Dear Mr. President

From: danengber@yahoo.com Sent: Wed 11/5/2008 07:22 AM Subject: Be the first e-President (not spam!)

By Daniel Engber Posted 10.27.2008 at 12:00 pm 5 Comments

CHEAP HITS

I know, I know -- these ideas sound interesting, but you've got a lot of other things to deal with. Does the country really have the resources for a technology facelift?

The beauty of all this is that it's not as hard as it sounds. Sure, it will take effort to finish the shift from a paper culture to a digital one. But the monetary costs should be small. Many of the ideas and Internet technologies are out there for the taking. Consider that the Brits developed their open-source E-Petitions site in collaboration with a nonprofit called MySociety. This isn't a huge software-development company but a group of four full-time staffers who work from home, plus a network of unpaid volunteers.

Several of the most important American e-government initiatives have been similarly inexpensive. The Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 set the ambitious goal of creating a searchable Web site to track all federal spending. The Congressional Budget Office guessed that the project would cost $15 million in its first five years. In the end, the feds paid just $600,000 for a prototype that had been built by a nonprofit watchdog group.

And consider those inital costs an investment. According to Andrew Rasiej, a co-founder of the blog techPresident.com and a senior technology adviser for the congressional-watchdog group the Sunlight Foundation, this kind of reform leads to money saved down the line. "It's extremely inexpensive," he explains, "because the data accessibility will create massive efficiencies that will make it pay for itself many times over. The biggest issue for the next president" is to recognize and acknowledge that "citizens are capable of building many of the tools that will open up government and reboot our democracy themselves."

Mr. President-Elect, by combining radical transparency with focused and purposeful user interactions, you can ensure that your administration is more responsive to the American people and makes better decisions about how to serve them. You have the opportunity to bring us from an era of unprecedented White House secrecy to one of unprecedented openness, and transform the presidency for the 21st century. I hope you seize it.

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5 Comments

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wzjx77

from clarkston, mi

10/27/08 at 12:14 pm

Seldom have I ever read anything less worthy of reading, so I quit after 1 of 2. Hide everything on line where the old folks that actually vote do not venture. Science is good and the internet is good, but sometimes old is better.

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Ophiguris

from Upsala, Ontario

10/27/08 at 12:39 pm

Is. . . anyone worried about hacking?

I mean, modern computer users can get in to even the Pentagon and such. Some hackers can take over whole computers even. I'm canadian, and also very inexperienced : P. But how fool proof /IS/ the government's system?

There was a quote from an ex-CIA agent;
"Bring me 50 of the world's best hackers, and I will bring this country to its knees"

In order to set up an interactive community, AND online as well, there will need to be several hundreds of layers of security precautions. More so, what about leaks? Getting a hold of a government operator would be easier, and you could be breaking into servers in and out easily. As well, you'd have hundreds of members in such a community, and I don't think the president can handle ALL of them. You'd need thousands of staff, all trained to best answer questions. And even then, it's not really average american-president interaction. It's like talking to Kid's Help Phone, trying to figure out your life.

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mythgarr

10/28/08 at 10:26 am

@Ophiguris:
Thankfully, most of the data they are talking about providing online is already publicly available. Voting records are already online, but they're only listed by the bill that was voted on - it's not currently possible (at least on the government website) to select a senator and see that PERSON'S entire voting record.
Additionally, providing online community tools to make suggestions for bills, provide feedback to posted suggestions and such would need no more security than facebook, myspace, or whatever. All of that correspondence to senators, governors, etc are available for public request via a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request.
This article is talking, primarily, about enabling easier communication between elected officials and their constituency.

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Mark Nowotarski

10/29/08 at 11:06 am

As a patent agent and active participant in Peer to Patent, I can say that this “crowdsourcing” approach to citizen government relations has merit. There’s a lot more work to be done, however. One of the challenges for the creative patent agent is to find a way to write a patent application that can be reviewed equally well by two very different audiences, the Peer- to-Patent reviewers, and USPTO patent examiners. This is no small feat, but for those that can master it, dramatically higher quality patents and much more efficient patent examination should result.

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