Getting to Know Deanna (An excerpt from the book Share This!)
[Cross-posted, with minor edits, from the Zanby blog. -LU]
My good friend, co-conspirator, social media maven, and all-round diva of awesomeness Deanna Zandt has a new book out. And it mentions Zanby! Share This! How You Will Change the World With Social Networking (Berrett-Koehler) is chock-full of anecdotes and case studies drawn from her own life as a social activist, artist, and media maker. Deanna illustrates the many ways social media improves our relationships and enables new forms of political and social expression that are changing the world for the better.
One of those anecdotes recounts how Deanna and I met up in Brooklyn two years ago. (And it gives a nice plug for Zanby.) We barely knew each other before that, having met in passing at a conference. But, thanks mainly to Twitter and Facebook, we were able to connect, build trust, and grow a friendship with a depth and speed that would have been virtually impossible just a few short years earlier, considering that she lives in Brooklyn, I live in Seattle, and we see each other once a year, if we’re lucky.
Here, with Deanna’s permission, is an excerpt from pages 41-43 of Share This! where she tells our story:
Your Life Makes History
Now that relationships and trust influence how we receive and manage digital information, we’re becoming more connected, and thus we have the capacity to be more empathetic. That trust-created empathy will lead us away from the isolation and resulting apathy that we’ve experienced as a culture, arising from the 20th century’s focus on mass communications and market demographics.
Here’s a story about how building trust through social networks has worked for me. A couple of years ago, I spoke at a conference in northern California. After my song and dance, Leif Utne, the vice president of community development for the software company Zanby, came up to introduce himself. He was working on a project that he wanted to get my employer, Jim Hightower, involved with. We exchanged contact info and became Facebook friends; later we started following each other on Twitter.
About a year and a half later, Leif messaged me to say that he was coming to Brooklyn for a visit and wanted to know if I’d like to get coffee. Sure! Of course! When we sat down a few days later, I asked him how the baby was–he and his wife had spent a long time adopting a baby from Guatemala, and Leif had even lived there for ten months. He lit up and showed me recent photos, and then asked how my dog, Izzy, was adjusting to life in Brooklyn. I had adopted her from a rescue organization, and we laughed at how the processes for adopting dogs and children were eerily similar.
Leif asked if he could show me a new online service that he’d taken a job with, one that would give groups a way to connect their memberships. Absolutely, I said. We did a run-through, and he talked about some of his company’s successes. I started thinking of clients who could really use something like this tool and offered to put him in touch with them.
My online friendship with Leif is significant for several reasons. Social media enabled a kind of “identity authentication” between us. I was aware of Leif’s family’s work with the Utne Reader before I met him, but being connected via social media gave me insight into some of his values and interests. And vice versa. More important, though, it allowed us to collect seemingly unrelated fragments of information about one another over time, and to create a wide-angled picture of the other person with those fragments. Technology writer Clive Thompson calls this phenomenon “ambient awareness” of the people around us.
It doesn’t impact my life at all to know that Leif is heading to the airport, and he probably doesn’t care that I spent an extra 30 minutes with my dog in the park this morning. But over time, we are able to see a portrait of one another’s lives take shape and feel connected. While Leif’s trip to the airport doesn’t affect my daily life, if he misses his plane, I feel bad for him. There’s the empathy, simply by being aware of another person’s “mundane” activities. Our portraits of one another facilitated an in-person conversation that otherwise would have been stilted and awkward:
“So, you, uh, have kids?”
“No, you?”
“Yeah, one. A little boy.”
“Uh-huh.”
Instead, we were able to tap into what we care about pretty quickly, and the landing into the “business” end of the meeting was much smoother.
Admittedly, experimenting with what it means to share different parts of our lives can sometimes be uncomfortable. Chip Conley, the CEO of a family of boutique hotels in northern California called Joie de Vivre, offers a case in point. In 2009, he wrote about the fallout from photos he posted to Facebook from his latest Burning Man trip. Some workers were surprised to see Conley in a tutu and a sarong. The complicated part wasn’t that he didn’t want them online, or that his investors or board members didn’t want them online; it was that some employees struggled with seeing their fearless leader show a carefree side of himself that didn’t “fit” with the standard work environment. We’re all still determining what we each individually consider acceptable amounts of information, as well as what we’ll tolerate organizationally and culturally.
