Sarah Milstein on Iranian Protests and Twitter

Interview with Sarah Milstein

In this 10 minute interview with Sarah Milstein, co-author the Twitter Book, she discusses how Twitter is being used by Iranian protesters and how Twitter has accidentally created a system not easily overwhelmed or controlled by authorities. She also talks about the continued evolution of Twitter over the past few months. I ask her to contrast the reaction to Twitter during the Swine Flu with the reaction to Twitter during the recent events in Iran, and it is clear from her answers that as Twitter becomes more familiar to the general public the significance and meaning of the platform are constantly evolving. Milstein comments on whether Twitter is becoming more "serious", and responds to the continued stream of stories by journalists who feel the need to pass judgment on this still-emerging communications platform. Milstein also discusses this week's 140 characters conference in New York.

On the Iranian protests, Milstein is very deliberate to say that the powerful aspect of Twitter during the Iranian protests is that Iranians within the country were able to use it to communicate with one another and with those outside of the country. Toward the end of the interview, I ask Milstein to comment on inadvertent transparency in the context of a previous post by Brady Forest. The Iranian protests story this week was as much about facilitating communications as it was about making sure that protesters were not communicating unintended information to the Iranian government.

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Four short links: 18 June 2009

Weaker Copyright Good, YQL.gov, GeoSPARQL, Happiness

1. Harvard Study Finds Weaker Copyright Protection Has Benefited Society (Michael Geist) -- Given the increase in artistic production along with the greater public access conclude that "weaker copyright protection, it seems, has benefited society." This is consistent with the authors' view that weaker copyright is "uambiguously desirable if it does not lessen the incentives of artists and entertainment companies to produce new works." (read the original paper)
2. Using Public Data for Good With the Power of YQL -- The first part is a new batch of YQL tables providing data on the U.S. government, earthquake data, and the non-profit micro-lender Kiva. The second part is an incredibly easy way to render YQL queries on websites. After all, what good is data that no one can see?
3. GeoSPARQL -- RDF meets geo goodness. SELECT ?s ?p ?o WHERE { ?s gn:name "Dallas" . ?s ?p ?o } (via the geowanking mailing list)
4. How To Be Happy in Business -- this Venn diagram makes me happy. (via Ned Batchedler)

Geolocating Your iPhone Users via the Browser

Hallelujah! Geolocation is available in the iPhone's browser. I was thrilled to finally have this app ask to use my location. This is only true for the new 3.0 version of the browser (oddly, geolocation is *not* available in the Mac version of Safari 4). Adding the ability to geolocate users via the browser opens up a whole new range of web apps.

If you're eager to start catering to the legion of iPhone users ready to tell you where they are, Adam DuVander (the fellow behind the Portland Wifi Finder among other things) has written up an excellent post on how to access their location. The iPhone is using the W3C Geo-Location spec. If you are running the latest version of the iPhone OS you can try it out at https://bit.ly/w3cgeo

The code itself is very simple:

navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(foundLocation, noLocation);

function foundLocation(position)
{
var lat = position.coords.latitude;
var long = position.coords.longitude;
alert('Found location: ' + lat + ', ' + long);
}
function noLocation()
{
alert('Could not find location');
}

(you can get more information on the behavior in Adam's post)

Apple was smart about the user experience and kept the user in control. I was prompted to give Safari permission to access my location (I should only be asked this question one more time). I was then prompted to share my location with the website (in this case Adam's test). I expect many sites to quickly update their mobile sites to include location (Google already identifies your location if you are using the Android browser so I hope they update the iPhone version of their homepage shortly).

The Next Wave of iPhone Apps

This is the biggest week of the year for iPhone users, as Apple released iPhone OS 3.0 on Wednesday and will be launching the new iPhone 3GS on Friday.

