 have a few things to say, but also have a few things to hear and to interact on. So the broad plan here is to let the panel introduce themselves. But we'll go down through two passes here. There is lots of opportunity in the broadband plan and in the five ideas that Eugene put forward to look and hope for value, things that should be harvested, the upside potential of this. And I want our panel to sort of say some things they see that they would hope for the high value opportunities here. But as with anything that proposes to change the world in our society or anybody's society, there are some risks and some things that we would want to avoid in the next period of time in trying to make this go forward. So we want to have a little time to talk about that. After we go through those things, I would like to hear some Q&A from the audience. And then we'll see if we've come to some place we can make some sense of it. So panelists, go down and just introduce yourselves in the first pass through Chris. Sure, I've already introduced myself. Chris, you've sent me a high director of the Center for Future Civic Media here at MIT. My name is Laurel Rumah. I am the Guptuo Evangelist of Riley Media. My name is John Wunderlich. I'm the policy director at the Sunlight Foundation. And I'm Nick Grossman. I'm the director of Civic Works at the Open Planning Project. So we now not only have a broadband plan, we have an administration that on its first day had a president who put out ideas that said this stuff will be more important at this time and in this administration than before. What do we see looking at that and listening to Eugene's ideas as the upside potential things we ought to be sure and grab ahold of here? Chris? Sure. Our work has been focusing on one of the interesting things about the history of the internet is that it's done incredible work for empowering affinity groups, online groups, people who share interests. But it's been much less clear how it helps individual communities, actually geographic communities, which are the kinds of locations that law happens and the kinds of locations that people can't get out of their neighborhoods. They have a civic obligation to their neighborhoods. And part of the reason is because of this huge issue of digital divide, which happens across ages, across communities. So one of the great opportunities that we're seeing is the opportunity to start thinking about what are the software platforms that a community can use, not just at the federal level, which there's been a lot of attention on recently, but at the local level, at the Alderman or the county level. And so among the experiments that we've been running at the center have been trying to understand how community collective action can happen differently online. What are the ways that people can organize, apart from just gathering news and understanding news? How can they use that news to change their communities? We've been looking at how communities can understand their own financial situation better. So some of our students are leveraging on the popularity of sites like Mint or Expensify that allow people to aggregate their financial information so that a community can understand where money is going out of the community. What are the kinds of services that they're paying outside and losing money on and preventing themselves from economically empowering themselves? And the last one I'll just mention is thinking about new tools and techniques for deliberative decision making and agenda building. And we think that those are potentially really powerful. Just as a quick idea on the community focus, is it mostly that we are expanding penetration of online possibilities, or is the broadband and the speed of broadband particularly important for the community focus you're talking about? Well, I think it is particularly important, because if you look at a lot of these technologies, they've really been primarily used by 20-some things in San Francisco, New York. And what you're seeing is that demographic builds, especially with hopefully the broadband initiatives emphasis on inclusion, then what you're going to see is that a lot of different people are going to be using these tools. And so it can more holistically represent the society. Whereas right now, it's doing a great job of representing just relatively small parts of society. Laurel. Well, I think one of the major points that Eugene really made was that broadband is not going to be used just for video games, downloading pirated music and videos, and just playing around on the internet. We're talking about serious work being done, not just in communities and government, but also entrepreneurs and the technologists that are needed to kind of put this vision into action. We're moving away from the social web, where we vote on Facebook for our favorite things and sign petitions that are really silly. And moving also to the Civic Web. And that is taking this extra energy and looking at our individual local communities, which we all sort of have a real tie to. That's where we pay taxes. That's where we live. That's where we wait for the bus and go to work. And how can we actually transform that to our reality, which is the digital natives that work until 7 o'clock at night don't get home in time to go to public meetings, but still need to be able to participate online in some fashion, and that fashion is now online. So the importance of just transparency, including video, and having city hall meetings on video and online available later for public comment is really critical. And documenting how communities grow and change over the years will be very important. So that was very heartening to hear. Also just the importance of recognizing that technology is already there. And enterprise and private communities are actually already using these tools and techniques. And the government sort of needs to hurry up and play catch-up so everyone can participate. Let me ask a small follow-up on that. In the sense that community, again, is a central value. Historically, local communities were more powerful probably than they are today. In that sense that when I grew up, you knew all your neighbors. And now you don't. Do you see this communication capacity through broadband re-strengthening or strengthening in a new way the very local communities? That's a really good point, absolutely. I probably know more of my neighbors online through our Yahoo email group list than I've ever met in person. And when you have an initiative in your local community and you want to gather as many people as you can, one of the first things that you do is create a Facebook group or some other online platform. And then when it gains momentum and steam, then you go out with a paper initiative. You try to get signatures. And you knock on doors to people who you don't actually know. And so this is sort of a problem. Getting back to our neighborhoods, and the neighborhood as a platform is really critical because you're looking at the space where you spend a lot of time. You want to invest. This is where you're raising your children, where you're working. And you need it to be the best community that it can be. And so what we're asking is that with technology, it can be. But it is also a very, very careful balance of people and training and understanding that technology does not replace people, but it actually makes, especially in small governments, where every single dollar is so precious these days, it can make just everyone's time be used more efficiently. John. So I would say that civic engagement through digital technology like the broadband