Thanks to the alienating effect of mass communications, our ability to converse directly with one another, and to engage with the larger culture in a meaningful way, has withered. While no one has figured out a precise formula for what amount or mix of sharing creates empathy, presenting real pictures of real lives indisputably frees us from our pigeonholes. Social networks give us the opportunity to reengage with one another.
Order Share This! at your favorite bookstore, or online at Amazon, Powell’s, Barnes & Noble, or Indiebound.
Helium Hijinx
The UpTake crew – me, Jacob Wheeler and Mike McIntee – sing like the Chipmunks at Netroots Nation 2010.
I’m going to Netroots Nation 2010
This week I’m making my first trip to Sin City. On Wednesday I head to Las Vegas for Netroots Nation 2010, an annual confab of 2000+ progressive activists, bloggers, techies and politicos, taking place at the Rio Hotel. According to a press release, this is “the largest gathering of the Democratic base ahead of the midterm elections… Energizing the Netroots was key to Democratic successes in 06’ and 08’ and will be important again this year.”
I’ll be there representing Zanby, which will have a big presence in the exhibit hall. We’ll be showing off the latest version of our innovative platform for online collaboration, group management, and social networking. And we’ll be touting some recent client projects like Rework the World and The UpTake.
We will also be sharing booth space with our friends and allies at Warecorp, a full-service custom web dev shop, The UpTake, an award-winning video citizen journalism outfit (and Zanby client), and Mobile Roots, maker of mobile apps for political campaigns.
So if you’re going to Netroots, drop by our booth and say hi!
More from the press release:
Speakers at the conference include: Senator Reid, Speaker Pelosi, Secretary LaHood, Sen. Al Franken, Elizabeth Warren, Gov. Brian Schweitzer, Ed Schultz, Sen. Jeff Merkley, Sen. Ben Cardin, Sen. Tom Udall, Rep. Alan Grayson, Rep. Raul Grijalva, Rep. Jared Polis, Rep. Donna Edwards, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, Van Jones, Rich Trumka, Tim Wise, Lizz Winstead, Majora Carter, Markos Moulitsas, Tarryl Clark, Bill Halter, George Goehl, Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, Deepak Bhargava, Gerald McEntee, Eliseo Medina and many more.
You can see the full schedule here: http://netrootsnation.org/agenda
The City as Community-Building Platform
[Cross-posted from the Zanby blog. -LU]
I recently helped facilitate Open Gov West, a two-day conference on “Gov 2.0” organized by my friend Sarah Schacht, executive director of Knowledge As Power. Over 200 open government advocates and practitioners came to Seattle City Hall from across the Pacific Northwest and Western Canada, plus a few from farther afield.
Day 1 was a traditional conference, with programmed panels, a keynote speaker, and “work sessions” where attendees came up with recommendations for action in the areas of open government policy; data and document standards; funding; and working with non-traditional partners. Day 2 was an unconference, where anyone could offer a session on any topic.
At a discussion session on Day 2 titled “The Architecture of Gov’t 2.0,” Vancouver-based facilitator and web strategist Gordon Ross posed a provocative question: “What would the city website of your dreams do?”
The City Website of My Dreams
I’ve been pondering that question for a long time. Here’s what I wish I had said in that session:
The city website of my dreams would not only let me find relevant information, process transactions, lodge complaints, and communicate with elected officials. It would help me connect with my neighbors.
When I move into a new neighborhood, I wish I could go to the city’s website and join a group for my block (or a collection of several blocks) — complete with discussions, event calendar, photos, videos, and listings of relevant city services, businesses, nonprofits, neighborhood associations, and so forth. That way I could plug in and get to know my neighborhood (and my neighbors) quicker than ever. I could browse archived discussions to see what issues have been on my neighbors’ minds, peruse photos and videos from recent block parties and festivals, and check the calendar for upcoming events. And if I moved to a new neighborhood, I could just quit the online group for my old neighborhood and join my new one, taking my profile, friends, and history with me.
