Good evening. I'm Stewart Brand from Long Now Foundation. Tonight is a little bit about averting the collapse of police government. The government is broken. Usually what people mean is the Senate is broken. Or the California legislature is broken or the process by which voters put forward peculiar propositions broken. But the way government is gets broken is not just by votes but whole levels of participation. That Beth Noveck is taking an angle on. Both of the kind of the philosophy of open government and what is especially interesting to an audience like this is basically the techniques and technology of open government. Please welcome Beth Noveck. Beth Noveck: Thank you. Thank you to Stewart and to the Long Now Foundation. I am thrilled to be back in San Francisco and to have the chance to talk to you tonight. It will not be six easy steps. I think it is many more very difficult steps to try to rebuild and remake our government, to reshape our government and to bring change to the way it works to make it more effective, more efficient and to better serve us the American people. I want to start my story a little bit further back in Florence in the year 1421 when Filippo Brunelleschi, whose work we have all gone to admire in the domes of Florence as tourists, received a three-year patent for a barge with hoisting gear that carried marble along the Arno river. It was one of the earliest patents. And of course then in Venice the process of patenting proliferated over the course of the 15th century and the glass makers of Venice received patents again for the process of creating glass and Venetians begin to immigrate the idea of patenting of getting monopolies on the way that glass was manufactured defused and then spread to other countries. Countries frankly, like England, where, of course, the monarchs and rulers of England and again in other countries throughout Europe, were in the habit of granting patents largely as a way to raise funds for the crown to favored person whose were prepared to pay for them, to have the monopoly rights, to manufacture whether it was not simply and useful inventions but even ordinary inventions like salt. And so the realty of invention and innovation became disconnected from the institutional practice, the abusive institutional practice of granting monopolies. And after a public outcry, the institution was, of course, reformed and James I of England was forced to forego his right of granting patents. And in 1623, parliament declared the statute of monopolies, which restricted the crowns power to actually issue patents and began to then systematize and regularize the process of giving to inventors the patent of a certain number of years over their inventions. So this spreads, of course, to the U.S. It comes over from England. And the patent clause of the institution, many of you may know, article 1 section 8, clause 8, that talks about securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respectives and writings and discoveries. This is the only clause in the constitution that is enacted without any debate. Because it is by this time common practice to have a patent system, and it was long the practice not only in England but of course it had been the practice of the states before them, and becomes adopted then by the federal government, largely as a way to resolve contentious fights that are going on Among the States over patents over the steam ship, steam ship technologies. But also because it's a really cheap way for the now bankrupt, federal government to give this right to inventors by giving them a right to say you can go out with this monopoly and exploit it. Doesn't cost us anything. We don't have any money because we got to pay back this revolutionary war debt. So why don't you go ahead and so was enacted without debate this clause in the constitution. But in fact, this system becomes broken as well. Thomas Jefferson as you may know was not only secretary of state but also the first head of the patent office and he has in addition to all the other things he is doing, has to examine 30 patents that are waiting for him to review. And it is too much work for him so he says forget this patent examination system we are going to switch to a registration system. Basically, pay your fee, get a stamp, you get a patent. So 40 years later in 1836, we say again, we have this disconnect between the realty of innovation and the idea of granting patents so we evolve from the system of abusive monarchical control in our constitution republic we revolve a routinized system of creating, of issuing patents. But once again, we find ourselves at a point of disconnect, where this system isn't working. The office that is supposed to be the office of innovations mired in bureaucracy. We have backlogs, piles of paper, which I'm pleased to report that the new head of our patent office David Kappos is bringing down this backlog, but we have 700,000 backlogged patents which haven't been examined. With examiners who have at most 1820 hours to actually read all the literature, review the patent and decide whether it deserves a 20 year grant of monopoly rights to become the new iPod or cancer curing life saving cure or whatever important invention it may be and these are being done by people who have a BA in Science and may be not even in the science of the patent which they are examining. And this has serious social consequences, diverting large amounts of money away from scientific RND that could be used to put back in discovering those cures for cancer and instead being sent over to the lawyers like me and the students which I train, so they are in fact, diverting potentially money away from developing innovation and into a system of litigation. So this is just one example, I think one of money, the way in which government institutions have been what I would call at risk of creating a single point of failure. In other words, we have concentrating division making power in the hands of too few people whether legislatures in Congress or cabinet officials in the executive branch or bureaucrats and agencies like the patent office. But we construct our institutional practices around this notion that this is the best way that we have to make decisions. That we have to entrust these important public decisions to government decision makers that one remove the biases of public participation. And in fact, this is however, we are even though we are moving way from, we do not have a system of monarchy or aristocracy, but we still believe in this notion, I think, institutionally, of the notion of political expertise and the notion we have to rest power at the center. And what exacerbates this problem and we were discussing this earlier today, is that we are making very long term decisions that affect the fate of our planet, the fate of our economy, the fate of major systems of health care and education are being made by people who are in very shortterm political positions. So we have a disconnect between the longterm effect of what we do and the shortterm