Building better White House policy through online citizen engagement

Cammie Croft, former deputy director of new media at the White House, is taking on a new challenge as the director of new media at the Department of Energy.

In her new role, Croft will be upgrading elements of the IT infrastructure at an immense federal agency to enable her and her team to implement the digital tools for online engagement that she applied during the presidential campaign and the new administration's first year in office. The Department of Energy has IT infrastructure challenges that exist within many government bodies at all levels, from an outdated content management system (CMS) to difficulties supporting blogs or commenting.

Net Generation D.C.

When I met Cammie Croft, she was typing rapidly into a friend's new iPad in a coffee shop, transcribing notes and glancing at a buzzing BlackBerry on the table next to her. At first glance, she looked cast directly from the contemporary mold for young Washingtonian professionals in the spring of 2010: chic business casual, constantly-connected through multiple devices, and thoughtful about the changing relationships between government and citizens due to technological innovation.

After I solicited her opinion of the iPad's utility for web work -- she'd adapted rapidly, though missed a keyboard -- our conversation about her work revealed both a wry sense of humor about Washington politics and a deep understanding of the commitment required to create, manage and sustain online engagement strategies.

Then again, Croft is no ordinary web worker. She's been in the new media trenches at the highest level of government, from the real-time presidential campaign to the rapidly-changing platform behind the White House's online communications.

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Actually, half of all iPad Books are Fiction

Suggestions to my previous post inspired me to normalize our metadata¹ for titles available through the U.S. iBooks app. A comment prompted me to rollup iBooks publishers into publishing conglomerates²:

Comments from other readers gave me the idea to map the 100+ iBooks categories to the more familiar BISAC categories. Doing so means over half of all iBooks titles are Fiction³:

The distribution of titles across the BISAC categories varies by publisher. For example 64% of Macmillan's titles are Fiction, while 19% of HarperCollins are in the Religion category:

[Click HERE to enlarge.]

I also computed the MEAN price per paid title within a (BISAC) category⁴, for each of the major publishers. Click HERE for details.

(1) Data for this post includes titles available through the U.S. iBooks app from 4/15 through 5/4/2010.
(2) In creating the equivalent chart for my previous post, I didn't include titles from Project Gutenberg.
(3) Share of the major FICTION categories can be found HERE.
(4) Even with the BISAC categorization, Cookbooks is one of the higher-priced categories.

Four short links: 5 May 2010

Web IDEs, Timely Election Displays, Face Recognition, # Books/Kindle

1. Sketch for Processing -- an IDE for Processing based on Mozilla's Bespin.
2. British Election Results to be Broadcast on Big Ben -- the monument is the message. Lovely integration of real-time data and architecture, an early step for urban infrastructure as display.
3. Face.com API -- an alpha API for face recognition.
4. Average Number of Books/Kindle -- short spreadsheet figuring out, from cited numbers. (Spoiler: the answer is 27)

iPad 3G and the vacancy of the connected textbook

Last Friday was iPad 3G day and, at my house, the FedEx truck barely made it out of the driveway before the iconic Apple-designed packaging was discarded on the floor and my iPad was busily synching it’s pre-purchased apps.

For the past couple of years I’ve been pulling out my iPhone and my Kindle in meetings, laying them on top of each other and saying, “There -- something like that” when asked what the digital textbook would be like. It was an attempt to convey a fuzzy, absent space in my thinking where a tool should be that could serve as a window to the Internet, to an engaging world of content that invites exploration, and to communities of peers and others that enrich learning. Friday, I finally got to hold a beautifully designed piece of hardware with equally beautifully crafted digital books and learn a little more about the shape and structure of that fuzzy space.

The Elements, Alice, and Jack have been reviewed extensively elsewhere. My personal experience? Delightful. Engaging. Fresh. In an earlier post, I characterized the 21st-century textbook as, among other things, living, interactive, and connected. The artful books I enjoyed on my iPad brought home just how well authors can deliver engaging books that are living and interactive using the technologies of today. The fuzzy vacancy in my mind is filled up in places by rotating images of Boron and Ytterbium, or by a jar of Orange Marmalade falling down the rabbit hole. In other places, the fuzziness persists.

