Gov 2.0 Radio » Citizen 2.0

Gov 2.0 Radio Hot Links – July 8, 2010

Adriel Hampton — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 03:08:37 +0000

Brought to my American readers from the future:

Armed with Science: Time, Einstein, and the Coolest Stuff (video)

Govistics launches visual data application

Web 2.0, Gov 2.0, Society 2.0

Information Week: 12 Worst Government Web Sites

Phillippines Supreme Court Joins Twitter to Widen Access to Decisions

Where next for digital engagement?

Gov 2.0 Expo: From DC to Russia

Adriel Hampton — Sun, 30 May 2010 16:05:16 +0000

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Episode

From DC to Russia: In this 15-minute show, Russian new media consultant Alena Popova joins us live from DC to share lessons learned at the Gov 2.0 Expo conference. Alena cites presentations by Tim Berners-Lee, Dustin Haisler, Tim O’Reilly and David Hale.

Download episode.

Conundrum – Managing Party Invites and Informal Events

Adriel Hampton — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 04:13:37 +0000

Is Evite the Myspace of party planning sites? That’s what Amy Mengel opined in response to my complaining about the service. With just about every social network trying steer users towards its own events solution, event planning still seems very wild west in the Web 2.0 world. Evite is well established, but I groan every time I see one of their e-mails in my inbox. Invariably, the invite falls into one of two categories: a mass invite from someone I don’t know or haven’t talked to in years; or, a mass invite from someone I know well and who probably should have picked up the phone or handed me a card if they really wanted me at their wedding. I loathe Evite. But, in the rare case where I do RSVP to an event through Evite, the automatic reminders can be handy. Then again, I could set those up in Google calender as well.
Meetup.com has a nice system for event planning, but it’s very tied to that specific community. Facebook also has a nice interface, but if you’re like me – with a lot of activists and organizers in your network – you may also have gone to a default ignore mode to tune out hundreds of spammy invites. (Facebookers, I doubt that everyone in your network is a good fit for your event; maybe take a little time to target those invites?)
Eventbrite seems to be a decent solution with integrated social media, but I still haven’t seen it used in an e-mail setting. And maybe that’s the issue – that some invites should be very non-intrusive, and that others should be very personal. And e-mail is too much for one, not enough for the other.
But that’s me.
What online solutions are working for your events and parties? And which do you respond to?

Posted via email from Wired to Share

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Let’s Do It San Francisco – Next Steps

Adriel Hampton — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 03:41:47 +0000

The Let’s Do It movement is inherently grassroots and requires a massive volunteer effort. Since I publicly floated the idea on Thursday, the response has been positive, with support from the director of the SF Neighborhood Empowerment Network, line-level SF city employees, Craig Newmark, and, very importantly, Ben Berkowitz of SeeClickFix (a Web, phone and mobile app that allows citizens to track and report blight and municipal infrastructure issues), just to name a few. Ben and his co-founders are going to be in town in mid-April, and it makes sense to have an initial volunteer team meeting at that time.

The volunteers who kicked of Let’s Do It in Estonia started with a team of 20 that grew to more than 600, with tens of thousands taking part in the culminating day of action. My first goal is to have at least 20 of us at an initial meeting mid-month.

To clean graffiti, we’re looking at a couple big issues. Some of the worst of it is on state-owned and private property. That means getting permissions from the property owners to remove it. And we’ll need ladders, not just paint and paint supplies. I think the permission part is pretty easily dealt with as we create an opt-in for property owners, who will greatly benefit from this effort (they are legally responsible for removing graffiti on their property). We need muralists on board for hot spots, a trash transport plan, and, as we pick up steam, there may be opportunity to address other blight as well.

There already are commercial paint matching apps, and we’ll want to work to tie them into the mapping system as well as seek partnerships with paint companies that can provide mobile paint matching services for the day of action.

Alissa has pointed out that we can tap SF’s 311 system to identify outstanding complaints before the day of action (thinking about at September or October for the date, perhaps the weekend of 10/10/10).

I’ve created a Twitter account and hashtag for LetsDoItSF, and we should also agree on an open shared space for online collaboration: Google docs, Wave, GovLoop, here?

Thoughts?

To get more insight on what we’re diving into, check out the Let’s Do it World action manual. What we are doing here will not only dramatically improve blight in San Francisco and show the power of collective civic action, it is also critical infrastructure building in one of the world’s most earthquake-prone regions.

The technologies for pulling this off have only advanced since 2008 and Estonia. Let’s do it!

Cleaning Up All Dumping and Graffiti in SF in One Day

Adriel Hampton — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 22:20:03 +0000

You may have heard the story of how on May 3, 2008, 40,000 volunteers picked up all the trash in the country of Estonia. Since then, similar “Let’s Do It” actions have been organized from Bangalore to New Dehli.

In the U.S., there’s been a lot of action around technology and government, and conferences with tag lines like, “Private Sector Solutions Meet Government Challenges.” Two major points of energy in what’s called the Gov 2.0 or Open Government movement have been transparency, pushed by organizations like the Sunlight Foundation, and the “open data” movement, harnessing governments’ propensity for statistics to create handy mobile programs for organizing and accessing useful information on parking, recycling, available taxis and neighborhood crime data.

