My concern for California governments in the digital age does not spring from skepticism about their interest or willingness. We are, after all, the home of Silicon Valley—the birthplace of tech start-ups. State agencies and local governments in California have been especially willing to enter the digital age. But then, so was the Obama administration. What keeps going wrong?

President Obama finds the root of the problem in government inefficiency: “Our IT systems—how we purchase technology in the federal government—is cumbersome, complicated, and outdated.”

There is nothing false in the president’s statement. In fact, it very much fits the popular narrative of the problems with governments and technology. Procurement processes are cumbersome; legal requirements (whether imposed by Republicans eager to promote accountability or by Democrats eager to appease their labor union political base) add further inflexibility to bureaucracy.

But the danger with this analysis is seeing the problem purely as a procedural one: streamline a process or two, change a few rules, and voilà! The government is now ready for the digital age. As technology writer Clay Shirky pointed out in Politico: “The biggest problem with HealthCare.gov was not its timeline or budget. The biggest problem was that the site did not work, and the administration decided to launch it anyway. This is not just a hiring problem or a procurement problem. This is a management problem and a cultural problem.” (The italics are mine.)

Technological innovation in government is hindered by a cultural fear of failure combined with the top-down management of bureaucratic administration. Such a culture is not conducive to innovation; as Shirky points out, “A culture that prefers deluding the boss over delivering bad news isn’t well equipped to try new things.” This approach all but guarantees the very failure that management wants to avoid.

HealthCare.gov is just one example of a government’s failed attempt at technological innovation. Californians have witnessed a number of tech disasters: from the DMV’s IT Modernization project and the VoteCal voter database to the expensive new payroll systems for state employees and L.A. Unified School District employees.

Must we throw up our hands and say, “Well that’s just government!”?

I’m optimistic that the culture of government can change. It has in the past. Many of the obstacles to technological innovation in government that exist today were created by a mid-century cultural shift toward a more professional and administrative government; current procedures for bidding and requisitions date to that shift. And efforts to make that bureaucracy fair, transparent, and accountable often hinder innovation, as officials tend to focus on disclosure and following the rules, rather than bending them to accommodate new ideas. California’s Brown Act, with its public reporting and meeting requirements, is an example of just the kind of inflexible reform that discourages smarter government.

To get technology right, governments need to learn to let go and allow the work of preparing a technology project—beta testing, phased rollouts, trial and error— drive timetables and decision-making. A website is only ready when the people building it, and those trying to use it, can show that it’s ready.

When it comes to learning the lessons of HealthCare.gov, my eyes are on local governments in California. In many city governments in California, there has been a cultural shift from a top-down administrative system to a more collaborative approach. Some of the biggest cultural changes have occurred in cities that experienced major failures. After its bankruptcy, the city of Vallejo launched the nation’s first citywide participatory budgeting project to allow local residents to set priorities and make decisions. After corruption and scandal were uncovered in the city of Bell, a new, reform government has engaged residents in all sorts of new ways.

Government officials fear that such reforms will cost them control and increase the risk of runaway projects. These are not baseless fears. There is real risk involved in moving away from a top-down administration to adopt new technologies or involve residents in policy-making. But there is also real risk in refusing to make that cultural shift.

That cultural shift is starting to happen. In a recent survey by the nonprofit civic organization Public Agenda, 85 percent of senior local government officials reported a shift in their views on public engagement since their careers began, with most saying that, over time, they came to value public engagement.

This new openness to input and collaboration—and the move away from command-and-control—are precisely what the digital age requires. It will be easy to identify the governments that don’t change; they’ll be the ones dealing with technological disasters that get compared to HealthCare.gov.

The post Government Bureaucracy’s Fear of Failure Doomed HealthCare.Gov appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

At a recent meeting on Capitol Hill, a young Congressional staffer offered the answer. He said: People think that tweeting or commenting online about the surveillance is actually doing something to hold the surveillance accountable. In other words, we’re confused about the connection between transparency and accountability. We haven’t defined the difference between using this era’s technological tools to shine a light on how government works and using this era’s technological tools to hold the government accountable.

And there’s a big difference. Young, tech-savvy people who care about Internet issues love to have hackathons and develop apps and produce investigative data visualizations in the name of transparency, but none of these fashionable things are a substitute for actual governing. And actual governing is hard to find these days. Witness Congress’ failure to pass a budget, the sequester cuts, hostage-taking tactics in the Senate, threats of government shutdown.

