Participation Tools

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7
Sep 06

Civic Footprint

For some time now I’ve been interested in the possibility of bringing together political information from all different layers of government and finding ways of layering it. Too few of us understand where the key decisions on the issues that concern or affect us are taken. Action at a local level can be a very powerful political tool it’s hard to find out which level is most appropriate, or to trace how issues move between layers. Unfortunately it can seem even harder to find well-structured data at more local levels than it is on a national level.

That’s why I was very interested to discover Civic Footprint, a project of the Center for Neighborhood Technology that provides a simple web interface (and since May 2006 an API) for residents of Cook County, Illinois to find out the ‘political geography’ of their address.

For users of the website those districts are matched up with representatives, so you can quickly find out who represents you on each level, and from there jump off to that representative’s website or wikipedia entry, or a Google News or Technorati search for them. It’d be nice if the congressional pages (such as this for Danny Davis (D)) were integrated with a site like govtrack for more targetted information that google or technorati can provide, but it’s still a great source of information.

It doesn’t look like the API will yet tell you who the representatives are for each of your districts, simply providing the IDs of those districts. Hopefully it will soon. It’ll be very interesting to see how the site develops, as it shows potential to become something of an example of how civic and political data can be made accessible and how services can be built on top of that.

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2
Sep 06

Best Demonstration of an API

The good people at mySociety have been discussing the API they’ve opened up for They Work For You. They also have a few examples of how the API might be applied.

Best of them, and possibly the best API demo I’ve seen, is a text adventure run over telnet. Entering a UK postcode will select an MP for you, and you have to guide that MP to Tony Blair’s Sedgefield constituency, doing battle with any opposing MPs you pass along the way, and eventually fight the PM himself.

Entering my parents’ Tunbridge Wells postcode unfortunately selects me a Conservative MP, but in the spirit of role-playing I guided him to Sedgefield and defeated Mr. Blair. Greg Clark MP‘s verbal diarrhoea skills are not to be trifled with, and he picked up 3246 Experience Points along the way. Very entertaining.

Read more about ‘Battle your way to Sedgefield’ here, and try your hand here (or here if you really want to avoid telnet).

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31
Aug 06

Michigan.gov Named Best In Nation

On Tuesday the Center for Digital Government announced that Michigan.gov had won its annual “Best of the Web” award. You can see the state’s press release here.

The site has introduced a number of useful new features over the past year. If it weren’t for their recent addition of news feeds I probably would have missed this story, and quite a few others, and their efforts to improve accessibility, and unify public facing services are to be applauded. But the fact that they won the award is a sign of the poor state of governmental websites in the United States.

The improvements that the state website has been making should have been made several years ago. As they add features that the rest of the web embraced several years ago, the “open data” movement has taken off, but there’s no sign of trying to provide the core governmental data–information that would help citizens find new ways to interact with their government and participate in democracy–more accessibly.

Accessible, informative and useful government websites are a good thing (attractive, inviting ones would be nice) but it’s a shame that they can’t be part of a more general strategy designed to provide well-structured, useful, mashup-able data about all activities of government.

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19
Nov 05

Saving The Net, Public Services and Municipal WiFi

Grand Rapids, Michigan, the city in which I live, has recently been conducting trials of citywide WiFi technologies. Mayor George Heartwell and the City Commission have an impressive vision of the potential offered by municipal wifi, not just for helping the general community leverage online tools, but also to connect together public services and make service providers more efficient. Unfortunately that vision isn’t shared by some of the current infrastructure providers, or all State Congresspeople, and their are moves to introduce legislation at state and federal levels to block such plans.

Doc Searls has a piece at linuxjournal.com about the more general threat posed to the public internet by the increasing dominance of US telephone and cable companies. It’s a long piece and the third section gets fairly technical, but it’s well worth a read for anyone interested in maintaining the freedom of the net.

One of the less cataclysmic outcomes he describes relies on these municipal WiFi projects, and there are many reasons I prefer that outcome to the suggestion that Google (or other private providers) might become WiFi providers. Neither outcome is likely to provide free bandwidth, and both would result in control remaining centralised (whether internationally, nationally, or on a city-level) but municipal wifi would ensure that control of network infrastructure was metered with the same democratic controls that govern other services such as education and policing provision.

It’s been some while since the public has had to deal with such a significant shift in what constitutes a ‘public service,’ those things that are essential infrastructure for us to efficiently live our lives. We may seeing with the increasing dominance of the net in our lives, and it’s important that we all ensure that we aren’t legislated into a position where we (the people) can no longer determine what we want government to provide for us (to be clear: I am not necessarily calling for increased government provision, I want to ensure that the demos can decide what it asks its government to do). It may be that WiFi provision is where that debate really heats up.

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13
Nov 05

Belfast City Council Online

Tony Bowden writes to lament inept attempts to make Belfast City Council meeting minutes available online. It certainly seems like a lot of e-government services are designed with the issue-focussed user in mind rather than those who simply want to keep informed or educate themselves. That’s not such a surprise given that most of the pressure for these services is coming from interest groups, but it would seem that with something so simple as meeting minutes it would be harder not to provide a browsing interface than to develop one and then provide for more complex uses on top of that.

