 I do want to very much thank Beth for coming up here. She's sort of juggling, sort of re-engineering the U.S. government and a newborn at the same time. And so I think being able to find time on her schedule for us is greatly, greatly appreciated. She, I had meant to bring a copy of her book. She has this wonderful book, Wiki Government, which I think lays out the theory and principles of many of the things that she'll be talking about today. Beth has really been, when we think about, and obviously this is something I think about a fair amount, the role, the sort of basically how information technology potentially breaks down the boundaries between society and government. She's really been at the forefront of wrestling with the implications of this and how we can really re-engineer government to in some sense relax those boundaries in a way to make our government and our democracy function better. And I think that comes across in her book, Wiki Government. But now she's been put in a position as deputy chief technology officer of, is it, sorry, is it the White House or the government? I've heard of the United States. Oh, that place, that place. Could you edit that out of the United States of America? Yeah, so, there we go. But, and she's in a position now where she can actually help push these things into practice. And she's, and a number of, I think, very interesting and successful steps in this direction have been taken. And so it'll be really fun to have a discussion about this now. So I could go on in greater detail, but I think that that would do the injustice of you're not hearing Beth as much. I will also give her particular credit for not using PowerPoint. So she'll just be putting ideas out there, which is a wonderful novelty. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. And thank you again to all the hosts and to so many people for coming out during exam time. I mean, I jokingly add of the United States because when I come here, this is friends and family. I see so many familiar faces both from here and even from abroad. So it's just such a delight to be here. And as a result, I wanna make this as conversational as possible while still sharing as much information as I can about what's taking place in Washington. But I'll invite you please to interrupt me as I'm speaking with any comments or questions. And then we'll leave plenty of time for discussion afterwards, in part because David has strategically, David Weinberger strategically put a piece of pizza right under here, which is wafting up as we speak, tantalizing me. So I'm gonna talk really fast because this looks really good down there. Thank you very much for that cruel piece of pizza. So, as David mentioned, it's really exciting to be in this unique position. As a number of people have been in the room who have been called into service, pressed into service, whether from the inside as I am, as we sometimes think is the inside of the bubble or the outside of the bubble, who are giving up our summer vacations, our leisurely academic lifestyle, the theory of the leisure class or the leisure of the theory class now to try to do what we can to try to bring change to the way that our government works to restore faith in our democratic government and in our democracy. And to try to, I think, stem the tide of what is a crisis of confidence that we are experiencing in government right now. Some of you may have seen the Gallup poll that came out a few months ago that listed the five least well rated professions. And I think you can probably take a guess at what those are. We all know that car salesmen are on the list proverbially, interestingly, lawyers, not on the list, I might add, but replacing lawyers on the list are members of Congress and senators taking two of the five spots of least well rated professions. So we understand that there is a problem going on here and whether the rating, whether we're talking about the 25% approval rating of Congress or of other parts of government, that there is a real trust issue that's taken place. And whether, again, it's from the right or from the left, I think there's a problem now whereby we do not feel connected to, empowered by, or able to influence what takes place in government. We definitely know that we have inherited a set of institutions, and I've spoken about this at Berkman before, but I wanna reiterate again the message that I see now as on the ground, the fact that we inherit a set of institutions that are based on a certain conception of centralized expertise, where government is the decision maker, often disconnected from, again, the populace, for reasons that at the time in a different communications era seemed entirely justified, which was to, again, cut us off from the hue and cry of populist influences and to enable us to make the most independent decisions informed expert decisions possible. But we know that this is actually not the case in the networked in society in which we live today, that we are not making decisions in the best way that we can, that in Washington or whatever the capital is, whether it be Tokyo or Zurich or any state capital, is really not in the best position to make decisions all by itself. We don't have the information that we need, and yet we centralize power increasingly in these capitals leading to the kind of frustration that the president talked about in his State of the Union address. When he talked about the frustration that people experience where every day in Washington is election day. He said, we can't wage a perpetual campaign where the only goal is to see who can get the most embarrassing headlines about the other side. So we have a problem that's occurring now where power and participation are being driven apart from one another, and the distance between the citizen and the power under which the citizen must live is increasing, which is compelling government to adopt I think less participatory institutions, which leaves democracy, again, ever more in doubt and turns citizens into disgruntled rebels who become increasingly alienated, and we only have to witness the rise of the reactionary Tea Party populism in this country or the anti-immigrant nationalist parties in Europe really are, I think, give some indication of just how alienating the failures of participation in the institutions of modern democracy have become. There is an imperative to try to reinvigorate or invigorate, I don't know if we want to romanticize what has taken place before, civic engagement, and there was just yesterday, some of you may have seen the headline about some new papers that came out that said that civic engagement helps to reduce violence and improve public health. Just out now in the Journal of Researching Crime and Delinquency has a study that came out that said rural communities that were more civically robust had lower average violent crime rates and experienced less change in violent crime during the 1980 to 2000 period. They're similar in the same headline. There were also stories now about how the, again, it's another journal here, Social Science and Medicine also has another article that just came out or another story that was just reported yesterday. And again, demonstrated the importance of civic structure on communities for general public health and well-being of those communities. And yet we really are witnessing an absence of this kind of, the fostering of this kind of civic engagement. An absence really of ways that we can, in fact, do something that allows us to take action and take control of and participate in government using particularly the technologies that are available to us. I was just catching up on Glee on Hulu the other day and they're constantly playing these commercials for something called dosomething.org. And I really like the mantra of do something and wonder where it is that and when we are going to build more of dosomething.gov. So I'm here to talk a little bit about what we're doing in that regard with trying to create dosomething.gov, if you will. The opportunity for people to engage with government and for government to foster engagement, again, in communities around the country. Again, on earlier visits to the Berkman Center and Cambridge, I've had opportunity to talk about the Peer to Patent Project, which was one of the models and the sort of impetus for my thinking about the work that we're doing now and that really has been something that has shaped my own thinking and has shaped, I think, a lot of the thinking that we're trying to bring to what we're doing in Washington, namely this, for those of you who are new to the idea, the patent system is a primary example of one of these places where we have a centralized decision maker, the patent official, and whether it's in America or in any other country who is responsible in a very small number of hours for making the extremely important decision of who gets a 20-year grant of monopoly rights over the next pathbreaking invention, or in many cases, not a pathbreaking invention that doesn't deserve a patent, because in the United States