that we're discussing today certainly has an impact locally. And also we are starting to see at the Sunlight Foundation in our work a broad systemic effect across society. So the rush of and flourishing new information that's coming out as a result of the administration's open government directive is being replicated or perhaps was already happening on a congressional level and across many states that are undertaking similar initiatives to release information. And that kind of information access is the thing that is empowering all of us to be better researchers or to be lobbyists or to be investigative reporters or civic journalists. So everyone is being empowered in the same sense in which only certain few people used to be empowered. And just one particular example, there's a bill in a hearing in the Maryland State House today actually that's gonna do a lot of things. But one of the things that it's doing is taking access to real-time information about legislation that used to cost $800 a year if you wanted to access it. You had to pay a once-a-year subscription fee of something like $800. And they're gonna do away with that subscription fee and replace it with a fee for people that wanna register as lobbyists. And that's the sort of redistribution of power that we think is really empowering, especially because of the other change that we're seeing which is in the platforms and tools that people have access to that are changing the way that we analyze and share and look at information. And that doesn't just go for people who have access to broadband. I think people who have access only through newspapers or only through television benefit also from better transparency and digital access because the people that are writing those newspaper stories or the people, the producers at CNN are also using the internet to get their information. So the effects are pretty broad, I think. So you see an opportunity that many people could get energized to participate partly because the barrier to entry is a lot lower. If you've got a lot of information and tools readily accessible and you don't have to devote an entire evening to stopping what you're doing and going to participate. And you see then that this engagement should not only be thought of as communities and locally but it will really spread in many, many ways and we should seek that. Yeah, yeah, across different levels of government and also for some important stories to be told you needed a computer-assisted reporter who knew someone who could make a good chart who knew someone who was a reporter and suddenly those might all be the same person. So some of the stories that we need to be told, I think, are much more likely to be told now. Nick. Okay, so the thing that I think is exciting is that government services are potentially a gateway drug to civic engagement and it's not necessarily about jumping right into debating policy with your neighbors but it's that broadband mobile access has made it easier for people to use their cities and once they start having a better connection with the day-to-day services that they use they can step into a more substantive conversation with the people who are making all that happen. So for example, I ride the bus to work and I can see on my iPhone when the next bus is coming that's great information with me it gets me a little bit more connected with who's providing that service and it's really easy to take the next step and then slip in a little bit of feedback into that and so all of a sudden now I'm having a conversation with those people. And Laurel mentioned the idea of the civic web. I think that's a really nice way to describe it. It's not just about politics and government it's about the whole city and our whole community and how we use it. So I think that's really exciting. I'll leave you with some. So it truly is the interactivity that's possible. Things aren't just from the institution to the individual that many more ways are gonna open up for some feedback for some engagement in that. That's what we're doing. And government is intimidating for people. So if you start with the things that are already easy to use and that are just part of your, the things you need to get done in your day to day that's really a way to get started. They, I think it's called the delicious effect. So the bookmark tagging website people used it because they wanted to save their own bookmarks but then there was a secondary network effect that benefited the rest of people and I think there was a lot of opportunity for a similar approach in civic applications where you make something that's useful for someone to do the thing that they need to do but then it has benefits for everyone else. Okay, so we've gone through and we've sort of laid the table out with some of the things we would hope to see happen here and the potential that's been given to us. Like any change, there's some risks and some things we would perhaps want to avoid and not fall into. What do you see as those, Chris? Well, like most, when you go to the dentist they tend to concentrate on the bad teeth and my list for negatives is longer. I guess the first one I think has to do with sloppiness. I think that the amount of data that's available is growing but people's understanding, even fairly sophisticated people's understanding of it isn't necessarily growing and that's a kind of a national kind of expertise that we're gonna have to build. So I'll give an example of, there's this whole rash of crime mapping applications that are out that basically use reports from police departments, which is great except that I have yet to find one that actually does white collar crime, which case Manhattan would just be this big red kind of blur and Westchester County and a bunch of, so but the trick there, are you actually offering information or are you offering really facile statistics that look more like red lining than they do like actually informing a user or empowering them? So I think that that kind of ignorance is I think one of the top problems. Next I'd say that while we're seeing this potentially incredible movement towards citizen journalism and towards citizen generated information and we're not necessarily seeing the same legal protections or norms that protected journalists or journalism organizations in the past. I think this is a huge issue that needs to be taken head on and thought very carefully of. When I give the example of George Washington providing discounts, postal discounts for newspapers and magazines, the estimated cost in today's dollars of that is it was something like $2 billion a year. You know, this broadband plan is covering 7.2 billion. So that was a constant renewing advantage that was given to small operators so that their voice could be heard. Part of that is that net neutrality is a huge key. We could have national broadband and things could go south very, very quickly in terms of what kind of speech people are allowed to have on that broadband. Some of our best allies in the United States like South Korea, you have to enter a real government ID number in order to leave a comment on a blog and bloggers are being arrested for reporting anti-government or actually true stories that the government doesn't want them to publish. That's not a feature that we want. And so a corollary of that is that anonymous speech should be guaranteed. You know, not every site has to use anonymous speech. I would much rather run a blog comment section where people had to log in and be consistent but let's not forget that the Federalist papers and many of the key enlightenment texts that this country