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November 18, 2002
Chris Warner on Citizens and Community
Chris Warner is the Founder and CEO of Earth 911. He is serving as the raconteur for this afternoon's last session. Earth 911 is a web site that gives people information customized to their zip code on where to recycle, what local water quality issues are, etc. The site functions in cooperation with all 50 states in a public/private partnership. The site uses a GET for queries and so its results are linkable. Here is the information customized for my neighborhood.
Chris says that government hasn't been able to do this. California, for example, had 248 government funded hotlines to tell citizens where to recycle oil. What happened was that the state mandated that that hotlines exist and so each little community or agency that had anything to do with oil recycling created a hotline that did it in their own way. Each was a little fiefdom that didn't want to go out of business. The problem was that there was no way even one of those numbers was going to show up on 8 billion oil containers each year. Earth 911 was able to create a single place that works nationally and its number is on oil containers. They've been able to do the same thing for water quality and avoid a similar fate for a similar state mandate.
Over 4500 government jurisdictions input data onto this site, so that data is near real time. He tells about a meeting with Christine Todd Whitman where she went to his site to get information about a beach she lived on in New Jersey and the data was 50 minutes old. The EPA site for the same beach had been last updated 2 years and 3 weeks earlier. In their defense, the EPA is getting better. Utah is part of a pilot program now to send XML data to the EPA to update their information regularly.
Earth 911 provides a value to the people entering information by making many of the notifications that they'd have to do manually, so that by going to one site, they accomplish a lot of the administrative tasks required for different events. So people have a vested interest in using this site to do their work. A pretty nice business model.
The point of all of this is that Chris has built a community of concerned citizens and government workers to solve a real problem. The community couldn't have happened without technology, but it was driven by a common cause and innovative people. Foundations and non-profits don't typically make good use of technology and don't understand it as an enabler. They see it solely as a cost, not an opportunity. Earth 911 is clearly a diffferent breed.
03:47 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Paul Taylor on Moving eGovernment from Commodity to Community
Paul Taylor, Chief Strategy Officer from the Center for Digital government is the raconteur for this afternoon's first session. He offers the following table:
| Citizen as... | Season of Gov | IT POV | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pre-Y2K | Customer | Expanding | Legacy |
| Dot GOV | Owner/Shareholder | Efficient | Extend Value |
| Post | Citizen | Effective | Transform |
Paul calls the Pre-Y2K and Dot GOV eras "Digital Government 1.0" and says they are mostly about moving routine stuff to the web. The citizen is sold on DG1.0 by choice and government was sold on cost (i.e. "efficient"). He views this era as being defined by the term "commodity." The Digital Government 2.0 era, called "Post" in the previous table, is sold to the citizen as a conversation (see Cluetrain Manifesto here) and government being sold on contribution. In between DG1.0 and DG2.0 is a rocky road that is defined by the notion of capacity. That is, how do we build the governance models, enterprise architectures, and systems that will enable DG2.0 to work?
This notion of eGovernment being about conversation as opposed to commodity experiences is an interesting one. Paul makes the point that a system in Tucson that helped citizens report road damage so that pot holes could be repaired turned into policy discussions about infrastructure maintenance where the citizen is part of the governance process. This ties into some of the discussion we had regarding Joel Kotkin's talk this morning.
01:45 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Chris Thomas on Web Services
Chris Thomas, Chief Strategist, Intel Corp. is the keynote speaker at lunch. He began by talking about portals. The Intel portal does $2 billion in business per month. The portal was deployed in 1998. In 1999 a partner survey showed that partners hated the portal because they had to enter data from company systems to portal and info from portal to company systems. Intel reaslized that they had forced the insertion of a person in the process.
Intel has found that there are 700 places where a human is part of their business processes and they are a relatively automated company. Intel is asking the question "where are the places where these people are ciritical to the business process (an approval, for example) and where are they simply adding unreliability to a process that ought to be more automated?"