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Four short links: 4 May 2010

Software vs Biology, Virtual Keyboards, Massive Sensor Network Scheme, and MTurk via JavaScript

1. Comparing genomes to computer operating systems in terms of the topology and evolution of their regulatory control networks (PNAS) -- paper comparing structure and evolution of software design (exemplified by the Linux operating system) against biological systems (in the form of the e. coli bacterium). They found software has a lot more "middle manager" functions (functions that are called and then in turn call) as opposed to biology, where "workers" predominate (genes that make something, but which don't trigger other genes). They also quantified how software and biology value different things (as measured what persists across generations of organisms, or versions of software): Reuse and persistence are negatively correlated in the E. coli regulatory network but positively correlated in the Linux call graph[...]. In other words, specialized nodes are more likely to be preserved in the regulatory network, but generic or reusable functions are persistent in the Linux call graph. (via Hacker News)
2. Virtual Keyboards in Google Search -- rolling out virtual keyboards across all Google searches. Very nice solution to the problem of "how the heck do I enter that character on this keyboard?". (via glynmoody on Twitter)
3. Information and Quantum Systems Lab at HP -- working on the mathematical and physical foundations for the technologies that will form a new information ecosystem, the Central Nervous System for the Earth (CeNSE), consisting of a trillion nanoscale sensors and actuators embedded in the environment and connected via an array of networks with computing systems, software and services to exchange their information among analysis engines, storage systems and end users. (via dcarli on Twitter)
4. Turkit -- Java/JavaScript API for running iterative tasks on Mechanical Turk. (via chrismessina on Twitter)

Ignite Bay Area @ Web 2.0 Expo Tonight

Ignite Bay Area is happening tonight to help kick-off Web 2.0 Expo. We will be returning to the Mezzanine (444 Jessie Street, SF). As always these will five-minute, 20 slide presentations on geeky topics. We will hear from the likes of Jen Bekman, Derek Dukes, Jesper Andersen, and Tobias Peggs and we are sponsored by .CO. Expect to be wowed by discussions on democratizing planetariums and surviving both TV news reporting and hungry hippos (over cocktails, of course).

I'll be there along with local Ignite Bay Area organizers Carmel Hagen and Emily Goligoski. This is the third set of @IgniteBayArea talks. This event will feature limited seating and will be free. The evening's schedule is below.

Here are our awesome speakers for the evening:
1. Derek Dukes is the co-founder of timeline creation company Dipity.com and will be sharing thoughts on lean as the new black.

2. Kim Lembo manages tech partnerships at the NASA Ames Research Center and will be talking about democratizing planetariums.

3. Tony Deifell is the managing director of Q Media Labs. He wrote The Big Thaw: Charting a New Course for Journalism and is going to be discussing the Why Do You Do What You Do project.

4. Ola Helland is a web developer who started the One Million Giraffes site after a bet with a friend.

5. Cara Jones is a former TV reporter who lived to tell and will share how reporting bad news led to the founding of her company Storytellers for Good.

6. Jesper Andersen founded FreeRisk.org and will be sharing how to not hurt those you stalk in “When Social Edges go Black: Forgiving on the Internet.”

7. Chuck Kindred convinced us of his presentation skills by starting with this introduction: “I am a big, strong, athletic, handsome, vulnerable, sensitive, engaging young man. You probably don't know anyone like me.”

8. Tobias Peggs is the president of One Riot, a real-time search engine and advertising startup, and will tell us about starting companies in India.

9. Chris Hutchins founded LaidOffCamp and has also survived a hippo attack.

10. Ignite Bay Area alumnus Deb Schultz is a partner at Altimeter Group and will be sharing her observations on Jews and the Internet.

11. Fresh from Ignite Boulder, Andrew Hyde, the founder of Pick.IM, will be describing when crowdsourcing turns exploitative.

