W. David Stephenson on the Federal CIO: Vivek Kundra

by Timothy M. O'Brien | comments: 0

Stephenson’s Introduction

I'm David Stephenson from Stephenson Strategies in Boston. I'm an eGov and Enterprise 2.0 strategist and theorist.

(NOTE: Although "Democratizing Data" will not be an O'Reilly title, Stephenson continues to develop this content for future publishing.)

Tim O'Brien: Tell me what that means what do you do for your client? I'm assuming your client would be government.

David Stephenson: My particular emphasis is on empowering the general public to really become no longer just passive recipients of government services, but instead active co-creators and I've done this particularly in the past in the field of homeland security and emergency communications. Now that has led me into the broader field. Vivek Kundra and I have done a lot of talking about it and we've been working on a book together. It’s unclear at this point whether he will be able to continue with that book, called "democratizing data". [The book] talks about making organizations, whether government agencies or businesses to be data centric using metadata. And then being able to supply that to all of your workforce, to do public feeds, the data to help build faith in government through transparency and even the most astonishing thing when he did it in District of Columbia with their Apps for Democracy contest where you actually take those data feeds and do mash ups and create real services.

Stephenson on Vivek Kundra (Federal CIO)

TO: You mentioned Vivek Kundra. He was just appointed as the Federal CIO. He's going to be working within the OMB (Office of Management and Budget). Could you tell me a little bit about the work you've done with him?

DS: Well, I was brought in one with very limited aspect, after they had already established a very admirable record in terms of transparency and innovation, that was basically to do a blueprint for how to transform the existing programs to make the District the model of governmental transparency in the world, basically. And that is the kind of guy Vivek Kundra is. He just doesn't settle for second best. He really wants to try to make sure that everything they're doing is state of the art and pushing the envelope.

(continue reading)

The Paradox of Transparency

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 24

In his memo on transparency and open government, President Barack Obama said:

"My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government."

Obama made a down payment on that transparency promise by hiring Vivek Kundra, the CTO of Washington D.C., for the new post of government CIO. Kundra's visionary application of technology to the procurement process had attracted national attention, and with recovery.gov the centerpiece of his plans to give the public a view into how stimulus money was being spent, it looked like we were off to a good start.

Then reality intervened. Last week, the FBI raided the offices of Kundra's former employer, the Office of the CTO in Washington D.C., arresting a mid-level manager and the head of a long-time IT contracting firm who were involved in a bribery and kickback scheme. The White House promptly suspended Kundra, three days into his new job as Federal CIO, "out of an abundance of caution," despite the fact that the FBI made clear that Kundra was not a target of the investigation, and that the corrupt official in question, Yusuf Acar, had been working for the city since 2002, well before Kundra took on the job in 2007.

While Acar's frauds were not revealed by technological means, but by an old-fashioned whistleblower, they are exactly the kind of procurement shenanigans that Kundra set out to uncover in D.C. Without talking to CW (the "Cooperating Witness", as he was named in the FBI request for an arrest warrant), it's impossible to know what role Kundra's emphasis on cleaning up the DC procurement process played in encouraging the whistleblowing, but this conviction is certainly in line with Kundra's goals, as stated in his December 2007 testimony at the Public Roundtable on Theft and Fraud Prevention in District Government Agencies (pdf).

The paradox of transparency is that it may indeed reveal waste, fraud, and malfeasance, making things appear worse before they begin to get better. This is not something to be afraid of. It's a sign of success.

Nonetheless, the political atmosphere in Washington has grown so sensitive that the Obama administration initially felt the need to distance itself from Kundra, lest they be touched by even the faintest whiff of the D.C. scandal.

We need to make sure that the transparency mission is not going to be hijacked by political considerations. What cabinet secretary, what governor, what mayor, what IT manager in local government, what supplier will support the Federal transparency initiative if whatever is uncovered will have to be weighed against the risk that the other party will take advantage?

We need a bipartisan commitment to transparency. It's ridiculous to think that we won't turn up things that we don't like, but we need the message to be: we're all in this together. We need to make sure that transparency doesn't become a political weapon, or "out of an abundance of caution," we'll abandon the mission before it has a chance to succeed.

Fortunately, we saw news today that as of today, Kundra is back at his White House desk.

Hope Art

by Brady Forrest | @brady | comments: 3

The Capitol Hill Seattle blog has produced a short video about the surge of Obama art around Seattle. On the street you can find Shepard Fairey's Hope image has been put on garage doors and merged with donuts. It's also being used to advertise for local businesses (as seen in these coffee posters).

The other day I heard an interview with Shepard on NPR about how his art went from the street to the inauguration. It's definitely worth a listen.