Whatever you think of him, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has done the service of stopping us and focusing on this point. We now know about the government surveillance, thanks to the transparency he forced upon the government. But what on Earth can we do to make sure the surveillance doesn’t violate the law and people’s rights?

All our transparency tools, it now is clear, were never civic correctives in themselves.

How did we get stuck like this? One reason is that the high-profile innovators in Internet communications produced campaign technology—not governing technology. Campaign technology—like that employed by President Obama’s re-election campaign or petition sites like Change.org—identify people, accelerate communication, and aggregate data. They are modern versions of old campaign tactics—knocking on doors, news cycle management, voter targeting. But, while the embarrassing videos circulated by campaigns, e-mail call-outs to donors, and social media shaming of opponents are effective campaign tactics, they are ineffective as tools for the hard work of making government policy.

Effective policy-making requires something different: trusted personal relationships between policymakers that lead to collaborations that benefit the public.

When you think about things this way, you understand that the problem with over-surveillance at the NSA is not about technology—it’s about a huge policy failure by the humans in Congress. Oversight of policy and agencies is the fundamental role of Congress: It is a wonky, complex, drawn-out process that requires experts, institutional memory, staff who like each other, and Members who will compromise. This work is fundamentally about human relationships, trust, and political capital—negotiating tools that can’t be developed the same way in the digital world.

We can’t bring accountability to the NSA unless we figure out how to give the whole legislative branch modern methods for policy oversight. Those modern methods can include technology, but the primary requirement is figuring out how to supply Congress with unbiased subject matter experts—not just industry lobbyists or partisan think tank analysts. Why? Because trusted and available expertise inside the process of policymaking is what is missing today.

According to calculations by the Sunlight Foundation, today’s Congress is operating with about 40 percent less staff than in 1979. According to the Congressional Management Foundation, it’s also contending with at least 800 percent more incoming communications. Yet, instead of helping Congress gain insight in new ways, instead of helping it sort and filter, curate and authenticate, technology has mostly created disorganized information overload. And the information Congress receives is often sentiment, not substance. Elected leaders should pay attention to both, but need the latter for policymaking.

The result? Congress defaults to what it knows. And that means slapping a “national security” label on policy questions that instead deserve to be treated as broad public conversations about the evolution of American democracy. This is a Congress that categorizes questions about our freedoms on the Internet as “cyber security.”

What can we do? First, recognize that Congress is an obsolete and incapacitated system, and treat it as such. Technology and transparency can help modernize our legislature, but they can’t fix the system of governance.

Activists, even tech-savvy ones, need to talk directly with Congressional members and staff at home. Hackers, you should invite your representatives to wherever you do your hacking. And then offer your skills to help them in any way possible. You may create some great data maps and visualization tools, but the real point is to make friends in Congress. There’s no substitute for repeated conversations, and long-haul engagement. In politics, relationships will leverage the technology. All technology can do is help you find one another.

Without our help and our knowledge, our elected leaders and governing institutions won’t have the bandwidth to cope with our complex world. This will be a steep climb. But, like nearly every good outcome in politics, the climb starts with an outstretched hand, not one that’s poised at a keyboard, ready to tweet.

The post Transparency Is Not Accountability appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This sort of argument is a very old one—and a very American one, because we demand so much of ourselves. Like many Europeans visiting the United States in the 19th century, the British diplomat Lord James Bryce marveled at the civic burdens placed upon Americans. “For the functions of the citizen are not, as has hitherto been the case in Europe, confined to the choosing of legislators, who are then left to settle issues of policy and select executive rulers,” Bryce wrote in 1888. “The American citizen is virtually one of the governors of the Republic.”

Lord Bryce’s observations remind us that we don’t live in a democracy but in a democratic republic—a hoped-for mixture of civic engagement by citizens and virtuous representation by those chosen by the people. American government generally, and California’s government specifically, have put pressure on both sides in the relationship to hold up their end of the bargain. The example of Detroit, however, shows that in a “new normal” era of diminished revenues and budgets, this pressure is forcing cracks in the foundations of governments from the city to the state level.

For Californians, Detroit was not our first warning about the costs of limited and self-interested civic participation. We have our own examples—like the bankrupt cities of San Bernardino, Stockton, and Vallejo, and the municipal corruption of Bell.

These are all man-made disasters. And the theme that connects them is public surprise; citizens were unaware of their city’s financial status until it was too late.

Bell’s problems began at an underused ballot box, where only a few hundred total votes established Bell as a “charter city,” removing it from state regulations on pay for its council and employees. In San Bernardino, most residents didn’t know their municipal government was going to declare Chapter 9 until the night of the council meeting. In Vallejo, some residents actually alerted the city about its dire fiscal standing, but a lack of leadership by council paved the way toward filing.