context, the examiner only has about 15 to 20 hours in order to make that decision. And that's an examiner who has limited training in science, potentially usually only a BA in this country, unlike in Europe where there's a bit more education, but it's not necessarily in the science in which the examiner is actually doing the work. And so we have, again, this problem of the centralized culture of expertise, the notion that the examiner needs to be disconnected from the influence that he or she might incur if he talks to people in order to inform his work, and as a result, we know not only do we have a backlog that's approximating now 700,000 patent applications, but we're issuing patents that are leading increasingly to very expensive lawsuits and increasing numbers of lawsuits, challenging the validity of those patents, such that the office that is meant to be the office of innovation in our government, the patent office, is increasingly, again, potentially disconnected from its mission. So the idea of peer-to-patent was to take the common social network technologies that we know, and to use them to connect volunteer scientists and technologists to the government in order to help in making that decision, or more accurately, in order to crowdsource or gather information from the knowledgeable scientific and technology technological public to get better ideas to inform the way the examiner makes that decision. Just yesterday, I had a chance to go to a lecture, and I might add it was the first lecture I've attended that I was not speaking at in the last year, which is very exciting, something I plan to do a lot more of this year, about the idea of reinvigorating the notion of an office of technology assessment, and they put forward exactly this kind of idea that the participatory technology assessment techniques that we see particularly now in Europe, where 18 different countries have participatory technology assessment offices, that we can try to reinvigorate the same notion again in the US, particularly using new technology to connect people with scientific expertise to the people who have to make very difficult and complex decisions, whether it's about a patent or global warming and climate change or energy independence or smart grid or health IT or all the other things that Anish will have talked to you about Anish Chopra, the CTO, when he was in Cambridge two or three weeks ago, I think three weeks ago, followed by Andrew McLaughlin, my colleague deputy CTO for internet policy who will have also re-echoed some of these same enormous challenges that we're facing, and the question is how do we actually use the techniques that we learned from something like peer-to-patent to enact institutional innovations in government? So if we're to address any of these difficult questions, whether it's about increasing access to education or spending the healthcare cost curve, we have to actually bring innovation to the way that government works and to be more innovative. And it's a fairly straightforward and simple mantra, but not something that I think is well understood, particularly in legal culture where we pride ourselves on the notion of consistency, precedence, and frankly, uniformity of procedure that are intended to create equality of access to the legal system, equality of access to government institutions, but instead our lawyers are inherently conservative, have caused us, I think, to drag our feet on the kind of re-examination of our business model, if you will, in the way that the music industry and journalists and others have been doing and have been the subject of conferences for years now, again, places like here where there have been very deep conversations about what it means to engage in institutional innovation in every industry except the industry of our democracy. So what does that mean? And let me shift now to talking a bit about what that actually means in practice for what we're doing. It doesn't mean that we're trying to move towards, and I get this question sometimes, direct democracy. This is not about inculcating technology to create push button voting. What we need is more information, not less information faster. That is not the solution. Although we know that whatever we need to do needs to be done quickly and needs to be done cheaply. In this budgetary climate, we're not in the position to engage in expensive institutional innovation. And in fact, what we're looking to do is to use technology, in fact, to reduce the costs by which we deliver services and address the problems that we face. It's also not a conception of deliberative democracy. So we're not looking at, and the reason you have not sort of seen the spread of things like deliberative polls and more of these sorts of techniques as valuable as they are, they are largely focused on talk rather than on action, rather than on that kind of do something.org or do something.gov conception that would actually allow us to solve problems in new ways together. It's what I like to think of as a collaborative conception of democracy, where what we're focused on is the action that we can take using new technology to share and divvy up and trade the work that we're able to do. And I'm glad to see that John Clipinger is here and folks from the Law Lab who are looking at exactly this question of how we use technology to divvy up and share work and engage in robust collaboration via the net, which we need to actually bring to the way our legal institutions work. So this kind of policy innovation is really the focus of what we're doing. And I'm pleased to report that this Friday, the White House is actually convening a summit on policy innovation focused specifically on the innovations of prizes and incentive-backed competitions as well as open grant-making or the two themes we focus on on Friday. The Case Foundation is helping to sponsor and doing the live streaming of interviews. We'll be carrying streaming of the conference next week. But I want to commend to you, it's, by the way, a sold-out event. I've been told there are 200 people on the waiting list for a room that can't accommodate as many slots as there are just for government people who want to get in to talk about how we could use open techniques of grant-making like peer-to-patent. Or, for example, broadband match. Some of you may not know that the NTIA, I don't know if Berkman or anyone else or Northeastern, you've taken a look at broadband match at all, which is what it sounds like, dating, broadband dating. Now, and I don't mean use of broadband for dating, I mean use of broadband to connect people applying for broadband grants in order to match big and small grantees with one another to share and trade applications to write a better application together. Echoes, perhaps of the, what was the project called? What Berkman had that was the Open Brief Writing Project years ago? Open Brief, open law, open something. Nobody remembers, either. You remember where Larry had everybody working on the amicus brief together online 10 years ago, so we're catching up, right? So, but this idea of trying to look at more open and collaborative ways to the way that we work in order again to improve our functioning. Down the street at William James Hall, the guys in the psych department, like Hackman and Kosselin, have written about this concept of the importance of groups of redesigning our political institutions and they talk more generally about all kinds of organizations and institutions in order to connect people to one another. As they say, we simply do not have enough genes to program the brain fully in advance. We must work together extending and supporting our own intelligence with social prosthetic systems that make up for our missing cognitive and emotional capacities. Evolution has allowed our brains to be configured during development so that we are plug compatible with other humans, better than my Mac, I might add here, so that others can help us extend ourselves. And it's exactly this notion that we have to extend ourselves through collaboration and that applies equally to our institutions. And it applies as much in government, I wanna re-emphasize as it does in civil society. So when DARPA sets out to celebrate the internet and runs the DARPA network challenge and says, let's come up with ways to identify where the 10 weather balloons are that we're going to release. And MIT is able to, in nine hours, using simple social networking technologies and a rather sort of straightforward incentive scheme for paying people to help with solving the challenge, that's a very simplified description, are able in nine hours to solve the problem, again, working together and collaborating with solving the problem of where weather balloons. The question is how we then take that same technique and apply it to much more complicated problems, not just that's mathematically complicated, but from a political, from a social, from an economic perspective to address the challenges that we face. So how are we going about this? The having the president's first executive