The iPhone OS 3.0 Software Update provides a significant number of enhancements to the operating system including spotlight search, cut, copy, & paste, voice memos, support for landscape keyboard usage in Mail, Messages, Notes, and Safari, MMS and tethering for carriers that support these features (AT&T; late summer for MMS, tethering TBD), and dozens of other improvements. The update is free for iPhone, and $9.95 for iPod touch. Just plug your device into iTunes and you will be prompted to upgrade. If you're upgrading a second generation iPod touch, iPhone OS 3.0 will activate the Bluetooth chip that has been dormant since last September.

The new iPhone 3GS includes a faster processor, longer battery life, video support, an improved camera (3-megapixel), voice control, a digital compass, and conveniently in the same form factor as the iPhone 3G so that you won't have to buy a new case. Models will be available at $199 (16GB) and $299 (32GB) if you qualify for the discounted hardware upgrade pricing. AT&T; announced on Wednesday that the hardware discount will be extended to iPhone 3G buyers from last July, August, and September. If you stood in line for an iPhone 3G last summer, you won't have to wait a full year to buy the iPhone 3GS at the lower price.

In addition to the iPhone OS 3.0 Software Update and the new iPhone 3GS, there is a third and equally exciting aspect to this week - the rollout of the next wave of iPhone apps, based on the new iPhone SDK provided to developers in March for iPhone OS 3.0. This SDK provides iPhone developers with some major new features for use in apps including Push Notification Service (PNS), in app purchasing, peer to peer connectivity over Bluetooth, in app maps, turn by turn navigation, accessories support, iPod library access, audio recording, streaming video, in app email, support for cut, copy, & paste, undo, and much more.

If you have an iPhone OS 3.0 upgraded device and you're interested in trying out this next wave of iPhone apps, I have included a representative list of iPhone OS 3.0 apps below. If you know of any others, please post them as comments with associated links. I expect the list will grow rapidly over the next few weeks. NOTE: All of the app links below will launch iTunes, or if you're viewing this blog entry from your iPhone OS device, the links will launch the App Store app.

iPhone OS 3.0 Applications:

• AP Mobile by The Associated Press: Push Notification Service (PNS)
• Tap Tap Revenge by Tapulous: Push Notification Service (PNS)
• Star Defense by ngmoco: Push Notification Service (PNS)
• MLB.com At Bat 2009 by MLB.com: Live video streaming
• Sonifi by Sonik Architects: Peer to peer connectivity over Bluetooth
• Leaf Trombone: World Stage by Smule: Peer to peer connectivity over Bluetooth
• Bomberman Touch 2 - Volcano Party by Hudson: Peer to peer connectivity over Bluetooth
• Flick Fishing by Freeverse: Peer to peer connectivity over Bluetooth, in app purchase
• Enigmo by Pangea Software: In app purchase
• Light Riders by DS Media Labs: iPod library access
• My Brute by Bulkypix: iPod library access
• Things by Cultured Code: In-app email, cuy, copy, & paste, undo support
• Gokivo + Yahoo! Local Search by Networks In Motion: Turn-by-turn navigation, in app purchase
• Recipes by Whole Foods Market: In app maps and email, support for copying text. [Disclosure: My company, Small Society, developed this app in partnership with Whole Foods Market.]
• AroundMe by Tweakersoft: In app maps

Want a Map of Tehran? Use Open Street Map or Google

All eyes are on Tehran right now. As the center of the Iranian election protests the city has become increasingly important to websites this week. To keep their site up-to-date with this latest crisis area Flickr switched out the Yahoo road Map with Open Street Map. When I heard about this I wondered how other major mapping sites faired.