Such a platform would give me and my neighbors a powerful tool to self-organize — everything from potlucks to crime-watch patrols, yard sales, childcare swaps, street cleanups and community meetings about city policies of interest to the neighborhood. We could organize car-, bike-, and tool-sharing coops. It would give us a quick way to share alerts about burglaries or fires.
And it would give the city a powerful way of targeting communications to specific blocks. Need to clear the street because of a snow emergency, tree-trimming, or a broken water main? Just send a message to that block’s listserve and word will spread fast. Add an SMS gateway to send text messages to residents’ mobile phones and word will spread even faster. Connect it all to a CRM database and an Open 311 system and you’ve got a powerful tool set for citizens to engage with the city not just as individuals, but as groups, as neighborhoods, as communities.
That’s the grand vision the old community organizer in me has for what a city website could do for citizen engagement.
Pieces of this vision already exist, mostly organized ad hoc on private platforms like Facebook, Google Groups, Ning, and all manner of blogs and email lists. There are a few organized, larger-scale examples. E-Democracy.org hosts email discussion lists for 25+ communities across the US, UK and New Zealand. Frankfurt Gestalten (“Create Frankfurt”), is a Drupal-based project inspired by the great pothole apps FixMyStreet (UK) and SeeClickFix (US), but with a greater emphasis on groups organizing around neighborhood initiatives proposed by users. The Dutch foundation Web in de Wijk (“Web in the Neighborhoods”) provides a toolkit for residents to create their own neighborhood websites. The explosion of hyperlocal news blogs — like WestSeattleBlog and MyBallard in Seattle — has proven that there’s a hunger for online spaces that support offline neighborhood-level community-building.
Of all the sites I’ve seen, Neighbors for Neighbors comes closest to the vision I describe above. This Boston-based nonprofit has built Ning networks for all 18 neighborhoods across the city, stitched together as a citywide network under an umbrella WordPress blog. City staff, neighborhood activists, landlords, business owners, police, and residents of all stripes are active on the site, using it to organize everything from potlucks to pickup soccer games to public meetings about saving neighborhood libraries.
But I have yet to see such a network of self-organizing hyper-local community groups fully integrated with a city’s website.
Zanby’s Groups-of-Groups Approach
I’d love to build a system like this on the Zanby platform. Our unique groups-of-groups architecture enables the clustering of local groups into “group families” around any criteria — like geography, of course, but also other affinities that might unite certain block groups to others in different parts of the city, like proximity to schools, libraries, parks, transit lines, waterfronts, commercial zones, etc. Those groups could easily network and collaborate with other groups across the city with shared interests by joining group families organized around those interests. This architecture allows groups to network with other groups.
Imagine, for example, that a block in Boston lies within earshot of a freeway, borders a river, has a transit stop on it and is home to many Spanish speakers. In addition to belonging to one of those 18 geographic neighborhood group families, my block could join families for, say, all the blocks across the city that lie along the same light-rail line, or along Boston Harbor and the Charles River, or along highways, or with similar demographics. Those groups might share certain interests and concerns with each other that don’t map to the geographic neighborhood lines.
Meanwhile, a group a few blocks away might not be so concerned about freeway noise or transit safety. But it has a community garden and a retirement home on it. That group might join group families organized around elderly issues and community gardens. The host of a Highway Neighbors group family could create events, discussions, documents, etc. that are easily shared with all of the groups in the family.
The key concept here is that group families allow groups to network and collaborate with other groups.
It’s also fairly easy to integrate third-party tools and data into a Zanby community, using APIs, RSS feeds and embeddable objects. So each block group and neighborhood group family could serve as a social media dashboard displaying discussions, events, documents, etc. generated by Zanby, side-by-side with feeds of info from city databases, video streams of public meetings, live chats with residents and city officials, etc.