electoral cycles, that characterize the way in which we tend to make decisions in our government. But this president, my president, Barack Obama, has talked about the fact, to quote him: That the best ideas don't come from Washington. And that from fact, we have to looked at the ways we can reengineer our institutions to look at taking advantage of the expertise that comes from outside the center from the periphery and bring it into the way that we make decisions if you will in the center. It has very serious consequences. If we don't do this, we are witnessing the disconnect now, an approval rate of Congress now that is about flat on a good day and 25 percent and is often less than that, but with the faith in government and the trust in government institutions, is at an alltime low. And it's understandable if you think about the serious threats that we way face whether from global pandemic or international terrorism that organizations and institutions that are built on a 19th century conception of sovereignty and 19th century nation states and borders don't fit with the kind of global porous distributed threats that we face today. So this fear that we have that Madison worried about the factionalism in American politics, and the factionalism that would happen from the rabble is in fact happening when we have such a disconnect between what happens in the center and what happens at the periphery. The centralization of power is in fact potentially driving a factionalize and disgruntled and increasingly dissatisfied distrusting public, where participation and power are increasingly being driven apart, and the distance between the citizen and the government that works for him is increasing, which is compelling government in turn to adopt, or was until now, less participatory institutions that in turn fuels this process of dissatisfaction. A process that I think we see reflected now in a reactionary populism that is springing up in the Tea Party Movement in the United States or ante immigrant nationalists parties in Europe, we are seeing the kind of alienating forces that are at work at the moment. Coming back to our good friend Jefferson for the movement, he of course, knew everything there was to know and he was way ahead of his time. When he was heading up the patent office in 17 none, he writes to his good friend a professor at the United States of Pennsylvania and he says I have a problem. I have this patent application sitting on my desk, for a chemical process and I don't really know how to examine it, I would be so obliged as your most hummable servant if you would actually help me to review this patent application. He took advantage of the distributed expertise that was available to him, mind you he used a letter and not the Internet at that point. But we too are now coming to recognize the opportunities that are available to us if we take advantage of today's technology, the technology that is allowing us to come together in new ways to work together increasingly powerfully as groups on the Internet as purposive groups if we can take advantage of this power for the benefit of our political institutions. So you've heard lectures here and elsewhere and discussion of course of the reengineering of the music industry, and the publishing industry and industry of journalism. And we here, of course, depending on who talks about it, the death nail being sounded for any one of these industries on the one hand, and you talk to people on the east coast, and the Phoenix cry, rising from the ashes on the west coast of the reinvention of these industries. Well, I come to you tonight and wonder whether we might engage on the similar kind of geographical arbitrage and figure out here together, whether there are ways we can reengineer our political institutions in the same way that we are thinking about this in regard to our institutions in social and economic life? So we did a small experiment along these lines, with a project that we call Peer to Patent, that I want to tell you about for a minute and then bring you up to date on what we are doing in the Obama administration to do this on a more widespread scale. So E.L. Wilson once said," the world is full of amateurs, gifted amateurs devoted amateurs, you can pick almost any group that has any kind of intrinsic interest in it, from dragon flies to pill bugs to orb weaving spiders, anybody can pick up information in interesting places, find new species to rediscover, what was thought to be a vanishing species or some new biological fact about a species always known." And we seize upon this truth that out there, everywhere there is an expert in something, whether it is expertise that is derived from experience or through enthusiasm that each of us is an expert in something. And we are increasingly using that expertise whether it's to use YouTube videos and put them online or get involved encoding projects or participating in new ways in our social life, that we actually might take advantage of in our political life. So the idea behind peer to patent was to take this problem of bureaucratic slow down and inefficiency in the patent office and to marry to this idea of self selected expertise and create a process by which people could volunteer, self selected to work together not as individuals merely sending information to the government, but work together in teams and groups to help discover information that would help an examiner decide whether a patent truly deserve as 20 year grant of monopoly rights, the patent, is it truly non-obvious and novel as the law requires. And so by creating a software interface and software system that would allow groups of people to self select to come together, to review each other's works so again as in groups, not simply as individuals, thereby to take some of the burden off the already beleaguered government examiner by using visual interfaces and the screen to help reflect back to and explain to people clearly what is it that they need to do, how do they divvy up the tasks of actually examining a patent, we were able to set up a project not removed from government but together with government, the first institutionalize social network in the federal government to actually participate in the work of decision making. That would actually allow us to connect a network to an institution to help it improve the way it works. This is not despite people, I have a book out called Wiki Government, and the word Wiki is fun and easy to say, but it is not in fact, a purely wikified process where there is a freeforall where anybody can type and write whatever they want. Of course, Wikipedia doesn't work this way either. But it marries the crowd sourcing of scientific expertise with the institutionalized legal decision making by a patent examiner to arrive at a decision. So we get the software engineers and the garage enthusiasts from all over the country saying, "Ah, let me take a look at that invention. Have I seen anything like that before?" And we marry that to the knowledge of the legal