action, having the bully pulpit and the star power of President Obama back of the notion of institutional innovation and openness in government as his first executive action, issuing a memorandum on transparency and open government is extremely important for the work that we're doing. So it's very, very, very helpful to spreading this mission and this agenda to be able to go around and say, president said, president said, the president said it's a lot better than saying some academic one said in a book that David has read and my mother, et cetera. It's much better to be able to say that the president has articulated three principles and I'm saying this in jest, but in all seriousness, the president is very serious and very committed to this agenda and this notion. He is after all a community organizer at his roots and in heart, who believes in this concept of people working together to solve problems. And so we articulated these three principles, transparency, to promote accountability, participation, to inform and improve the way we make decisions and collaboration to enable others to help in the way that we make decisions and to get us focused not simply on getting information into government, but getting government to articulate problems, to articulate tasks better, to allow people to collaborate on actually solving those tasks. That memorandum has set in motion a policy-making process which began with what we did was instead of as government typically does, issuing a draft of a report or a policy and then inviting public comment, we started with the process of inviting public comment in order to help create a draft of an open government directive. It was a hard one battle and from the outside may have seemed, you know, why are they using these tools? Why this brainstorming tool? Why not that one? Why this blog? Why not that one? It was a very, I think, what may seem very simple from the outside, like gee, you set up a blog and had a discussion, was frankly revolutionary for the government. We were the first blog with comments in the executive office of the president. It was the first time really in any kind of an OMB policy-making process the comment had been taken in advance of creating a draft. So it was really about an acculturation process as much internally as externally such that now when I look at the open government plans and I'm fast-forwarding that are being written across the executive branch by all the agencies, every single one of which is full of what is, Washington people say, forward-leaning commitments, forward-leaning, aka making promises for things we will do, not just celebrating the things we have done. A year and a half ago, that would have been, I think, impossible. We were told, I remember being told, you cannot make promises because what if we don't fulfill them? To now having a, being at a place where we now have said every agency must make commitments for how it will bring innovation to the way that it works, such that we will then be forced to hold ourselves accountable. So I'm presaging now what happened. We issued an open government directive in December which said that every agency has to come up with its own open government plan. And then on April 7th, three weeks ago, where are we in time, three weeks ago, we had every agency required by law and another dozen besides, I'm just noticed today, the NEA has an open government plan, the Ex-Im Bank has one, the National Indian Gaming Commission has one, in addition to all the so-called CFO Act agencies that all the cabinet departments that you've heard of, like DOT and EPA, et cetera, as well as then the agencies within the executive office of the president like OSTP, OMB, there are five of them within the executive office of the president. What the directive did was to create a roadmap to say, here are the basic things you have to cover. You have to cover how you're going to inventory, how and when you're going to inventory all the data in your agency and put it up online and make it available, not just online, but in raw downloadable formats for the public. You have to come up with a plan with concrete milestones for how you're going to engage people in policy making, participation in policy making. So not just how you're gonna do Twitter and write a blog and do the sort of marketing work for the communications work of the agency, which is very important that more of that is going online and becoming more Web 2.0, but how you're really going to engage people in meaningful policy making work. And finally, this question of how you're going to engage in collaboration within government, across levels of government and with the public. So that process now, we've just had the issuance of the plans and just yesterday, Tuesday, we just had every agency issue and the White House collected all of these, the self-evaluations of the plan. And when I say self-evaluation, it was a collaborative process that was a combination of agencies, doing a self-evaluation and the White House providing some, I got to go back to my professorial capacity and essentially grade a lot of papers and go through them and say, here's how they could be better. So they were sort of midterm grades, if you will, including our own OSTP plan, the Office of Science and Tech Policy, where we did not give ourselves a green, the equivalent essentially of an A, for fulfilling all the requirements asked of us in the directive. When we really sat down to assess ourselves, we realized we forgot links we had promised to put in, we weren't as clear as we should have in terms of details about how we're going to engage in, for example, the incorporation of collaboration tools. And so this collaboration, this process of self-evaluation plus White House evaluation, plus now evaluation that's being done by outside groups. There's an organized process being created by a coalition of interest groups called Open the Government. But in addition, other researchers in the e-government community have been also adopting plans, if you will, going through them, providing feedback. And agencies are enormously receptive. We're already on our second iteration in the last 10 days of our plan. We're at version 1.2, or 1.1.2, something like that now. And again, I'm hearing daily now from agencies saying we'd love to talk to people who could tell us how to make this better as we move from a process of planning into a process of implementation. Because ultimately, it's not about having the best possible plan that crosses every i and t, dots, dots, and t's. And see, that's why we forgot links in the plan. It's really about doing what we've said that we're going to do in terms of making the government more open and collaborative. So the way that we actually get there, how do we get there? We get there, I think, in three ways. One is with people. It means that now in every agency there is a responsible person for open government and, in many cases, a coalition of people who are working across the department or the agency to enact open government reforms. The Department of Transportation has over 200 people on their strategic open government planning committee. HHS, huge department. They didn't just plan it at the top of the HHS secretary's office. What they did was reach out and create a committee across every single agency, whether it's NIH or FDA, that are all involved in thinking about how to be more open. And they have two different strategic planning committees, one focused on data transparency, the other working on participation and collaboration within the agency. So we have exciting, I think, stories like this that involve people who are getting involved, whether people who've been there, who've wanted to do this work and are being essentially unleashed, if you will, or people who've been brought in, like Todd Park, who's a, by the way, if you ever need speakers in the fall, wonderful person to come bring, is the new CTO of the Department of Health and Human Services, the former founder of Athena Health, who, again, an innovative, agile, exciting thinker totally committed to this notion of rethinking the way that government works in more open and collaborative ways. Okay. In terms of transparency, so people is one way. Two is through platforms. Tim O'Reilly has sort of made this a mantra now, talking about government as platform. Well, there's a lot of truth to this because it's one thing to have as a value or a principle, the idea of transparency, participation, and collaboration, but unless you actually have a way to do it, it's really hard for people to get there. So setting up data.gov as a platform, having a place where people could put their data and to be clear, data.gov doesn't store all the data, it really is an index of all the data so that citizens, the public, have a place they can search for government data that they're looking for. So having those platforms, even as a kind of shining beacon on a hill, if you will, that here is the place you can go to make transparency happen in practice. Or even now, the simple fact that the General Services Administration pre-negotiated a license for a brainstorming tool and gave it to every agency so that it could run a brainstorming to plan its open government plan, was an enormous step forward. Again, offering the platforms to reduce the costs and make it simpler for people to be transparent, participatory, and collaborative. So just a few more words about some of the specifics going on in this space. So in transparency, the goal here, as I said, is really to make unprecedented openness the default. It's things like publishing the White House visitor logs online. It's things like releasing the White House staff salaries. It's things like streaming the healthcare summit that we did towards the end of the healthcare debate and closing the revolving door on lobbyists. But I think even more importantly, it's this notion of getting data out there and putting it up on data.gov. And to those who would say, and probably not the folks in this room, but to the people who sometimes ask me, who wants raw data? I'm not a statistician. Well, the last time I got this number, which was maybe two weeks ago, the numbers on data.gov were 64,877,378 hits to data.gov. This week, the Pew survey came out on the use of technology and government and 40% of the respondents, 40% of adult internet users, have gone online for raw data about government spending and activities. 