All these failures—and there are certainly more to come—are taking place in the midst of what local government expert Bob O’Neill recently called “a time of creative destruction” in state and local government. Borrowing the term from the free-market economist Joseph Schumpeter, O’Neill sees a combination of fiscal crisis related to the demographic impact of baby boomer retirements in the public sector, the “impact of technology,” and general public distrust of our governing institutions forcing a new relationship between citizens and government.

O’Neill says this will require “a new brand of leadership”—of local officials who will be expected to go it alone, with little help from Washington or their state governments. But by its nature, the era requires more from citizens as governors as well.

On the leadership side of the problem, this requires making government easier for the public to understand. An interesting essay by John Bridgeland and Peter Orszag in The Atlantic magazine, “Can Government Play Moneyball?,” is a tribute to how technology can be used to evaluate the performance of our governments. The use of performance “dashboards”—online platforms that visualize spending and program performance—by forward-thinking municipal and state governments shows how we can much better evaluate and communicate government programs. The challenge comes—as the writers note—in finding the courage to shut down programs that simply don’t work: “Getting the right information is less than half the battle. Acting on it, once it’s in hand, is harder still.”

The field of data visualization has made presenting complex information—from budgets to program performance—almost easy. Take a look at Salinas, California’s “Open Budget Platform” (full disclosure: I’m an advisor to this company) or Michigan’s “Mi Dashboard,” and you’ll see the days of budgets in three-ring binders are numbered. This need not be a partisan issue, as writers from the left (like Cass Sunstein in his latest, Simpler), and right (like Phillip K. Howard in many books) are making compelling arguments for the importance of making government at all levels simpler.

With simplifying should come de-layering: In George Will’s follow-up piece to the one quoted above, he interviews Detroit’s emergency manager, Kevyn Orr, who has learned firsthand of the incredible byzantine bureaucracy that is (or was) the City of Detroit. Orr described it as “bureaucracy on steroids,” with “more than two dozen layers of approval for planning and zoning.” Civic engagement simply won’t work in a policy-making environment that is this opaque.

Civic engagement also requires opportunities. In Los Angeles, an experiment to get more regular people into government is underway. The Liberty Hill Foundation, a nonprofit, has set up a “boot camp’’ to encourage and train people from all over the city to qualify for membership on public commissions and thus add to the pool of candidates for appointments. This may work, because officials are more open to engagement than before; in a recent survey of California municipal officials I participated in along with the Institute for Local Government (funded by the James Irvine Foundation) titled “Testing the Waters,” 85 percent of the 900 officials asked said that “their views of public engagement had changed since their careers began” (positively, for most of them).

Citizens need to seize these opportunities—and others. In my experience consulting on public processes around California and training public officials in engagement, a constant challenge is that too many people view themselves not as “citizens” but as “customers,” people who deserve a certain treatment by their government because of taxes paid.

Yes, there are times when we as citizens demand proper service from government—whether it’s from the water district or the public works department—but seeing ourselves only as clients of our government is fiscally unsustainable and fundamentally undemocratic.

And when we make decisions, we need to be careful to consider the long term. For all the speed of contemporary life, politics remains, as the sociologist Max Weber once surmised, “the slow boring through thick boards.” One of the essential trade-offs we all face is to make and support decisions that might benefit future generations, and not just our own.

For those who sit on the sidelines, the costs of civic inaction are increasing. Just ask people in Detroit, San Bernardino, Vallejo, and Stockton, where civic failure may mean slashing police and fire services. If only citizens in those places had acted sooner. Now, citizen support is going to be crucial for those who do the difficult business of bringing such cities back. When governments attempt to make policy more participatory and transparent, they need to be supported by citizens who will engage, learn about the issues, and participate in hard decisions.

In Federalist No. 1, Alexander Hamilton wonders whether the American experiment may become the first government formed by “reflection and choice” as opposed to centuries of “accident and force.” It would be hard to say stories like Detroit’s or Stockton’s are “accidents.” But we’ll see more such stories in places where citizens and officials are not committed to reflecting on difficult choices.

The post Did Democracy Bankrupt Our Cities? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The courts blew more than $500 million on a new computer system—before recently abandoning it, unfinished. The state burned through $262 million to design a payroll system upgrade so bad that it had to revert back to the legacy application that still needs replacing. This is real money; that $262 million is enough to pay 3,000 California teachers for a year. It’s almost equal to the City of Los Angeles’ budget deficit for the fiscal year 2012-2013.