was founded on were done anonymously because the authors felt that it was judicious. And when Hillary Clinton says as she did recently, we must also grapple with the issue of anonymous speech. One of my students said no, we must also protect that right as vitally as we can if we're a democracy. Grapple's the wrong word. So I think these are some of the largest concerns that I have. And I think Clay Scherke once said the problem with the situation, with the old media losing most of their business model before something has filled its place is that that's what happens in a time of transition. The old things break before the new things take their place. And I think that's where we are right now. We need a lot of advocacy and a lot of laws to kind of protect the coming situation. In what we've seen so far, for the things that were positive, we've seen some specific recommendations made of things to be done. Do you see enough energy in the process that's going forward now to address the concerns that you've just had about protecting the small voices and also trying to do something about eliminating the downside risks of clear ignorance? Yeah, I mean I would say that I'm seeing the opposite energy that some of these international trades and trade agreements and attempts to create legal regime around copyright and theft are what could potentially kill any of the positive things that we've just been talking about. So that to me is a huge concern because a variety of fairly small businesses have gathered together to try to protect their rights in a way that could erode the greater rights of this potential information revolution. Laura. One of the things I think that needs to be avoided is that open government isn't just for a closed smartphone device that we need to actually build web applications and applications in general for every kind of device, whether it's a phone or a computer or also maybe a sensor that's left at your bus stop so you no longer need to have pieces of paper that tell you what time the bus comes but something that you can actually go up and just push a button and it'll tell you. So then we're lowering the divide so it's not an entry point of a $500 computer, $400 smartphone or we've earned a $150 cable bill. When government thinks about making themselves open and encouraging and engaging in the sensor, technology is also really important as well because we want to bridge that digital divide as quickly and as completely as possible. Another thing is that procurement is pretty tricky, of course, these days and I'm curious to see how the bidding would go for a video.gov contract. When we saw data.gov go up for bid, the quotes came back at $80 million for a website which just made us all worry. It's nice work if you can get it. It's nice work if you can get it. So web developers out there, yes, you will have a secure future. And also a web app does not make a movement just because a city gives you data to one section does not mean the city has complete and total buy-in of all of their data. We're looking at holistic views of how we can open data across municipalities, across states and in the federal government as well. The hope is that we need to make these changes correctly and completely but then also make them so they stand in place. When the White House buys into something like transparency and open data, this is a clear sign for all the other municipal governments to also kind of chime in and say, well, if the White House is doing it, we too should do it. That's good, but when politics change and administration change, we're talking about long-term good for the people, for citizens and not just for the politicians in their short terms. One of the things you started with was the concern again about we need to close the digital divide. We need to be more inclusive. Do you see broadband itself as emphasizing a speaking mode that's traditional for everybody, not so much just writing, but as therefore a more natural way to include larger numbers of people? Well, it's a learning curve like everything else. We were out in Montana a couple years ago and we're waiting in line with everyone else at the library to get access to email and we were just trying to get access to email. We weren't trying to get access to apply for a job, for any kind of government plans or anything. We were just on vacation. And I looked at this like this is crazy in Boston where we come from, there's Wi-Fi in every corner and everyone has a computer, so if you really needed access, you can always borrow someone's. But we're talking about educating large amounts of the population to not just use technology, but to use it well and to use it for the greater good. So I think the digital divide has to come hand in hand with some real human training as well. It's not just the technology. So start at the shore, start at the libraries, the local governments and get the library some more funding again so they can be open on Saturdays when people traditionally have the day off and start these classes in communities. So people realize that to them, using a keyboard may be foreign, but after a while, once they receive feedback and understand that this is the way that society is now communicating, they'll feel more comfortable about it. John. Sure, so I have a couple of risks or pitfalls to identify first. I think we need to have a careful balance between on one side, when we're making more open or more participatory government or civic sphere, there's encouragement and experimentation. So the sort of please do it model it'll be good for you. And then on the other side, there's statutory requirements or codified requirements. So with the administration's open government directive, that's a bit of a combination of both. Right now I would say it's a little bit more on the encouragement side since it doesn't have many hard and fast requirements, but I would also say that that's appropriate. So when you're dealing with something where best practices are as unclear as they are for digital participation right now, I think it's a careful thing to balance when you should pass a law requiring something or when you should have issue guidelines recommending or encouraging some kind of behavior. Second, just like in the same way that some of our business models are outdated, I think some of our cultural expectations about openness are outdated. Just two examples, one, if you look back to President or then Senator or candidate Obama's promises around healthcare deliberations, I think the whole country is in a very different place than we were a year ago when that promise flew and he said that it would all be on C-SPAN. And I think part of that is because of what we went through with part of that is also because we're growing new expectations about what it means to have deliberations in public and that that's gonna be a complex process for everyone to go through. I think the same is true when you talk about accuracy of data, when you look at recovery.gov, when that went up, there were all these news stories saying, oh, we got you, you bought two million pounds of ham for $5 or whatever it was. Then it turned out that that was just an error in how the data was described. So we have different expectations about what the point is of putting out this site and what data accuracy should be. So those are just two examples of places where we need to grow better cultural expectations and understandings about what to expect. It's been very interesting to me over the many years as the toxics release inventory has been released, how many debates took place about the adequacy of that data, which