While I have no special celebrations, toasts, cakes or melodramatic speeches planned, I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who has supported this site.

Special thanks goes out to our current contributors, Chris Golden and Nick Troiano as well as our former contributor Alexander Muir.

And a thank you to our readers, especially the ones who actively tweet our links and comment on posts here.

Here’s to another great year. Please help me make this blog even better for 2010.

—Ethan

Most presidential events and White House briefings are now streamed at whitehouse.gov/live — allowing the public to watch Administration events live and in their entirety. The addition of the streaming video application could drastically expand the potential reach of the Administration’s message and connectivity to the average citizen, making it a powerful political tool.

The State of the Union Address tonight will also be watchable on the White House Facebook application, where users will be able to post comments in real time and engage with others on Facebook.

On its surface, advocates of open and transparent government should applaud these moves — which show how a tech-savvy administration is using innovative technology to open the doors of the White House. However, users should understand where the content is coming from. Both the White House Web site and its applications are streaming content that is being produced by the White House, which ultimately is in control over which events are broadcast and by what methods they are accessible. There is no oversight or C-SPAN-like public access filter. That said, one would suspect that any attempts to manipulate media messages would not go unnoticed, given the increasing size and engagement of the audience.

Also this week, the White House and YouTube announced a partnership, Citizen Tube, where the public is invited to submit questions for the President via video and, next week, the President will respond, via YouTube, to answer them. Users will be able to vote on favorite questions using Google Moderator, according to the site. YouTube will also be live-streaming the State of the Union Address tonight.

Finally, WhiteHouse.gov released a series of short video statements from ever member of the Obama cabinet giving an update on the work of their department- the longest video is 90 seconds. The “Cabinet Reporting to You” videos are a first of its kind.

With these new ways of watching and interacting with the White House and the President, the administration is setting a high standard for engagement in its first State of the Union Address.

On Wednesday, Jan. 20, the Brookings Institution hosted a discussion on cloud computing including a keynote address from Brad Smith, senior vice president and general counsel of Microsoft Corp. Smith unveiled a policy proposal from Microsoft, which urged Congress to consider new legislation to regulate the cloud.

“We need a national conversation about how to build confidence in the cloud,” Smith said.

Defined simply, cloud computing is “computing delivered as a service over the Internet.” A national survey conducted for Microsoft by Penn, Schoen and Berland found that while 75 percent of Americans don’t know what cloud computing is, 90 percent use it.

Gmail and Google Apps are an example: the data does not reside on any one hard drive or tied to a single physical server. Instead, a user can access the data wherever, whenever, with an Internet connection. As more industries move data to the cloud, they are balancing the flexibility, reliability and choice of cloud computing with real concerns about privacy, security and legality.

The survey reflected that sentiment. While a majority of the general population and 86 percent of senior business leaders are “excited about the potential” of cloud computing, security and data privacy are concerns of more than 90 percent of those surveyed. And while there is growing confidence in the cloud (think about how many Americans use it for online banking, for example), there are also new inherent challenges.

The first is jurisdiction: Who is in charge? The Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986 would seem to extend to the cloud, but the law is terribly out of date and has not been modernized to keep pace with the development of the Internet. As an example, ECPA extends greater privacy protections to e-mails stored for less than 180 days than those stored longer. Obviously this is a throwback to the early days of e-mail, when keeping the messages for long periods of time was burdensome and uncommon — but this is clearly not the norm today.

In the same vein, does the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which is protection from unreasonable search and seizure, extend to the cloud? Do users have a reasonable expectation of privacy or do they relinquish thEat when using a third party (i.e. the cloud) to store private date? Many insist that the courts must extend Fourth Amendment protections to the cloud, however they have not to date and there currently exists no legal precedent for such an argument.

While the U.S. courts may soon consider the issue of Constitutional protection, businesses that choose to host their data centers offshore raise the issue of international sovereignty and jurisdiction of the cloud. Smith says that Microsoft supports an international treaty defining access to the cloud but is cognizant that such an action in the near future is unlikely, and that in the interim it will be up to the private sector to make critical choices about the future of the cloud.

Vivek Kundra, the Obama administration’s chief information officer, has spoken about the potential of cloud computing to increase access to data within government by reducing time spent on procedure and increasing time spent on achieving an agency’s fundamental mission and goals. He has estimated that the cost savings could be as great as 1/10. In a speech last year, Kundra chided what he sees as the focus of government IT on infrastructure maintenance rather than deploying technical tools to achieve goals.