40%, this is staggering to me, the number for a project that was started not even a year ago. We're coming up on the year anniversary. So a lot of this data is about tracking spending, traditional kind of accountability. Look under the hood and see how government spending money. The IT USA spending dashboard that tracks the $76 billion of IT spending in the government, that's at 89 million hits of people actually looking for data about how government may be overspending, projects being off budget. It's essentially used as a way to drive performance around spending in government institutions. But beyond that, we used in the directive, we didn't simply talk about putting up your spending data or putting up data about how the agency works. We used the term high value data with the intention of trying to define a new term that would be about data that helps the agency achieve its core mission, one of which is accountability, but the other of which is actually putting out data that helps to solve problems. So right now, if you go online, you'll see a posting that has just gone up on the White House website. And I may be getting out ahead of it, but there's no secrets in this because it's something that actually took place yesterday, which is a wonderful posting by the Department of Labor in honor of yesterday's holiday, which was called Workers Memorial Day, in which they talk about the fact that they have now released in raw format 15 years of data about workplace exposure to toxic chemicals. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, OSHA, has been releasing, engaging in a campaign of radical transparency to release as much data as possible. Again, to help achieve the goal in this case, what they talk about is saving workers' lives. It's not about how government spends money, but if we release this data, we enable people to build the tools that help us to understand if there are chemical hazards that have been reported in a workplace, or to check if one's occupation has a greater risk of exposure to particular chemicals. It's when HHS releases its CMS dashboard that we can see for the first time now real spending data about Medicare and Medicaid that we can mash up and help us to understand better the comparative healthcare, not only costs, but also effectiveness across different communities. HUD and its open government plan is engaged in a radical transparency plan in an effort to fight homelessness, to, again, put the data out there that'll help us to understand better, empirically-driven decision-making, how we can combat homelessness across a federal, state, and a local level. It's when USDA puts out data about nutrition, and then we combine that with launching a campaign to create video games to teach young people healthier eating habits, and 10,000 people sign up, that we take this concept of transparency and we make it real in terms of achieving the actual goals of government. And this is a segue, also, then, into achieving the goals of participation, because it's not transparency for its own sake. It's not transparency by itself. High-value data means looking for data that people want, and agencies are specifically supposed to ask the public, which data do you want to see first in order to get people to do stuff with that data, to do something with it, whether it's making video games or making visualizations or mashups or writing reports or whatever it may be that could help us, again, to solve our problems better and faster. So when the Energy Department and its Open Government Plan talks about the Open Energy Initiative, openei.org, which is an open-source web platform to make a range of Department of Energy resources and open energy data widely available to the public, they not only put the data out there, but they put it up on a wiki to enable people to share and participate back and contribute data back into the system from their own communities. NASA, as one of their open government projects that they've launched, is not just a move towards the adoption of open-source software and a new open license or the use of one of the open-source licenses that NASA is using in order to be able to distribute technology out to the public, but in order to encourage people to share technology back with NASA in order to achieve, again, its missions. So the participation piece is a very, very important part of it, and that includes both the participation connected to transparency, as well as now looking at new ways for actually getting people engaged in policymaking to solve problems. I'll say a bit about that. I think more about that will come up in the Q&A because one of the things you should be asking me about is why we're not better at this yet. One of the ways we're doing this is, and I should have mentioned this before, and given gratitude and thanks to the General Services Administration who's taken upon themselves the role of not simply procuring pens and pencils and real estate and cars for the government as their job, but also procuring software and technology, including 165 new terms of service that have been signed for social media. So in other words, if you want Facebook in government or you want to blog or you want to use Flickr, they have created government-friendly terms of service that have the necessary privacy protections and accessibility for the disabled that's required in terms of the selection of tools and put those up on a site called apps.gov, which is a storefront for acquiring software with government-friendly terms of service, as well as cloud computing and software as an infrastructure, as well as pens and pencils and other things. So it's the storefront, essentially, for government procurement and is working quickly to try to procure also things like prize platforms, challenge platforms, and other kinds of engagement tools. Finally, let me talk a little bit about the collaboration piece of things. So I've mentioned sort of the three values, transparency, participation, and collaboration and the way that we go at this, both through policy, through platforms, and the people that are essential to making this happen. The collaboration part was very intentional, and I remember the debates and discussion about whether we should, you know, isn't participation and collaboration the same thing? Won't people get confused by what these two things are? But again, citizen participation, particularly for people who are non-U.S. residents in the room, will know that citizen participation is a very well-established and known term in policy. I'm thinking about German media policy in particular, has a very well-developed concept of citizen engagement and participation that, again, is about citizens talking to government. But the question about how we push the solutions out to people to solve problems is, I think, the really exciting new frontier. So that means that's both about connecting government across levels of government. So a few weeks ago, Mayor Gavin Newsom and Vivek Kundra celebrated together the Open 311 project, the now launch of the Gang of Seven Cities, municipalities that are sharing with the help and sponsorship of the federal government, sharing software across municipalities to help improve the delivery of government services. It's the work to do brainstorming within government like in the Veterans Benefit Administration, where the President said we must bring down the backlog of Veterans Benefit claims. And so in order to do that, again, taking to heart this notion that the best ideas aren't within Washington. The expertise is not sitting among a few bureaucrats in a couple of offices within the Beltway. It's about asking the 57,000, excuse me, the 19,000 employees in the 57 regional offices of the VA, how