was considered to be really lousy data, but it's been interesting to see how people have adjusted and the evolution of that has taken place over time. I'd say as more governments get on board with doing open government and broadband brings back to more people, I think a big risk is that governments will try and do too much themselves, and that means trying to build too many tools that could be better built by, say, the private sector. And the other risk is that they could move too slowly and get stuck in old ways of doing things. In both cases, you're talking about broadband and ubiquitous computing as a disruptive innovation and there's a poster of Clayton Christensen out front talking about how that affects industries and one of the things that in both cases you need to look at is the new entrance into providing services who are going to be innovating faster and trying out new approaches and doing less and doing things with a whole new approach than you would have done even a year ago. So if government tries to move too incrementally, they run the risk of totally missing the boat and spending too much money providing something that doesn't work well enough. So you've seen a lot of effort in the open government space right now to focus on opening up data so that application developers can start building consumer tools. That's been a really positive model but it's a real mind shift for government agencies to get away from we need to build every single piece of the entire experience to we can focus on doing the thing that we can do really well which is often providing the data, providing a platform and then letting other people build interfaces on top of that. But I think you agree in non-exclusive ways because one of the things we're seeing is that in the 1990s and early 2000s, government entered a lot of relationships, exclusive relationships with a single vendor and that's why we're in this mess. Right and that's why we advocate for open data at all points of the process. So if you're, say you're releasing transit data which is something we work on a lot, you don't want to get into a private data sharing arrangement with one vendor like New York City had with Google for a long time. You want to have an open interface using open standards so that anybody can build anything on top of that data. And as I hear this, a government that can make mistakes either going too slow or locked in too incrementally or trying to do too much too fast, do you think that the current plans as you understand them are more or less in the right position or is the danger more one or the other? The current plans for open government or the current plans for broadband? Certainly for broadband in the conjunction of civic interaction and open government. Well, okay so you saw on the, what you were getting at in terms of incentives versus requirements that if you build too many requirements you end up potentially getting data and information that's not useful. And so the incentives have to be structured so that people are building, the interests are aligned between people who are using the data and people who are providing it so that you don't end up spending a lot of money providing data or anything else that's not actually useful. And I think you run the same risk trying to, if you mandate too much open government interface where interface is the actual end user software. I think there's a potential for a lot of money and effort to be spent making something that's not good and doesn't provide a good experience and people don't use and then it'll be seen as a failure and a waste. Okay, so we've laid out a few things very, very quickly on what we might be hoping for and what we might be worried about as this goes forward. And we're open for Q and A to see and hear what you folks think we ought to talk about to make sense of what is a very big announcement of a very big program at a very important time. So, yes. And we'd actually ask, could you go to the microphones on either side because this is being streamed as well and people will not hear any of your questions if you don't do it. Good idea. Should we just line up? Yeah, line up, that's great. Good evening, my name is Nolan Bowie. I'm a colleague of Jerry's, I teach at the Kennedy School. I had a question for Eugene. I noticed that among the five core goals of the plan there was no mention that closing the digital divide particularly within a set timeframe was among those. And in regards to the first goal of having a open and transparent government where all of the public information, the government information is available online. Will citizens, will investigative reporters, will public interest organizations and advocates and attorneys still have to file Freedom of Information Act to get information or will it all be available? And if so, how will we know what is missing? In regards to the panel at large and in regard to the digital divide, if we begin to sort of try to empower all of the communities, when then do we get to closing the digital divide? And at the same time, by empowering those communities who are already empowered, don't we increase the gaps? Don't we ultimately need a timetable? Eugene, we'll let you start with this. Both great questions, take them in order. The first question about bridging the adoption gap, the recommendations that I discussed today cover one very small area of the National Broadband Plan, which is the portion related to civic engagement. Broadly, the National Broadband Plan is broken down into three main groups. The first group deals with broadband deployment, the infrastructure question, how do we get infrastructure out there? And right now, we believe that about 95% of Americans have access to broadband infrastructure. Chairman Genokowski, the chairman of the FCC, about a week, a week and a half ago indicated a goal of 100 squared, which is making sure that we have 100 megabit access to 100 million homes in America within 10 years. So that's one issue. Second issue, the issue that you addressed, which is broadband adoption and the gap. Last week, the FCC released a survey, which indicated that between 65% to 70% of Americans who have access to broadband are currently subscribed to broadband services, which means that there's a gap of about 30 to 35% of Americans that don't have access. What was important about that survey was that it was the first survey of that non-adopter group, and many individuals and many groups have gone out and said that 30 to 35% Americans don't have access, but have never told us much about that group at all. Let me give you one example. As you can imagine, some of the non-adopters include individuals over 65 as well as the poor. And the FCC is hosting an event at the museum on, I believe, March 9th to roll out the recommendations related to adoption and closing the gap. But one example here that is instructive. In certain cases, we realize that broadband is either too expensive for individuals, which is one of the reasons that were cited, or is not relevant to people's lives. And so we had the CEO of Skype come visit us. They indicated that the fastest growing group of adopters for Skype services are individuals aged 55 and over. The reason why? They use Skype's web video conferencing service to see pictures of their newborn grandkids. And so the first thing that happens is they call up their son or daughter and say, I want a computer and I want broadband access to continue to see pictures of my grandkids. And so that demonstrates that there's partially relevance, there's partially, there's a whole host of reasons why the gap is this. And the FCC