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Government in your hand
By WDavidStephenson | May 21, 2007
Today’s Federal Computer Week runs an op-ed I wrote on a transformation I refer to as “government in your hand.”
It argues that Mayor Bloomberg’s recent decision to allow people to attach camera phone videos or photos to 311 or 911 calls is the precursor of a revolution that will transform the relationship of government and the governed because of a combination of:
- powerful networked personal communication devices, from camera phones or self-organizing, self-healing “mesh” networks
- Web 2.0 applications that facilitate collaboration
- equally important (but less understood) new scientific understanding of how leaderless groups, such as social networks linked by cell phones, are capable of high-level collaborative thought and action through the phenomenon of emergent behavior (or “swarm intelligence.”)
These devices have transformed our daily lives and the media. It’s inevitable that they will have the same impact on government.
I cite several examples, such as the Patent Office’s new Community Patent Review peer review system using social software, such as social reputation, collaborative filtering and information visualization tools, to allow outside experts, and interested individuals, to review patent applications, or the decision by several municipalities to post data bases, on a real-time basis, on everything from crimes to pothole reports, then invite the public to create “mashups” that transform data that previously was analyzed well after the fact, if ever, into valuable tools that can guide policing and/or or help increase government’s accountability.
I concluded, “Government in your hand: it’s coming whether or not officials want it, so the challenge to government is to find effective new ways to make the public effective partners and capitalize on this new, bottoms-up technology.”
I hope you’ll read the op-ed, and, if you find it informative and provocative, please pass it on to your friends and colleagues.
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Topics: empowering public, technology, policy and politics, collaboration, networked security, e-gov transformation, Uncategorized | |
