Maybe it's end-of-year nostalgia, or maybe it's all the LinkedIn feed employment updates plus awareness of changes at my own company, anyway, I got to thinking this week about my initial explorations into the community of government transparency and digital reform known as "Gov 2.0" or "open government."

I got involved in Gov 2.0 in 2008 as a municipal government employee after wondering whether some of the digital engagement strategies of the Barack Obama presidential campaign could be applied to civic engagement in a more formal context, and found a small but welcoming community first on , then on GovLoop.com and Twitter. I went on to become group manager for the LinkedIn Government 2.0 community, to start the Gov 2.0 Radio podcast, and to make a (highly unsuccessful) run for U.S. Congress. During that campaign, I met Jim Gilliam, a civic technology entrepreneur, and, in 2011, I joined Jim and his co-founder Jesse Haff at NationBuilder.

NationBuilder, a community organizing system, now has 80 employees and provides a web platform for thousands of politicians and elected officials, and a growing number of cities and agencies. I recently met a new intern on our data team who has quite a local (NationBuilder is based in downtown Los Angeles) reputation in the open government community, and when she added me to a couple of her community Twitter lists, it struck me that I know fewer of the names and faces of today's Gov 2.0.

***

For a more up-to-date view of the Gov 2.0 community, check out these Twitter lists:

***

Read more

There's been a big shift in how people use the web that caught up with Healthcare.gov and sister sites yesterday. You can build the most beautiful and "scalable" website for web visits, make it open source, put the code up on GitHub, talk about how innovative it is, then watch it crumble under the server strain of people trying to actually do something through your site.

Healthcare.gov's real challenge wasn't to build an alternative to a commercial CMS (content management system), it was to build an application that can handle event-oriented human behavior - for that you need the best systems engineering, not "10,000 authenticated users through GitHub" for your content delivery, as one of the Healthcare.gov contractors highlighted in this Atlantic profile of the project by Alex Howard.

Before the application process bogged down yesterday, Healthcare.gov got lots of nice gov tech insider buzz for its open source nature. But the project still had contractors on board, and based on how the service behaved on opening day of the Affordable Care Act, it could have stood a lot more testing of what people actually wanted to do with it. Kind of like Mitt Romney's Orca system on election day last November.

The Healthcare.gov site loaded fine, but trying to apply through it was kinda like buying first-time Comic-Con badges online.

Open source has changed the technology landscape for the better, underpinning many of our favorite startups. However, simply invoking it like a protection spell is no replacement for the architectural skill and planning required to pull off the systems needed for a successful Healthcare.gov launch. Health and Human Services, which managed the project, needed a little more "Puppet vs. Salt" and a little less "open" in its vernacular. 

Adapting to a web where people are participants, not viewers, is the lesson we're all learning. Web infrastructure needs to support people, not publishing.

The reaction to failures of Healthcare.gov under heavy load won't work if the discussion is about how other services fail - it has to be about building infrastructure that's designed for peak interactivity and not for views.

Choice quotes from the Atlantic profile:

Bryan Sivak, CTO at Health and Human Services: "Instead of [running] farms of application servers to handle massive load, you're basically slimming down to two. ... The way it's being built matters."

Dave Cole from HSS contractor Development Seed: "You're just talking about content. There just needs to be one server. We're going to have two, with one for backup. That's a deduction of 30 servers."

Maybe there was a lot more infrastructure work going on behind the scenes, but the project leads' obsessive focus on the content framework is telling. 

Healthcare.gov's scaling challenge was never about delivering content like a really popular website, it was the peak activity challenge that Twitter faces on a regular basis. is why Twitter is stable now and wasn't in 2009 - those are the issues HHS should have been talking about.

___

Few updates after a bit of Twitter fun on these issues today:

Not faulting Alex's reporting in any way here - I believe if the HHS team was really focused on the infrastructure for supporting a signup rush at the time of the Atlantic article, that dedication would have shown up in the story. The omission of that kind of discussion (read the article - the project team seems to have an almost flippant approach to back-end server architecture). I also googled around looking for commentary on that front from earlier in the life of the project.

I didn't do a detailed investigation, this is an opinion blog piece not investigative journalism. As I said above, it's quite possible there was more going on - but the fact the site had so much persistent trouble as an actual application (while it functioned fine as what we call in the biz a "brochure site") means whatever was done fell dangerously short. 