will be rolling out recommendations next week to address some of the gap issues. On the second question about FOIA, what we recognize is that all of these tools do not replace FOIA. And we recognize that FOIA potentially is the oldest version of open government initiatives that have been historically going on in administrations for some time. This will not replace FOIA, but what we realize is that by providing data, providing tools that these tools will help empower Americans, help empower the individual citizen to learn about their government, know more about their government, hold their government accountable, and gain access to government services. Any other panel responses? Yes, bridging the digital divide. As much as a $400 computer is not always affordable to everybody, it still is a $400 computer compared to even just two or three, four years ago when you're talking much, much greater money for a device to get you online. So in an ideal world, it would be nice if there were some, every school kid had a computer or at least access to one. So within my realm of expertise, that's what I would like to see. But also as far as businesses, just simple businesses trying to get information and open data, you can imagine, and this actually does happen in Chicago, a coffee shop who purchases an LED sign for say $100 and this project is actually also happening at the MIT Media Lab, and a stream of open data from say the MBTA, the transit system in Boston comes to you and lets you know how far away the next bus is for the bus stop right outside your coffee shop. So then you put up the sign for small investment and your customers can see how long it takes for another cup of coffee between the buses. And so then you're sparing entrepreneurship as well as enterprise because for that small investment that coffee shop owner does not have to be online, does not have to know anything about broadband or being online at all, but they do have a device that gives their customers something that otherwise they would just be waiting outside the bus stop waiting for the bus to come. So I mean, there are some lower barriers to entry on some of these devices we're starting to see. Again, as costs come down for production and manufacturing, we'll see much more. I'd just like to build on Eugene's point quickly about moving beyond FOIA, which in order to talk seriously about, I think you need to talk three or five decades from now in order to ever get beyond the model of citizens affirmatively requesting things. But in the meantime, there's a huge gap between on one side what agencies are required by law to disclose and those things that they choose to disclose because it's in their interest. And to us, I think to most people they recognize that between those two things there's a whole world of things that agencies should be thinking about releasing that may be in everyone's interest but maybe they wouldn't choose to release voluntarily that initiatives like the Open Government Directive and other forces at work now are gonna have benefits for everyone that aren't necessarily things they would, they're required by law or that they would choose voluntarily to release. Yes, another question. Yes, I'm Andrea Kavanaugh from Virginia Tech. I had two unrelated to questions, one on a digital divide and the other on open source. It's fairly well established that people who have lower income and perhaps lower reading literacy even are not using computers but they own cell phones. Many, many of them do. About 50% of those not using the internet. And I'm wondering whether the government, the FCC in particular in this broadband initiative is taking any of that into account in its planning including how you present the content so that it's accessible on a screen with small real estate and the usual interface problems. On the open source side I'm very interested if the government's really trying to have an open source policy and pursuing open source software because it takes a huge effort to get over that inertia. Okay, now that question actually, we may pull you if it's legal to do so Eugene into some more of these conversations because some of them address more what the FCC is directly doing as opposed to our observations on it but panel do you, Nick? Yeah, I'll start with the open source question. That's something my organization deals with every day. And we are working mostly on the local level. Many cities are now adopting formal open source policies and we're cataloging them at a website that we run called openmuni.org. If you go there you can see them, there's a wiki and we're trying to help cities learn from one another. Open sourcing, open source policy. San Francisco is a really good example. They just created a open source procurement policy and the CIO then said yes, I'm getting lots of flak from my vendors. So this is, open source is absolutely integral to the open data, open government movement. Open source is a way of building software to be shareable and contributable so other people can contribute to it and make it something different. So the whole point is to write an application once and use it many times and also it is free. So that is usually one of the good aspects of it but not always. So the White House also built a website on Drupal which is an open source content management solution. So we are seeing quite a bit of adoption and a lot of people beating the open source drum which is very good. Okay, actually let me make one quick comment about the cell phone concept. In 1987 we started a program at the Kennedy School that was looking at what we first called strategic computing and then it was leadership in a networked world. But the interesting thing to us as a huge focus of attention has been tensions between political people and technology people in government and could they find a common agenda? The common agenda became the phrase online, not inline, 24 by seven, the fact that you could deliver services without having to change too much of the government, two people who appreciated it and therefore people who talked to the public and had to show them some result from a public action add something to point to that people really did appreciate. With cell phones becoming such a big connective device to the internet, I expect that lots of governments will be putting very serious attention into how it can reach. Yeah, sorry. Well I would just, you know, getting back to my dentist role, I spot a cavity because I mean, you know, David Reed, one of my colleagues at MIT who developed the intent protocol in the internet, really, really smart guy. He said, if I as an engineer was asked to devise an information system that would be perfect for Robert Mugabe, it would be the American phone system as it stands now. And so, you know, unfortunately, yeah, governments are paying a lot of attention to this. They're shutting down the phone system in countries after elections that don't go where the government wants them to. So it's an incredibly potentially transformative technology but it's also right now an incredibly dangerous one because there is no potential for anonymous speech. It's almost entirely done through private interests and when governments want to get involved, as we saw domestically in the NSA wiretapping scandal, they can do that. And so, you know, I think this is, it's a very dangerous path to say that while phones are an excellent way for people to access information, they're also an incredibly successful way to control information and to prevent people from being able to act on it, so. But you would like the city of Cambridge to offer such services? I