do we solve this problem? You're at the front lines working with veterans who are coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan and waiting at least six months and sometimes years to get the benefits to which they're entitled. Within the first week of a brainstorming competition of those 19,000 employees, 7,000 signed up and submitted 3,000 ideas, which through a winnowing process were narrowed to the top 10 ideas that are being implemented within the VA. So in a manner of a few weeks, we've moved to developing solutions to a really egregious problem. The Wikified Army Field Guide, getting collaboration across the Army to write the new operations manual by getting soldiers at the front, warfighters as they're now known, to actually collaborate on writing the manual that affects how they operate informed by their own experience being in the field and in this harm's way, if you will. But it's also then about not only connecting people across government or across levels of government, it's also about connecting public-private as well. So when the National Archives made the decision that it would, and I know there was a symposium here about law.gov a few weeks ago that talked about making primary legal sources available to people, when the National Archives said we're going to make the federal register, the newspaper of the executive branch, essentially, available for free instead of for $17,000. When to put it up online and make it available for free in raw formats, Princeton University stood up together with some folks who used to be at the Berkman Center and developed a project to actually make the first annotatable federal register. And others like Carl Malamond out of public resource developed a more searchable federal register. And now what NARA is able to do, the National Archives, is to take the innovations that they've developed and bring them back in-house to improve the delivery of the federal register and stay tuned for more developments with regard to how we present that. It's about the president getting up in November at the Educate to Innovate Conference and saying we have a national priority around educating American students in science, technology, engineering, and math. But instead of, again, government being the sole problem solver, we put out the challenge to the public and have launched, and the private sector has launched, National Lab Day. You remember Net Day? So this is an initiative to get scientists and technologists to go out into American schools and to do hands-on learning. On the first day that it launched, organizations representing two million members signed up to participate in National Lab Day. Again, a collaborative initiative to help solve the problem. So it's hot in the room. We're at the end of the hour. The pizza smells really good. So I want to pause here and say that we are working hard to try and practice this notion of bringing innovation to government. But we have some challenges that lie ahead of us. We know that to really get at radical transparency, we have to do a much better job of inventorying our data, which is a hard, hard thing, particularly for agencies sitting on exabytes of data, some of it in paper form, some of which is digital, but isn't yet available online or available online but not in raw formats. We know we have a lot of work to do, I think, to improve our capacity to do citizen engagement and participation. We frankly don't have the experience or the tools by which to do it well yet. And I'd like to think that if I came back a year from now, I hope that we're going to look back and say we got a lot, lot better at doing meaningful engagement with citizens around policymaking. And partly, again, it's not a tools question, it's an experience issue. Government hasn't been asking. Therefore, citizens haven't been participating. Now, as we start to ask, I don't think a lot of people believe that we really mean it. They think, yeah, I'm gonna give a comment on a blog, but who's really going to listen to me? Is anybody really home and listening? So I think we have a lot to do to develop and mature our culture of participation and engagement. Expert networking. So coming back to this idea of how we get expertise and particularly scientific expertise into government, we have got to learn how to improve upon the model of the Federal Advisory Committee, the notion of small groups of people who are the same group of 20 people, even if they're now balanced and represent the public interest, it's still not as effective as, frankly, a peer-to-patent model where you get volunteers who know things, pooled from millions of people who might be able to supply information to how we make decisions. And frankly, collaboration and collaboration tools is something we haven't been as experienced with using in government as we have been in the private sector. So I think over the next year, and if you read the open government plans that agencies have written, there's much more interest now and attention to getting people to talk to one another across agencies, across departments, with the public. And that means some tools and acquisition of tools to do so, because there now is an acceptance, I think, that's spreading quickly throughout government that we are not the only experts. That it's a network of experts that really have the information we need to make empirically-based informed decisions. But it's not simply a matter of the technocratic question of expertise and empirical rigor. It's, frankly, again, a question of our democracy and restoring faith in our democratic institutions, because I fear that even if we create lots of opportunities for participation, for creating information, if we don't celebrate this as being about the importance of democratic government and the importance of bringing reform to the way our institutions work, bringing back the trust that people have in government, that we will have a very hard time as we proceed through the 21st century and a new technological era. If we don't actually take seriously the president's mission in Mantra, where he said, back in May, when we launched this open government initiative, I ran for president because I believe that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together. It's an imperative for the success of government, but it's even more of an imperative, I think, for the longevity of our democracy. No one interrupted me. I'm disappointed. It's very hot in here. Questions, comments, thoughts, and I think there's a mic that we wanna send around, right, for webcasting purposes. Thank you very much. I come from Keio University in Japan and have been studying the Open Government Initiative, US Government Initiative with a lot of excitement, particularly in the area of collaboration because it's not only talking about policy making, but it's going beyond policy making to policy execution. And we were very excited about that notion. At the same time, as you mentioned yourself, the tools and methodology for collaboration seemed not as clear as some of the other parts, but if you have any kind of sort of strategy in terms of developing tools, methodology for collaborative execution of policy, I'd love to hear that. So I think the collaboration, let me say there's a lot of, there are two kinds of, let me say where we've been really successful, I think, in terms of uptake very quickly, which is when it comes to this sort of brainstorming, the kind of inculcation of brainstorming techniques and methodologies, we've gotten a lot better at that very quickly, particularly internal to government. So that VA example, we started with that one project. We subsequently said, we're gonna have a meeting for anybody who wants to come, no obligation not required by the directive, no order from the Office of Management and Budget to do so. For anyone who's interested in doing this sort of brainstorming style of collaboration, that's been practiced by a lot of businesses with doing idea generation with their employees, as well as with customers. We had 30 agencies show up on a very rainy day and that group has continued to meet of its own volition. It has the unfortunate name of ideation community of practice. I'm not sure who made up the term ideation as a fancy way of saying brainstorming, but I think that's an area which we're seeing tremendous, I think enthusiasm and, but again, it's the, what's been really interesting and successful about this is that when, just to give the VA example, again, it wasn't the tools. It wasn't the choice of tool. And they picked a tool that cost $2,000 to implement this whole project across 19,000 employees. It was the process by which we sat down and said, okay, what's going to happen on day one when you actually ask, what question will you ask people? How will you get their responses? Who's going to respond to their responses? So there was a, there's almost a kind of questionnaire that we've developed where we walk through steps with agencies or with ourselves and we wanna do one of these processes because it's really about thinking about the