Dec 16 2008

Whose Transparent Government?

By Dr. Mark Drapeau (a.k.a. @cheeky_geeky)

Reservation for 300 Million, Please

Since Barack Obama was elected, many people have called for a more open, transparent government.  Through my work in Washington, DC on the interaction between government and emerging social technologies,  I have heard phrases like “government with the people,” “participatory democracy,” and “user-generated government” tossed around.  Additionally, many in the new media intelligentsia have called for the new Obama administration to use social tools like Twitter for governance, as they did for campaigning, for example with Twitter (http://twitter.com/barackobama) but also other social technologies like Facebook and even herculean mobile phone text messaging.

It’s started.  Some of the Obama transition team’s experimental initiatives like “Seat at the Table” (http://change.gov/newsroom/entry/seat_at_the_table/) are innovative, putting aside the issue of people without Internet access effectively not having a seat reserved for them (http://globalcomment.com/2008/obama-open-government-and-changegov/).  On the surface, this is a very inclusive approach to the transition period leading to eventual governance in January 2009.  It is still very soon after the election, the transition team is very busy and mostly in ‘receive’ mode, and the inauguration hasn’t yet occurred.

Ultimately, the extent to which the Obama administration uses social tools to govern the United States remains to be seen; whether they are making use of social tools during the current transition period (http://mashable.com/2008/11/03/presidential-transition/) is unclear.  Regarding the future, elites in the social networking tech community have opinions that range from hopeful (http://www.newsweek.com/id/170347), to thoughtful (http://open-government.us/), to activist (http://www.sunlightlabs.com/), to critical (http://mashable.com/2008/10/01/government-where-is-the-urgency/), to impatient (http://steveradick.com/2008/12/14/stop-the-posturing-about-government-20-and-do-it-already/).

Here, I explore using a specific example where the responsibility for “participatory democracy” lies.  In a social technology empowered world, where does the government stop and the private citizen begin?

Brand Ambassador of Change

According to Twitterholic (http://twitterholic.com/change_gov/), a new Twitter account called @change_gov (http://twitter.com/change_gov) was created on November 9th, just days after the presidential election.  It sure looks ‘official’ – the colors are red, white, and blue, the website points to Change.gov (http://www.change.gov), and the background graphic looks very similar to the main website of The Office of the President-Elect. In slightly over a month, with seemingly no self-promotion (other than informally representing the future leader of the free world), @change_gov has steadily accumulated over 600 followers.  TweetStats shows (http://tweetstats.com/graphs/change_gov) that the @change_gov account tweets about twice a day on average, only uses TwitterFeed to shunt news from the main Change.gov website, and hasn’t had any conversations with people.

But who created the Twitter account for Change.gov?  With what intentions?

In writing this post, I want to be transparent – I know who created the @change_gov (http://twitter.com/change_gov) account.  We talked about a potential article and agreed that it would be interesting to write.  Here’s the key question from the standpoint of social media and transparent government: Does it matter who it is?  Are readers affected differently if this person is on the Obama transition team, if they are a full-time federal employee, if they are a government contractor, or if they are a private citizen?  Does the transition team ‘own’ the data on their Change.gov blog, or it is the people’s information to mash-up as they please?

This leads to numerous other questions, not all of which can be answered at present.  Can there reasonably be multiple President Obama, Change.gov, Transition, etc. Twitter feeds?  How do we know which to trust (http://www.chrisbrogan.com/advertising-and-trust/)?  Must accounts be verified by Twitter, or can we as readers adopt our own individual “trust but verify” policies?  What are the downstream effects of these decisions?

Apps for Democracy!


The notion that the people can do whatever they please with government data is certainly the model of the District of Columbia, exemplified by their tremendously successful Apps for Democracy contest (http://www.appsfordemocracy.org/) run by their CTO, Vivek Kundra (http://www.ctovision.com/2008/11/vivek-kundravivek-kundra-was-appointed-by-mayor-adrian-m-fenty-on-march-27-2007-to-the-cabinet-post-of-chief-technology-of.html).  People from anywhere in the world were encouraged to enter an open contest designed to inspire the creation of applications making information in the District’s open data bank (http://data.octo.dc.gov/) more useful to citizens, visitors, and government employees.

In another example of use and re-use of government information, I am personally involved.  Here’s a link to a free copy of my Department of Defense paper about counterinsurgency operations, called “So Many Zebras, So Little Time” (http://www.ndu.edu/ctnsp/defense_horizons/DH%2062.pdf).  But here it is for sale for $10 (http://search.barnesandnoble.com/So-Many-Zebras-So-Little-Time/Mark-D-Drapeau/p/9781437901429), and here again for $10.95 (http://www.stormingmedia.us/70/7049/A704974.html).  This somewhat duplicitous behavior is perfectly legal – there’s no copyright on the words I wrote in the public interest.
Getting back to The Office of the President-Elect being represented on Twitter, the CTO of DC found no reason that an informal contest or challenge couldn’t occur, no restriction on monetizing any of the new applications, and no limits on what could happen next.  Right now, the Apps for Democracy are “what you see is what you get” with no inherent guarantee to the user.  Is this so different from @change_gov (http://twitter.com/change_gov)?

The Absence of Deceit

With regard to brands and brand ambassadors on Twitter (http://mashable.com/2008/12/12/twitter-brands/), is Change.gov a case where an account should be represented by an overt person, or are people are willing to ‘trust’ the information?  Among the social media elite, the debate continues (http://mashable.com/2008/12/14/brands-do-twitter/).  As far as the Change.gov case study goes, all of the information on the Twitter version of @change_gov comes via TwitterFeed directly from the Change.gov site.