would like to see phone technologies that don't use service providers necessarily. And there are peer-to-peer systems that allow that. You know, if you, math has shown that peer-to-peer phones can actually have significantly better bandwidth in emergency situations. The more people with phones, the more bandwidth you get. And there are some phone manufacturers, I won't mention them, but they work in Finland who are working actively on this much to the chagrin of some of the major providers. Let's add one small comment, which is that people talk a lot about mobile when they talk about the digital divide. But I think we also have a participate, or what I'm gonna call an analog participation divide. So in the existing forums that we have for community input, there's a greater divide than the digital divide. And I think there was a report that you published on your website that was the Digital Town Halls study that showed that you bring an analog process online and the people who use the online version tend to be more diverse from more different incomes, more different backgrounds. So I think there's a possibility to address issues of participation divide without even talking about the digital divide at work, as it's been talked about. Hi Jerry, hi Chris. Mark Tomizawa from Civic Express, which is not even a thing, it's just a network of people who work across academia, private and public industry and nonprofits and education, including first responders. Chris, thank you for the Haiti stuff of three or four weeks ago, that full week that you launched. I thought that was a marvelous example of some of this, the value of smart people coming together using a public platform and helping to reconstruct an entire society. We say open source, but I think that's an example of open resource. I think the government sometimes could get capture immense value, not just from the people who Chris and Dale had in the room working with the State Department, but if you open that up to the citizens and you say we need information that's not in a federal database, what can you tell us about this situation in your neighborhood? Can you share photos? Can you share stories? Are there retirees who used to work for medicine, the State Department, academia, public health? I think that would be marvelous to have open resource as a comeback channel and building on Laurel's bus stop analogy. What if instead of stopping to buy a cup of coffee, you put in some information and you help save taxpayers a billion dollars? Now I use that big number for a reason. I talked to Governor Rendell. I said what if we could have teams, virtual teams work on saving people money and time? Would you pay them if they hit a metric? And he said absolutely. And I said why? He said I pay them in year one and after that I wouldn't pay them. We just lower taxes. So I'd like to know if there is a chance to recapture knowledge from everybody in the United States for starters around very specific issues that government finds overwhelming because they become clogs and bottlenecks. And if we can use former NSA people to work with current NSA people, right? If we can open up the informal network, the mesh and compliment the formal institutions that somehow become overwhelmed when things are moving very, very quickly. I wanted to ask if that was part of the plan or if it could be part of the plan. And the other thing I wanted to say was there are a lot of kids who can make this stuff dance and a lot of them are in high school. If we had a public initiative and said we need to make every cell phone attach in a civic way to a civic location where the government says we're working on this, we need your help, and we actually rewarded prizes for good thinking, I think you would unleash massive, massive creativity. It's all there. I just think somehow we've set up rules sometimes that hold kids back. So I'd like to say this could become our version of the 1960s where it's not Rosie the Riveter. It's like we're all in the pool and no one has helped me to understand that. I just don't know if this is something government welcomes. It's gonna happen. The trajectory of all this is inevitable, like Ushahidi. So the question is, is there a role for an individual and a group of individuals to work with the FCC to help say here are specific possibilities that are ready to go? That's ultimately my question. Panelist. So I hate to respond to such an optimistic question with a pitfall, but there is a statutory prohibition on the government accepting volunteer help, which is kind of ridiculous if you look at it from this context, but if you look at it from the context of the budget shut down in the 90s or other similar things, you can see the spirit in which such a law was passed. So it needs to be an outside organization working with the government in parallel in a sibling relationship? Or when people come up with such ideas, there are certain entities within the government that have gift authority that are allowed to accept gifts. So then you just channel it through there, for example. That's one of the things that we have to route around is this kind of old world idea about not being able to accept help because it could create corruption when here we're just talking about what should be fundamental to democracy. Giving things away for free like ideas. Right, right, exactly, which we wouldn't want because then you'd feel beholden. I think there's a lot of enthusiasm within government for this kind of project, but that sort of broad scale idea that you're talking about is difficult to plan well and so we're at an earlier stage. And we're starting to see things like Carl Malamudja in the last few weeks announced something called the, I think it's called the International Amateur Scanners League and it's an email list with 10 or 15 people on it that are starting to go to the National Archives and they're showing up with DVDs and making DVD copies of videos that the National Archives has. They email them to Carl who then puts it on YouTube and makes a permanent digitized copy of it and that's one thing of the world of digitization that could be crowdsourced. There's also resource collections so when you think about policy work, you say that there are high risk things you could do with the public but then there are also much lower risk things like what are the best examples of this or what are the best resources we should rely on as we think through this and that's certainly something that the FCC has done as they came about this plan but for the bigger ideas like the ones that you're talking about that's something that I hope we're gonna see a lot more of in the coming years. You could see it in the coming months actually. Referring to Carl's work is good because I mean Carl's taking this approach that it's better to ask forgiveness than beg permission and some of that work happens like all politics happens is essentially leveraging from the outside and so some of it is cooperation but it's cooperation that only works with some of the members of government who are really happy about it and helping you to push the other members of government who aren't. Thank you. Yes. Very low tech general question with a lot of assumptions. I'm waiting to see what happens at the midterm election. My real question is can someone address or kick around the idea of the disillusion with the government that's happening? There is some buzz that maybe Scott Brown was elected because of that. I think more of that will show up at midterm elections. It's interesting talk about voter participation with this technology but we're talking about a country