Second, Matthew Hancock , including 56 separate javascript files. Whether you're using a CDN or not, that's just bad. "The site basically DDOSed itself," in Hancock's opinion.

Finally, if an important initiative like Healthcare.gov is going to get 2.8 million views in a day, I want everyone who wants to apply through that site to do so smoothly. My ding on "open government buzzwords" is that it's really easy to do "innovative" things with government technology and get headlines, without actually delivering for constituents.

___

Another update from :

Alex the devs and designers who built the content framework aren't to blame here.

Fair enough. I think it's fairly clear from the above that I blamed HSS and a culture of thinking that web properties are publishing applications and not designing them for interaction. It's really time to stop talking about a "front-end" and a "back-end" for any kind of website. If it doesn't scale for interaction, it doesn't scale. Twitter's infrastructure challenge isn't displaying millions of tweets, it's keeping all of them threaded in real-time. 

Open source content frameworks are nice (hey, ), but HHS separated that issue from the kind of services needed to effectively scale the application process. It's like building a really shiny muscle car and then giving it a weak 2-liter engine. Fully integrated applications with content delivery and scalable interaction design are really, really hard. And that's where buzzwords fall short.

___

Sept. 7 update:

On Saturday, I wrote about these issues on GovFresh, "The openwashing of Healthcare.gov" and cited a Reuters article that laid the project on CGI Inc., a giant federal contractor. 

Today, the Wall Street Journal quoted an HHS spokeswoman and IT experts regarding flaws in the system. The article mentions CGI and also says Experian had a contract around identity verification. Based on the analyses I've read, it seems like there could be timeouts or critical delays between security question submittal and verification, which would indicate architecture issues again, not an Experian issue per se. 

What happened at CityCampSF Hackathon 2011 on Saturday and Sunday? Lots of great discussion about technology and open government, folks meeting for the first time over pizza, Red Bull and Peanut M&Ms, and some civic hacking on online lobbyists filings, timber harvest plans and text notifications for public meeting agenda keyword alerts. CityCampSF participants:

This is the briefing document I've provided for prospective lead legislative sponsors (see questions and comments below):

Along with a number of other open government advocates, I've launched a campaign to put a definition of "open data online" into California and San Francisco law. The issue is that often when documents and data are published online, they cannot be accessed or used in a meaningful fashion because they cannot be searched, indexed by Google, or combined in a meaningful way with other documents for analysis. I want to tackle this not by mandating that certain documents and data be published online, but simply by creating a reference standard so that when new mandates pass, or new documents are published online as a matter of course under existing law or regular business, they are in accessible formats.

This has the benefits of making things easier for people who use screen readers, for developer who want to use public data to build applications, for transparency advocates, and is simply good policy. Publishing data in formats that can't be searched, compared to other documents or reused in a meaningful way is as useless as keeping it tucked away in an obscured file cabinets. Publishing in accessible formats online is as simply as education employees in how to properly save and store documents for online publication using the same software they already have on their computers. In an ironic demonstration of the current problem, San Francisco's current open data law was published by the Board of Supervisors as an unsearchable PDF.

Here's the FAQ on SB 1002 (pdf)

And here's the draft bill text for SB 1002 (pdf)

Open data in San Francisco, the state of California, and throughout much of the U.S. and the world remains hobbled by a lack of legal definition. San Francisco's own open data law, for example, is posted online by the Board of Supervisors as a non-searchable PDF. On December 10-11, at the winter CityCampSF Hackathon, Gov 2.0 advocates will publicly launch an advocacy campaign to institute an open data standard in San Francisco municipal and California state law. The primary goal of this advocacy will be to achieve a clear and reasonable definition of open data for all materials required by law to be published online.

Please join us in endorsing this advocacy campaign, and encourage your friends and legislators to sign on as well.

Use our recruiting tools to rally your friends to this important cause.

For more backgound on open data laws, check out Civic Commons - Data Policy Policy; and Open Standards Policy.

For another definition of open data online that we will consider, see the CityCamp model Open Government directive, which describes open data as being published online in an "open format that can be retrieved, downloaded, indexed, sorted, searched, and reused by commonly used Web search applications and commonly used software."

This legislation should also encompass the goals of increased transparency in responses to SF Sunshine Ordinance requests and California Public Records Act requests - documents released in an electronic format after implementation of this ordinance would have to follow its standards of accessibility.