Inauguration Moments and Links

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 11

Like many people around the world, I was stirred by the inauguration of President Obama. Listening to his speech, I wanted to share a couple of the bits that stood out for me, as well as a few related links that caught my eye during the day. I already shared most of these links via twitter but thought they deserved a blog post as well.

1. As you might guess, I loved Obama's inauguration speech calling to America to step up to big challenges:

   In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted — for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things — some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom....

   Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions — who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short. For they have forgotten what this country has already done; what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose, and necessity to courage....

   What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility — a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.

   Amen! As you know, I do believe we face great challenges, and must rise to them. How fabulous to have a President who acknowledges the joy of what is hard! Leadership begins with vision, hope and a sense of possibility. People follow because they believe in that vision. This is a man who makes me want to sign on the dotted line!

2. I loved the promise on the new whitehouse.gov to "publish all non-emergency legislation to the website for five days, and allow the public to review and comment before the President signs it." I also love the fact that all of the public comment on whitehouse.gov is licensed under Creative Commons licensing. (As Carl Malamud pointed out, the government-contributed material is already in the public domain - a good reminder!)

   

3. In a lighter vein, I loved the San Francisco prank that replaced Bush Street signs with Obama Street. Amazing bit of coordination to get as many of the street signs relabeled as they did before the police stopped them.

4. I also got a kick out of Jennifer Pahlka's tweet: "I'm taking obama's mention of "makers of things" as a coded endorsement for MAKE"

5. CNN's partnership with Microsoft to build a Photosynth model of the Inauguration out of user-contributed photographs is an amazing demonstration of the power of Photosynth and the future of collective visualization. What's so cool is that the demo keeps getting better as more photos are added. (Silverlight install required, but worth it. And yes, Silverlight, AKA moonlight, works on Linux.)

6. The other great image of the inauguration came to me via Doc Searls on twitter: the ManyEyes visualization of the word tree for the Inauguration speech, showing phrases rooted in the words "we will":

   

   (Also try searching just on the word "we," as well as "we are".) A cool visualization tool helping to see the key ideas of a wonderful speech!

7. Update: A wonderful photo, via Dave Winer: Sasha gives her dad the thumbs up! (Not reprinted here, because it's "all rights reserved," but do follow the link and take a look!)

8. Update 2: Another wonderful photo, from Popular Science, shows a satellite view of the Inauguration. Amazing how like an antheap Washington looks.

It's Not Over: We are "the change we need."

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 32

Like a lot of people, I was feeling a bit of post-partum letdown after the election. Those of us who were really engaged, following the polls, making calls to undecided voters, arguing out the merits of the candidates, experienced a bit of a vacuum after the election. Doonesbury summed it up pretty well: "I've been on a constant news drip all year and I can't shut it off."

But of course, the idea that it's over till the next election is, well, "so 20th century." As Barack Obama said in his presidential acceptance speech:

"What began twenty-one months ago in the depths of winter must not end on this autumn night. This victory alone is not the change we seek - it is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were. It cannot happen without you."

The question, of course, is the right way to get involved. What do we do next?

There are four biggies for the tech community:

1. Actually apply for one of the jobs in the new administration. If there's going to be any substance to the incoming administration's plans for change, there will be a need for people with clue from outside the beltway to join in. And this doesn't just mean more lawyers. There are great technical people who've been working from the outside on government transparency. I'm thinking of folks behind initiatives like the Sunlight Foundation, or Everyblock, or public.resource.org. Heck, I'd even reach out to the geniuses behind mysociety.org in the UK. You do a great job of showing what's possible. I'm wondering whether some of you ought to be on the inside, helping to implement "the change we need." Seeing Kevin Werbach and Susan Crawford as the FCC transition team leads was an awesome wakeup call. Hey, these aren't Washington insiders or telecom lobbyists! They are our peeps from the internet community!

2. Whether inside or out, the tech community can continue to lead by example. I'm imagining legions of bureaucrats saying "it can't be done" countered by demonstration projects that show that "yes we can." I'm remembering Carl Malamud's heroic work putting SEC data online in 1993. The project started with activism by Jamie Love - "you guys ought to do this." Told by the SEC that it would take many years and tens of millions of dollars, Carl got a small team together, built an online database in a few months, and showed them how to do it. After Carl operated the service for two years as a non-profit, the SEC took it over.

   I have a feeling we'll need a lot more of that kind of technology activism by example, as the usual suspects seek to dip into "the great money river" of government spending, driving up the cost, extending the timelines, and reducing the possible impact of the new administration's initiatives.