So I examined the road and satellite maps of Yahoo, Mapquest, Google, and Bing (formerly Live Maps). Looking at the images below it becomes very clear that user-generated maps win in hard to reach places. Both Open Street Map (above) and Google (below) rely on user-contributions. Open Street Map relies almost entirely on user uploaded GPS tracks for its mapping data across the world. After the jump i've included the satellite maps from each service (except for Mapquest who did not have them). They were

Google is using data acquired from their just-under-a-year-old Mapmaker program (Radar post). With Mapmaker users can add roads, POIs, regions and features. It's a very powerful tool that has greatly expanded Google coverage. Google has been slow and deliberate in using Mapmaker data on their main site. In fact it was just a couple of weeks ago that Iran's mapmaker data "graduated" to the main site. There are now 64 countries on Google that have been updated with Mapmaker data.

This isn't the first time Flickr has done this (Radar post). They've also used Open Street Map for Beijing, Black Rock City (2008), Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Adelaide, Sydney, Brisbane, Canberra, Melbourne, Baghdad, Kabul, Kinshasa, Mogadishu, Harare, Nairobi, Accra, Cairo, and Algiers.

So what's holding back Microsoft, Yahoo and Mapquest? Unknown, but hopefully they'll realize that their top-down approach isn't working.

Compare the Maps for yourself:
Note: I have included data layers where they were available (Google and Microsoft).

Google Maps:

(The markers include Wikipedia articles, photos, video, webcams, POIs, and public transit stations)

(The markers include Photosynths, user collections, photos and Wikipedia articles)

Yahoo Maps:

Mapquest Maps:

(This took a while to find, I had to find the International Maps page and click-thru a couple more pages to get the map)

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Four short links: 17 June 2009

Word Mining, Open Ideas, Power Meter BotNet, and Realtime Web Traffic Tracking

1. NY Times Mines Its Data To Identify Words That Readers Find Abstruse -- the feature that lets you highlight a word on a NY Times web page and get more information about it is something that irritates me. I'm fascinated by the analysis of their data: boggling that sumptuary is less perplexing than solipsistic. Louche (#3 on the list) has been my favourite word for two years, by the way, since I heard Dylan Moran toss it out in that uniquely facile way the Irish have with words. I think Irish citizens get this incredible competence with the English language for free, along with staggering house prices and beer you can walk on.
2. Open Ideas -- Alex Payne's blog of Concepts in the public domain, awaiting collaboration and appropriation.
3. Buggy 'smart meters' open door to power-grid botnet (The Register) -- Paul Graham said that we've found what we get when we cross a television with a computer: a computer. Similarly, intelligent power meters are computers, computers that apparently haven't been well-secured. To prove his point, Davis and his IOActive colleagues designed a worm that self-propagates across a large number of one manufacturer's smart meter. Once infected, the device is under the control of the malware developers in much the way infected PCs are under the spell of bot herders. Attackers can then send instructions that cause its software to turn power on or off and reveal power usage or sensitive system configuration settings.
4. Chartbeat -- the sexiest web analytics ever. It gives realtime count of users, whether they're reading or writing (based on whether focus is in a form element), where they're from, mentions on Twitter, and more and more and more. This is a different form of analytics than Google Analytics, which tells you trends and historical access. Love this for the pure sex appeal of a heads-up dashboard that can tell you exactly how many people are on your site and exactly what they're doing. (via Artur)

ARhrrrr! : Augmented Reality Zombie and Helicopter Game

Augmented Reality is going to be coming to a phone near you very shortly. All it takes is a decent processor, a camera, a compass and a GPS -- all of which are becoming increasingly common on smart phones (Android phones and the iPhone 3GS qualify). It's going to be used primarily for games and geo-oriented apps. ARhrrr! is an awesome looking example of the former. In this game you hold your augmented reality enabled device above the "board". When you look at the board through your device you see buildings appear and ZOMBIES (left image).