The Other ‘L’ Word: Liability
Legal experts have raised concerns about liability when the government hosts open forums for civic dialogue. Government lawyers get nervous about being sued for censorship if, for example, an employee deletes a profane or racist comment on a city blog or message board. And if they don’t moderate such comments, they could be sued for facilitating hate speech. Similar liability concerns were common a decade ago in the private sector, mainly in the media industry, as newspaper and magazine publishers struggled with whether to add blogs, reader comments, and forums on their websites. Those issues have largely been sorted out.
Fortunately, while the public sector may be a few years behind in sorting out these issues, it appears to be catching up fast. In the past year, 24 federal agencies, and many city and state governments, have used IdeaScale and similar apps to create open forums for sourcing ideas from the public. The website of the New York State Senate, a model of open government, now hosts blogs for every senator, including public comments, and allows the public to post comments on bills. The White House also recently published new guidelines for federal employees on how to use social media to engage the public.
Helping Communities Help Themselves
Just like social media is reshaping whole industries by slashing the transaction costs of engagement, it holds tremendous potential to reshape government — or more importantly, the relationship between citizens and government. There was much talk at the Open Gov West conference about how governments at all levels can use social media and online communities to engage citizens in dialogue, to leverage their knowledge, skills, passions, and willingness to volunteer their time and energy to solve public problems and improve their communities.
But as Doug Schuler, of the Public Sphere Project, argued, “We shouldn’t be talking about how government can leverage citizens. We should be talking about how citizens can leverage the government.” After all, the government is there to serve the people, not the other way around, right?
Yes, and to that end the government should be a vehicle for helping people help themselves — not just as individuals, but as communities, providing the social space for civic spirit to grow. I believe that putting tools in the hands of citizens to self-organize and build community — through the government website — is one powerful way to do that. Vibrant civic life requires infrastructure. I hope that one day it’s considered as normal, and vital, for city governments to provide such community infrastructure online as it is to build and maintain parks and town squares offline.
“Exclusion” – my essay from the free ebook “Thrivability: A Collaborative Sketch”
Last month at the SXSW Interactive Festival in Austin, I had the honor of helping my friend Jean Russell launch an exciting new ebook called Thrivability: A Collaborative Sketch.
Inspired by Seth Godin’s collaborative ebook What Matters Now?, the book contains short essays and images by 63 big thinkers, each focusing on a word or short phrase that has to do with creating a more thrivable world. Contributors include some of my favorite thinkers, such as Clay Shirky, Beth Kanter, John Hagel, Kaliya Hamlin and Tony Deifell.
The book is available online as a slideshow, a PDF, and a website. Please give it a read. Share it via Twitter, Facebook, etc. And join the conversation.
Here is my own contribution, a meditation on the word “exclusion.” It appears on page 30 of the book. I’d love to hear your feedback.
Exclusion
Leif Utne, Zanby.com – Bainbridge Island, WA, USA
Ouch! Exclusion is such a harsh word. What place could it possibly have in a world that’s open, inclusive, and thrivable?
Like a hammer, exclusion is merely a tool. In its unhealthy forms, exclusion is used to oppress, to avoid accountability, circumvent democracy, and maintain established economic and political order. It brings to mind secret societies, smoky back rooms, nativism, and dehumanizing the “other.”
But exclusion can also be healthy and life-affirming. For individuals, that may mean choosing your conversations more wisely, lightening your load, de-cluttering your mental and physical space, eliminating distractions and focusing on what matters most. It means making space for solitude, contemplation, attention to yourself, to your breath, to nature, to being fully present.
Exclusion is not a choice of whether to exclude, or not, it is a choice of what to exclude.
For groups, healthy exclusion means creating safe containers in which to share and collaborate more deeply. It means being intentional about who and how many you want to share space with. It’s about creating and protecting sacred space. A good host has a talent for appropriate exclusion. It’s the social artistry of choosing who you want at the party, and who you don’t.