These are only the latest of California’s costly IT failures, and they won’t be the last. The way that governments here handle IT—hiring big outside contractors and IT experts to convert existing software and systems for government use—doesn’t work. For all the talk we hear about running government as a business, the monolithic systems designed for private businesses are inflexible and not easily adapted to government needs.

Information technology consultants (I used to be one) don’t always admit this. We prefer to exude confidence and believe we can make anything work. In practice, however, when we’re working on a big project, we do what’s asked of us—whether or not it’s best practice—and honor the client’s wishes. And when the client is a government, the client isn’t well enough informed to know what’s happening. Few in government understand just how different a system customized to meet the requirements of government is from the original software or system that the government wants to upgrade. So government officials ask for things that can’t be done. (I, for instance, worked on two applications for 311 call centers—311 is a customer service number for non-emergency government services—that were almost impossible to upgrade.) Or they sit back as a new system is created to serve the interests of contractors eager to maximize profit at the public’s expense. The resulting systems often don’t work or are too complicated to be maintained. So the new systems are abandoned, and governments return to the devilish old systems they know.

What’s the way out of this vicious cycle of misfit systems and wasted millions? Governments need a new strategy for handling IT. And the most important piece of the strategy must be: Don’t go it alone.

Instead of hiring contractors and outsourcing for their particular needs, California governments should go find other governments, either in-state or elsewhere, with similar needs. Water agencies that need to monitor their operations should find other water agencies looking to do the same thing. School districts should find other school districts working to solve the same problems. Then the governments, together, should construct the information technology systems themselves, collaboratively.

Why? Because collaboration will make things less costly and because the result is likely to be better, having benefited from a larger group of public officials thinking through the challenge and testing out possible solutions. The governments themselves can have employees work with technologists. They also can invite in software developers who may have ties to the community, rather than contractors.

This approach is called community-sourced software, and one example of its success is the Kuali Project. Kuali started as a group of higher education institutions that wanted to develop a financial system to manage universities. The schools pooled their resources, including a grant and other support from a national association of higher education institutions. They collaboratively built the project with various developers, and the resulting system worked—a financial system for higher education by higher education. Kuali is now a foundation that helps manage similar projects.

Community-sourced software is catching on—slowly. Recently, Marin County began looking for partners to develop a financial system, but the state and its governments need to move faster. About a month ago, the California Department of Motor Vehicles was forced to cancel a project to update legacy hardware systems for driver’s licenses and vehicle registration. The cost to taxpayers of the cancellation? Fifty million dollars.

Imagine that the DMV overhaul had been a community-sourced project, tackled with DMVs in five other states. All six states have similar needs when it comes to registering vehicles, so why not develop a system together that would work in each? The feedback and communication from many DMVs might well result in a better system—and maybe even shorter waiting times at the DMV. A multi-state approach also would work well for the state court systems and the payroll systems that still need replacing, since other states have courts and must pay their state workers too.

Such community-sourced solutions should be the standard across California. When the alternative is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on new systems we can’t use, the only question is: What are we waiting for?

The post Why California IT Keeps Crashing appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Five leaders in e-government joined Irvine Senior Fellow Joe Mathews of the New America Foundation in a discussion at Stanford University on the future of online government. The Zócalo/New America Connecting California event, presented in partnership with the Bill Lane Center for the American West, was attended by an international audience that included local government officials from Denmark to Palo Alto.

“Even in the far-flung regions of the state where the population is low, they are at least dipping their toe in the water,” said April Manatt, principal of April Manatt Consulting and the author of a new report that surveyed California governments about how they are using technology and the Web to engage residents. “I think what we’re finding is there are lots of different ways that local governments are going about this.”

Manatt said that local governments generally fall into three tiers of online services. At the lowest level, cities continue to provide the basic information online that has historically been made available offline and posted at city hall, including council agendas. In the second tier, this information is supplemented with additional information and city documents, and citizens are often invited to provide feedback over the web. In the third tier, governments have created online services that change the paradigm and go beyond providing existing city services over the Internet, said Manatt.

“Let’s as a community gather in person and online and explore the problems that we care about and throw them up for a vote,” she said. “The open data movement is a good one. … This concept of public data being given to the public is new and sadly innovative.”

“I think this is the most exciting space to be in for local governments,” said Greg Hermann, a senior management analyst for the city of Carlsbad. “We have a chance to rethink and redesign how they might operate. … Can technology save local government? Well, certainly not on its own, but it’s a powerful tool.”