Tony used his entry to announce the launch of the (completely unofficial) Northern Ireland Government Wiki. Properly modelling government structures is a complex business, and my experience so far that it’s a lot of work to build the critical mass required to make a wiki work in a context like this. But given the service the council provides, it won’t take much to shame them, and it’ll be interesting to see how the project develops.

UPDATE: Tony has written in more detail about the motivation behind the wiki approach.

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8
Oct 05

State of Michigan news feeds

In looking for some contact details, I spotted that the State of Michigan have added RSS feeds for a whole host of state news. That’s a nice simple step that will allow those of us interested in state level politics to much more easily keep track.

They’ve also added a blog for the state web team, which looks like it’s mainly aimed at supporting government employees in their use of the web, and one document on the site states that their new content management tools include podcasting support. Hopefully those blogs will become an opportunity to see what’s going on and hopefully input into the future direction of the state’s online services.

Now how best to get them publishing state data and statistics in open, machine-parseable formats…?

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11
Aug 05

Grand Rapids GIS

A couple of weeks ago I attended my first Grand Rapids Perl Mongers meeting in order to hear a presentation about the City of Grand Rapids‘ efforts to build a GIS driven by perl and hosted on linux. The presentation was interesting, though the coverage of the technology used didn’t dig much deeper than “we used perl and linux because they’re free and we had staff who advocated them” and “this is all done in perl,” and I didn’t get a sense of a broad vision for the future potential of such a system (by contrast, the Mayor’s speech when launching the latest phase of citywide WiFi testing demonstrated a broad vision for enhancing city services through the use of pervasive technology).

My main interest in the city’s GIS is the potential of opening up city information for use by community organisations in location-aware applications. There is potentially considerable benefit for community organisations in being able to integrate with the city’s databases in order to pull out information about issues that affect their constituency (road closures, zoning hearings, etc) and for businesses in being able to integrate with details such as public transport stops and routes. I’m also interested in using it as a backbone for more participatory politics tools, as keeping track of ward boundaries can be a tricky process and is best managed in one place.

Sadly my questions regarding web services hooks for the GIS were met with a response that I could get hold of my own map data from their source, which wasn’t really what I was going for. I’ve followed up with emails, and hopefully will hear more soon, but don’t hold out much hope that there will be any potential for integration any time soon. It is frustrating that a relatively recently built system using tools which are touted in part for thei “open source” credentials should lack interfaces which needn’t be hard to implement and that would encourage a much broader uptake of the system to build a rich information environment.

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25
Jul 05

Participatory Planet

For a while now I’ve been wondering about setting up a ‘planet’ style aggregator for discussion of ‘participatory politics’ type tools. Over the past few months I’ve been building lists of such tools at del.icio.us and on a wiki, as well, of course, as in my newsreader. But there’s something to be said for the ‘planet’ approach which allows interested parties to quickly get an overview of who the accepted figures in a given field are and where the conversation stands.

To encourage myself I’ve just thrown some software up (vanilla planet, basic templates, etc) at planet.publicservants.org. I’m not sure how much time I’m going to have to work on it in the near future, so if anyone reading this wants to volunteer to help with some new templates I’d love to talk. I also have no desire to set myself up as a gatekeeper for this conversation, so please let me know of other sites/blogs I should be adding.

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18
Jul 05

Tracking Rhode Island

While on the East Coast last month we visited Rhode Island for a wedding. That tiny state was a great setting for the nuptials, but I didn’t get much indication at the time that—when it comes to giving its residents access to key information—it is one of the most innovative.

Shortly after we returned, I spotted this piece on Jeff Barr’s blog which I’m only just getting to. He eulogises about the clarity with which Rhode Island’s state government have grasped the vision of the “remixable” Web 2.0 concept, and their recent efforts to embrace those technologies: providing their citizens with tools and data about government in a format they can actually use.

The state’s GovTracker services provide a RESTful API and RSS interfaces to get hold of all sorts of information from the Secretary of State’s office. Access to the state directory, board/commission membership, election details, lobbyist registrations and “rules and regulations” are all provided, with results defaulting to RSS 2.0 (shame it’s not Atom or RDF, but we can’t have everything all at once and there’s always XSLT).

Would that more governments were doing this. Most citizen-run e-government projects are mired in the hassles of writing and updating scrapers to get access to this essential data, simply because the relevant offices are not willing to post their data in a semantically-rich, reusable format. Rather than focus on interfaces and innovation we first have to work to just get at the data. Data that, as taxpayers, we are paying to have gathered in the first place.

Rhode Island have leapt out ahead of the crowd with this initiative, but there’s at least one more step that would really help their citizens leverage this information. Probably the hardest data to scrape are the records/journals of legislatures. If Rhode Island were to start providing access to these (and bill data) in a similar fashion, it would be particularly impressive.

Hopefully more and more governmental bodies will grasp this vision and follow the example of Rhode Island, though I suspect the onus is on us as developers to demonstrate just how useful it can be.

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