Every marketer knows that exclusion is a powerful tool. Done well, limiting access to a place, a group or a product makes it cool. Anyone who has launched a new online community can tell you that early on exclusion is vital — to set the tone and model the kind of interaction you want. It’s a way of establishing a new culture intentionally.
Exclusion can be about useful constraints, which spur creativity, whether you’re answering an essay question on a test or innovating new products. Imagine, for example, a candle. What is a candle without a wick? Without light? Without heat? Without wax? Such a thought experiment can help you identify which properties are intrinsic to something, and think creatively about novel ways to reproduce them.
Exclusion is part of evolution, particularly the conscious evolution we are living through now. It’s about casting off outmoded, destructive ways of thinking and being. And it’s absolutely essential to a thrivable future.
I’ve already gotten some great comments on this piece. One friend suggested “discernment” as an alternative to exclusion. I like that. It has much less of a negative charge to it. But that charge is part of why I find the term exclusion provocative. I like re-framing terms in ways that shift their charge.
Another friend suggested a different frame: pruning. For a tree to thrive, it takes pruning, which means making healthy choices about where to cut back so you can channel its growth in positive directions.
What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.
September Moon (aka Full Moon Outside My Window)
UPDATE 9/19/2018: The title of this song is actually “September Moon” according to the composer, Chandler Yorkhall. The title of this post now reflects that.
Check out this haunting round I recorded last weekend:
Here are the lyrics:
Full moon outside my window this warm September night
Pulls me into wakefulness far too early.
I’d rather be sleeping, the day’s already too long for me.
I’ll just wait for dawn.
The voices on this recording are me and Irene Ravitz, a 14 year-old girl with a bell-like voice. She and her mother, Marika Partridge (the long-time producer of All Things Considered), taught it to a group of us last Friday at a party at my mom’s house on Whidbey Island that morphed into a wild jam session.
I loved this tune as soon as I heard it. It was the first thing out of my mouth when I woke up Saturday morning, and it kept repeating all day in an endless loop. So I fired up GarageBand that evening and laid it down, lest I forget how it went. After dinner, Irene and Marika came over again for another singing session. So I pulled Irene aside and recorded her singing it once through as well. Then I just copied and pasted the clips of our voices onto several separate tracks, staggering our voices to create the round. Finally, I added a little reverb, exported as an MP3, and voila! Enjoy!
[Photo credit: www.flickr.com/photos/gnuckx/4836489480]
Twitter Transcript from ‘The Socially Conscious Geek’ at SXSW
The buzz on Twitter about ‘The Socially Conscious Geek‘, the Core Conversation Lauren Bacon and I facilitated last weekend at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (aka SXSWi). Here is a straight cut/paste of the tweetstream on each of the hashtags for our session — the official hashtag #sociallyconsciousgeek, which we shortened to the more manageable #scgeek.
Tweets on #sociallyconsciougeek:
stevehopkins @SarahMoran we should totally chat 🙂 would be great. #sociallyconsciousgeek sesh? Awesome! 2 days ago from TweetDeck
SarahMoran @stevehopkins dude, I just worked out what you’re actually working on atm. We should talk! #sociallyconsciousgeek sesh at #sxsw was good 🙂 2 days ago from Tweetie
laurenbacon @btruax re #sociallyconsciousgeek – we shortened the hashtag to #scgeek. 4 days ago from web
pcrampton @hertling Thanks! 🙂 #sxswi #sociallyconsciousgeek #scgeek 5 days ago from TweetDeck
hertling Notes from socially concious geek session at #sxswi #sociallyconsciousgeek #scgeek http://bit.ly/9ccDjp 5 days ago from TweetDeck
