Tag: gov20

September 6, 2011

Improving Engagement by Understanding People

I’ve been studying and/or working in government and technology (“gov20) since 2007. My original interest in the field was around improving the efficiency and effectiveness of governance. The idea was that if we had better data and information about our work, engaged with the people our policies were designed to impact, and used the best technologies to manage the process, that we could create better government. I still carry this fundamental believe, and over the last few years have had the privilege of working on a variety of different technology and engagement projects with nonprofits and government institutions as well as studying how the best practices in the field from an academic perspective.

Much of the work to date has focused on pushing the use of technology to further engagement, improve the delivery of services and information, and help organizations meet their goals and missions.

In my experience, it is important to think about several layers when designing gov/tech/engagement projects:

July 30, 2011

Social Media in the Middle East and North Africa: Why Now? What’s Next?

Last month I went back to the Kennedy School to speak at the Plenary panel of the HKS reunion weekend. The panel was called “Revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa: Why Now? What’s Next?” The panel was moderated by Xenia Dormandy, Senior Fellow at Chatham House (MPP 2000), and featured Tarek Masoud, Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation and Razzaq al-Saiedi, Senior Researcher, Physicians for Human Rights (MPA 2009))

I was invited to provide some perspective on the role that social media has / is playing. I was happy that the panel was so diverse; the focus was not on social media, but rather on the socio-economic and political factors at play, which was quite refreshing to someone embedded in online media.

The panel video is now available in case you want to watch it.

November 24, 2010

Governments listening to what you say, and how you feel

Image by williamcho via Flickr

In many countries you vote as a method of expressing your opinion on your leaders, and on certain key issues. In some countries surveys, ideation platforms, and other methods are used to understand opinions without the requirement of implementing changes, simply as a tool to hear what citizens are thinking.

Singapore, however, is launching an effort to mine sentiment from social media, using tools developed by IBM.

This will enable the government of Singapore to gain a deeper understanding of how people feel about various topics through passive listening. Of course, it is important to remember that automated sentiment analysis is imperfect, but so too are manual surveys. It is also important to fully understand the demographic being monitored as it may not represent the right cross-section of citizens, and manual surveys may still be required.

However, it’s a good first step and certainly something that, balanced with other solutions, should help governments better understand how citizens feel about key issues.

John F. Moore

Government in the Lab

November 18, 2010

Open data is data that delivers results

Image via Wikipedia

I struck a nerve around open data, as I mentioned in my earlier article, when I stated that “XML is simply a markup language, a container for data. Is it one of the most preferred containers? Absolutely. However, open government data is not synonymous with XML. Open government data is simply government-owned data that can be mined in order to create useful information. It can be in XML, PDF, text files, print outs, etc… The key point is that the data is being released for others to use to create value from it, not the format that it is released in”.

Initial comments on twitter argued that open data had to be XML, then opened up to being any open, non-proprietary format. For developers I would absolutely agree that this makes sense. It’s much easier for developers to work with open formats like CSV and XML vs. proprietary formats like PDF. Developers, however, are not the leaders of open government.