rules of the patent system that the examiner has to arrive hopefully faster and better in a decision. Now this process which began as a pilot program over two years, is in the process of being transformed under to an institutionalized process of the patent office to actually bring it in house as the way the patent office will work. And so what we see here is the opportunity I think to rethink not only our democratic institutions, but our democratic theory. And let me pause for a moment to say why I think this is actually a change over the way that we have talked about even participatory democracy before. So a lot of people with the advent of technology said, "Great we will move to a system of democracy, pushbutton voting, where we can actually have everybody voting in real time directly on making decisions." But we know that of course, is not sufficiently complex as a way of working, I mean, it is nice when my students can push a clicker and say faster and slower, or louder, or I don't understand, but in the complex world of political decision making direct democracy is not necessarily the best way to make decisions on the basis of information and good science. On the other hand, there is the world of deliberative democracy which is long has been held up as the great ideal as to which we should aspire. Where neighbors talk to one another in civic and civilized discourse but the problem with deliberative democracy and this in part the artifact of our old technological error is that it puts all the emphasis on talk rather than action. So where it is very nice to come together with one's neighbors and if what we really have to do is make change happen and take action we have to think in fact not about the inputs, not about how we talk together, but the out puts. How do we actually take action together? How to we solve problems? How do we get stuff done? And that is what I would term as collaborative democracy. The world of Peer to Patent where we actually are marring up the work of the crowd, the work of the network, with that of the institution, that allows us to an extent, and I think this is a midway point on a longer term historical tutrekry(sp), which is a term I'll talk about in a minute, of devolving power down ward, of devolving power outward. From our represented institutions at the center that are supposed to represent us, but are increasingly are disconnected from us, to a much more decentralized world of power where the groups to which we can join and to which we belong and that is the exciting about the online life, is that we now can choose from among thousands of different associations to which we want to contributes our time and money, and our attention, whether for a short term or for longer term that we can get involved in order to make change happen to do stuff in the world a kind of cosmopolitan pluralism if you will, that the Internet enables a new kind of equality of power that really allows us now to think about how we can reengineer our institutions, not simply for the sake of talk but as a means to an end of actually achieving things in the world better, faster and in new and creative ways to attract and attack the complex problems that really we confront. And at the basis of this, is really the notion I think something we essentially intuitively realize and know which has been supported by a great deal of imperial research by folks like the Group Brain Project at Harvard, the idea of when we come together, when we share our diverse expertise we are stronger than when we work alone. And for so long our systems of political participation particularly in government have always revolved around the individual, the individual vote, the individual comment on a regulatory rule making, but are so limited in the way we have turned to looking at groups and people in organizations, to really get involved in helping us to do our jobs better. And so this is a world that we are seeing lots of this concept that is now emerging increasingly in our social life but not yet in our political life to the same extent. So if we look very recently to talk about something that is in the news just in the last few weeks in response to Haiti and Chili the crisis camps that have sprung up, groups of people that are getting together to hold hackathons, if you will, in support to creating software that will help for disaster relief and recovery. So Mission 4636, the emergency reporting service that allowed anyone in Haiti with a cell phone to text the number 4636 with a message that would help identify where that person actually was and that relied then on teams of volunteers to translate those messages from Creole into English and help identify again where people were so that actually combine the concept of crowd sourcing, lots of distributive volunteers, within micro work, specify tasks that people would need to do of course, to solve the tremendous problem of disaster relief and recovery. This is now growing into a whole movement that has become to be known as Crisiscommons not just Crisiscamps that take place on weekends but that is now going forward over time that will become an institutionalized organized effort in developing better software and tools and better again, organization of volunteer to help with disaster relief and recovery. And we got this really well in the campaign. We all knew about this when we got involved and engaged whether it was for Obama or for McCain, we understood what it meant to do this kind of distributed work. We know what it meant, in fact, to phone bank or to get someone to drive to the poles, or to donate money, or to take on a task that would allow us to participate toward the common end of electing the candidate of our choice. I bet that many people in the audience here were involved in some way in Silicon Valley for Obama, which as we all know was not a campaign office set up by the center apparatus in Chicago but was spontaneously created by volunteers in the south bay who galvanized tens of thousands of volunteers to get involved in building the tools and doing the phone banking and doing the work to actually help to support the campaign and became in fact, part of the election apparatus if you will, but grew up spontaneously from outside. You know, Obama himself has talked about this, he writes about this in the Audacity of Hope when he talks about his visit to Google, and he talks about the mesmerizing image more organic than mechanical as if I were glimpsing the early stages of some escalating evolutionary process which all the boundaries between men, nationality, race, religion, wealth were rendered in invisible and irrelevant. The physicist in Cambridge, the bond trader in Tokyo, the student in a remote Indian village, and the manager of a Mexico City department store were drawn into a single constant conversation time and space giving way to a world spun entirely of light. A very poetical rendition of that sense that we have, that oceanic feeling of being part of the network that allows us to bring about this kind of