At its core, the promise of cloud computing comes in giving users greater choice and access, in giving businesses greater flexibility and connectivity and giving government greater efficiency and transparency. Microsoft recently proposed the Cloud Computing Advancement Act, which will continue a national conversation about the future of the cloud and the future of the Internet.

More reading:

• Huffington Post article by Brad Smith
• POLITICO, “Microsoft Urges Greater Oversight”

They sound great in principle. As models, they are ideals that are worthy and noble to subscribe to. But goals are different than action steps. What we “want” is different from what we “have.” Now consider that the path to getting “there” is not laid out (or funded) and the scene will be set to explain the second Open Government Directive Workshop series that took place Monday at the U.S. Department of Transportation.

About 175 people from across government, including agencies as diverse as the Interior and State Departments, met in a day designed to mimic the mindset behind the President’s Open Government Directive: an open, transparent and collaborative daylong working session, where best practices were exchanged, relationships formed and new ideas proposed.

One common refrain: “How are we going to do this?” With limited time and resources before each agency must submit their plan for open government to the Office of Management and Budget, and launch a Web site to announce their plans to the public, agencies are struggling to bring together the resources they need to comply with the Directive. While some speakers offered reminders that many of these tools and concepts are not new, it was clear that this change to the bureaucratic mindset was. As an example, in a PowerPoint presentation meant to discuss how his agency was an example of government 2.0 with an online collaborative working library, the first slide was a legal non-disclosure agreement against discussing the information to be presented. If we are truly going to live up to the spirit of open government, then this example showed the challenges that lie ahead.

The federal government is a large and diverse body and different agencies are clearly interpreting the presidential directive in different ways. A representative from the Health and Human Services Department talked about how his agency was implementing the directive within existing resources and procedures, saying that this will likely not be the last open government directive to be issued so it wasn’t prudent to make permanent changes now. On the other hand, the State Department showed real examples of how their global diplomacy initiatives are reaching people around the world, in real time.

Eleven presentations, limited to five minutes each, revealed different initiatives taking place within our government. Despite some having evident shortcomings, there was a palpable excitement. This is something new, something exciting and something that can have a real effect and actually make an impact.

How do we get there? Clearly a first step would be to alleviate concerns among those implementing the presidential directive that each trial need have tangible results. Government is well known for having a risk-adverse mindset — only appropriating funds and resources for programs that have a proven track record, for example. Government 2.0 is different. There is inherently an element of experiment and risk. This has to be embraced, not something to shy away from.

After the morning session, participants turned the workshop into an un-conference, following an open discussion format, in the hopes that the day would turn even more beneficial to attendees in their professional work and could therefore be directly applicable as they meet the demands of the Presidential directive.

The Open Government Directive Workshop Series will continue throughout 2010, roughly once per month. I attended today’s event as a correspondent for Social Government. All of the presentations, as well as archived video clips, of today’s event are available online at www.opengovplaybook.org.

Ten presentations will be made by federal agencies engaged in open government best practices and there will be over three hours of small group discussions and dialogue.

Social Government is proud to be the official Twitter partner of tomorrow’s workshop. Throughout the day, tune in to our Twitter feed, @socialgovt, for insight and analysis from the conference. I will be attending and will be following the conference for us on the blog.

Be sure to check out this post: “Why Open Government Is Important.”

The Los Angeles Times reports:

“The road tour, billed as the largest civic outreach campaign in the bureau’s history, features 13 vans that will bring census information and interactive displays across 150,000 miles for 1,547 days with 800 publicity stops at parades, festivals and such major sporting events as the Super Bowl and NCAA Final Four basketball tournament.”

This is a great opportunity for the Census Bureau to leverage new Web 2.0 technologies in its outreach (particularly to help avoid under counts, as one organization pro-actively points out). The Times explains that Bureau is “bringing Twitter, Facebook and other 21st-century technology to the centuries-old exercise.” Each vehicle of the tour, according to a press release, will have its own Twitter handle and users can “track the tour online as it happens and through daily social media postings.” That sounds great.

However, it seems that the agency is off to a poor start. Despite gearing up to interact with more than 300 million Americans, here’s what the social networks of the agency (some of which came long before the 2010 push) look like at this point:

• Agency Twitter followers: 898
• 2010 Tour Twitter Followers (@2010portrait, which is avatar-less): 59
• Facebook Fans: 303
• YouTube subscribers: 128
• Flickr says, “U.S. Census Bureau doesn’t have anything available to you.”

