Transitioning the US government has resulted in a deluge of spilled words with respect to the use of technology by politicians and governments as we approach the end of the first decade of the 21st century. Closer to home, the Liberal Party’s compelling need to rebuild has stirred interest in using technology to connect to party members and financial supporters.
Some of us still vividly recall the anxiety fostered by Y2K when, on the eve of the current century, it was fear-mangered that all our computer systems, and overly dependent society, could grind to halt at midnight, Dec 31, 1999. According to The Washington Post, a scene reminiscent of Y2K met the new president’s staff as they moved into The West Wing last Tuesday: decades old computers running software from the Clinton era and hardly a laptop to be seen. Staffers who had run what might be styled the first iCampaign for the presidency using state of the art web technology on sleek MacBook Pros couldn’t find the machines needed to upload text and photo files to The White House website.
Then there was the endless coverage of the President’s quest to retain his Blackberry so that he could stay in touch with trusted friends and associates without the screen of aides and lawyers and other well-meaning folk assigned to protect him from himself. That he got to keep a limited-function ‘berry modified to let him communicate with a small list of friends and family is only modest progress.
Not unrelated, The Atlantic this month carries a report about the potential of on-line communication between governments and voters/taxpayers. In iGov , Douglas McGray explains how open-source software and information technology has enabled individuals to work with the data in government hands. Over simplified, by publishing data in basic text or comma-separated-value format, it is very easy for anyone to analyse that data and/or build useful applications that can be used by every citizen. By publishing San Francisco transit schedules in a universal format, developers were able to offer an application, running on a mobile phone, to tell anyone the time of the next bus, and it cost the transit authority nothing. Similarly the US federal budget numbers are available in a format that permits anyone to analyse and critique government spending.
The iGov report compares these success stories to other US federal departments that fulfill the legal requirement to release data to the public by publishing it in a locked-down format that is virtually impossible to analyse or use. I could use the rest of my life to identify how many documents the Canadian federal government similarly releases in unusable formats.
The Obama campaign, and the subsequent transition team, readily solicited advice from the public, on-line. Now the administration has to shut down these avenues to comply with US federal records law, in the same way as the President has to stop communicating directly and privately. Can it be good that no friend is permitted to say anything to the President off-the-record or that the President is not allowed to knock ideas around, off-the-record But when the law requires that every communication with the president must be retained forever and made part, eventually, of the public record there is little choice but to stop the inflow.
North of the 49th, Canadians have been involved in a month-long consultation about the upcoming federal budget. The Prime Minister and Finance Minister have pursued behind-closed-doors consultations with other levels of government and lobbyists while the Leader of the Opposition has engaged the public in open sessions. Last Thursday, the Liberal Party staged an on-line ”town hall“ in which party members asked questions and debated budget issues with the finance and international trade critics. Participatory democracy was taken to a new level.
There is a sort of tug-of-war going on between those who treat government information as confidential and, when required to provide access ensure that as little as possible is revealed in a format that preserves the bureaucrats’ exclusive jurisdiction to advise government, and a those who want to make their own decisions about what information is useful and have the tools and know-how to use it. The former too often see technology as a hostile force while the latter sees it as necessary as milk for babies. The former is necessarily elitist. The latter is more populist.
While Senator McCain didn’t get the internet thing, a swell of populism swept Senator OBama to victory. Stephen Harper boasted last week that he doesn’t need or use a BlackBerry, cell phone or the Internet. I have no idea how widely known is Michael Ignatieff’s BlackBerry PIN but I do know how he has directed his caucus to use technology to engage Liberals in rebuilding the party, with the goal of returning to government as soon as possible.
The Liberal Party has launched en famille, an internet forum in which party members are opening debating policy and party structure reform issues. Compare this to the Conservative Party’s ”burial“ of policy resolutions tabled at its Winnipeg policy conference last year. Which is more likely to build a lasting and viable political operation; engaging party supporters in meaningful debate or using them as back-drops for photo-ops?
Aptly named the millennials, a generation that was a non-existent force a decade ago is making a major contribution to public policy. It is a generation that was raised with technology at its fingertips and is accustomed to accessing information anywhere, anytime and is very vocal in expressing its analysis. To quote a fellow aging Boomer, ”the times they are a changin.“ Millennials, and others who think like them, want to use technology to work smarter and faster and, importantly, engage themselves in managing their communities and their governments. A political party with a future must surely be a party that embraces technology and all that it offers to engage party members and the electorate. And whither the party that eschews technology?
Will the Boomer generation overcome its Y2K fears and join the millennials?