Web 2.0 Expo conference attendees will be given preferred admittance and the event will be first come, first serve. Here's the timeline for the evening:

7:30 PM: Doors open for Web 2.0 Expo Conference Pass & Expo Plus Pass holders
7:45 PM: Doors open for the general community
8:15 PM: Talks and networking begin

Envisioning educational technology in schools

I'm an advocate for encouraging school districts to plan for effective instructional use of technology. This may seem rather obvious to many, but in the course of my work as an educator, I've seen very few institutions do this well. Specifically, I'd like to see communities hold thoughtful conversations around how schools and families can support students' development towards becoming effective and participatory digital citizens. Schools must take a longitudinal and developmental approach to deliberately planning for the skills, literacies and habits of mind that they value in their graduates.

One tool that might serve as a springboard for these conversations is the New Media Consortium's Horizon Report: 2010 K-12 Edition. For the past two years, I've served on the advisory board for this publication produced by a Texas-based think tank. As board members, we have made recommendations and shared examples of what we consider best practices in educational technology. The New Media Consortium, in turn, took our recommendations and elaborated on core technologies that schools should be investigating and adopting in three time-to-adoption horizons: one year or less, two to three years, and four to five years. In the report, the New Media Consortium also discussed at length underlying key trends and critical challenges.

I'd love for readers of this blog (and my fellow Edu 2.0 bloggers) to look over this document and share your initial thoughts and ideas in the comments here or in the Horizon Report's comments section. Do you agree or disagree with the proposed horizons? Do any examples, trends or challenges surprise you? Do you have any thoughts on helping schools plan strategically?

This Thursday, May 6, at 7:30 PM EST, I'll be participating in a conversation with my friends from Seedlings at Bit by Bit on EdTechTalk , a webcasting community that has served as a tremendous professional development vehicle to many educators. Join us online and participate in a backchannel chat to discuss the future of educational technology in K12 settings!

The spy who came in from the code

Carmen Medina talks about tech, the CIA, and why government agencies don't play well with others

If you were going to pick an adjective to describe the Central Intelligence Agency, "open" wouldn't immediately spring to mind. But according to Carmen Medina, who recently retired from the CIA and will speak at Gov 2.0 Expo, openness is just what the agency needs.

Medina's Role at the CIA:

Carmen Medina: I just retired after 32 years at the CIA. I spent 25 years as a manager of analysts. In the mid part of this decade, I was sort of the number two in charge of analysis and also ended in charge of the Center for the Study of Intelligence, which is kind of like the Agency's think tank and lessons-learned center. During my career, I was a bit of a heretic in the organization, though a successful one I guess, in that I always questioned how things were done. From the beginning, I was really interested in how information technology and the Internet had the potential to change the way we did our business. So back in the late '90s, I was pushing hard to get all of our work online, even though a lot of people in the agency were skeptical about it.

Social media and extreme views:

CM: What the Internet allows, if you're an individual that has an extreme view, is the ability to broadcast that view in the privacy of your den. You can get information to support your view without having to go to any unusual places that would attract suspicion. You can find other people who hold the same views that you do. You're able to hide in plain sight, basically, while you're doing that. While I'm a strong believer in the Internet and social networking, like everything else that's happened in human history, it also offers a lot of potential for people who are not well-intentioned.

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Four short links: 3 May 2010

Science Data Hacking, Obstructive Interfaces, 3G to Wifi, and Australian Gov 2.0

1. Science Hack Day -- Saturday, June 19th and Sunday, June 20th, 2010, in the Guardian offices in London. A meeting place for the designer/coder class and scientists, with datasets as the common language. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
2. Facebook's Evil Interface (EFF) -- Facebook's new M.O. is to say "to better help you, we took away your privacy. If you are stupid and wish to attempt to retain your privacy, don't not avoid to fail to click here. Now click here. Now click here ... ha, moved it! Moved it again! Gotcha!". Attempting to use Facebook to talk to friends without having your friendships and interests pimped to the data mining Johns is as hard as canceling an AOL subscription.
3. Make Your Own 3G Router -- an easter-egg inside the new Chumby model (which O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures invested in).
4. Australian Government's Response to the Web 2.0 Taskforce -- it's all positive: all but one recommendation accepted. Another very positive step from the Aussies.

Report from Health Information Technology in Massachusetts

When politicians organize a conference, there's obviously an agenda--beyond the published program--but I suspect that it differed from the impressions left by speakers and break-out session attendees at Health Information Technology: Creating Jobs, Reducing Costs, & Improving Quality.