that compared to other countries actually has low participation and that's probably going lower actually. So can somebody kick around the disillusionment with government in the first place? Do people really want to use it? Engagement in its relationship to a situation now where a lot of people are angry and disillusioned with government. I don't think there'll ever be a time when people are not angry and disillusioned with government. So sure, then we need to pounce on this moment and see it as a really great time to recreate the government. What is the government? What is it that we want it to be? If this is not what it is. Everyone is angry. It doesn't matter what side of the idol you're on. So I think this is a fantastic time to start thinking about these issues and actually doing something and kind of stop talking about it. Nick. And I think this goes back to my original idea that one of the things that technology can help government offer people are answers to their basic needs and if we start doing that well, that sort of builds confidence back. There's an opportunity on the basic services level. And our generation or the next generation or all of us are going to expect government to work like Facebook or Amazon or Google and to the extent that it starts doing that I think it will make people happy on the small stuff. Something I've been interested in for a long period of time and have tried not to take personally, when I graduated from graduate school, I went into government and I know that the Gallup people were taking polls then that they've taken forever, which is asking people at what rate does your government do the right thing? And the four points were almost never, some of the time, most of the time, almost always. And when I came out, most of the time was what most of the people said. It was more than 80%. And it has pretty persistently gone downhill and downhill and downhill and downhill and downhill and it bumps up occasionally. But we have lost a great deal of trust in government and that's happened around the globe. One of the interesting things to me about this is directly addressing the transparency issue of will trust improve if the government explicitly shows we are doing a lot to not allow you to think we're hiding things from you. And I'm not sure it'll work, but I am pretty sure it's an important problem and legitimacy is a very critical problem. And so I'm happy that we're working on it and I think there's a plausible story that it could be powerful, but the proof is in many puddings and we've got to see what happens. Yes. So I'm a fellow bus rider and I'm delighted to hear that this issue is rising to the surface and even more hopeful that when I push the button that tells me when the next bus is coming, it might even be based on GPS and tell me if it's 20 minutes late. So my question is once we've resolved all of the relationship engagement issues and the infrastructure, what plans are there involved for sustainability and making sure that when I push that button it actually works and wondering if that would come out of the $7 billion? That's a good point. Sustainability of any kind of government initiative is really quite critical, but whether it is a website that you expect to find in the next administration like data.gov, it'll be interesting that Nick, you work on sustainability. I mean, so a big risk with all of this is that anyone could just decide to not do this anymore and just turn off data.gov or turnoffwhatever.gov. So I think it's a matter of making sure that it's clear that those things are tremendously useful. As for the bus thing in particular, I mean, I think it's important for governments to be able to try and find sustainable funding models for all different kinds of services and to approach projects in a way that are less capital intensive. So the bus example specifically, we advocate for agencies to put out the data first and then build the hard infrastructure. So once the data feed is out there, then you work with the shop owners to get the ad-supported Wednesday next bus coming signs and those pay for themselves and then you start rolling out the signs and so you're not saddled with a big infrastructure cost at the beginning of a project. So there are creative ways to fund things if you rethink the order of operations. That's a great example because actually all the buses in Boston have GPS units on them already. The data just wasn't public. And so by going, if you actually ask the government to design a sign, it costs about $50,000 for them to make sure that it's, this is a term of art, sailor proof, meaning that someone swinging on it or pelting bottles at it won't destroy it. Whereas if you ask private entities to host a sign in their shop, it's on private property, there's a whole different set of laws regarding that and most shop owners will just put it in the window and assume that no one will try to throw things at it. So really kind of different regime also of how much it costs to do each sign and to develop each sign. And I think that that's where some of the creativity and understanding what private public partnerships can happen and also basically how to leverage the government to give up data. There's a great project called Every Block that came out a couple of years ago that produces all sorts of machine readable data on communities and it was a five person programming team, one of whom wasn't actually doing any software programming. Their job was to go from municipality to municipality, getting concessions on what kind of data the local government would give up. And when Boston gave up say liquor licenses and would start putting that out in XML, that person would then get on a plane to like Chicago and Atlanta and say, well, you know, Boston's pretty high tech, they've put out liquor licenses on XML and Chicago would be like, we'll put out liquor licenses and we'll even put out movie shoot locations. And so basically one person's job was to go from place to place to place forcing these concessions. So I mean, it's really exciting how much data is out there that can simply just be opened by someone deciding that that's gonna be the policy. Okay, we're gonna let our panel have a few concluding words but I think we could squeeze in one more quick question. It's quick. I guess so far I've heard that engagement used interchangeably with access that most of this talk has been gone towards government transparency rather than necessarily public participation. And I wondered if you could talk about the potential for technology to move from more, to move from representational government to more direct participation in the process of governing by the public. I'm wondering if sort of this technology is going to lead to a blurring of the institutional boundaries between public and private action or if this is more about just replacing brick walls with glass. Yeah, I heard someone once described the downside of transparency is glare, right? So if you really want people to not know what's doing, you dump as many documents as possible and they won't be able to figure it out for a while. But fighting against that is news organizations, young news organizations like Talking Points Memo which dumps 50,000 pages of documents and within a couple of hours they have some really interesting diamonds that they found. So I think you can think of it as kind of a two-stage process. One is as this transparency and as the data comes out, a lot of organizations are really simply just trying to make it legible. And huge kudos to Sunlight, just absolute leaders in that area. And the point is that once it's