency equation and trust in government must be balanced with … participation in government processes.”

Lisa Rosenberg, one of NCoC’s experts from the Sunlight Foundation writing on the topic, said that the goal of transparency should be to “open up discussions, improve the deliberative process, and help our democracy live up to its potential.”

In this era of transparency 2.0, no longer will placing a window between the people and their government suffice. That glass needs to be removed. The people ought to be able to reach inside and fiddle around. Our expectations of transparency in government, which were once limited to observation, have expanded to include participation.

Progress is being made on this end also. Within the last year, citizens had the opportunity to @reply their member of Congress on Twitter, post a video response to his/her YouTube channel, or even ask the President a question in an online town hall. Like before, organizations have also paved the way for transparency, such as publicmarkup.org, where citizens can deliberate about and propose suggestions to specific legislation.

The folks at Government 2.0 camp, which recently convened in Washington, D.C., created this video of their top 10 recommendations for government transparency. In particular, three of their recommendations seize on the spirit of transparency 2.0: the release of open, searchable data, a single portal in which all federal Freedom of Information requests and responses can be made and viewed in real time and the ability for citizens to speak directly with the President (and presumably other elected officials).

In a 2008 Cisco white paper, “Realizing the Potential of the Connected Republic,” the authors wrote, “In a world where sharing information has become vastly easier, public agencies should aim to make as much information as possible available, and then enable citizens to give feedback on this information and to see the feedback of others.”

The report cites an example in London borough of Redbrige, in which more than 3,200 residents participated in an online forum called “You Choose” about capital improvements in the town and different ways to fund them.

The authors note, “The aim of the initiative was not direct democracy, but to open up the council’s budgeting process and enable citizens to engage in a dialogue with the council about what should happen.”

Through relatively new platforms such as Google Moderator (recently used by Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., for example) or an up-and-coming start-up deepdebate.org, government can solicit, channel and use feedback from the public like never before. This is the way forward for transparency 2.0.

Thus, whether it is as simple as leaving room for comments on a government blog (see the Department of Homeland Security’s “Leadership Journal”) or as massive as a national online deliberative discussion about a given issue (soon to come?), transparency 2.0 will be the backbone of a more social government. Citizens who are more empowered to get involved and public officials who are better informed to make decisions are few of the many benefits we have to look forward to.

I had a conversation recently with someone who works in marketing. She’s done work for companies, but she mainly works with regional nonprofit organizations. She told me that one of her most difficult tasks is to convince the nonprofits she works for that they need to advertise. Their attitude, she told me, was “If we have good programs and good services, people will just come. We don’t need to advertise.”

Now without getting too deep into the issues surrounding nonprofits, I think we can definitely draw parallels between them and government in general. Both exist specifically to serve the public’s interest, and both, traditionally, do that through offered services. But how is the public made aware of those services? Does supply create its own demand? I can think of many local nonprofits whose attendance has dropped year over year specifically because they don’t advertise, and more who try to raise money through special events but fail because they don’t advertise those either.

New media addresses this issue by making advertising cheap, easy, and targeted. A really great example of targeted advertising in government is http://www.usajobs.gov/. All it is is a searchable classified ad newspaper section with a specific audience. Easy and accessible. Or, perhaps a state or federal agency is working on something really cool (like sending people into space) and wants to 1. show the public that their money is well spent and 2. build interest in youngsters for specific career paths. Or maybe a state or federal agency is working on something that is really important (like global warming or local conservation efforts) and want to let people know how they can help. Agencies with similar goals should use new media to build awareness and get people involved and excited about the things that they’re working on.

New media can also help aggregate information down from the federal level. State governments and local governments need to publish information relevant to their populace. This means that the federal government needs to get better at making information available (whether that is online or through official government channels makes little difference, though for transparency’s sake online is preferable) and that state governments need to get better at talking to their constituency. Newspapers and local blogs/Web sites also play some role here obviously, but they should not be the only access points to information.

People are starting to get the conversational aspects of new media (Senator McCain did a Twitterview with George Stephanopoulos), which is why I’ve downplayed it here. But government needs to help start those conversations by giving us all something to talk about. New media, in its various forms, is where they need to be.

You need to look at what the government is doing about affordable housing, so you head over to HUD’s cluttered Web site. You’re presented with many links, small type and very few visuals to guide your search.

Unfortunately, this situation is all too common in government Web sites. While more and more Web sites are getting redesigned with the new administration, finding government information on the Web still feels like finding a needle in a haystack.

In recent years, the federal government has sought to fix this. Webcontent.gov has been a great resource for federal Webmasters, with a myriad of laws, regulations, guidelines and suggestions for making the ideal government Web site. Many of these are strict requirements, like Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, which governs accessibility requirements (and is now 11 years old). Others are suggestions by working groups like the Federal Web Managers Council, which in a 2008 white paper also addresses clutter.

But my answer to these problems, which have existed as long as the World Wide Web, is a simple one: Web 2.0 — and a very strong implementation of Web 2.o.

My ambitious suggestion is to create a government-wide social network. Every U.S. citizen would be granted a login, and every secure function currently done on every individual Web site would be done from this single hub. Think of it as OpenID for government, only better.

Citizens will be able to e-file taxes, submit the FAFSA, collect Social Security benefits, and yes, find affordable housing. Each agency would be represented as a module in this social network — and it would be designed with as little clutter as possible.

Social networking features would play key role with this hub. Each agency would have represenatatives online to answer questions. And of course, every citizen would be able to communicate with each other to receive advice, support and just to hello. Forms would be online, and everyone would be able to comment and give tips on filling out each form.

This project would be an unprecedented undertaking. It would cost a lot of money, and face regulatory hurdles from the start. But this all can be addressed.

Creating a centralized system like this is the best way for the government to serve its citizens. It would be designed for people with short attention spans and would be easy to use.

In my mind, this is the only permanent fix to the government’s Web woes. The possiblites are endless.