But what if the person controlling the account changed that?  What if they subtly inserted other feeds, or sly commentary appearing to come from the transition team that was not really associated with it?  Such scenarios form part of the core of my arguments for more authenticity and brand ambassadorship on Twitter, helping to determine who is accountable for information, messages, and brands (http://www.trainingresources.com/Articles/Accountability.pdf).

Transparency is most easily understood as the absence of deceit.  Is it deceitful to take open government data and anonymously use it to provide a free, public service?  Unclear.  Perhaps this is the very essence of “government with the people.”


Guest Bio
Dr. Mark Drapeau (http://twitter.com/cheeky_geeky) is a biological scientist, government consultant, and regular contributor to Mashable.com and other venues.  These views are his own and do not represent the official views of any organization.

11 Comments on this post

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  1. Pages tagged "commentary" wrote:

    [...] bookmarks tagged commentary Whose Transparent Government? saved by 20 others     jbuffy bookmarked on 12/16/08 | [...]

    December 16th, 2008 at 7:19 am
  1. Kelcy Allwein said:

    If transparency is a highly desirable quality for Twitter and other social media, the @change_gov is violating that premise. Looking at the twitterfeed on people who have been looking at the past few days indicates that they believe that it is part of an official Obama brand. I have no problems personally with the site, but @ObamaChange covers almost everything first and does it as part of the Obama brand. While they may have been a little slow to announce their presence ( on line after the election on 6 Nov), shouldn’t they get the credit for the news that they are putting out instead of anonymous feeder. That doesn’t mean that others can retweet the news but the perception is that @change_gov is part of the Obama brand and it is not. That is misinformation.

    I have no problems with sites like @oreillymedia or @sciam on Twitter. They provide me with valuable information. But they openly acknowledge who they are. I would recommend that other sites who are not so open like @change_gov do the same (although it’s pretty easy to figure out who is running the site if you do a little analysis on following and followers).

    December 16th, 2008 at 1:08 pm
  2. Stuart Lander said:

    Mark – this is a thoughtful article. My concern is that the new administration (and government at all levels generally) focuses too much on emerging social technologies as the way to be open and transparent. Using the technologies is just another way to control the messaging that government wants to send out to the public. Gov 2.0 should really about providing public access points to public data held by government. This might not be as “cool” as working with social media technologies but has the potential to have far more impact on a drive for openness and transparency. Federal, state and local government agencies should all be prioritizing opening up their data to the public. The developer community will create tools and applications to make use of this data.

    December 16th, 2008 at 2:07 pm
  3. meznor said:

    I was driving the other day, and the car in front of me had a bumper sticker which said: “Freedom is the distance between corporate influence and the state.” Kind of cut-and-dry, because we’re bombarded with any number of influences beyond those two.

    Anyway, whoever is behind the Twitter account should absolutely be transparent about who s/he is. If it’s some dude off the street and he just wants to stream status updates from the Change.gov website to a larger audience, then that’s cool, but as you say, it would be easy to start tweeting other messages along with the stream and passing it off as the transition team’s words. It could lead to a lot of misinformation about Obama’s team’s policies.

    Freedom to use and mash-up public information is one thing, but assuming the identity of another party, whether intentional or unintentional, is dangerous, especially when it’s the president-elect’s communications/transition team. People still believe Obama is a terrorist based on mudslinging gossip raised during the campaign. Hell, people believe Elvis is still alive… (*ducks*). I guess maybe ignorant people will always be out there and believe anything they hear. But the point is, true freedom has nothing to do with various groups trying to influence you and finding a middle ground where you can be “neutral” and make a decision; we all influence each other, by human nature, and constantly negotiate which influences we take into our personal worlds. True freedom lies in being truthful about who you are and what/who you represent, and making decisions based on perhaps the naïve belief that others are being truthful about themselves, too.

    In my opinion, whoever it is behind @change_gov needs to reveal who s/he is in order to minimize the potential misunderstandings that could result from not being upfront about his or her identity. Even if it is “I’m just some dude posting this… I don’t represent the Obama team,” without giving a real name… (Or whoever it happens to be, if it’s someone within the government.)

    December 16th, 2008 at 3:21 pm
  4. meznor said:

    Also, I think if the Obama team is part of any social networks, they should all be listed and hyperlinked on the Change.gov website. That would solve one part of the issue… it would also provide easier access to all of their networks and increase the chance of getting their message out, unaltered, before the media and third parties get at it.

    December 16th, 2008 at 3:26 pm
  5. youtube gir said:

    thanx for post

    December 1st, 2009 at 3:09 pm
  6. Cartoon Bears said:

    Like the rest of Obama’s campaign promises, this too shall pass. He’s finding out that he is not in control, never was and never will be. He’s playing with the ‘big boys’ (ultra-rich globalists) who put him there in the first place, and he will do as he is told.

    December 4th, 2009 at 10:43 am
  7. Saglik Sayfasi said:

    Gov 2.0 should really about providing public access points to public data held by government. This might not be as “cool” as working with social media technologies but has the potential to have far more impact on a drive for openness and transparency.

    December 13th, 2009 at 7:18 am
  8. printing said:

    Open your eyes. He says he’s going to do something and then doesn’t because his followers are cult-like and listen to his words rather than watch his actions.

    January 4th, 2010 at 9:48 am
  9. printing said:

    Is Obama’s transparent government, so transparent that you can see right through to communism?

    January 4th, 2010 at 9:49 am
  10. resimler said:

    Thank you for the post.

    February 12th, 2010 at 4:56 pm