change. So the question is how do we take this change.org, if you will, what we all know from our civic life and there are 10s of examples. And this is bringing coals to New Castle, to talk about this in the bay area these examples come from here. But the question is how do we import this, how do I take this back with me to Washington? How do we import this into a vision of reshaping our institutions so that they go from looking like this to looking like that? So there's some examples. So DARPA turns around and to celebrate the growth of the Internet, they run this competition which many of you may have heard about, to say who can identify the fastest, where these 10 balloons end up, these are the release of the 10 balloons and it runs this phenomenal crowd sourcing project that essentially not like other incentive based central networking schemes, awards, allows people who get help from people in their social network identifying where the balloons to share the reward money with them. And in nine hours using simple offtheshelf social networking commercially available Facebook and etc. social networking technologies to identify where the 10 balloons actually were. And you know, in fact, this example, the idea of using teams and relying on teams and doing this in collaboration with the government institution is the exciting I think new prospect of where we can go going forward using technology to reinforce and enable the ability of people to work in groups and to work effectively in groups to selforganize themselves in ways we could only do a few years ago, if we worked together face to face we can now marry this ability of the network to the actually work of the institution. So we have to think about the process of institutional reinvention. And Alexis de Tocqueville who came and observed of course American life now, not that long ago any more, where are we in time a while ago, he writes in his recollections, "I'm tempted to believe that we call necessary institutions are often no more than institutions to which we have grown accustomed. And that in matters of social constitution the field of possibilities is much more extensive than men living in their various societies are ready to imagine." And of course that is the case. Those of us who live within the status quo have a hard time of reengineering from within. And yet if we want to think about the prospects for peaceful evolution rather than bloody revolution we have to think about how we begin to embark of the path of the long now of the reengineering of our institutions in this peaceful way that will allow us however to experience change in scale and so I want to tell you a little bit about how we are embarking of this process of institutional redesign now in the first year of the Obama administration. It is not the concept of the thousand flowers bloomings, the kind of free for all direct democratic let's do all of government by wiki noris is the command control approach that we have been used to in our represented institution that are none the less have been entirely have been commanded and controlled in the way that they work and yet there is instead the notion of a kind of focused collaboration an organized collaboration that is the interim point of this pathway to towards a reengineering of our democratic institutions. And this is an idea that has had a lot of compelling residence but the idea of a cultural change that many people all of whom who are outside government now, picked up after the president issued his first day of memorandum the very first action that the president took. I think that that has significance. That it was the very first thing that he did to sign this executive memorandum on transparency an open government on his first day in office to use the bully pulpit and the tremendous star power of his Presidency especially to say we are going to change the way that our institutions function according to three core values. Transparency, participation and collaboration. In other words we are going to use openness as a montria(sp) to drive the way we do that we do business. Not as a essentially a new thing, not as a vertical, but as a horizontal as the social operating layer of the way that our institutions work we are actually going to institute a policy process that begin with this memorandum and had another culminating point on December 8th when we issued the directive on open government to say that we are going to try to move all of our political institutions towards more open and collaborative, toward more networked ways of working. So this is a tough question and we can talk. And I hope that we do, about what it means to reengineer an institution as big as the American government from within a manageable amount of time. I know there's the long now prospective which says we could just wait it out until all the institutions crumble, and may be in a thousand years it will all look different but I'm too impatient for that and so I am the short now figure in that sense. We have to try to marry the sense of enthusiasm and action and doing things in the here and now with a long term vision as to what it means to actually have institutions that actinia long term, responsible way by creating institutions, catalyzing the change that will make that possible. Has now have been tasked with the idea of coming up with its own open government plan it is not a top down, structure or mandate. The acceptance so far is to say every agency from the bottom up must come up with its own plan for how to reengineer that it works. How do we take essentially the strategic goals of the agency the strategic agencies of all the actors within the executive branch of government and change the way that they happen. How do we get everybody to everybody to start thinking about what can you do to try to make change happen informed by these values. Now part of the way we do that is of course with people. People and characterize leadership and incredibly important and that starts with president Obama himself. And it starts with the creation of new roles, like a chief technology officer, or chief information officer, or I'll pick out one other person. Todd Park, who some of you may know, also from the west coast. Cofounder of Athenahealth, who is now the CTO, the new innovation of health and human services. Its the creation of these new roles that helps to actually spread the message of cultural change and shift. And it is extremely important that in addition to that day one memorandum of transparency participation and collaboration that those same values and those same words that went into writing that memorandum actually were used to secretaries and senior leaders of appointees within the government before they were chosen. So ensure people were coming on board who ascribe to and believed in and this concept of institutional change and innovation. Of institutional RND that we should turn upon ourselves to improve the way that our institutions work. We also do this of course, we have to do it through projects enabled