3. Identifying specific proposals for best practices and points of leverage. We held an open government summit at O'Reilly at the end of last year, and came up with some guiding principles for open data, but we need to identify specific government data sets that could be opened up, specific channels for citizen involvement and oversight, and concrete actions that we can take together to make change. Hopefully, change.gov will become a platform for independent citizen efforts, in the same way that mybarackobama.com was a platform for self-organizing campaign efforts.

4. We really need to weigh in on the issues that matter. From climate change, to open spectrum, to education policy, to investments in science and technology, we need to make our voices heard. There's a lot of discussion on the net, but we need to remember to channel it to the people who are actually making the decisions. If it gets loud enough, maybe they will hear it on their own, but it's good if we can make concerted efforts to bring our suggestions to them via the channels they've provided. Let's give change.gov a chance!

   There was a great example of this recently on twitter. Like a lot of people, I was tweeting about things that ought to be done, when @thesethings wrote:

   all these points re: GM, rails, etc are great. We're submitting all this to change.gov, right?

   Duh. They are opening a channel. We think that one person's voice might be lost. But there are great social networking tools that could be used to aggregate voices, amplifying the signal even before it gets to change.gov. But if we don't direct the messages there, it's less likely to be heard. (Lazyweb call: a hashtag service on twitter that aggregates stuff hashed #change.gov and submits it automagically to change.gov. We also need change.gov to show what's submitted, so it's a conversation, not a combination soapbox/suggestion box. Hopefully, that will come.)

   The weekend after the election, my wife and I held a party at our house, which included an old-fashioned barn dance, complete with fiddler and caller for square dancing. What happened was a great metaphor for how we need to keep each other involved. The nice thing about a square dance is that if you don't have the right number of people, no one can dance. So we'd need two more for a square, and would call out to the people chatting outside: "We need two more!" We'd get three or four. And then, by gum, we'd have to call out, "We've got another square. Now we need six more!" And before long, we had just about everyone dancing. And even people who thought they didn't like to dance, and most certainly not something as old-fashioned as a square dance, had a great time.

   We are "the change we need." Step up and join the dance.

Why I Support Barack Obama

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 274

In my talks this year, I have been outlining some of the world's great problems, highlighting some of the things that are being done by technology innovators to solve them, and urging my listeners to "work on stuff that matters."

We are in unprecedented times. And folks, I'm sorry to say that the current financial meltdown is not the worst of it. Political instability around the world, wars over access to resources, and yes, terrorists, are all in our future. Scientists who've studied global warming agree that we're heading towards decades of extreme environmental stress, leading to even more severe economic disruptions than we have seen to date. Meanwhile, we have an aging population with ballooning healthcare costs, an unfair economy in which some people receive outsized gains while others fall behind, an educational system that is not preparing children for the future, and deficits that require an increasing percentage of our tax dollars to service debt to other countries. Even if there is a short term recovery, huge problems loom in the years ahead, problems we can no longer pass off to our children and grandchildren.

Faced with these problems, we need a president who can harness the best and brightest our country has to offer, a president who is conversant with, and comfortable with, the power of technology to assist in solving these problems, a president who is good at listening, studying, and devising solutions based on the best insight available, rather than on narrow ideology. We need a president who can forge consensus, not just among the partisans in our own fractured democracy but around the world. We need a president who can inspire our citizens and our global partners to forgo narrow self interest and embrace the possibilities that we can achieve if we work together to build a better future.

I believe Barack Obama is that president. He is a man of intelligence, but also a man whose character and temperament seem suited to the problems of our age: unflappable, optimistic even in the face of adversity, willing to speak the truth about subjects that have long been taboo (I'm thinking of his speech on race, and his speech on fatherhood) and with unscripted reactions that show his fundamental decency (I'm thinking of his reaction to those who wanted to make a campaign issue of Sarah Palin's daughter's unplanned pregnancy.)

Because this is a tech blog, not a political blog, though, I primarily want to address the subject of why members of the technical community should join me in supporting Barack Obama. (The New York Times has made a compelling case based on the broader issues, as has Colin Powell.) I outline four principal reasons:

1. Connected, Transparent Government
2. The Financial Crisis
3. Climate Change
4. Net Neutrality

I will also discuss some important additional considerations, personal and political, that I hope Radar readers who don't want to see politics in these pages, will forgive.

I want to be clear that this is my personal endorsement, and not an endorsement by O'Reilly Media. I'd like O'Reilly to be a company where people of all political persuasions are welcomed and supported, and feel free to express their personal opinions, as I have here.

(continue reading)

America's Capacity for Change

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 30

Peggy Noonan wrote a lovely few paragraphs celebrating America, in the middle of an otherwise somewhat nasty editorial about Hillary Clinton.

A friend sent, by instant message, the AP flash that ran at 16:56 ET on 06-03-2008. There it was suddenly on my screen:

"*** WASHINGTON (AP)—Obama clinches Democratic nomination, making him first black candidate to lead his party."