practice. As a counter example, because of the shortness of time, we supplied this brainstorming tool to the agencies to get the public's help with getting ideas for their open government plan. So more of a sort of policy-making process, if you will, to say what are the ideas we should have in this open government plan, I think the process wasn't as well promoted as it should have been or could have been. So having the tool by itself wasn't enough because there wasn't a similar sort of, there wasn't time to do a similar sort of process exercise. So I think it's really just about asking oneself those simple process questions and getting, you know, really just circulating those list of questions and getting people to think through how will I actually do this in practice? So the way that my office functions is as a kind of internal consultancy where we act as sometimes the people who ask those questions. But what's quickly happened is, again, I'm working towards making myself obsolete such that open government isn't a separate office, but it just describes the way that everybody works. People are learning from one another. The ideation community of practice, we now have a high level agency open government working group where we've been meeting every other week. And now yesterday I attended a workshop that wasn't called by the White House, but was, I don't even know who called it, but there were 30 agencies there to engage in best practice sharing about collaboration. So there's just an enormous amount of momentum that I think started with the message from the president, modeling it out from the White House, you know, the fact that we started to do things like have blog with comments and do brainstorming and actually engage people in policymaking so that people saw it's okay to do this, having the terms of service and the tools available to people. And again, we're not picking the tools now, but any vendor can sign up and list themselves on apps.gov. And the GSA is now starting to provide more best practice sort of training about how to use the tools, et cetera. So it's a process of creating a culture and then creating the vehicles for this sort of sharing. One of the things we're doing more also trying to do more radio and TV that we're planning, videos that we'll put up on YouTube to help anyone who wants to know how to do something to learn from one another. So there's just a, I think it's the internal collaboration that's helping to spur some of the know-how about the external collaboration. But I hope that's probably a long answer that didn't answer the question, I hope. But the answer is we need a lot of help also with learning how to do this and getting help from outside too. Please. Hopefully to follow that up. Would you mind introducing yourself? You don't have to do that. My name's David Allen. If you want an organization, look at idru.org. As I said, hopefully to follow up and hopefully productively to bore in a bit on brainstorming, but particularly it's steps after. You of course have described taking comments before you had a draft. The interesting question is what happened then? How did you pull a coherent document together? How did it go? What was involved? Hopefully to learn lessons so we can all move in such directions. And to presage on that event, going to your Veterans Administration example, we noticed that you point out that with many, many thousands I think of suggestions in hand, those were winnowed. That suggests some central action. Some small, maybe one person making a decision in the end about which of these suggestions are going to be useful. That's not to say that's the solution, but if we can talk a bit about practical steps after the brainstorming, what's actually involved then to get something coherence and move ahead with your problem solving. So quickly on the VA example, they actually had, because they have 57 regional offices, these ran as competitions within each office. So it was, and then the best ideas got passed up, passed up the food chain if you will. And they should be in their open government plan as well as on their website, a more detailed description of the process that they undertook to run that particular competition. But it was exactly, I remember the discussions about how that could work, how it can work in a way that it's manageable and useful and still makes people feel empowered. Because the original design would have had again sort of one person picking and then the question was well, then what's to stop that person from just substituting in their own ideas and ignoring everything else that was suggested. So they developed a really good, I think, model for how to get quickly through a large amount of content. What we did in our experiment with the open, how to create an open government process and policy was we did three steps. First we used a brainstorming tool, and I couldn't get out, I've forgotten the number of suggestions, but it was something like probably on the order of two or three thousand suggestions via the brainstorming tool. And we had the usual sort of rating and ranking of the suggestions up and down. But we found that the rating and ranking wasn't as useful for a couple of reasons, one of which was that midway through the process, frankly, after the first day, we didn't actually operate the system ourselves, it was run for us by the National Academy of Public Administration, and we discovered midway through that you didn't have to be registered to vote. So we turned on the registration system midway through because it really does skew the system if you don't have to be registered, people aren't gonna have a sense of accountability in the process, so if I were to do it again, I would require registration and have said this to agencies who undertake similar processes. We took the three thousand suggestions, which one of the things the brainstorming tool does is it allows you to label them by category. So we knew at least these ones were about transparency and these were about participation and these were about collaboration, these were about tools and these were about policies. So we had them sort of in loose buckets and then what we were able to do was we group them into 16 themes, 16 questions, and it didn't take that long to go through them because they were already pre-sorted thanks to the tool. And we took the 16 themes and we put them back to people as a series of 16 blog postings. We said, here are the 16 suggestions that you made that we found, some I should say, some were easy suggestions. So we said, oh, this is a totally self-evidently obvious good point. But where was anything but that? We put the 16 questions back to people, one blog posting a day or two blog postings a day and we said, give us your more in-depth thoughts on this topic. And we used a tool that allowed for not only rating and ranking but also flagging things as off topic. And in consultation with the White House Council's office, we came to a decision that as long as the public was doing that sort of flagging as off topic rather than the government doing any kind of censorship of the postings, it would work perfectly fine. The way this WordPress plugin worked was if you flag something as off topic a certain number of times, it would actually shrink the posting to just one link. So it wouldn't interrupt the flow. So the comments then you saw were all on topic, on a particular topic. Although I should say to be in fairness in answer to your question, what initially happened when we ran this was we got a lot of off topic postings of people actually posting either about UFOs or posting about the President's birth certificate. And some of you have probably heard me tell the joke before which is not a joke that the sign above my door says, Beth Novec, Chief Intergalactic Policy Area 51 is my office number, which was a reference to the fact that we got so many of these UFO postings. But until people, we put out a call to people in the open government community and said, hey, we need you guys who care about these issues to help to steward the conversation and start using these tools that are available of marking something on topic or abusive and very quickly, the kind of people who were there to rant went away and it became then a more substantive topic. Conversation, the third thing that we did, again somewhat experimental, was we used a tool called wiki, I've forgotten the name of it now. Someone will remember it when I say this. It was the tool that was used a number of times in the last year in a number of policy contexts to allow people to author a wiki together, in other words to write the proposed, to write the open government proposals directly, but instead of the last person to change the draft wins as in a normal wiki, you had to, people had to vote on the changes. So they had to be consensus around the changes. Who remembers the name of the tool? I apologize to my good friends who helped us to learn how to use this tool who may watch this video and say, how could you forget the name? But it was an interesting experiment because