unflatpdx #sociallyconsciousgeek #slogsxsw bring your socially conscious issues over to the speed blogging event at Maggie Mae’s on 6th. 4:-6pm today 5 days ago from TweetDeck
btruax No one is tweeting from the #sociallyconsciousgeek panel? 5 days ago from TweetDeck
annemai Geeks who want do good outnumber nonprofits here at #scgeek aka #sociallyconsciousgeek 5 days ago from Tweetie
laurencastellon Interesting format: “modified fishbowl” for #sociallyconsciousgeek #scgeek #sxswi 5 days ago from Tweetie
calliemiller #sociallyconsciousgeek now = #scgeek hi all! 5 days ago from TweetDeck
stewarttownsend #sociallyconsciousgeek rm 7 level 3…. Panel discussion but unusual setting #sxsw . Interesting to see the discussion 5 days ago from twibble
Tweets on #scgeek:
brookebf RT @jfinlayson: BTW Good Capitalist Party 4 slactivists #SocEnt Mon7-9 #scgeek http://bit.ly/ddCD2B @socialedge @changemakers @SoCapitalist 3 days ago from Twee
detailmatters @foglio glad ur here #crowdx #scgeek #sxswi let’s keep the convo going! 4 days ago from TweetDeck
Foglio http://TheUpTake.org uses audience comments on a liveblog to log/filter vid streams of leg hearings & political events #scgeek #sxsw 4 days ago from Tweetie
dkrumlauf RT @brandon_merritt Any chance of an #scgeek meetup? Would love to continue the conversations in a beer related environment! (I’m in) 4 days ago from TwitBird iPhone
alexthegirl Really loved the Socially Concious Geek panel #scgeek. Will post my notes/thoughts soon. So proud of @laurenbacon! 5 days ago from Twitterrific
davekerpen @brandon_merritt come to the happy hour @theKbuzz is hosting http://bit.ly/b7B79Y #scgeek 5 days ago from TweetChat
brandon_merritt Any chance of an #scgeek meetup? Would love to continue the conversations in a beer related environment! 5 days ago from TweetDeck
bunkywu Nice to hear that @acumenfund was getting shoutouts at #scgeek panel! Thanks and wish I were there. 5 days ago from Tweetie
mattewing Great #scgeek session. Fun to hear about new progressive biz models Nice moderating folks 5 days ago from Tweetie
Dave_Stein #scgeek was great conversation with motivated people. 5 days ago from Mobile Web
maximka Best term I’ve learned today: “slow money” #scgeek 5 days ago from web
jfinlayson @brookebf #scgeek thanks where R U sitting? 5 days ago from web
robert1er I’m in a room full of socially conscious geeks who dream of working in non-profits. Good to see folks looking to make a difference. #scgeek 5 days ago from TweetDeck
kiramarch Yes! And np’s need to raise $ to succeed RT: @davekerpen Don’t be afraid to make money. You need to money to make social change. #scgeek 5 days ago from OpenBeak
SwapMamas Attending Socially Conscious Geek Panel. Inspired. #sxsw #scgeek 5 days ago from mobile web
Sarterus a lot of people here have issues sleeping at night. it’s great people are aware of the impact: they need options to work elsewhere #scgeek 5 days ago from web
slipaustin Listening to socially conscience geeks makes me super lucky and excited to soon be working at an advocacy marketing company! #scgeek 5 days ago from Twitterrific
mcastellon RT @laurencastellon: “I went to grad school to work for good, not evil.” #scgeek #sxswi 5 days ago from Tweetie
Jaketha RT @CALCASA: It’s always surprising to know how many people didn’t realize they could use their talents for good in non-profits. #scgeek #sxsw 5 days ago from TweetDeck
agreenerlifeorg At the #scgeek chat at SXSWi. Neat ideas here! 5 days ago from Twitterrific
coreindustries Listening to #scgeek. How to do good and still make money. http://sitby.us/0794/ 5 days ago from SitBy.Us
CathyBrowne Am observing discussions at the #scgeek session, room 7 in the ACC 5 days ago from Twitterrific
My SXSW Session: The Socially-Conscious Geek: Makin’ Money While Doin’ Good
Are you a socially-conscious geek? Have you ever taken a job you didn’t like because you needed the money? Do you feel like you have to choose between your ideals and your wallet? Or have you figured out a way to make a decent living while making a difference in the world? What are some of your stories of success…or failure? Do you have any tips or tricks to share? Come join the conversation this weekend at SXSW!