In this game you are a helicopter (middle image) trying to save civilians. You can shoot zombies -- the zombies can also attack you with organs. Or you can use Skittles as bombs (orange and green plumes in the right image). The video below gives a great explanation of the game:

The game was created by Georgia Tech Augmented Environments Lab (also known for their virtual iPhone puppy) and the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD-Atlanta). As they describe it:

By merging graphics with props in the physical world, handheld Augmented Reality games pull the player through the small screen and into a larger merged play-space. Our primary motivation for this AR game was to explore fast-action first-person augmented reality, where the camera controls and movement that would typically require a mouse and keyboard are handled directly by simply moving the device. Advanced tracking technology allows the player to quickly zoom in and out and view the world at steep angles, making this a highly interactive and engaging game. Finally, we wanted to test tangible input mechanics, such as placing and shooting Skittles to trigger in-game events.

ARhrrr! t was designed for the Nvidia Tegra, which unfortunately doesn't seem to be widely available. I can't help but be reminded of Will Carter's Mobzombie game which uses AR to chase the player with virtual zombies. Luckily for all of us Mobzombies is coming to the iPhone (follow @mobzomies for progress) so you can get your virtual zombie fix.

[via Bruce Sterling]

Interesting Questions Raised by Iranian Twitter Activism

Development (4:10 PM CST): The State Department has been in contact with Twitter to make sure that the service remained available for protestors in Iran. (reuters)

Last Friday, Twitter started to digest the Iranian election results, and the tool became a powerful vehicle for protest and coordination for student protestors within Iran and interested parties outside the country. American Twitterers used the power of the medium to push our own media machine to increase coverage of the story via #CNNFail and #iranelection, and several dedicated observers did some important work to create proxies allowing the Iranian opposition to circumvent network restrictions. While it is amazing to see individuals using technologies such as Twitter to sidestep repressive government censorship, Twitter has also made it easier for observers, a world away, to become active participants in an unfamiliar political system at times taking vigilante action against the server infrastructure of a nation-state.

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Four short links: 16 June 2009

1. Dealing with Election Results Data -- taking the raw UK European election data into Google's Fusion Tables to try and make sense of it. More cloud-based tools for the data scientist within. (via Simon Willison)
2. Time for an Open 311 API -- "311" is the US number to call for non-emergency municipal services. There have been a lot of individual projects to hack together web sites that provide the single coherent view of government services that the government itself is unable to offer, but the individual projects have all built their own APIs. SeeClickFix suggest these be unified so tools can be written (e.g., iPhone apps) that run across multiple municipalities. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
3. Shoppers Cars Soon Able to Power Supermarkets (Daily Mail) -- At the Sainsbury's store in Gloucester, kinetic plates, which were embedded in the road yesterday, are pushed down every time a vehicle passes over them. A pumping action is then initiated through a series of hydraulic pipes that drive a generator. The plates are able to produce 30kw of green energy an hour - more than enough to power the store's checkouts. (via Freaklabs)
4. Humans Prefer Cockiness to Expertise (New Scientist) -- the blogosphere explained in one paper. (via Mind Hacks)

Walking the Censorship Tightrope with Google's Marissa Mayer

Google sometimes finds itself at a difficult crossroad of wanting to make as much information available to as many people as possible, while still trying to obey the laws of the countries they operate in. I recently had a chance to talk to Marissa Mayer, who started at Google as their first female engineer, and has now risen to the ranks of vice president in charge of some of Google's most critical product areas, such as search, maps, and Chrome. We talked about some of Google's future product directions, and also about how Google makes the decision as to when information has to be withheld from the users. Marissa will be delivering a keynote address at the O'Reilly Velocity conference next week.

James Turner: As VP of Search Products and User Experience, you're responsible for a vast swath of the Google product line, from search to maps to Google Labs. You were also the first female engineer at Google. Can you talk a little about how you came to Google and what brought you to where you are today?

