Sarah Davies

I’m at a sxsw panel on open government. I’m interested in how the ACLU of Washington can help promote dissemination of government data. Here are the presenters:

	Alissa Black City & County of San Francisco
	Dmitry Kachaev OCTO Labs/DC Government
	Noel Hidalgo New York State Senate

I had no idea there were state governments that are so open! New York was the first state senate to adopt Creative Commons. They even send out their web traffic bi-weekly via RSS. They have built idea generator applications and put them under a GPL 3 license.

Alissa Black uptalks! She says that they built out a platform for different departments of the San Francisco city government to submit datasets that would be released freely online, but departments didn’t do it. So they then implemented a scorecard for each department. They have an internal city-wide wiki called citypedia! They pushed open source software adoption through the procurement side. They created a policy that says if a department is evaluating a software purchase over $100K, they have to investigate open source.

OCTOlabs created a contest asking developers to create open source government data applications using one of three government APIs. They have found that if you wait to have complete datasets, you will be waiting forever. Partial datasets should still be put up online. There seems to be a dillemma in that the return on investment of open government is very difficult to measure, so it’s very difficult to draw attention to. They are trying to build a community of people who participate in government through various applications and use that as proof that the program is working.

Audience questions are after the jump! Read the rest of this entry »

1. Find your evangelist
Is there someone in your organization who can’t stop talking about the great work you do? Bring everyone in your organization to mind. Have a Cinderella moment, and grab even those folks who scrub the kitchen floor and crawl around connecting cables. This person could be anywhere in your organization.

2. Give your evangelist time
Find someone else who can do what they do for five hours a week. Really. Offer to scrub the kitchen floor for them. Have them go around your office and ask everyone what they are doing. “What’s the most interesting thing you did this week?” “what’s coming down the pipe?” “what are you thinking about doing in the future?” Have them make a list of 10 interesting stories per week. Per week! They can do it. Have them record or write down direct quotes from your employees. Your organization has a lot more news than you think it does. It just takes a passionate person to go around and collect it.

3. Find your writer
You need a great writer. I can’t emphasize this enough. You need to hire a freelance writer who is looking for a little extra income while they finish their next novel. He or she needs to be funny. He or she needs to be charming. He or she needs to be a digital native so they know how to write for the web. If your organization is comfortable with it, I’d say find someone who is a little incendiary. Give them the by-line so they get professional cred for their work.

4. Pay your writer
Pay them $5 to write a sample blog post for you. If you like it, negotiate a rate that’s manageable for you. The very best professional bloggers make about $12 per post. Hire them to write 10 posts per week. (OMG! That’s expensive! Yes! How much do you spend on publishing and mailing the newsletter that no one reads? More than $480 a month? Hire a blogger.) Have them pick five of the evangelist’s ten weekly stories and write them up. (Yes, you are throwing away five stories! Chaff/wheat. Think about it.) Post one every weekday. Also have them find one news story or post from another blog every weekday that has to do with your organization, and post an excerpt from it and a linkback to it. Pay them the same rate to do this, even though it’s less writing. It’s important to have continuity of authorship, and other blogs will notice you faster if you link back to them. So, that makes two posts every weekday.

And that’s it. The technical aspects of setting up a blog are easy. If you don’t have a tech team who can install blogging software for you, just go to wordpress.com, buy the premium account ($15/year) so you can use your own domain name, and pick a theme. It’s that easy.

[Edited to add: Disclosure is hugely important to regular blog readers. A disclosure page, like this one or this one helps build trust with your readers. Tell them outright that your blogger is a paid contractor, not a volunteer supporter. Always make a note in your post if the author or the organization has personal or financial connections to the subject of the blog post. Hat tip to Jesse's comment below for the suggestion.]

My takeaways from Tim Hwang‘s sxsw panel:

The internet has its own self-referential universe of memes. Lolcats is one of the most virulent memes that has ever existed. It has a computer code, it has a wiki-translation of the bible, and it has become it’s own language that has spread throughout nearly every other meme online. What aspects of memes cause them to spread or die?

Recessions are great for internet culture. Lots more people are able to consume and create memes when they are unemployed. Twitter, Etsy, and Vimeo have all had hugely increased traffic since the recession started in October.

Can you hack internet culture? Are there reliable tactics to become “internet famous”? Can we have a “social net neutrality” that ensures that memes organically spread rather than being pushed by a small group of people who know how to hack the system?