legible, you get a second generation of people who are actually doing stuff with it and potentially becoming more engaged. And that's kind of more the work that we've been doing at the Civic Media Center is to say, assuming data now, what are the different models for engagement? And we're finding that there are radically different models for social change that are just becoming available with some of these tools. On your, we put it blurring the line between public and private action. I think that's definitely true that that's happening and that's why agencies that are writing social media policies like DOD just released theirs today, why that's so hard for them because there's a very limited sense which career employees might have a public voice and suddenly it's one that could make CNN in two hours at any time. So that's been difficult for them to think through. And that's also the reason that it's so offensive to all of us when the government gets it wrong, when they enter in a public-private partnership that's exclusive, like for example, when GAO decided to digitize these extremely valuable documents legislative histories that they had and they paid a private company to do it in a way that the public would never get access to it and they had to continue to buy a subscription to that company to get access to their own records. So that was nothing but a subsidy to that company and the public got no benefit at all from digitizing all these public records. So to me, the idea of a public-private partnership or our roles as people or as associations and organizations is suddenly very different than it was in a way that has a lot of opportunity but also some complex risks. Okay, we've been listening to some of the upsides, some of the downsides, some of the questions that are in the group. I'd like our panelists to give some parting thoughts now, particularly ideas of priorities for what we should be doing with this situation and these ideas next, Chris. Well, I guess I would just say that, we had a little bit more time to spend with Eugene and his team during the day and peppered them with questions. And I think they've done a great job of thinking within the mandate of FCC what's gonna be necessary to try to get this plan to work. But I think that it's really critical that the effort doesn't stop with them and that the pressure on the government doesn't stop. And I think that what we've seen is that broadband could be an incredibly enabling thing or it could just be a rehearsal of the worst aspects of broadcast media as they kind of coalesced in the 50s and 60s. So let's get on it, no sleep for any of you. I'd just like to quote Craig Newmark of Craigslist when he says, I welcome my nerd overlords. We're at a time of serious revolution and it's not just technology. If we go out in the streets and knock on our neighbor's doors and meet them face to face, that email and petition that you create later will actually be a lot easier to send and mobilize your street. Just start with your street and I encourage you all to go meet. As I've heard, one police, one member of your city council and then a teacher and someone else on your block that you don't know. So that is the non-technical path that we can take and then the other thing is just not to fear technology because in most cases we are intending to do no harm or very little harm but we do want to embrace what it can do and it can make government more efficient, more open and in turn make citizens more participatory in their civic processes. Thank you, John. So I would say, also going back to the last commenter that it's familiar to me that you talk about transparency and participation but then end up focusing on transparency and that's because it's much easier to do that. It's much easier to say, well, there's this thing that might have all these good effects but let's at least figure out what we need in order to make that possible. It reminds me of turning 16 and learning to drive and being so excited and then just driving around at night because I was so excited to be able to drive and it didn't necessarily have somewhere to go. So I think we all have some thinking to do about what it is we want to do with these tools and the potential is enormous and there's no right answers. It's going to be an act of creation and if you have ideas like the questioner before that I think right now is a great time to submit them. Every 23 of the agencies have slash open pages and they need to come up with pilot plans for participation so if you all have ideas for that they would love, I've met with a lot of people at agencies they would love to be validated by your ideas about what they're thinking through. Super, Nick. Sure and also to address that last comment about whether transparency enables participation I think one of the things that transparency does is it gives you a face on the other side and when you realize there's a human there and it's a human talking to a human you end up with a much more civil discussion and I think that's something really exciting and wonderful. My closing thoughts about all this would be that the way technology is working right now it gives us the opportunity to iterate and experiment and fail small so I think that's something to keep in mind especially when you're talking about government spending and not spending $80 million on making a data.gov website and then to impart some advice that I read on some personal productivity self-help blog the other day, take the hardest thing on your to-do list and just spend five minutes doing it first and I think that's a nice way to think about getting involved with your community and being engaged in a civic way so I would encourage you all to just start small and all do the same. One of the fun things about being a moderator is you get to say a few things at the end but in listening to this I'd really just like to underline what's happened down on the other side of the table. Chris and Laurel sort of focused on something that I think is likely very central to this whole thing which is as you look at how technology has been applied in the world and certainly in governments the there's a little hard part in getting the technology right but the hard part is getting the politics of it so you can act on it and the political strategy that takes these ideas from where they are now to where they'll really be effective is going to be critical and so that's idea number one. Idea number two I would argue is really sort of picking up a bit from John and Nick as well. In many ways engagement and participation is easier now because the barrier is lower. We can do things in little bits of time that used to require huge amounts of time. What I have not seen yet and what I think our experiments need to go on and some of our analysis needs to go on is let's take ideas like the big ones of education and health and safety and a green world and small business all emphasized in the FCC plans but let us think about engagement in small pieces as their taxonomy of ways we can build sustainable public support by asking people for a little bit and this technology makes it so convenient for people to give you a little bit. For campaigns that was a little bit of money at first and then it was a little bit of these other things and so the political world has sort of learned a bit about how to entice people into engagement a little bit at a time but our world of governance and community action opened up now by broadband. We've got to think those things through and I hope we do and I hope we're successful and thank you folks very much. Thank you panel. Thank you.