Government’s Obligation to YouRadical Transparency inside government.

GREG PALMER

March 5, 2008

Director of Web Communications, NYC Public Schools

Who Am I?

Founded Keystone Politics in 2004. One of the first state blogs.

Technology Advisor to the Oversight Committee under Chairman Henry Waxman.

Sometime “ideas” nerd for online civic projects.

Head Web Geek for the NYC Public Schools.

What’s Transparency?“Disclosure” is a poor synonym.

You pay for the government to do a lot of workon your behalf. You own that work.

Part of doing that work has to means itmust be public.

Execution is a large part of transparency.

What’s Gov’s Obligation?Let you know what we’re doing.

Let you know why.

Give you the opportunity to participate.

Give you the opportunity to base your creationson the work we’ve done on your behalf as taxpayers.

How-To for GovernmentBuild websites to solve simple problems.

Execute them extraordinarily well.

These are the things people actually use.*

Leverage your scale, your public mandate and brand.

* CREDIT TO TOM STEINBERG THERE.

Make Things Easy to

Understand: CalendarsEverybody wants them, everybody understands them, but I’ve never seen a good one.

At the Oversight Committee, we built a calendar for hearings and committee business.

Linked it with detailed information about each meeting.

More importantly, we collaborated with outside groups to develop an RSS feed for the schedule.

People Want to Know:

How’s My Gov. Doing??NYC unveils “Citywide Performance Reporting”

More than 40 city agencies report on over 500 performance measures.

Simple views = citizens understand.

What’s getting better, what’s stable, what’s getting worse?

Easy to Understand

Fulfill needs that are easy to understand. Leave out bells and whistles.

Everyone understands a calendar.

Everyone wants if the government is doing a good job.

Proactive

Proactive, creative information release isthe way of the future.

It’s continuous. Batched information release isn’t appropriate much of the time.

Opportunities of ScaleGovernment has a huge opportunity to leverage its scale and brand

Wyoming = 520,000 people

Delaware = 860,000 people

Rhode Island = 1 million people

NYC Schools = 1.1 million students(bigger than 8 states)

Some Big NumbersGoogle has 16,000 employees.

U.S. State Department has 30,000.

Microsoft has 79,000.

NYC Schools have 140,000 employees, including 90,000 teachers in 1,500 schools.

Our websites have over 200,000 pages. Parts of the site are translated into up to 12 languages.

So What?With scale comes challenges, but more importantly, opportunities.

Government, despite its flaws, has an enduringand powerful brand presence.*

How can we leverage our

enormous size to do a fantastic job serving citizens?

* Credit, again, to Tom Steinberg

Here’s Where We’re AtGovernment is often lightyears behind inworking with modern technology.

Often, we’re not even on the right path.

No RSS feeds is a great example.

Government has a 1998 attitude.

We think we’re an island in a world where that’s no longer realistic.

Slow and Steady

Government will never beat private enterprise in technology development.

It can and should more closely track thetechnology of the commercial internet.

Real e-government won’t come from trying to create e-government.

Rather, it will be a mash-up of simple replacements for offline tools citizens already use.

Where to BeginStable, standards-based platform.(Don’t try to reinvent the wheel)

Bridge the gap between business owners andweb geeks.

Start small, put some simple, non-controversial goals out there.(Ex. - We want a great calendar)

Commit the resources to execute them well. That probably means less features, not more.

Questions for You

Who does this stuff well? (I always want to learn!)

What progress will government make in the next few years?

How does transparency play a role in that?

More Info

E-mail me: gregpalmer@alumni.lehigh.edu

I’ll put this presentation and more on the web:www.gregpalmer.net