Marissa Mayer: Sure. My background is when I was at Stanford, I was doing a symbolic systems degree in artificial intelligence. And I was always somewhat interested in search. I ended up getting an email [from Google] towards the very end of my job interview process. I came to Google and did the interviews. And I came here because I really wanted to put my AI background to use. For about the first year or so, I did. I did a lot of work on categorization, some work on search quality. And then interestingly, we sort of had a void around how the site looked and felt and how it worked. And we tried very hard to hire someone in UI. We thought we needed someone to do UI like one day a week, and do systems engineering the rest of the time. After a few months of failing to hire such a person, Urs Hölzle, our VP of Engineering, pulled me in and said, "Marissa, we've looked through all of the resumes and you have this background in your undergrad on cognitive psychology and philosophy and things. And would you mind dedicating one day a week to UI?" So I did.

I pulled together a volunteer team to help out one day a week while we all still worked on our various AI and systems work. And then, of course, one day became two days which became three days or four days or five days. And I was also programming at that point. I switched over from a lot of the AI work I was doing to programming the front end for Google, working on the Google web server because it was nice for me to be able to not only make decisions about the UI but also to implement them.

And then because I was implementing the changes to the front end, I would go and meet with Larry and Sergey. And they would say, "What's happening on the site this week?" And I would say, "Well, I coded a change that looked like this. And I coded a change that looked like that. And translated this page and it'll go here. And there'll be a pull-down over there for the number of results." And without even realizing it, I did project management before Google had project management, by specifying how things were and looked and communicating to the rest of the company about how these changes would manifest. And then when we got to about 200 or 300 people, Larry and Sergey discovered that most companies have this function, product management, which I didn't know about; they didn't know about prior [to this]. And we decided we should have such a department. They realized there were a few of us around the company that were doing product management even though that wasn't our title. So they started the product management group and got it started earlier. And so I became a PM.

First, I was the PM on Google.com, really broadly across the whole site, because there were only three of us. One of us did the site, which was me. Salar Kamangar did the ads. And Susan [Wojcicki] did the partners. And then as our teams grew, I became the director of consumer web properties, where I still did all of the consumer facing work of the website including branching into Gmail and tool bars and some of these other areas. And then as we progressed, eventually, we restructured so we had search, ads, and apps, because Gmail and the related space of calendar and docs became large enough that it made sense to spin it out. So then I kept the search piece and the properties we have that are more related to search.

James Turner: There's always been other companies trying to take a piece of Google's dominant position in search; how does Google plan to stay a step ahead in search, especially in light of new players like Wolfram and Microsoft's new emphasis on Bing?

Marissa Mayer: Well, we are very focused on search. We have a large team here that's really focused on it and working hard on it. And we're constantly trying to forge in new directions. So we were really excited about the launch of our search options page because we think that allows us to try a lot of new ways to slice and dice and filter results. We were also really excited about Google Squared, which attempts to do automated text extraction from the web and present comparison tables for different entities in response to queries. They're both new ways to search. How do you generate a timeline from a web search? How do you generate a comparison table? And some of our competitors are also looking at those same issues. So I think on the whole, right now, our search is a very healthy ecosystem. There's a lot of interest. There's a lot of activity, and there's a lot of new ground being forged.

James Turner: Google users want the most useful results, but content providers want to get their pages seen, sometimes it seems at any cost. How will Google continue to provide the most useful results in the world of increasingly sophisticated SEO gaming?

Marissa Mayer: Well, we generally -- we really want to be fair in these issues as well as be good to users. We do think that spam is very detrimental to the user experience. We do have an incentive to find spam and remove it from our results. But we want to do something in a way that's very scalable. The web is scaling at an incredible rate. And we don't think it's really viable to try and fight spam in a manual way. So we're always looking for new algorithmic ways to understand new spam techniques, to be able to detect them in an automated way and remove them from our results. And the nice side benefit that scalability has is it's also reasonably objective and fair.