Dakin Sloss, the executive director of California Common Sense and a senior at Stanford, described how the process to gain access to public documents can be difficult to maneuver and is not always successful. He said that when he tried to request access to the log for the California State Checkbook, he was told that it doesn’t serve the public interest to release the information.

“My vision is that 10 years from now every government will be tracking in real-time,” said Sloss. “It’s a new way of thinking.”

Tim Bonnemann of San Jose participation company Intellitics, Inc. pointed out that local governments have historically created opportunities for getting involved, and that the new development is really moving that participation online.

“What are the objectives you’re trying to reach?” is what governments must ask themselves, said Bonnemann. “You might end up not relying on technology. If you have a distributed population, then you might still have to do your face-to-face meetings.”

David B. Smith, the executive director of the National Conference on Citizenship, said that local governments need to focus on learning how public engagement works and to make it a priority.

“My job is to empower you to help you solve those problems,” said Smith, who rejected an audience member’s suggestion that the government’s job is to handle problems and not to facilitate solutions.

“‘I elected you, why don’t you go do your job?’ That’s what got us into this problem,” Smith told those in attendance. “That’s the paradigm of the last 20 years. It can’t be the paradigm of the next 20 years.”

Watch full video here.
See more photos here.
Read expert opinions on whether technology brings citizens closer to government here.

*Photos by Brian J. Smeets

The post Municipal Mouse Click appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Our increasing connectedness has been affecting our lives in dramatic ways. It’s also been shaping our politics. In 2008, for instance, new technology helped to vault a non-leading presidential candidate, Barack Obama, into first place. But is the new ease of connectivity likely to lead to improvements in how we approach our politics? In advance of the Zócalo event “Can Technology Save California Governments?”, several authors and scholars weigh in on the political opportunities and pitfalls of our new technologies. Will they encourage better political engagement?

Yes, but the trouble is that political engagement crashes on the rocks of our government bureaucracy

It is inevitable that new technologies will encourage better political engagement, but it is also increasingly clear that political engagement is insufficient to solve the problem of citizen-government interaction. As new tools allow better representation of the will of the people, each political viewpoint can have a stronger voice. But until we create an agile, responsive system of government at the bureaucratic level, we will use those voices to fight with greater and greater efficiency over our limited (and often wasted) public resources, arguing about a smaller and smaller piece of the pie instead of making that pie bigger.

My generation grew up thinking that political action was the key to making our government reflect our values and our interests. Increasingly, we realize that no matter who we elect or what issues we highlight, the system the politicians are supposed to oversee is so hobbled that if we don’t reform the “how” of government–the big, messy bureaucracy that thwarts our political will–our actions at the political level won’t make a serious difference. This is why you see such interest in open data, in “hacking government,” in giving government the same tools that the private sector has to make citizen’s lives better. Someone once said if you have an intractable problem, make the problem bigger. Let’s look at the larger problem of our connection to government if we want lasting, systemic change.

Jennifer Pahlka is executive director and founder of Code for America.

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No, because technology is making us dumber

California as a governable entity is on life support, and its salvation is unlikely to come in the form of a tweet. One effect of the new technologies has been to make us prey to sound bites, like those that fill the news cycle or that try to explain initiatives and propositions.

Information is power, but this hardly matters if we are becoming a less smart or less patient citizenry. The digital trend is moving us toward more superficiality and brevity. Just as e-mail was a bastardization of exposition, texting is a bastardization of e-mail. Just as blogging debased intelligent debate, 140-character micro-blogs debase blogging. The dumbing-down that results is counter-democratic and may be moving us toward demagoguery. Confusingly worded initiatives and double-negative propositions require careful dissection, but some of us may have become too compromised in our attention spans for that task. As a result, we are better targets for propaganda and half-truths.

With so much information at our fingertips, we often think of ourselves as too good to need a teacher. Gone is the one-to-many didactic model, in which the “one” is an experienced person subjected to quality control and the many are the individuals hungry for facts and willing to spend time learning them. Receptivity in the absorptive, open-to-what-you-may-have-to-teach-me sense is a dated stance toward information. Active, especially interactive, is what is “in,” and we are all, equally competently, creating and disseminating information. A successful democracy assumes informed voters. We are drowning in information but are less informed.

It was never perfect. But what made democracy less imperfect was our ability to learn, probe, be patient, and read between the lines. We seem to be losing those skills, and it is in no small part because of our addiction to new technologies. This can’t be good for democracy.

Dr. Elias Aboujaoude is a Stanford University psychiatrist and author. His most recent book is Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the e-Personality. He is cofounder of eTherapi.com.