what we wanted to do was both to get not only suggestions like be more transparent and release more data, put it more up online in raw formats, but to get people to actually write the language because the hard thing was going to be how do we take these big ideas like government innovation and transparency and turn it into concrete language of a directive that's short enough and simple enough and yet detailed enough for an agency to know what to do. And we wondered how do we go about this? Do we tell people to inventory all their data? Do we tell people to put up some data sets online? How many data sets? How should we do that? So the process of getting people to write the draft educated us about what we should say, but also I think helped to educate everyone involved about how hard it is to actually do this in practice. It is not as simple a matter of saying we love transparency, but doing things practically, concretely, and in a manageable way was very hard. And so one of the difficult, to come back to the other question a bit, one of the difficult learning exercises around doing any kind of collaboration or participation is how to winnow a lot of material into something that's manageable, which is why much of the work we focused on in the first year is about getting, doing proliferating lots and lots and lots of smaller participation exercises. In other words, every agency doing something on energy or the Chesapeake Bay and for the EPA or whatever it may be, the FDA doing their new transparency thing. So getting different communities involved and each of these communities is small enough that the volume of participation isn't going to be huge. When we start to tackle issues of a national level, general participation initiative, where you're talking about potentially millions of responses, as we saw in the presidential transition, the gets where we did a project, for example, like Citizens Briefing Book, and said give us your suggestions for the first 100 days of the administration. And we got 75,000 submissions, three days before the president was to be inaugurated. Trying to move that sort of volume of participation I think is very hard, which is why smaller proliferating, smaller opportunities, many, many smaller opportunities for participation both speaks to people's highest and best use and their interests, but it also helps to make it a more manageable process. You have the mic, so you're moderating. Thank you. Thank you, mixed ink, mixed ink. My name is Alvin Boscherein from the Netherlands. I'm here with this next. In the Netherlands, we have also a number of initiatives in trying to involve people in policy making, and it was also started to increase the trust of people in government. Now, as you started your presentation, you also mentioned that senators and another group, I don't recall, are not very well trusted, so to speak, and I read your presentation also that this initiative is at least partly to restore trust in the government. Now, I assume that there are limitations to the extent that people can really get involved in the policy making. And how do you deal with managing those expectations to avoid a backfire and people get disappointed that their suggestions are not brought further? So the first, we're starting with what I think about is crowdsourcing information or expertise. So where I'm, if I'm trying to make a decision about a patent application, we're not asking in that context should this patent be awarded or not, or how do you feel about this patent? We're asking the question, do you have information relevant to determining if this invention is new as of this date? In the, in questions that are more scientific or technical, again, the information we're seeking, I'm low to use the word objective, but, or these are all dangerous terms, objective, factual, it's not that they're not value laden, but it's a different thing than having a debate about that's purely about values or viewpoint. It's, you know, it's one thing to have a conversation about immigration that focuses on, again, your feelings about immigration, and another thing to focus on getting, you know, factual information in that pertains to the use of virtual fences, I'm just making up an example, and the tech, what's the latest technology that could be used in the virtual to create a virtual fence, for example. So again, by starting in areas that are easier, if you will, that are more information rich, I think we can begin to build a culture of participation more readily and more quickly than if we start with the hardest possible. You know, if we start with a public participation on the topic of abortion, would be a very bad place, I think, to have started this agenda. It's not about fostering contentious debate. It's really about fostering an informed debate and conversation, so that's the, I'll leave it at that for the moment until we can get some more questions in. There was a question here and there, so. Hi, I'm David Yates from Bentley University. I'm wondering about what you've learned in advance of starting this process, and I have two examples in mind that people may or may not be aware of. One is, within the government before, there's lots and lots of good examples about doing participatory input from citizens, and particularly from the scientific community. So the state of the art cryptography that we use on the web today was actually developed by Belgian mathematicians about 15 years ago, and that's now what is the AES standard. So how do we get international expertise involved as well? And in that same vein, we've heard from folks from Japan and folks from the Netherlands. I'm wondering what you're doing to learn from countries that are ahead of the curve on this, and I'm thinking specifically about Estonia that perhaps has been the most aggressive about federated democracy direct to the people. They have a population that's two orders of magnitude smaller than ours, but this lesson that you learned about making sure people register before you started debate, that's sort of something that they learned eight years ago. It's a great point. I'm going to the Netherlands in two weeks, and I just met with some senior officials from the UK yesterday. There is a beginnings of a real international conversation. I just got a message that we have a delegation from Norway coming because they're starting data.gov.Norway just came across my Blackberry this morning. My colleague is going to Mexico next week. We're really trying to get up from our desks now for the first time. I mean, it's really, literally, we have not gotten up from our desks in a long year. And I think by necessity, and now doing that kind of cross-sectoral learning is really important. But I should say that the Estonian example and where there have been a lot of exchanges of ideas and information has been around what you might think of as e-government. So the sort of service delivery questions, and there has been a robust conversation among the CIOs on technology infrastructure for government questions, where there has been a conversation. But some of these more culture change questions of participation and collaboration and open policymaking, I think a lot of that debate is new. I mean, to be fair, what we're doing builds on the reinventing government work that was done by Gore, how many years ago, eight, nine and a half years ago, plus we couldn't have done this without that. We couldn't have done this without the e-government basis that got us started on this. I mean, a lot of the work that we do, and also my colleague, Jeff Zients, the Chief Performance Officer, who still works with and is there to work with agencies on service delivery issues, efficiency in service delivery. So there's a lot of, I think, international, there's some international predicate to this, but now what we're really seeing is a movement that's spreading particularly around the transparency front, which is the data, the data.gov concept. As Tim Berners, Sir Tim Berners Lee, excuse me, is spearheading this in the UK, and I think we'll continue working on this whoever gets elected. Talk about divisions between government and the people. Poor Gordon Brown. And the bigoted woman, I just read on the plane on the way here, that's the kind of division that people feel between their candidate and their government. So whatever happens in the elections next week, I think there's a movement that's underway around sort of an international movement, and we're trying to now spur some of that international dialogue and be part of that conversation, so. Miriam, you had a, there was a, I think we passed the mic back. My name is Miriam Mechel, fellow with the Berkman Center. Thank you, Beth, for the very inspiring talk. I have a sort of an old fashioned question, might be, because it strikes me from time to time to think about the question whether you could say that transparency in government is in any case and always a good approach to make government better and to improve the trust people having towards politicians and whatever. Or if there might be some