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Personal Democracy Forum ramp-up: from vulnerability and overload to rage, mistrust, and fear

The Personal Democracy Forum will hold its sixth annual conference at the end of this month. The theme, "how technology and the Internet are changing politics, democracy, and society," has been central to O'Reilly's work over the past few years (and a theme on which we're holding a summit of our own in September). Over the next two weeks I'll write three blogs on the Radar site to get some of my current thoughts off of my chest, clearing some space so that when I get to the PDF conference itself, my blogs can focus on its events and statements made by its participants.

This blog covers:

• The government participation cycle: if you want to dance, sir
• Vulnerability: a reason to put brakes on outgoing information
• Overload: a reason to put brakes on incoming information
• Rage, mistrust, and fear: inhibitors of the government participation cycle

The government participation cycle: if you want to dance, sir

The grand vision for government/public collaboration is a set of feedback loops that intensify the influence of the collective will on government policy. A feedback loop might consist of a cycle like this:

1. An agency (or less likely, a legislature) posts data in a downloadable format through a flexible API and announces a call for applications.
2. Companies and public interest groups define goals and put programmers on the task.
3. The public uses the resulting applications to generate data and share it with the agency.
4. The agency sets policy or changes direction in response to the data.

At any step, a failure by any of the responsible actors to follow through will leave the process hanging and discourage future projects in open participation.

This doesn't mean every project needs to include all four steps. The public may benefit from government data without offering feedback, and programmers could put their work under an open source license or into the public domain for the benefit of the government or members of the public without asking them to share more data. Agencies can also use programs to improve internal coordination instead of working with the public. But the full four steps serve as a canonical model for government/public collaboration.

Successful examples already exist for each step. As I write this, Data.gov has 261 data sets and 30 tools; thousands more data sets are promised soon. Appeals for donations of code, such as Vivek Kundra's Apps for Democracy in Washington, DC and the Sunlight Foundation's Apps for America, show that coders will play their part, at least in the current atmosphere of enthusiasm for the new initiative. And the public has responded to requests for data.

But at the federal level, we need to dance a few rounds of the full cycle before feeling confident that open processes are fully entrenched. I'll return to this theme in the last section of this article. The cycles of public participation will teach lessons, of course, that feed into a still larger cycle of constant experimentation and improvement.

As public participation moves forward, it's worth remembering that resistance to the free flow of incoming and outgoing information is not irrational. The resistance spring from healthy coping mechanisms learned by individuals and organizations learned over their lifetimes. I have already published and solicited comments on a list of fundamental questions on government participation; in this article I describe two such issues that play a special role in resistance to information sharing.

Vulnerability: a reason to put brakes on outgoing information

A couple months ago, I read a stirring report from a federal agency manager trying to sound out the Administration concerning how much the agency ought to reveal. The manager was stunned and inspired by the response of Bev Godwin, a prominent director at the White House and General Services Administration, who advised talking about the bad things as well as the good and soliciting negative as well as positive feedback.

Vulnerability is the keystone of transparency and openness. Online forums, if they are run democratically and competently, encourage vulnerability through a combination of self-correcting mechanisms:

The right to respond

Anyone criticized in a forum has repeated chances to defend himself at length. If the forum includes a rating system, persuasive arguments and well-chosen facts will float above false accusations as well as flaccid excuses from the accused.

Support networks

Proponents of each side pile on to each debate, turning it into a community issue and diluting the personal biases brought by the people who began the debate. A bit of a mob scene can erupt at times, awakening the risk that the losing side will walk away in a huff while sensitive community members flee the fury. But as long as participants value the community over partisan agendas and prefer honesty to grandstanding, the community comes out stronger, more aware of its options, and ready to integrate what it has learned into further action.

Community memory

Forum members recognize when old debates are re-ignited, and can fill new members in on the history. They can also predict the way prominent participants will line up on an issue. Debates are thus tighter and more quickly resolved.

A propensity for truth

These traits all end up privileging accuracy and making it harder (although not impossible) for bad judgment to prevail through false claims, manipulative demagogy, appeals to group solidarity, and the other tricks used by insincere factionalists.