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Not necessarily–not unless new technology is integrated into our governance

New technologies no doubt will make it easier for members of the public to participate in government at all levels. We are already seeing this with the growth over the past three years of digital technologies and tools that fit under what is broadly referred to as Gov 2.0. However, tech-enabling participation does not necessarily result in “better” participation, or by extension, better governance. At best, the technology alone may lead to more public participation, but again, more does not necessarily mean better (and in fact, more in many cases may be worse). Technology, no matter how sophisticated, usable, cool, or sexy, is simply a tool. For public participation to be “better” requires a level of trust among and between all parties; it requires easy access to relevant and meaningful data and information; it requires follow up, engagement, dialogue; and it requires openness and transparency among other key elements. To be sure, new technology is essential for better participation and governance in the future, but it’s not sufficient.

At the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Global Agenda Council for the Future of Government, we have recently developed a framework for the future called FAST Government (Flatter, Agile, Streamlined, Tech-enabled). At the foundation of the FAST government framework is the idea that technology must be integrated into the very structure of government and governance, thereby ensuring that the essential elements for any public service or process–public participation in particular–are brought to bear from the outset. This is the future of government.

Gregory G. Curtin is the founder and principal of Civic Resource Group, and a fellow with the World Economic Forum’s Global Advisory Council on the Future of Government.

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No–not unless we engage a little more deeply and thoughtfully with what’s happening

The world has been mesmerized by the fiery glory of the Arab Spring and by the confused but potentially seminal nature of Occupy Wall Street. Social media–instant, viral and brief–seems tailor-made to get people to the barricades, potentially changing the nature of political engagement. We naturally relish these techno, David-versus-Goliath tales, and cheer when tyrants fall, 21st-century style.

But is this the whole story? Political engagement may begin on the streets, but Tweets from Tahir cannot build a democracy or boost the quality of political engagement in the long run. As the Tunisian human rights campaigner Sami Ben Gharbia recently said, to build a democracy in his country, “we need another set of skills, not protest skills, skills of building.” I’d argue, in fact, that today we are using our tech-tools in ways that may discourage high-level political engagement.

To build strong democracies, we need rich dialogue and the ability to build trust. But in our rush to expand our networks exponentially and to use thin, faceless media for most communications, we are undermining opportunities for the kinds of rich, difficult interactions that cultivate trust. And when we are together, presence is too often punctured by constant interruptions. The deep, face-to-face focus needed to build strong ties–across bargaining or boardroom or dinner tables–is a rarity.

To build strong democracies, we also need a capacity for sustained thinking and planning. Yet overloaded office workers now switch tasks every three minutes, hopscotching through their days. We rarely pause to reflect. We multitask furiously, a style of work shown to lead to shallow thinking and poor learning. I worry that we’ll increasingly see a new type of ignorance, born not from a lack of information, but from an unwillingness or inability to turn data into knowledge.

Our tech-tools can spread the word, bring us to the barricades or polls, and offer tsunamis of info-bits. But it’s up to us to then engage critically, deeply, and responsibly with the political challenges of our day. Our new technologies merely bring us to the doorstep of change.

Maggie Jackson is an award-winning journalist and an author, most recently, of Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age.

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Yes, lots of people think technology is improving our politics–but not without costs

As more people move toward living their lives online, there will be heated debates over whether new technology is improving our political engagement–or just making it different. As with all new technologies–from the discovery of fire to the invention of the printing press–the use of the latest communications networks has both positive and negative effects.

Will innovative forms of online cooperation result in significantly more efficient and responsive government? In a 2010 survey Lee Rainie and I conducted for the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, 72 percent of the nearly 900 respondents optimistically answered, “Yes.”

We have been seeing this techno-optimism reflected in many studies of Internet users over the past decade. During the 2002 midterm elections, a Pew survey revealed that many voters were beginning to turn to the Net to learn about the candidates and issues from multiple sources.

Social media tools stole the headlines during the historic 2008 presidential race. Pew survey data from that period shows how vital the use of text messages, YouTube, Facebook pages, and Twitter feeds were in fundraising and overall political engagement.

The 2010 elections showed further innovation. Fifty-four percent of U.S. adults (73 percent of adult Internet users) reported that they used the Internet for political purposes in the 2010 election cycle–far surpassing the numbers reported in the 2006 contest.

A 2011 survey on local news sources indicates how Americans learn about local politics. Right now, most get it from a wide variety of sources, but overall most say they are generally still getting most of their information on politics from their local newspaper (26 percent) and local television news (28 percent).