Perhaps you can’t judge an agency by is followers. But it’s 2010, and by any standard, the Census Bureau is behind. Less than two years ago it scrapped plans for hand-held computers that could have saved taxpayers some $3 billion, and, as a little icon on it’s Web site reminds visitors, “NOTE: THE [CENSUS] FORM CAN NOT BE FILLED OUT ONLINE.”

This is from an agency that, as NextGov’s Alan Balutis wrote, carries out “one of our nation’s most important statistical, financial and political exercises.” He asks during the fallout from the hand-held computer controversy, “Where was the Census CIO?” That question persists to this day, especially since the agency’s own mission statement touts its “readiness to innovate.” Where is the innovation?

Granted, Census staff know it’s coming, recently confronting the issue on its blog:

“We are looking both at new tools of data collection that make it easy for people to respond and tools that can guarantee that information people provide can be kept confidential. We have to worry about both. It’s easy to predict that there will be many generations of technologies suitable for data collection invented over the coming years. The Census Bureau needs to stay on top of these developments to fulfill its mission to the taxpayers efficiently.”

To its credit, it also has followed through, to an extent, on a promise to relaunch 2010census.gov that includes “include additional information resources and an online newsroom that contains interactive and social media elements.” The site is flashy and easily navigable. It has a compelling interactive feature where visitors can view video content that explores “real life stories that make up America.” Unfortunately, the load time is slow and one can’t easily share these stories across social networks. While there seems to be an effort, the agency still has far to go.

Our first census was carried out by U.S. Marshals riding on horseback in 1790. And while 2010 might seem like the modern equivalent, some more encouragement from citizens and oversight by Congress might just do the trick in 2020.

What do you think? What are some ways the Census Bureau can embrace Government 2.0 to more effectively do its job?

At this pace, 2010 will be an even better year. This year is a major election year, with the entire House of Representatives and a third of the Senate up for election. In addition, 37 states and two territories will hold gubernatorial elections. This blog hopes to pay close attention to the government 2.0 promises made by candidates. Of course, our coverage will remain nonpartisan and unbiased.

So with an exciting year ahead of us, here are some predictions, in no particular order.

1. More and more state and local governments will embrace government 2.0 technologies. In 2009, we largely saw long-standing stigmas erased at the federal level as agencies continued to effectively integrate social media into their Web presences. Cities such as San Francisco and Washington were leaders at the local level. In 2010, we’ll see these state and local governments expand their presence on Twitter, and turn hard-to-use Web-based GIS systems into user-friendly Google Map mashups. But with budgets facing a crunch at all levels of government — especially at the state level — development will be at a slow pace.


Craig Newmark

2. Government 2.0 will receive more high profile endorsements. Craig Newmark, best known as the founder of Craigslist, is an exuberant government 2.0 supporter. While I don’t anticipate this being the top political issue of our time, more pressure from outside government will bring more attention to the cause.
3. More companies offering government 2.0 products will be on the ground in Washington. In 2008, Google opened their Washington office. Last year, Facebook followed suit. Lobbying for the adaption of government 2.0 across the federal government will lead to results. Will we see Twitter add a D.C. presence this year?
4. Improved outreach to state and local governments will take place. While I don’t expect Google to open a Juneau, Alaska, office and Facebook to open one in Tallahassee, Fla., companies will step up efforts to court these smaller sectors of government. We might see special Web sites created especially for this purpose, and possibly some new hires as well.
5. Any remaining barriers to government 2.0 at the federal level will be removed through the legislative process. While we pretty much saw this happen last year through the rulemaking process, the antiquated laws on the books preventing the adaption government 2.0 will be repealed in Congress. Why not?
6. Open source is open for business in D.C. and at all levels of government. Following the lead of the White House in choosing the Drupal content management system to power their Web site, government Web sites from D.C. and all across the country will recognize the benefits of open source: cheap, easy and fully customizable. Open source is budget-friendly and comes with a large pool of developers. Of course, security is always concern with open source, and could be a barrier to open source CMS deployment throughout government. But if it’s fit for the White House, it’ll probably work elsewhere.
7. “Ghost tweeters” will be unmasked. With more public officials using social media tools than ever before, the public will demand to know who is actually Tweeting, writing the blog posts and updating the Facebook statuses. Throughout government, there’s a mix of authentic tweeters (like Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo.) and people who have ghost tweeters (like President Obama, who publicly acknowledged that he had never tweeted before). Officials should be required to disclose if they’re really the ones tweeting. It’s a form of government accountability.
8. More officials will do the tweeting, blogging and Facebooking themselves. Tacked on to the previous item, constituents will demand to hear directly from their public officials in social media. It does not take long to send a 140-character tweet or a short Facebook update, and it’s very easy to teach people how to do it. Really, I can find little excuse here.