This weekend I’m headed to the SXSW (South by Southwest) Interactive Festival, in Austin, TX for the first time. I’ve wanted to attend this geekfest for years, but could never find the time or justify the expense…until now. This year, I’m presenting, or at least co-facilitating a discussion session together with my friend Lauren Bacon, principal at Raised Eyebrow Web Studio in Vancocuver. Here are the details from the SXSW website:
Can you make a living as a geek without sacrificing your ideals? Definitely. These pros have carved out a niche working with mission-driven, ethical clients in both the non-profit and for-profit sectors – and want to show you how to bring your values to work while keeping a roof over your head.
When: Saturday, March 13 at 03:30 PM
Where: Austin Convention Center 7
Presenters
Lauren Bacon
Raised Eyebrow Web Studio IncLeif Utne
Zanby
If you’re going to SXSW, add us to your festival calendar, and come join the discussion Saturday afternoon.
Open Gov West Conference, March 26-27, Seattle City Hall
Open Gov West is just three weeks away! Hosted by Seattle’s new mayor Mike McGinn and organized by my amazing friend Sarah Schacht, ED of Knowledge as Power, this confab promises to be one of this year’s hottest local/regional gatherings on open government, Gov2.0, transparency, citizen engagement, open data and all sorts of related awesomeness. I’m proud to say I’m a co-convener. If you hail from the Pacific Northwest, or are just interested in Gov2.0 and can get yourself to Seattle for this, I hope to see you there.
Check out the press release below for details. And to register or find out more, visit the conference website, http://opengovwest.com.
————————–
PRESS RELEASE
Open Gov West – setting the standards for Gov 2.0 in Seattle
Open Gov West is a regional two-day conference on open government hosted by the City of Seattle and Knowledge As Power on March 26th & 27th, 2010 at Seattle City Hall. Coordinated by Knowledge As Power and supported by Mayor McGinn’s office and Seattle City Council members, this important gathering will bring together decision makers, technology companies and citizen activists, city and state government, agencies and organizations from across the Pacific Northwest. The conference opens at Seattle City Hall on March 26th with a government work summit, producing open government recommendations and resources. Day two will be an “unconference” where presentations are given by conference participants. Attendees at day two range from innovative open gov organizations, government CTOs and citizen activists. The two days will provide opportunities for governments and organizations to collaborate, reduce costs, and plan open government strategies.
*********************
‘Gov 2.0’, utilizing technology to increase transparency and access to government, is rapidly developing at city, state and federal levels of government. As yet there are no universal standards for how governments present data, or how citizens can most effectively communicate with government. Some recent examples of information provided by governmental and agency websites are overly complicated and poorly structured, more confusing than illuminating.Sarah Schacht is Director of Knowledge As Power, a convener and organizer of Open Gov West. She began researching the application of web communications in politics as an undergraduate. A decade later, her research and work across the North America has shown why the Open Gov West conference is important: “Governments must meet the needs of modernized citizens seeking greater access and transparency. The danger is in each government ‘re-inventing the wheel,’ overspending on technology when they could have modernized their systems in collaboration with fellow governments.
This is the time for open gov initiatives to meet the needs of citizens and governments—freeing both from outdated technology”.Governments throughout the greater Pacific Northwest and Canada have recently launched open government directives. Open Gov West is an opportunity to bring leaders in technology innovation, government and civic engagement together at the start of the open gov process, to establish shared standards and partnerships.
*********************Open Gov West is organized by Knowledge As Power (KAP), a 501c3 whose mission is to help individuals become informed and effective within the legislative process. By providing online legislation tracking and citizen-to-legislator communications tools, KAP helps busy individuals easily and meaningfully participate in the lawmaking process. KAP’s service currently covers the Washington State Legislature and will soon launch a service for the Seattle City Council.
http://opengovwest.com
http://knowledgeaspower.org
######For more information, contact Sarah Schacht, Executive Director, Knowledge As Power at 206-909-2684 or director@knowledgeaspower.org
Foglio's Field Notes 