In several Pew surveys, respondents have expressed serious concerns about certain negative effects of new information networks. These include the overt amplification of extreme viewpoints; the tendency for people to seek out only the information they want to hear and to “remain in their silos”; the diminishment of media organizations with well-trained journalists; and the vast amount of inaccurate and distorted information now influencing political engagement.

Janna Anderson is director of the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University, where she is also associate professor of communications.

*Photo courtesy of CFariello.

The post Good Gizmos and Good Governance appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Price knew he and other colleagues could have responded to the cardiac emergency faster–if only he had known it was taking place. But how could he know? That afternoon, the chief and his colleagues drew up a plan on a deli napkin for a smartphone application that would provide just such notification.

Earlier this year, the San Ramon Valley Fire Protection District iPhone application was launched–allowing people certified in CPR to volunteer to be alerted if someone nearby appears to be having a cardiac event and may need help. Once notified of the emergency and the location, registered users can find the victim and administer CPR (or locate the nearest public defibrillator, as directed by the app).

“We’re crowdsourcing good Samaritans,” the fire chief has said of the app.

Such innovation reveals the delightful paradox hidden in all the bad news about California’s troubles:

Californians, while living in a state that experts say is ungovernable, have within their reach new tools that give them greater power to govern themselves than ever before.

Technology is the reason. Often with little public notice or scrutiny, most of California’s 5,000-some local governments are experimenting with technologies to engage the public and improve services. The sophistication of this use of digital technologies for citizen interaction–referred to as eGovernment, digital government, or Government 2.0–varies. The benefits are wide-ranging.

You can go online to have the city police in Santa Clarita check on your home while you’re on vacation. In Pebble Beach, you can add yourself to the Community Services District’s database of local people who need special assistance in the event of an emergency evacuation. You can schedule a visit to your cousin in jail via the Santa Clara County website or public kiosks.

If you need to appear in court or qualify yourself for social services in Nevada County, you can avoid long drives over windy, snowy roads by finding one of several county video cameras set up for direct conferencing with local government. And if you’re a truant in Anaheim, you can avoid school reassignment or prosecution by carrying a hand-held tracking device, provided by your school district and the city police, that monitors your location throughout the day.

The timing of eGovernment’s rise is at once problematic–and fortunate. Public frustration with government and cuts in public spending are natural obstacles to launching new programs. But the same factors also create an opportunity to redesign how government interacts with, and services, the public. Technology, if deployed wisely and efficiently, may provide better engagement, better information and better service delivery, at less of a price.

How is California doing so far at this task? The early results are uneven. California’s powerful culture of innovation has produced clear progress from the days of simple government websites. But the progress has been unevenly distributed. And success stories have yet to be identified, much less encouraged and disseminated. When it comes to eGovernment, Californians don’t know what other Californians are doing, don’t know what works, and don’t know how to measure success.

How to start? By creating a clearinghouse where Californians and their governments can share information about what’s working and what isn’t. Armed with information, Californians would be better positioned to demand a basic level of technology-driven service and engagement, just as they do with analog government services such as emergency response and sanitation.

For now, governments such as the San Ramon Valley Fire Protection District must spread the word themselves. To let the public know about its iPhone app, San Ramon used social media, issued public service announcements, and did aggressive outreach to community groups. Some 40,000 people within the fire district’s boundaries have downloaded the app. The fire district also has set up a non-profit foundation, PulsePoint, to help public agencies around the world (more than 125 have inquired) replicate the San Ramon application in their own communities.

They may go further. Apps similar to San Ramon’s could be employed to find missing or kidnapped children, to fill sandbags during a flood, or to staff emergency shelters in times of crisis.

April Manatt is principal of April Manatt Consulting and lead author of the new report, “Hear Us Now? A California Survey of Digital Technology’s Role in Civic Engagement and Local Government.” Joe Mathews is Zócalo’s California editor and an Irvine Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation.

*Photo courtesy of RuffLife.

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While Polihale is formally a Hawaiian state park, its main feature is a 12-mile strip of beach, which sits just below the Na Pali cliffs in the southwestern portion of the island. Its remoteness and terrific surfing waves have made it a popular tourist spot.

When a tropical storm blew through the island in December 2008, it washed out most of the two-mile road that snakes from the old sugar cane fields near the park entrance to the magnificent beach, which included a couple of bridges and other facilities. Within a few weeks, the state’s Department of Land and Natural Resources (DLNR) sent out a team of engineers to assess the damage and devise a solution.