Portals are like dating services. Dating services bring people together, but after that, the people form a trust relationship and interact peer to peer (my words, not his). Web services is about that P2P relationship. The portal is about finding things. Web services are about the trust relationship that occurs afterwords and, hence, transactions.
If you look at my Enabling Web Services paper, the breakdown for this is the portal is serving the XML Schema, WSIL, RDF, and WRDL documents (the dating service) and then the application is designed for direct machine to machine transactions (by bring XML to the front, having URLs that are well designed, and having a well defined and well designed API).
12:55 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Office 11: Why it Matters
So far, I've pretty much ignored the news of Office 11 and its XML capabilities. In this InfoWorld piece, Jon Udell discusses in detail what it does and why it matters. After reading it, I've decided that I'd better start paying more attention to Office 11. I've written before about the vast amounts of government data that is largely unavailable because its unstructured and unindexed. Office 11, if used right (and therein lies the rub), promises to be an important technology in solving this problem. The 2000 and XP upgrades to Office were easily ignored. Many agencies have not upgraded since Office 97 and its worked out just fine (and certainly saved some money). I think Office 11 will change that.
The fact is, Microsoft may have finally seceded in doing with product development what they couldn't do with oppressive licensing and software audits: given us a reason to buy their stuff (I hope someone in Redmond is paying attention). The question that faces us is how to make this kind of upgrade happen. We have a number of machine/OS combinations that will not likely support Office 11 and there are, as always, financial concerns. Many of the applications of Office 11 won't be deployable until most desktops are sporting it. This is a good example of how the lowly desktop is becoming a critical part of the enterprise architecture and choices that individual division make affects the ability of the enterprise to interoperate. Its gotten a lot more interesting that "can Word Perfect read Word documents?".
10:57 AM | Recommend This | Print This
The Real Economy
No conference like this can not talk about the economy. Joel Kotkin, Senior Fellow at the Davenport Institute for Public Policy at Pepperdine University, and a Senior Fellow at the Milken Institute in Santa Monica, Calif.is the raconteur for the morning's opening session on just that topic. Cities and regions are always in competition with each other and ultimately, the question is one of survival. Cities come and go, at least in terms of their relevance. An interesting fact: the longest run for any current city as a "place that matters" is London at 400 years. There's a link here to Emergence. Some interesting issues that change cities:
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People can live anywhere they want (relatively speaking) and are not as tied to a place as much as they used to be. Interestingly, this leads them to be less nomadic than their parents. This could spell trouble for places like New York and San Francisco. To wit: San Bernadino/Riverside CA is the fastest growing economy in the US.
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There is a sociological return to family, stability, and faith.
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Terrorism makes a number of cities less livable than others. New York and DC, for example, have a lot of symbolic targets. People in urban areas are twice as concerned about terrorism as rural folks. Terrorism causes companies to disperse their systems, data, and people.
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More and more companies are moving technical operations to heartland communities because they have well educated, hardworking people who can be hired for a reasonable salary and enjoy the quality of life.
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It is a mistake to believe that when the economy recovers things will be just like they were. He tells the story of talking to a group of developers from New York City who said "smart people have to be here." In fact, New York hasn't made much progress in 40 years. 140 of the Fortune 500 were located in New York in 1960. now, only 39 are locate there. The same is true of the Forbes 400 richest people: 80 lived there in 1960 vs. 48 now. The fact is, smart people don't have to be in New York and techies don't have to live in Silicon Valley.
Joel ends on the note that the availibility of information is leading to what he calls a "new citizenry" that is able to make independent of the developers, enviros, labor unions, and others who have traditionally driven much of public policy. I think this ties in nicely to my theme of eGovernment, ultimately, being about transparency and accountibility.
10:11 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Mayor Robert Walkup
The opening remarks for the conference are being given by Tucson's Mayor, Robert Walkup. Walkup is not a career politician. He was a retired engineer who decided to run when he saw a problem with water in the city that had a technical solution that no one would acknowledge or consider. He sings the same song that Gov. Leavitt does on quality of life and its link to economic development.