by the technical technology platforms that allow us to do these projects at scale across the federal government and in part we have to do it through real work that allows to take the genie out of the bottle in order that we can't put it back in. It is one thing to articulate policies to have noble words and grand statements about the importance of openness and transparency that from administration to administration these policies have changed we have had one policy under Clinton reversed then under bush reversed under Obama of course that makes the default rule to be one of openness, a default rule more sweeping than ever before. But none the less, we have to back up the words and the commitment to transparency which is actual work that we are doing. So the commitment to transparency and the way we are bringing about change is by opening the doors and opening the data of government. Making unprecedented openness the default, but also doing things like posting all of the visitors logs from the white house, posting up online who comes and goes, for the first time ever so you can see and analyze the fact, who comes to visit me. And who comes to visit other people in the white house, so we know there no secret energy meetings going on, but those are in fact happening out in the open, that has by the way has an effect on the way that we work, because we then come to think about, if I'm meeting with group X, on one side of the political spectrum I may should now think about that I may need to meet with group Y on the other side of the political spectrum in order to make sure I'm hearing all views. And getting adequate representation in the expertise in which we are confronting. It also involves projects like of course, projects like launching recovery do you have that are creating unprecedented transparency in the way we spend our money, posting the salaries of white house staff, work like the 3.9million streams of the health care summate that took place that week. So there is this way by which creating the technical platforms and pushing the release of data on to the platforms like data.gov, and then the spin off platforms that data.gov spawning whether on the state or local level that is insuring the data that becomes truly transparent and open. Data.gov since its inception a few months ago has already had over 64 million hits to the site. So to those who would ask who would actually wants raw government data. Well 64 million people seem to want raw government data. And when it comes to things like the IT dash board or USA spending.gov, 89 billion people seem to want to see this data that then in turn allows the kind of data jamming or cultural jamming fowl, where people take the data and mash it up and use it for other purposes which I'll talk a little more about but just last week because we made available the stream of the video of the health care summate the sun life foundation was able to turn around and give readers and viewers then not only the video but the video annotated by what campaign contributions are being given to the person who is speaking during the summate and it was phenomenal the number of views they got. And as one critic put it, the sunlight foundation, media event that took place was a smack down to CNN. In terms of the actual effect on transparency because they let the data do the talking. And provided an alternative to the talking heads on the cable new shows or even the talking politicians on C span. By giving people the raw data, the chance to make up their minds for themselves as it related to the health care summate. So when even you take this raw material when you can remix it and reuse it to do interesting things with t becomes a powerful social tool. So this goal of data transparency and insuring all agencies under the open government directive must inventory their data, decide which data to put up first online. And have to release what we term high value data are actually getting our their information that is either frank, information that is about government spending so it helps us to reduce waste, fraud and abuse. And we use specifically recovery.gov process the spending and tracking of spending of recovering money as a way to bootstrap data tracking down to the state and local level. Let me tell you it is a very hard process, because that data is kept in very different ways sometimes in fancy coded XML, sometimes in XL spread sheets, sometimes in a shoe box. So trying to track that data is hard but we are starting the process using this as a mechanism as tracking how we spend money as a way of opening up and insuring the government institutions are more efficient. But high value data is more just data that helps for government accountability. It it's also data that helps us to achieve the core mission of a given agency. And so frank, the USDA has released a data set about nutritional information caloric values of the major foods that we eat. What this does, it doesn't help us know how much money the USDA spends, but what it is does help us to do is launch an initiative with foundations with corporation, to create a game that helps young people make healthier eating decisions. Or that allows then volunteer development to mash up that data and create up iPhone applications or new people to start businesses that may generate economic value. So it is high value data because it achieves a core mission in this case reducing childhood obesity that has been one of the center pieces not only in the president in the first ladies agenda which I have done. I have accidentally sat on the president's let us. There's a picture of me doing this somewhere. I'm not really joking, if you are a gardener, this is the most beautiful garden, because of all us crowd source volunteers pulling the weeds out there. But the point is the transparency and the release of raw data helps to drive then a cultured participation of loving that data of doing things with it that allow us to actually generate real value and meaning in people's lives. So participation has had of course, new forms that will seem completely almost standard and roped by the standards of silicon valley but you have to understand that we came in and created the white house open government initiative this was the first block that took comments. This was the first commenting site that we ever had on a white house website the first block in government only began in 2008 from all places the TSA. So things that we take for granite here as totally standard and will I think another few months take for granite as totally standard even within government has for such a long time not only been the case. So the president's interactive universe U tube question time that he did a few weeks ago, with the department of labor rolling out its regulatory agenda frank, or its budget using web chat, you would say department of labor regulatory agenda probably 99 percent of the audience think snooze, but one percent in this audience and that's the notion of contributed expertise and enthusiasm I think this