By February, the DLNR was ready to return to Polihale and conduct a public workshop to discuss next steps with the community. Officials from the Department announced that reconstruction would cost $4 million and take more than a year to complete. Even this estimate seemed optimistic, given the state’s cash-strapped condition. Local resident and surfer Bruce Pleas, who attended the meeting, worried, “The way they are cutting funds, we felt like they’d never get the money to fix it.”

This is where the story often ends when it comes to tackling an expensive local project. There’s not enough money. The project is complicated and will take too long. Nothing happens.

But there is a better way to think of such a predicament: as a golden opportunity.

With fewer financial resources available to government agencies, individual citizens have an opportunity to take action and tackle big problems themselves. At the same time, local governments have the opportunity to improve public service delivery, increase productivity, and reduce costs.

This is what happened in Kauai, but not at first.

In the immediate aftermath of the storm, community residents–including many who depend on the park for their livelihood–were bewildered by the news that the park would be closed for a year or more. The best that representatives from the DLNR thought they could do was to speed up reconstruction by several months with monies from a proposed “Recreational Renaissance Fund” that sat in the State Legislature. The state advised community members to “participate” by calling their elected representatives to demand they pass the measure.

As DLNR’s chairperson Laura Thielen noted at the time, “We are asking for the public’s patience and cooperation to help protect the park’s resources during this closure, and for their support of the ‘Recreational Renaissance’ so we can better serve them and better care for these important places.”

The government’s response was typical of that of many large institutions–public, private, nonprofit–facing a crisis: to look inward (at internal resources and capabilities), or to look up (to higher levels within the organization for financial or logistical support). Citizens become a “mass” to be lobbied in order to pass spending measures. However, as revenue-challenged governments seek to deliver consistent levels of service, many are recognizing the importance of looking out (to citizens and civic organizations) for support. This is what the DLNR missed. To put it mildly, the DLNR’s approach did not sit well with residents.

As Ivan Slack, co-owner of Na Pali Kayaks, which promotes tours of the coastline, put it: “If the park is not open, it would be extreme for us to say the least. Bankruptcy would be imminent.”

So it was Slack who led a group of his fellow residents to compose their own plan to open the park earlier. The DLNR’s initial review suggested this was no simple beach cleanup, but rather a significant construction project that included bridge building, road grading, and reconstruction of bathroom facilities.

In response, local residents donated materials and poured their own construction and engineering expertise–along with good old-fashioned blood, sweat, and tears–into this mammoth undertaking. Kids cleared brush and local restaurant owners brought in food, while volunteer construction crews worked heavy equipment in bridge and bathroom construction. After hundreds of volunteer work hours, the project–originally forecast to take nearly a year to complete–was finished within three weeks.

As Troy Martin of Martin Steel, who donated about $100,000 worth of steel, described it, “We shouldn’t have to do this, but when it gets to a state level, it just gets so bureaucratic; something that took us eight days would have taken them years. So we got together-the community-and we got it done.”

It would be easy to dismiss this story (or even appreciate it) as anomalous, but those who work with local governments know that it is a window through which one can see a new relationship developing between stressed local governments and citizens.

The core of that relationship: a government in this era does not exist to tell citizens what to do. It is there to act as a partner, convener, catalyst, and facilitator of structured discussions in order to solve public problems. For many local governments, budget cuts–which began with the proverbial “waste, fraud, and abuse”–have moved into more significant territory. Public services, from libraries to parks to schools, are on the chopping block.
As this happens, far-sighted municipal leaders are going beyond “cut/keep” decisions–and involving their communities directly in maintaining some level of public offerings. As a result, not only are services improved while costs are reduced, but citizens are being called upon to reconsider their role in their own governance and to take action to build stronger communities.

The lessons of Polihale State Beach Park could not be more relevant in California, where governments are reeling from the ongoing financial crisis. And they are already being learned. A new report from our organizations, Golden Governance: Building Effective Public Engagement in California, shows how many of the state’s civic leaders are already responding to the lack of resources by creating revamped, mutually owned governance structures.

But there is much more to learn about how best to do this. And there is much more we can build–even in the wake of the worst of storms.

David B. Smith is executive director of the congressionally chartered National Conference on Citizenship. Pete Peterson is executive director of Pepperdine University’s Davenport Institute for Public Engagement and Civic Leadership. Their report, Golden Governance, which was commissioned by California Forward and the Center for Individual and Institutional Renewal, will be released at an upcoming Zócalo Public Square event in Palo Alto.

*Photo courtesy of abnormalcy.

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