feel, some topics, whatever, where you need something like, let's put it like an arcane zone or something like that, where political decision making can be prepared without being public, where you really have the chance to take ideas, innovations and take them away again because they do not fit without being criticized all the time, because as soon as you put an idea into public, especially under the circumstances of the current very, currently very much like harsh confrontational discussions or partisan discussions, they are squeezed until they really become something like a mainstream. What do you think about that? Oh, you know, now having served in government and we both now have this experience of having been in academia and gone into government and, you know, back into academia, I just said this morning I'm going to put a tattoo on my knuckles that says what you type will appear on the front page of the Washington Post. So be careful before you hit send on anything now. Although I think that's the case in every sphere of life. I think they're just quickly, I should have mentioned the fact that first of all when we talk about transparency, we are also cognizant of fact that we have to be careful about personal privacy. We have to be careful about national security as well. So we have a national, we have a review process for both before data sets go up on data.gov to ensure that we are not compromising either in the data that we release. And I, but I think that we are so far from the point of, you know, the question of, you know, do you put cameras in every government officials office? Do you have to log everything you say to every person? I mean, we're so far from that being the concern, I think at this point, we still have, I mean, in a way I'd rather err on the side of, you know, I talk constantly about transparency and openness because we just have to get people over the hump of even sharing the things that they should be sharing, like basic data about healthcare and energy and the environment that people need in order to make informed decisions. I don't think we've had yet, and we do have this back and forth, you know, but again, the way we make decisions, I see the value of being able to have closed door brainstorming where you can be really stupid and stay really, you know, come up with dumb ideas and float them and we want to, I mean, ultimately, and you're absolutely right to raise this because ultimately what we're trying to do is foster a culture of experimentation and fearlessness and if people feel that everything will be scrutinized, then they won't be able to do that. So I think that there's, as a matter of principle, you're absolutely right and then figuring out how to do this in practice, where to draw these lines of balance. But right now, the focus of transparency, when we talk about opening the doors of government or shining light on the workings of government, this is more focused on things like, you know, budget information, it can be also meeting schedules, who people are meeting with, which I do think is important because it helps not only to know, you know, is there the secret backroom meetings with the energy companies question that people that spurred this in the first place, but it also gets you thinking about whom you're meeting with. Because when you sit in Washington, it was probably your experience in government, people come to you and want to meet with you all the time and you quickly run out of time to reach out and to meet with the people you should be meeting. Or to, you know, you see the people who come at you. And so you start to then think about, well, gee, if I met with this group on the left, I should meet with this group on the right. If I meet with someone on this side of an issue, you know, to sort of create some internal deliberative practices, if you will. But I think it's hopefully going to be something more important. Hopefully we get to the point where we're so open that we start to have this worry. But right now, it is just absolutely, the culture is so baked, private, you know, closed door working is so much the culture that we have a long way before. I think that's the problem. First, we have to get people to be more open. Last, I think we have time for one more question, right? One, two more, you can tell me. Let's see what's. Oliver Gassmann, University of St. Gallen. I'm very much concerned with the IP system. And I was quite curious when you mentioned the peer repatent initiative, that also evaluation might be inside. Now, knowing how IBM and Microsoft and ABB to call, and UBS to take a name of you as Swiss one too, behave and would be politically active, actually to be very dominant in the evaluation field is bad. But there's actually absolutely nothing against just taking up the state of the art. And what is hindering us since the patent offices, also European patent offices, are all very much overloaded with work? What does hinder us? Just open up and ask for the state of the art. Is there any one argument against it? So I think there's just two parts of this question. One is to the extent to which the question is about the role of IP. You're asking about the patent context, but I do want to mention that in terms of IP, one of the important parts of the open government debate is making sure that we have open access to government materials, not protect, again, reasserting and reaffirming that they are not protected by copyright in the US. This is another difficult question when in the international context, and that they are made available in the public domain. We ran an extensive policy, again, another open policy forum. This one got even better than the time we did this with the three phases in the brainstorming. We did one on public access to fairly funded research as well. So we're looking at some of the intellectual property implications of open government as well as the way the intellectual property policy can help to undergird and support innovation in government. So the second part of your question, or two parts of this, one is the competitive motivations of the companies was something that was built into the notion of peer to patent. In other words, the fact that IBM would participate because they wanted to defeat a Microsoft patent was all to the good because again, we were asking the sort of factual questions, not the value questions, but how do you feel about the patent? But give us the information and if it's relevant information, I don't care if you gave it to me because you hate your competitor or because you hate the patent system or because you love participating or you love the patent system. We saw all these motivations when we surveyed people across the board. But what's happened now since is that was the program that I ran as an academic that was subsequently taken over by Mark Webbank is now that pilot has phased down, although a pilot is still running now in Australia and we have one in Japan that's going to start up again. But now the patent office, Dave Capos is the new Undersecretary for Intellectual Property has said we're going to now introduce citizen participation and the peer to patent method into our standard procedure. So the patent office is now studying how to bring it in-house if you will. I don't necessarily mean the specific tool, but how they're going to adopt the engagement process that we've piloted into regular patent office procedure and what kind of policy that needs to be tied to, again, in terms of openness. A lot will depend, I think, on the progress of patent reform through Congress in the coming months with regard to also questions of expanding the regulatory authority of the USPTO so that it can do this, expanding the ability of the patent office to induce public comment without consent from the inventors and other sort of technical details. But again, more openness in the process, I think is all to the good. One of the last thing I'll mention about this is that as part of the open government effort, the patent office has committed to make the whole corpus of patent office literature available in raw downloadable formats. The hindrance to that right now is simply the creaky old servers of the USPTO. So groups like publicresource.org and Google and Nathan Murveld's intellectual ventures have stepped up to say we will help to actually serve this data to the public so that the patent office doesn't have to work. You know, we can do it quicker than we can actually replace the infrastructure at the patent office as they begin to transition to a new IT infrastructure there but radical patent office transparency we think will help to promote innovation by opening up accesses information. So I think we unfortunately have to call up that although you can relive the moment speaking of transparency on the internet when it goes up. And you said you'd come back in a year, right? So you can see how it's going. If you'll have me back in a year. Absolutely. So I want to thank you. I've got to know back there. Thank you. Thank you for getting to see this from now on. It's been great.