A quick overview of what I took away from the conference is sobering. Health care costs will remain high for many years while we institutionalize measures intended to reduce them. Patients will still have trouble getting their records in electronic form to a different doctor (much less access it themselves). And quality control will make slow headway against the reluctance of doctors to share data on treatment outcomes.

Still, I have to give the optimists their due, and chief among the optimists is Richard Shoup, director of the Massachusetts eHealth Institute and one of the conference's key organizers. He points out that the quality control measures emerging at the federal level (the "meaningful use" criteria for electronic health records) meshes excellently with both the principles and the timing legislated in Section 305 in the Massachusetts health care bill. Massachusetts has a long history of health care IT deployment and of collaboration to improve quality. "All stakeholders are at the table," he says, and the Massachusetts eHealth Institute recently floated a statewide plan for implementing health care IT.

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Education 2.0: The importance of ownership

I've been teaching adults for almost twenty years. First as a lecturer, then as a professor and for the last ten years as a coach and facilitator for large organizations all over the world. I love technology and the possibility that it represents but I believe that technology can only ever enable educational success. It rarely drives. As technology becomes more pervasive we must shift our focus to the driving factors. I would argue that a key driver for educational success is the internal sense of ownership each student has for his or her own development. If they have this, they will find a way to succeed. If they don't, the technology enables ever greater levels of complacency.

For example, companies offer more and better educational content to their employees each year via technology. The delivery mechanisms become more sophisticated, the market analysis and demographic segmentation become more precise. The richness of the experience and the connectedness of the learning with the world beyond the classroom becomes ever-broader. Do employees learn more today than they did in 1970? In 1900? I'm not sure. I've seen no compelling evidence either way. The ones who really want to learn, learn more. The self-starters learn more. The employees of the best companies learn at a breathtaking pace but that has more to do with these company's ability to attract those who are committed to their own self development than it does with the quality of the educational technology. Students who own their own development use new technology well - it serves as an accelerant to their educational success. But the accelerant is not the spark.

This is the case for adults - employees in the world's largest and richest organizations. Is it the case for children? I don't know. Probably.

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Gov 2.0 Week in Review

Open government assessed, Web managers meet, Britain erupts and Internet Policy 3.0

Since last week's Gov 2.0 Week in Review was well-received, we're going to make it a regular feature. If you have news and tips about the government 2.0 space, please let me know at alex@oreilly.com or @digiphile on Twitter.

Open Government Initiative checkpoint

Over at WhiteHouse.gov, federal CIO Vivek Kundra and CTO Aneesh Chopra posted an initial assessment of open government plans, evaluating "version 1.0" of agency plans against the requirements of the Open Government Directive. The White House also published an updated open government scorecard that includes specific self assessments. Analysts Andrew DiMaio and Alan Webber both observed that no agency failed the initial assessment.

The White House's Office for Science and Technology Policy teamed up with the Case Foundation for a policy innovation summit today in Washington on "citizen-centered solutions." The event included a livestreamed conversation with Sonal Shah regarding the use of contests, prizes and other initiatives to engage the public in policy making.

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Recent Posts

• State of the Internet Operating System Part Two: Handicapping the Internet Platform Wars | by Tim O'Reilly on April 30, 2010
• Health IT committee has six months to define insurance enrollment standards | by Alex Howard on April 30, 2010
• Four short links: 30 April 2010 | by Nat Torkington on April 30, 2010
• Promiscuous online culture and the vetting process | by Alistair Croll on April 29, 2010
• Four short links: 29 April 2010 | by Nat Torkington on April 29, 2010
• A few weeks in, a third of iPad Books are Fiction | by Ben Lorica on April 29, 2010
• Setting White House priorities for electronic privacy: HIT, smart grid and education | by Alex Howard on April 28, 2010
• Four short links: 28 April 2010 | by Nat Torkington on April 28, 2010
• The 21st-century textbook | by Marie Bjerede on April 27, 2010
• The military goes social | by James Turner on April 27, 2010
• Pew Report: Citizens turning to Internet for government data, policy and services | by Alex Howard on April 27, 2010
• Four short links: 27 April 2010 | by Nat Torkington on April 27, 2010