This list may present online forums in a bit too rosy a light. But they do permit social norms that protect vulnerable people, even if the norms don't function perfectly. The real problem comes when words leave these forums and end up in other environments not subject to the same rules.

Government staff have already witnessed too many negative experiences in traditional, non-virtual settings. They have seen what happens when a comment is taken out of context and bandied about in the broadcast or print media, introduced into court testimony, or used as ammunition in partisan debates. They know that comment posted on the Web can be fodder for the same opinion machine--and are in fact even more dangerous because the Web makes them more visible.

That's not fair. It's very hard for anyone outside an agency to judge why it came down on one side of a debate or what that decision's long-term effects will be. Most agency actions are a complex fermentation blending the data that was gathered, assessments of the data's accuracy, assessments of the possible trends indicated by the data, consultations with the public (yes, outsiders are routinely consulted), judgments about Congress's intent, judgments about the interests of the Administration, and more. But groups with a cause like to ascribe one-dimensional reasons for key agency decisions and mine public statements for corroborating evidence.

This doesn't mean that all agencies are honest and act in the public interest. Plenty of bad government decisions have been made under pressure from well-organized special interests or to pay off political donors. One role of civil society is to expose these influences--that's what open government and the Personal Democracy Forum are all about. So we want more of these online forums. But we also need to protect the agencies whom we expect to use the forums. To encourage the necessary vulnerability, we have to combat those who abuse the results.

Journalism is starting to incorporate its own feedback loops and open its pages. Elections and policy debates are also monitored by the blogosphere. So some forums are becoming friendlier to the cause of vulnerability (the court system is unlikely ever to change). But it will be a long time before it's safe to lay out one's thoughts in an open, self-policing community.

Overload: a reason to put brakes on incoming information

The previous section mentioned the possibility of a "mob scene," and if people putting out information must be able to tolerate being vulnerable, those requesting input from the public have to deal with a potentially low signal-to-noise ratio.

We need not look far for an example. Take last month's brainstorming session on open government, launched by the White House and the Office of Science and Technology. It drew over 1,000 submissions in a single week. (Even more are on the site now, but they arrived after the official close of the session.)

The thousand submissions offered quite a smorgasbord for a group led by the new Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government, Beth Noveck, to spoon through. They ended up with many intriguing ideas. But the gathering of ideas was simply a suggestion box, not real crowdsourcing. The web site offered no tools for editing, combining, and culling entries (and there would be inadequate time to use such tools anyway). The only aspect reminiscent of group behavior was a casual and anonymous rating system, which played little role in the results.

And that's a relief. After all, how many Americans would be able to assess the Office of Open Government created by Florida Governor Charlie Crist, or the potential for Cooperative Research and Development Agreements to help convert government data and applications to open source? Both of these projects earned a place in the results, even though the Florida model got only 24 votes and the Cooperative Research and Development Agreements only 46. (Although they might have conceivably been mentioned in an earlier brainstorming session conducted among government workers, I couldn't find them in the publicly posted comments.)

In response to a question about the voting, Noveck wrote me, "We wanted to encourage the National Academy of Public Administration to try different voting techniques. They started out by allowing voting by unregistered users, and later restricted it to registered users. Given the change, we didn't want to disadvantage anyone who participated. Consequently, we viewed the voting as informative but not determinative. On our weblog, only registered users can vote on comments."

As her statement indicates, the second phase of this transparency project has already sprouted more of the checks and balances found in mature discussion forums. We can expect the Administration to wend its way toward systems that gather useful opinions from self-organized groups of qualified commentators, the model pioneered by Noveck in her Peer to Patent project.

But will the White House have the time and resources to establish a foothold for a solid and lasting open government program? That depends on public tolerance for the Administration as a whole.

