OpenGovWest11 Presentation Summaries and Review

I attended OpenGovWest11 this year for the first time. OGW discusses open-government, transparency, collaboration, and participation.

Below are a number of notes and summaries from OpenGovWest11.

• OpenGovWest11 Local Governments and Transparency Technology
• OpenGovWest11 Unlocking Your Data: Emerging Data Standards
• OpenGovWest11 Websites and Usability
• Lunch at OpenGovWest11
• OpenGovWest11 Creating Open, Accessible, Low-cost Documents
• OpenGovWest11 Syncing Government and Civic Resources
• OpenGovWest11 Keynote
• Getting started at OpenGovWest 2011

All conference and attendee submitted links available on Lanyard at http://lanyrd.com/2011/ogw11/

Support http://knowledgeaspower.org/ Knowledge as Power, the organizers of OpenGovWest.

Let’s get started with a summary of events during OpenGovWest11.

Keynote

The Keynote and opening remarks started off with Portland, OR Mayor Sam Adams.

Portland, OR Mayor Sam Adams Keynote

Mayor Adams spoke of their new data system, under Beta status “The Hub” along with PDX Reporter App, available on Google Code. Read specifics on their new App here.

One major announcement at OGW11 is that Zanby (http://zanby.com/) went open-source during the conference! It always makes me happy to see commercial products go open-source. I believe that once you involve community in the development of a product, that it will almost always become better!

I really enjoyed listening to Tiago Peixoto, a participatory democracy expert. View his website here. Some of my notes from his introduction are below. In summary, participatory governments have shown great success and proved beneficial for both government agencies and the citizens.

• https://twitter.com/#!/participatory
  
• citizens say what and where the money should go
• around 1500 cities around the world use participatory budgeting. the budget and spending is painted on a wall so that people can see what is spent and where
• increased transparency, better allocation of resources, others
• tax collection increases when people have a say in the budgeting – tax collection tripled in one area.
• phone call and SMS was the most effective methods of communication 80% more response than other forms of media contact
• what is the role of technology in participation?
• let people decide on a portion of the budget
• highest percentage of participation from the poor
• face to face meetings rate of participation only 2%
• reason to support participation: inclusiveness of process, increase popular support for decisions
• the most Popular Idea ranking is the worst idea.
• http://www.allourideas.org/ – a suggestion box for the web

Be sure to check out Alan Roseblatt from the Center for American Progress Action Fund. His comments were insightful and most of all just made sense.

• targeting people with social media (e.g. tweet a petition or action)
• technology undermines the physical restrictions of politics
• http://act.ly/
• Citizens are better at using social media tools that government
• citizens want to be able to act on the information e.g. share, follow through, act
• if you describe a process, there must be follow through for the process. for example, if there is a web site with an explanation for a process, there had better be a link to follow through
• if government meets citizen data expectations, they will be more responsive
• if you tweet @comcastcares for your problems, you will get a quicker response that actually calling Comcast. people want quick turnaround times and a responsive government
• people expect government to be active and social
• Standard comms discipline for executive messaging for years. Parallels? RT @Overlapping: “140 characters is a 9-second soundbite… #ogw11
• consumers of content determine channels of distribution
• http://www.slideshare.net/drdigipol

Read my notes from the Keynote here.

Creating Open and Accessible Documents

http://openstates.sunlightlabs.com/ – a project to scrape government websites for documents and information

Digitization and archiving Vancouver, metadata and documentation

http://codeforamerica.org/

B.C. Government went to XML – tools for working with XML are quite expensive. B.C. government built their own tool to work with the data.

http://www.dvlottery.state.gov/ – Oops

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) – governments are scanning and archiving old documents, using ORC.

http://citp.princeton.edu/ – Princeton Center for Information Technology

Biggest Challenges to Modernizing Documents:

• changing perceptions of how we do business

http://www.linux.com/archive/feed/43020 – XML applications for Linux

http://schemadocs.akomantoso.org/ANdocumentation/front-page/akoma-ntoso-documentation

http://omeka.org/ – Dublin Core standards and web publishing – Take a look athttp://archive.landtrain.net for a live example

Websites and Usability

Websites and Usability slides with Kathy Gill and others at http://wiredpen.com/2011/05/13/how-to-create-government-websites-that-don%E2%80%99t-fail/

My initial impressions from OpenGovWest11 were extremely positive. The Juniper Hotel provided an awesome and very inviting entrance to the events. My only real complaint is that the sessions were not longer. The average session was only 45 minutes, barely enough to get the conversation going. It was usually right towards the end that I was getting into the topic and asking questions – then it was time to wrap it up. Thank you to the Ford Foundation for sponsoring my attendance to OpenGovWest11!

A better perspective of the Juniper tent

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