is fantastic and in fact, 1500 live participants watch the budget role out and 6,000 people have sense watched the videos archived, and that's compared to one hundred or 2200 people who participate in this meetings live when they took place in a room in Washington previously. And so in fact if we look at things like NASA, if you think about NASA which is only 35miles south of here in sill call valley, so what NASA has done, they have embraced this concept of citizens participation and coined the term participatory exploration so they have been convening gathering of sill call professionals and NASA experts to discuss how to use new tools and create communities as a way of building participation. And they began employing crowd sourcing methodologies and advocating for more programs that would engage the public and this year in their physical year budget have received the modest amount, but it is an amount of $5 million to spend on their new participatory exploration office. This is exciting because it really creates the opportunities that exist for people to work together again too, really achieve goals that happens when you marry transparency and participation. This is just one of thousands of examples that I could give you and I've stolen here that steward use in earlier in the day, the notion of insuring that there are when we put the data out there and let people look at it, they find the gaps, they find the dragons, they find the missing spaces, they see the patterns and they see the consequences of that data, but they are able to make the visualization to make the games to make the iPhone apes that turns transparency, raw data and information into useful knowledge. We have that in turn, we can create more informed processes of participation and policy making. So actually involving people in government decision making. So when we created the white house open government initiative, the first thing we did was to open up the question what should our open government policy be to the American people useing a series of online tools and techniques. The office of information and regulatory affairs within the office of manage. And budget have created a regulatory dash board, which I command you to go look at it. It is a brandnew, and it's in its first instances, it is trying to put out information about how government makes regulations, unless we think that legislation is where the action is at, we pass about 400 pieces of legislation a year, we are making between 48,000 rules every year. It's the executive branch agencies that's where a lot of the detailed work of implementing legislation actually takes place. So it's these efforts of actually creating open policy making forms, the office of science and technology policy has for the last several weeks run a forum to ask what should our policy actually be on public access to government funded research. We have run a form of web cookies that has now used public input to help decide what our policies should be on the policy of cookies on government Web sites. It is all this the whole series of new open policy making initiatives that are being spawned and what would the release of the open government directive one of the things it has created is that every single government agency in fact, now has turned around to create its own open government web page. So you can go to EPA.gov/open or DOT.gov/open, and there you can actually provide input on the open government plan. So scale, they are using the product called ID scale, which is a brainstorming platform to actually generate ideas for how to make the agency more open. The citizen engagement tool has been alive for about 25 days. I have to confess, I don't think we have done a good enough job of letting people know that the opportunity exists, this is I think the most historic opportunity, it is government wide, open participation in policy making, woo do have about 1200 ideas that have been posted across the federal government about how to become more open and more participatory. But we need more. And we need everybody whatever their issue of interest, to come in and say I care about seeing this data set released or here's how I think the agency should be more participatory, or here are ways in which we could be more collaborative, or just to get involved. But it is only by getting involved, that the message will go and get to these institutions. That we want participation, that we want transparency, that it matters to people. And if they if we build it, they will in fact come. If we build the open institution, people will come and get involved and participant. So to give you another example from NASA, again, from aims here, is in the NASA Web site, on their idea scale site, someone posted the idea. The top idea was for NASA sponsored space themed bar camps. West Coast idea. And the ideas that people posted can be commented on by other users. So someone put in the comment field, that in fact, the is the first space bar camp is going to be taking place last weekend in San Diego, called space up. I don't know if anybody was there. Well, NASA saw the posting and they saw the comment and they got on a plain and they went out to San Diego and they sponsored the event and they showed up and they participated in the weekend and work with the community of interest in actually developing the ideas that then came up out of space up. Now space up would happened whether NASA showed up or participated or not, but because there was this real collaboration, this true participation between the institution and the network, that one things emerged and that again the community of practice was really fostered. One of the ways we are doing this again is by enabling participation through platforms. So data.gov is helping to ensure that when agencies want to put up their data they have a place to put it. When you want to find data, you have a place to go to search for it. The government services administration, the general service administration, excuse me, which provides pens and pencils and cars and buildings to the federal government, also provides software tools. And they have negotiated now 165 new so called government friendly, they have the requisite provisions and accessibility provisions, new social media platforms and that is just since November. And so this allows any agency that wants to use Facebook or YouTube or Google analytics, or social text, to essentially pull it off of apps.gov. So if you are out there and your developer and you are an entrepreneur and you have a tool whether free or fee, submitted it to apps.gov. It's by the way a lot faster than going through a traditional procurement, and it makes an available to anyone in government that wants to use it. I highly recommend combining it with a video or screen cast that shows people how and why they shooed use your tool. But we desperately need access to the tools and technologies that will allow us to do more and better participation. So finally, the last prong of the agenda is collaboration transparency fairly