Endorse

Of late, I've been been using the photo sharing site Flickr more and more, shifting my focus from researching its 4 billion images to uploading fresh content and networking through the site. Flickr has tremendous functionality for creating blog content and populating other social media platforms as well. I've got a recent post about using Flickr in a broader content strategy, and Dan Slee of UK local gov't has a great guide called "Social Photo: 11 groovy ways Flickr can be used by local government."

One of the great local government examples we've looked at is the Flickr activity of the Washington State Department of Transportation, managed by Jeremy Bertrand. Today, we opened an official Flickr account for the San Francisco City Attorney's Office, where we hope to not only highlight our great city, but also feature photos that illustrate the work of our office, from the hard-fought battle for marriage equality, to City Attorney Dennis Herrera's anti-gang initiatives.

If you are a San Francisco photographer, or just interested in connecting with our content and San Francisco favorites, please add us on Flickr. We also welcome suggestions on how you think we can best use this channel.

Steve Radick: Managing Your Time While Managing Your Social Media

Stephen Collins: Government 2.0...it can be a reality

David Forbes: I Do Not Believe in Collapse

Kristy Fifelski: 'Govsourcing' the Reno.gov homepage

Sarah Estes Cohen: Hybrid 2.0? How to leverage social media for emergency management and response

Dan Slee: Social Photo - 11 groovy ways local government can use Flickr

Andrea DiMaio: Human Resources and not Communication are the Front Line of Government 2.0

Lac Carling 2010: Q&A with David Eaves

For at least that past two years, a tiny yet fast-growing group of folks who call themselves "Gov 2.0 advocates" has worked tirelessly to spread a message that emerging technologies, low-cost communications and digital culture can reshape government to be more collaborative, transparent, efficient and connected to its citizens.

We have advocated for humanizing government, and for using new tools to bring more citizens into the deliberative process and to help shape the future of both our democracy and the bureaucracy. One of the main tools for the Gov 2.0 movement has been social media, as activists and line workers join technologists and political reformers in calling for more open communication between officials and agencies and the public they represent and serve.

Last week, Government 2.0 – a term first used by Bill Eggers in his 2005 e-gov-focused book of the same name, and that has become almost synonymous with Web 2.0 as developers have turned on to the promise of government-brokered data troves and universal open standards – won a significant victory. Twitter, the popular social media messaging service that has serves as a platform for thousands of startups using its architecture and user base, announced that it is hiring for its first field office, focused on the government sector.

Twitter Goes to DC
Twitter's job posting and further remarks by corporate spokesman Sean Garrett explain the DC-based position as the first step towards a public affairs unit, with support for innovative and engaging uses of Twitter in politics and policymaking. A new blog by Garrett and his team has since March been highlighting interesting government uses of the platform, from San Francisco's integration of Twitter and 311 non-emergency service requests, to construction updates and border crossing wait times by tweet, to the British Prime Minister's communications usage.

Twitter, thanks to millions of active and aggressive content-sharers and innovators around the world, has transformative powers. Conan O'Brien took to the service to recreate himself after losing his show, creating numerous accounts, rallying his fan base and using the free and frenetic publicity it to launch a comedy tour. Legendary film critic Roger Ebert, after panning Twitter as trite, has become one of its staunchest advocates, using it to deliver and amplify commentary on everything from film to politics to sport and humanism. Newark Mayor Corey Booker has used it to spread a hands-on philosophy of hope far beyond his New Jersey township.

Twitter Grows Due to User Innovations
Twitter's growth and popular features have often evolved from the minds and whims of its user base, from the intensely popular "retweet" convention for repeating and affirming others' messages, to the hashtag form of semantic tagging in its short messages, to Follow Friday, the day that tweeps around the world recognize friends and favorites.

Government 2.0 – which first hit Twitter's mainstream of "trending topics" during a March 16, 2009, pilot broadcast of the Gov 2.0 Radio podcast including govies, contractors and consultants calling in from South by Southwest and their DC-area homes – is now set to join the legacy of user-driven Twitter conventions. The first Twitter office outside of San Francisco will help connect politicians with their constituents and agencies with the public. It will help serve an engaged and innovative Government 2.0 movement, while that movement continues to shape and grow Twitter's utility.

Government 2.0 and the use of social media for politics and public service are still in their infancy, but it's safe to say that Twitter's new focus on this arena is a milestone of which we can be proud.






References:

Clever Twitter Accounts – Government



Roger Ebert – Tweet! Tweet! Tweet!