But I’ve always seen Gov 2.0′s greatest potential as unleashing projects like Let’s Do It, harnessing collective energy and talent to overcome big civic challenges. Could San Francisco create a Let’s Do It project to collectively map all of the dumping and graffiti in the city and take it on in a massive day of volunteer action involving muralists, City workers, business sponsors, neighbors and volunteers from around the Bay?

I think so.

cross posted from OpenSF

New Podcast: Making Gov 2.0 Happen in Massachusetts

Adriel Hampton — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 15:22:33 +0000

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Episode

Making Gov 2.0 Happen in Massachusetts: A conversation with Jess Weiss, Mass.gov project analyst, and Brad Blake, director of new media for Governor Deval Patrick, about how the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is using social media, barcamps and other creative initiatives to advance collaboration and public participation in state government. Says Blake, “People deserve to better understand what their government is doing and participate in shaping public policy.”

Download episode.

#yeg: Critical Mass for Gov2 Awesomeness

Adriel Hampton — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 01:21:29 +0000

There are certain governments that quickly come to mind as groundbreakers in the fledgling Gov 2.0 movement: State of Utah, City of San Francisco, City of DC, Manor, TX.

Edmonton, Alberta is making critical strides of awesomeness in joining that pack. From last week’s Open311 announcement to Saturday’s Open City Workshop, Edmonton – known on Twitter as Yeg in line with its airport code – is making huge moves to improve civic life through technology and community collaboration.

Yesterday, Edmonton CIO Chris J. Moore was widely quoted as telling attendees, “You are the strategy.” Moore is a pretty cool dude. His office has no desk, just couches and a laptop, so I’m told. (I’ll pin that and more rumors down when Moore visits SF in April.) Saturday, he announced several new “Open City” initiatives: a new app for reporting quality of life issues; a new partnership with Code for America on improving local technology; moving IT services to the cloud; and an app-building contest with a $50,000 kitty.

Edmonton has a vibrant social media community, which I’ve written about before. I’m excited to see what the future brings. I’ve also put together a list of folks on Twitter involved in the Open City discussion, and you can follow them here.

Promo: Growing the Gov 2.0 Movement

Adriel Hampton — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 05:56:03 +0000

One of the important things to consider in any kind of activism and engagement is pop culture. One of this week’s guests, Sarah Granger, was much more on the ball than me, reminding that the Oscars are Sunday. So, we’ll be moving the live Gov 2.0 Radio tomorrow to 2 p.m. PT/5 p.m. I hope you’ll join us as we talk with Sarah and Luke Fretwell of Govfresh!

On this week’s podcast, we’ll be taking a 20,000-foot look at the Gov 2.0 movement. Sarah explains more:

“One thing I’ve been thinking about lately is the whole definition of gov 2.0, the semantics – e-gov, open gov, open data, etc. I was thinking about this before Gov 2.0 Camp LA, but the session with Billy Grundfest where he essentially came up with a summary statement really brought that home for me. We still are such a small movement when you step back and look at the whole of society and where they focus their energies (celebrity watching, reality TV, just making house payments, shuttling kids to and from school). Trying to get more people engaged in the discussion of where they want their government(s) to go in the future may sound obvious to those of us knee deep in it, but for everyone else, I think the novelty of transparency may still be lost.

“As I wrote in my post about breaking gender barriers, there are a lot of practical steps we can take to raise awareness and get more people involved. What are the best strategies for taking the movement itself to the next level in terms of awareness and communication?”

Changing the World, One Gov 2.0-Enabled Voice at a Time

Adriel Hampton — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 04:13:22 +0000

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Episode

Changing the World, One Gov 2.0-Enabled Voice at a Time: Join a preview of Gov 2.0 Camp New England with Sarah Bourne of MassGov and Yasmin Fodil from HKS, followed by a conversation with Wayne Moses Burke of the Open Forum Foundation.

We talk with Wayne about tools like GovLuv – for connecting citizens to their elected reps through social media, the upcoming citizen engagement developers workshop and Participation Camp he’s working on, and his vision for advancing public participation in government by connecting government managers and staff, public engagement experts, online tool developers, and citizens.

“I think our focus as a community needs to change from ‘technology in government’ to ‘citizen-centered government,’” Wayne says. “What we’re really in the middle of is a broad cultural shift that I believe will result in an engaged citizenry. The complication on the government side is being ready for that.”

Local Gov 2.0 and Participatory Community

Adriel Hampton — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 22:38:22 +0000

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Episode

Local Gov 2.0 and Participatory Community: We discuss Gov 2.0 applications for local offices and agencies, and highlight next week’s Gov 2.0 Camp LA. We also discuss community collaboration and the challenges of building participatory community around issues and actions. Special guests include Erin Kotecki Vest, political and special projects director for BlogHer, Ron Vinson, Deputy Director of San Francisco’s Department of Technology, and eCommunications manager Martha McLean of Ottawa.

Related posts:
Carol Spencer – Social Media, Local Gov and NAGW

Local Government Innovation from Manor, TX

SFPUC – Making a Social Media Splash