The ethos that made the internet so wildly successful is not the ethos of a majority of its members at this point. Any ISP has the ability to “unroute” traffic by claiming to be a site it doesn’t own, and flushing all the packets it receives. We are relying on the neighborly nature of lots of ISPs working together, and that’s certainly not the way most people are. Wikipedia depends on passionate volunteers who keep out the spammers. Wikipedia is only 45 minutes from utter chaos if all those volunteers, who are in no way contractually obligated to stay, leave. The internet’s siblings to those wikipedia volunteers are called NANOG, they are the passionate volunteers who fix the “map” of the internet whenever someone attempts to alter it maliciously. What happens if those, again, not contractually obligated volunteers, leave?

Originally, personal computers merely ran any executable code that you asked them to run. What would have happened if someone had distributed bad code? They could have taken down several computers, but for 20 years, no one did. Today’s pcs have huge stacks of software running at any given time, and their users don’t know which ones are good and which ones are bad. Since computers are increasingly networked, and we’ve legislated to allow ecommerce, we now have a huge motivation to distribute bad code – money.

Steve Jobs has said that the beauty of the iPhone is that Apple can control it, meaning it’s nothing like the pc because no one can send you bad code. Even after the app store launched, Apple approves all apps available in the app store to protect its users. But that gives apple the power to deny any app at any time. Apple can pull the plug on any app you use without explanation. In fact, Apple has denied apps merely because they seem to be pointless and they might offend part of the user base (case in point: a Bush presidency countdown clock that was denied). What would Wikipedia be now if they had denied everything that might be offensive or pointless? The same thing is happening with Facebook apps.

Our devices are now “updating” themselves to be things quite different from what we bought. What if your toaster got an upgrade and suddenly started making orange juice? We are no longer purchasing devices we control (like the pc), we are merely paying to enter into enigmatic breakfast-oriented relationships.

Contractually, Apple could reprogram all iphones over the air to turn on their mics and send the ambient noises back to Apple. They wouldn’t even have to tell users that they did this. We would only know that our batteries aren’t lasting as long as they used to.

What do we do? We can all report to each other what software we are running and what software our “experts” are running, so that when someone tells your computer to run code, you have some idea of whether that code is new or old or common or rare. That would be a good start.

I’ll be headed down to BarCamp Portland this weekend. I’m hoping to attend lots of presentations and give one on WordPress Theming. I themed all the sites below with customized versions of the Green Bug WordPress theme.

• Freedom for IP
• Marijuana | It’s Time for a Conversation
• Fire and Water Healing

I’d like to explain to people what to look for in a customizable theme (do you like where the menus are? is it widget friendly? how much of it is images vs text?) and what to ignore (colors, icons, fonts). It’s pretty easy to search and replace specific colors or fonts, or run all the image-based colors through photoshop to get them to agree with the color scheme you choose.

The conference is free, so if you’re in the Portland area, you should definitely drop in and see what sessions are being offered!

Taking a page from the TechCrunch book, here is the list of Web 2.0 companies that I use everyday and couldn’t live without. My productivity and general ability to manage my own life would utterly fail without these technologies:

Firefox The reason I use Firefox is that it is exceptionally good at getting me the information I need in the manner in which I want it. I strip out ads with Adblock. I can dissect, identify, and (temporarily) change nearly every aspect of the pages I’m looking at with Web Developer. I spend a majority of my day staring at Firefox.
Gmail, Google Reader, and Google Calendar These three apps manage a vast majority of my day-to-day craziness – three email accounts, twelve color-coded calendars, and an average of 2,672 blog posts each month. I don’t like the fact that my personal information is being surveilled and monitored by unknown parties. It scares me. But missing a board meeting or a day-care pick up because all my information isn’t in one place scares me more.
Miro Miro is an open source video delivery program. It subscribes to all the video feeds I like, downloads them automatically as soon as they are published, and then then patiently keeps them ready and waiting and meticulously filed until I’m exhausted and need to veg out and be entertained.
WordPress WordPress is one of the most awesome pieces of software I have ever used. Literally. It inspires awe in me. It’s a huge open source project. It has been looked at by thousands of coder eyeballs which means the code running it is flawless, efficient, best-practice code. It is third-grader-easy to learn. It’s the most powerful blogging engine in existence. It’s reliable. It can run on just about any web server. And I can customize it until the cows come home because all the code is open.