Rage, mistrust, and fear: inhibitors of the government participation cycle

Their rage has been directed at the heads of the financial industry. No peasant at the time of the French Revolution felt more hatred for Marie Antoinette than some of the comments I've seen about AIG. In addition, the current conditions of recession and financial uncertainty breed mistrust toward all three branches of government, and fear toward anyone who could seem to wangle an extra advantage over other Americans.

I'm not going to factor in the recent murders of law enforcement officers, Dr. George Tiller, and others because I'm sure the hate crimes were caused by lots of diverse factors, and it's unclear whether they represent a widespread cultural movement. We have plenty to worry about just by considering problems that will undeniably have a broad impact on Americans.

Over the coming year, lots of homes will continue to be foreclosed (because Congress failed to put a system in place to stop them), a blight that hits many neighborhoods like a dry Katrina. This ongoing crisis will be joined by credit card crisis (because Congress's bill didn't do much to stop that either) and perhaps already a student debt crisis. The Administration has its own challenges, waging two untraditional wars that nobody knows how to win and tinkering with a global financial system that always cracks its casings.

Open government doesn't deserve to be at the mercy of current political controversies. It did not originate with the Obama administration, and it doesn't require a Democratic Party philosophy. The George W. Bush administration took some steps toward open government (often forgotten amongst all the complaints over their unsavory maneuvers and information withholding). The Bill Clinton administration took steps too. But Obama is making it a centerpiece.

This gives us more hope than ever for openness, but ties its fortunes to the larger sphere of activities by the Administration and federal government.

To establish a foothold, openness needs some early, impressive success stories. Federal CTO Vivek Kundra has said his initiatives will prove themselves by saving money, although that certainly isn't his sole aspiration. If the Administration can land a few universally recognized successes--budgetary or otherwise--and especially if it can run through the whole cycle I laid out at the beginning of this article, such efforts will be continued by future Administrations.

Next article (Friday, June 19): twenty-five hundred years of Government 2.0.

Hands-On with the iPhone 3.0 OS; Search is the Winner

The iPhone 3.0 OS is going to be released this Wednesday. It will be available to all iPhones (for free) and iPod Touches (for a small cost). The iPhone 3GS will ship with it. The new OS became available last week to those willing and able to try it out a bit early (see Gizmodo for details). This is what I've noticed since updating:

Search - The new OS has search everywhere. It's the zero screen (to the left of your homescreen), in mail and in the iPod. It has become my preferred way of launching applications and finding contacts. You can choose what you want to search and their priority in Settings->General->Home (screenshot). I immediately set the Home button to go to Search, so that with just two taps I am able to launch an app. Unfortunately, there is no spatial component to contact search (I'd like to be able to pull up everyone in a town I am visiting for instance. I hope that third-party apps will be able to include their content in Search.

Voice Memos - Voice recorders have been around since the App Store launch so I didn't really understand why Apple was spending development resources on their own version. Now I know, Apple's version will run in the background letting you access other apps while getting an audio record of your surroundings. Unsurprisingly, you can't record phone calls with it.

Cut-n-Paste - The iPhone finally includes cut-n-paste. Initially I found it awkward, but now that I've figured out that double-tapping any text to select it. It is really, really nice to have this feature -- almost as nice as getting Search.

New iPod Controls - The iPod will now let you jump back 30 seconds if you missed something. It will also let you speed up or slow down audio. This is very nice for us appreciators of the spoken word.

Safari - Unfortunately I have not found any web app that uses the new geolocation and offline features of the new Safari browser. I expect that apps like Google's Latitude that use geolocation (demoed working in the browser at Where 2.0) and the new GMail that uses offline storage (demoed at the Web 2.0 Expo). I have not perceived the new Browser to be appreciably faster

There are other features (like forwarding SMSs and more detailed call logs), but these were the most significant updates to me. Right now there is no way the new Hardware API or P2P API. We'll have to wait for new apps to come to the store to try them out. I'll be getting the new iPhone 3GS this week and will share my impressions of the new hardware shortly.

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