A great old-school bulletin, and of course it carried a huge and moving message. It is good when barriers fall; it's good when possibilities seem to open up to more people, especially the young, who are always watching....

But what I thought of when the friend sent the flash was something another friend told me months ago. It was the night Mr. Obama won Alabama. My friend was watching on TV, in his suburban den. His 10-year-old daughter walked in, looked, saw "Obama Wins" and "Alabama." She said, "Daddy, we saw a documentary on Martin Luther King Day in school." She said, "That's where they used the hoses." Suddenly my friend saw it new. That's the place they used the water hoses on the civil rights marchers crossing the bridge. And now look. The black man thanking Alabama for his victory.

What kind of place makes a change like this? Only a great nation. We should love it tenderly every day of our lives.

I was having a similar thought the other day, but not about the evolution of our consciousness of race in America, wonderful though that is. I was delighting that, however far we swing from the center, the fact that our presidents can only serve two terms gives us a fresh start. In the dark days of the past seven years, when the possibility of stolen elections as well as misguided policies and even lies leading us into an unnecessary war might lead anyone to think that democracy was on its last legs in America, one might never have thought to be where we are today, with the real possibility of change in Washington. Even on the Republican side, the party outsider, the voice of criticism (at least initially) has become the candidate. How great is it that we allow ourselves to change direction like this?

The momentousness of change in leadership every eight years has been on my mind recently as a result of reading Jay Winik's book, The Great Upheaval, about the simultaneous change of political consciousness that wracked the world in the US, France, and Russia (though there it didn't prevail) in the late eighteenth century. One of the most stirring moments was the story about how George III reacted when he heard that George Washington was stepping down after leading the Continental Army to victory: "If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world."

If those words don't help you to "see it new," I don't know what will. That a conquering general didn't seize power was once remarkable. That, when called once again to serve, he stepped down after eight years as president, setting a precedent that was eventually signed into law, was an amazing breakthrough. It's hard to remember that it wasn't always this way, anywhere in the world, (and still isn't, as events in Zimbabwe and Burma remind us so painfully right now.)

There's a lot wrong with our country. But there's a lot right, and looming large on the list is our capacity to change, to reinvent ourselves, to rise to great challenges and surmount them. The words of the Constitution (which were echoed by Barack Obama in his speech on race), "to form a more perfect union," remind us that perfection is a journey, the act of improvement, not an end-state. It gives me hope that we'll be willing to rediscover our idealism and tackle hard problems like global warming, global poverty and income inequality, rather than focusing on the banalities of consumer culture.

I'm reminded of a wonderful poem by Rilke, as translated by Robert Bly, The Archaic Torso of Apollo, that touches on how all greatness, all beauty calls forth from us our own aspiration:

Archaic Torso of Apollo

We have no idea what his fantastic head
was like, where the eyeballs were slowly swelling. But
his body now is glowing like a lamp
whose inner eyes, only turned down a little,

hold their flame, shine. If there weren't light, the curve
of the breast wouldn't blind you, and in the swerve
of the thighs a smile wouldn't keep on going
toward the place where the seeds are.

If there weren't light, this stone would look cut off
where it drops so clearly from the shoulders,
its skin wouldn't gleam like the fur of a wild animal,

and the body wouldn't send out light from every edge
as a star does... for there is no place at all
that isn't looking at you. You must change your life.

I remember hearing Bly read that when my daughter Arwen was a tiny baby nearly thirty years ago. The power of the unexpected turn at the end - "You must change your life." - has stayed with me ever since.

The change we seek in America starts with us. (That's why I was moved to end my talk at ETech, Why I love Hackers with another Rilke poem, about the Old Testament story of Jacob wrestling with an angel. I intended it as a kind of introduction to my son-in-law Saul Griffith's talk about the engineering challenges involved in climate change. Saul made clear just what a big job we're in for, but also grounded the scale of the required change in very personal terms, showing for example, that the amount of aluminum required to produce enough solar thermal plants is similar in scale to our current industrial production of soda cans. He did an amazing job of showing the deep relationship between global scale and personal impact.)

Bringing it back around to politics, next up on my political reading list is Susan Griffin's Wrestling with the Angel of Democracy. I was delighted to see that wonderful image of Jacob wrestling with the angel that I used in my ETech talk, the struggle with hard problems that may defeat us yet strengthen us nonetheless, applied in a political context.

I guess this Sunday ramble is a bit of an appeal to all of you, whatever your political persuasion, to wrestle with the angel of democracy in the coming election, to learn about the issues and the candidates, to make your voice heard, and to play your appointed role in the future of our government.