obvious, participation, collaboration intentionally having a third prong to the agenda, it's not the same as participation because it's not just how you get involved in government but how in fact, can in turn that and challenges and ideas to people and let them and invite them to engage in new ways that we have ever done before and so that's the notion both of connecting government institutions to government institutions. So you heard about this open three 11 project that launched yesterday where San Francisco has been really been at the forefront and collaboratively with the white house and the federal government, in creating a community of state and local government organizations that are actually involved in sharing code and sharing tools and working together to create a common data standards that will allow for development and newer and better software applications and software services like 311 services that can be adopted then and spread to any city so that citizens get better services like 311 across the nation. It's also a way to connect government employees to one another to again solve problems more effectively so you may or may not know that the army now writes its fields man using wiki media. And then in fact, not you or I, but all soldiers can participate in to write the army field manual practice so that the people who actually know are helping to write the rules of the road for the people in the military. And just last week the department of defense unveiled its new social media policy going further frankly than the civilian agencies in allowing the use of any kind of social media within limits and that's leading to the creation of the apps for army or A for A project. Another apes development challenge the to to foster the development of software skills and programming skills but to develop applications and tools that are useful to people in the military. The Veterans benefit administration, the VA have actually been at the forefront of this idea of collaboratively connecting employees to employees. Using a tool called kindling, they have been running competition initially to invite employees to come up with ideas for how to reduce the back log of veterans benefit claims and in the first week, 7,000 out of 19,000 employees 7,000, of them, ideas 3,000 ideas suggested in the first month of the competition. Ideas for example, like Pittsburgh VA regal office that suggested the idea we could actually lessen the back log if veterans took a form with them when they went to the doctor a standard form that would allow standardized medical questionnaire that could be completed by the treating physician that would then facilitate to stream line process of applying for benefits so that the diagnosis and treatment by the physician didn't then in turn have to be translated into another form and another piece of paperwork. And that was so successful, this process that now the VA has launched another similar brainstorming process, if you will to try to crowd source, how the VA can improve its health IT systems within the VA. This idea is really taking off and there has now been created government and ideation, a community of practice, all the agencies were interested in running brainstorming initiatives. The first meeting that we ran purely informal totally voluntary, pouring rain that we held it, 60 people show up from 30 agencies. And that's all people who are about to start, want to know how to do this kind of open collaborative brainstorming. Danny Hillis who is part of the who is one of the founding members of long now is a creator of a tool called Aristotle, it is now being deployed across the defense department. It's essentially Facebook for scientists and technologies across the DOD, to connect them to one another. So as to hear the sort of project, within the navy who has been spearheading the implementation tells me that instead of actually discovering after the fact that the guys at the next desk to you has the expertise that you need to figure out how to solve the problem of dust getting into the helicopter blades of that is bringing down helicopters in Afghanistan and so only discover after the fact that the guy at the next desk actually flew those helicopters for 9 years before he held that desk job, when you discover that after the fact, there's something wrong. You should be able to know that before the fact which is why Aristotle is being used now across the DOD to connect SNT professionals but we need far more of these kind of expert tools expert networking tools to allow us to do our job better. Collaboration like the federal regulations 2.0 project which is an example of connecting public to private. So not just government to government, and government employees but public to private so that when the national archives and records administration decides, that it will take the federal registrar, the news paper of our democracy, the news paper that records the actions of the federal government every single day, something they used to sale for $17,000, per subscription and decides that we will give it away because this is data that belongs to the American people and is a national public asset and we shouldn't be selling the data, that has been created with your taxpayers dollars, with my dollars. Instead we release this and publish it. What happens, well, what happens is the focuses from Gulf Pulse, who I think are here in the audience, or Public Resource, turn around and rebuild, this, this is what the federal registrar looks like and turn it into this so they create, this is one made by Princeton, or the fed thread project that allows me to have a conversation about what is going on in government. Something we can't do with this. Or the, this project, the public resource project that creates hyperlinks within the document so when a rule references another rule or a piece of legislation I can actually understand the contacts for something that I'm looking at. These projects created in one week after the release of the data set. So, some of them have been worked on up until then, the change that we can make happens so quickly, through public private collaboration or in turn, not by connecting public and private, but by getting out of the way, and connecting citizens to one another endorsing and inspiring and talking about and celebrating a project like national lab day. Everybody here remembers Net Day? So think Net Day for school science labs. And when this project launched, again a project that from start to launch was a matter of weeks months at most, had signed up organizations representing two million people, engineers, scientists and technologists who volunteer to go into America's schools to go into hands on learning with our high school and middle school students to ensure that we are not last in science but first. Or a project like broadband match.gov. That the NTIA has set up to allow applicant for $7.2billion in broadband grant funds to find one another. It's kind of a match.com for grant applicant to say I'm a small grantee and