Happy New Year! This blog is back for 2010, and will be celebrating its first birthday at the end of the month. Here’s to a great 2010.

Image of Craig Newmark by Sierra Communications

A notable feature is an interactive map allowing you to identify specific locations where contracts, grants and loans are allocated. Just enter your ZIP code under the U.S. graphic on the home page and a map of your region will show the names of Recovery Act fund recipients in your area. You can even read descriptions of specific projects the funds are intended to support (for example, click here to see a map of projects in the Northwest D.C. area).

Another feature on the home page allows you to search for projects by agency, state, monetary amount and the type of award.

Charts on the site also rank allocations per agency or state/territories.

Earl E. Devaney, chairman of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, said the Web site intends to empower individuals to monitor projects in their area and report any suspected abuse or waste of funds. A red tab on the top right corner of the home page allows visitors to submit complaints electronically. A fraud hotline, fax number and mailing address are also listed.

“You’ll be our first line of defense against those who would abuse this money,” Devaney said in a video posted on the Web site.

The re-launch is in anticipation of the first quarterly deadline for spending reports from all grants, loans and contracts. Recovery.gov will post all data from federal contracts by Oct.15. Spending data from states and other recipients will be posted by Oct. 30. The quarterly process will be repeated until the entire $787 billion in Recovery funds have been spent, Devaney said in the video.

A timeline of actions taken under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 are listed here.

More information on the Act and Recovery.gov can be read here.

Please welcome Social Government’s newest contributor, Patricio Chile. Chile is a freelance writer and Web consultant currently based in Washington. Previously, he held positions at the USC Network Culture Project and at Third Sector Magazine in the United Kingdom. Chile is a 2009 graduate of American University, double majoring in Communication and Political Science.

U.S. Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra announced the site, writing in a post on the White House Blog:

Apps.gov is an online storefront for federal agencies to quickly browse and purchase cloud-based IT services, for productivity, collaboration, and efficiency.

The social media tools not only carry the GSA’s blessing but will also be easy for agencies to deploy — two previously difficult-to-overcome barriers.

In the case of the Social Media Apps category — there are three other main categories on Apps.gov — the site serves more of a clearinghouse for agencies to “request” usage of the tools. Users are presented with a page that contains a link to each tool’s GSA Terms of Service and Agreement. This agreement was the big legal barrier that prevented so many of these tools from being available to agencies for so long.

In addition to the 21 tools that launched today, six other categories of tools will be launching in the future: Livecasting, Mashups, Opinions and product reviews, RSS and Other Syndicated Feeds, Virtual Worlds and Widget Creation.

In addition to the aforementioned document sharing services, integration with FriendFeed, MySpace, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube also launched.

Notably absent is Twitter.

But my favorite service that launched is something called IdeaScale. IdeaScale is similar to Google Moderator, where agencies can crowdsource ideas. More popular ideas “bubble to the top,” its Web site says.

Sept. 15, 2009 will be a turning point in how government agencies use social media. Obviously, this site and its underlying regulatory approval took a while to develop. Keep up the good work.

In a related development, Google launched a government portal today. The popular Google Apps e-mail collaboration suite is set to launch next year for agencies.

P.S. Is it just me, or does Apps.gov seem to run on the slow side?

While the page is still new and largely devoid of content, it’s easy to see how this page could soon become a great resource for many agencies that use Facebook to communicate with citizens.

Could this hub be using the White House’s ambitious Facebook page as an example? When that page launched in the spring (it now has over 350,000 fans), it was followed shortly afterwards with a Facebook App, White House Live, which streams live events right in Facebook and allows for live comments from citizens.

It’s too early to tell how exactly this page will be used. But it does have an “Other Pages” tab, which includes popular agency pages like the State Department, EPA, NASA and Coast Guard.

All readers of this blog should become a fan of Facebook and Government — it will be interesting to see what’s coming. Could other social networks follow Facebook and create a similar portal?

In March, I wrote about best practices for government communication on Facebook.