youre a big grantee let's get together. And write a good application. And so this idea of helping to connect citizens to citizens is one of the most important things we can and are trying to do to move the culture shift forward. So let me just close. By saying a little bit finally, about how, how we have done this, and we go from here. People have to know what's being asked of them. That's what I think is in common to all of these projects. The better job that we can do, and we have a long way to go to learn through doing that, of articulating the problem, and then explaining to people what we need their help with and how to do it. The easier for it will be for people to get involved and to participate. In the same way that in the campaign we understood what it meant to phone bank or to drive someone to the poles, or to get out the vote, or to donate money. We now need similarly to chunk the questions to chunk the work so that people in the process of gov finance can get involved in the policy making processes, not just in elections but in how we make decisions on an ongoing basis to effect this kind of change. And as I alluded to before, I think that visualization of the use of the interface we can have another long now presentation about the way that the visual interface is powerful at helping us to do this. So one of the simple things that we have done is to set up on the white house Web site something called the open governments innovation gallery. Chin we post pool ideas that are going on in government as a way to the spire other people to follow the lead. So again TSA the first entity to create what they call idea factory, is one of the one of these idea generation tools and you'll see an example here of, this is the tool they have created to allow their employees to make suggestions of how the functioning of airport security. Then we can take a poll about whether we think is working or not. Here was an idea posted for respectful devastating bends. I don't know if you can read the small print. I'll let you guess to what that refers to in terms of security at the airport. But think grandma's ashes. And this, this system which is not only about generating ideas but then taking money and investing the ideas that the employees suggest as I have talked about is spreading all across the government. But what we are doing, the way it is spreading is by people being able to see what other people are doing. Their example, share code, share best practices and share knowledge. So this only works though if you, if we all get involved F. we all help. If you adopt a data set. So it's like adopt a highway. Find some data to love. To mash up. To visualize. To create an iPhone app. To build a business with. We need people to use the data to tell us what data needs to be released. Because frankly sits on huge amounts of information and we can't release it all at once. But we are committed to available in down loadable, open formats online in as real time as we can do it. But we need your help with prioritizing what we do first and what we do second, so we need your ideas as to what to do in terms data. How to save money. How to green the government? How to better encourage and facilitate citizen engagement and participation, how to facilitate the kind of collaboration that we've talked about. I think what we are talking about here is not the world of participation as we have known of it, in other words, a world of voting where everybody does the same thing come November election time, but where you may want to love a data set from the EPA, I might want to help the department of transportation of how we do citizen engagement and a third person wants to participate in reviewing a patent application. We don't all want to do the same thing. But the quality of opportunity is what is important by creating, proliferating lots of different opportunities for engagement driven by transparency and availability of raw data that we can take advantage of so that everybody has a way to get involved in something that feeds and inspires their passion, their expertise, and their enthusiasm. What is really going on here I think, is, it's just an interim step. To create, these kinds of open institutions, but it is only an interim step on a much longer evolutionary tutickry(sp) that really will devolve power down ward to us and to the association and organizations and groups o of which we are part of in radically new ways. That in a long time from now, won't look lake like the represented government that we know tonight, but will come to look like something very different. When more federal government institutions start to collaborate with the government pulses and the thread threats of the world or to support the national lab day initiatives that work with 100 different companies of developing commitments to investing in education, science, technology, engineering and math. This is all in the future that the net is enabling in allowing us to create increasingly power purposive groups. Groups that can come up with are new ideas sometimes reward would prizes. Or other types of incentives that help us to solve problems in new ways. So technology is increasingly enabling ordinary people to come together across distances to do these things to do these increasingly important works whether on a local level or now at scale on a national level. To get involved in bringing their collective wisdom to bear, and their collective talent to bare, to actually change the way that we work. This is fundamentally as about power. Because power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but act in concert. Power is never the property of an individual it belongs to a group. And it remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together. So when we set our minds to something and we work in concert to make it happen we are very powerful, and work together we can accomplish things that we cannot do alone. And that means that our political institutions have to evolve to recognize this new realty of power, have to evolve to the enable us to work together to help us selectively to solve increasingly complex problems that we face, but in turn we have to step up to the task. We have to demand this of our institutions, we have to demand of it of ourselves, so that, we have to get involved. We have to take action. The community exists now like it never has before. With an administration that is 150 percent committed to an agenda of openness of transparency, of participation, of collaboration of creating this concept of recognizing the power and the intelligence and the expertise of individuals of trusting the American public and of as the president says "Bringing all hands on deck, to the problems that we face today". So with that let me stop and invite discussion. It has been a pleasure to have an opportunity to talk to you today about what we are trying to do here to reengineer, reinvent, our government and over the long term, I think, and hope, reinvent our democracy as we know it today. Thank you.
