Monthly Archives: December 2009

Social Networking Lessons for Building Local Communities

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A city’s sustainability and stability relies on an active, engaged, and innovative population. But local government was never structured to address this social aspect of community even though many expect it to do so. Instead, as Tim O’Reilly said in this video, government is like a vending machine, “we pay our taxes and out come services.” So can governments succeed in building community by following lessons provided by successful social networks?

Here is an example of applying Social Networking Best Practices to Government. (The best practices are taken from the following Smashing Magazine post: Social Network Design: Examples and Best Practices):

1. Engage Quickly
Let people know what your city is all about, tell them what is going on in your city, promote interesting sites/information about local businesses or attractions, help them find others in the local area with similar interests.

2. Let Users Express Themselves
Provide outlets for local citizens and businesses to tell people about themselves and your city. Encourage creativity and self expression. This could be achieved through the use of print or digital media and hosted events.

3. Be Dynamic
Provide up-to-date, relevant, and interesting news and information about your city on a 24/7 basis through a variety of media formats. Encourage the entire community to contribute to this effort.

4. Allow Friends to be Grouped
Encourage the formation of committees and community groups. Many cities already have vibrant groups such as service organizations, religious institutions, scouting, etc. established within their area. Government can promote these existing groups, help others in the community find them, suggest ideas for other groups, and help provide training or assistance in the formation and management of groups.

5. Use OpenSocial
Ok, maybe this one doesn’t directly apply but let’s see how we can relate this to local government. The suggestion is to provide applications to users. So local governments can determine what types of “apps” could improve the community. Then provide the environment for local “developers” to create these applications. Perhaps it is coming up with a better way to pay bills or fees or secure permits or find parking or places to shop. Manor Labs is a good example of this concept in action.

The other idea presented in this section is to allow the creation of profiles. This is an interesting concept when applied to government; almost like creating some type of digital ID for each citizen linking them to your community. Then awesome people from your area become local ambassadors for your city.

6. Make it Easy to Communicate
Local government could work to provide channels of communication and encourage conversations. This can be achieved through sponsoring or hosting radio, print, television, and Web channels. Professionally moderated debates and discussions about local issues would also enhance conversation.

Partnering with local schools to encourage and teach younger citizens not only improves their communication skills but it enhances their sense belonging and provides a format for their contributions.

7. Show Only Relevant Information
This is important because too many times in government one person with an agenda hijacks the entire show. And usually no one else is interested in their agenda. Governments need to discourage one-sided rants or self-promotion and instead focus on creating a format that allows for everyone’s input and ideas.

8. Make it Easy to Take Action
Neglecting to provide a format where everyone can contribute really discourages buy-in and a sense of belonging. And those are two vital components to making the whole community thing work. Successful network managers make it a point to connect with their members and suggest ways to get involved that build on a member’s strengths. Local governments build successful communities by fostering this same sense of belonging and encouraging contributions.

9. Show Avatar Photos
The city of Chicago Millenium Park Fountain is a great example of how a city can apply this strategy. The fountain showcases photos of people. Others cities could take this same concept and apply it in a similar manner by displaying photos of citizens in some public medium.

10. Include Ways for Members to Connect
This step is related to the group and communication steps above. City directories provide somewhat of a framework for this but only group people by location. This could be expanded to include groups based on tags everyone uses to describe themselves.

And here are a few extra of my own:

11. Make it Fun to Belong
People are spending an increasing amount of time in MMORPGs and virtual worlds. Why is this? They are virtual communities that not only give participants a reason to belong, but more importantly they are fun and make everyone “playing” them feel better about themselves. And while life might not be a game, there is no reason we can’t enhance our lives so they are more fun and increase our sense of worth. When we are happy and feel good about ourselves, we are more productive and more likely to help others achieve these same feelings. So can government emulate this “gaming platform” and create something that encourages the same type of participation and distributes rewards to citizens. (Perhaps I need another post: Online Gaming Lessons for Building Better Government!)

12. Hire a Community Manager
All cities have people who are responsible for taking care of government assets like property and infrastructure. So if the social framework of a city is just as important as physical assets why don’t we have someone charged with taking care of it? I used to joke with people cities needed to hire a “city mom” but really what is needed is a community manager. Someone who manages or oversees the community in a manner similar to an online social network manager. And their job duties would follow the practices listed above.

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Virtual Cemeteries

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Managing a public cemetery is just one of the many tasks handled by a public works department. Typically we take care of cutting grass, repairing monuments, paving/plowing roads, removing leaves, burying people, selling lots, and handling the documentation and requests for grave locations. Little has changed over the years in how these duties are administered. But now, new tools like mobile devices, virtual worlds, and augmented reality offer us the ability to enhance delivery of some of these services.

Augmented reality (AR), or overlaying a computer generated image onto the real environment, is now available with the use of a mobile device like the iPhone. So how can this be used in the cemetery?

First let’s see how the City of Manor, Texas, used AR to created a Christmas greeting with the help of Muzar.org: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofmanor/4203935446/

Applying this concept to cemeteries, cities could contract with organizations like muzar.org to allow people to post digital content for their loved ones grave site. This content could be images of the loved one or family or even the home in which they lived. As a genealogist, I could also see the benefit of displaying documents related to the person’s life. Perhaps eventually people would be offered the chance to save this digital information for their own family history files.

At some point perhaps AR could also allow us to input a loved ones name while standing in the cemetery and have a virtual path displayed on the ground leading us to the grave. This technology could also allow the city to arrange for unsold lots to display a certain color when a person scans the cemetery with a mobile device.

The city of Manor is also using QR codes – here is an example of their use in a city park: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cityofmanor/2780890639/. Cities could use these codes in the cemetery to convey information. The codes could be placed on or near the graves or on maps printed out from a city Website or distributed at the cemetery. Then visitors to the cemetery could access the code once they are in the cemetery. These codes could link to information posted by the family, to information held by the city about that gravesite, or even at some point to information about the person on sites like Ancestry.com.

Finally something I have not yet seen but wonder at its application is the use of virtual worlds. If a cemetery was recreated in a 3-D application such as Second Life, a person could virtually visit the cemetery. This technology also allows for people to attach information, images, and video. I also wonder if someday we will be able to link our avatar’s movements to our own. Then while standing in the real cemetery we could access the virtual cemetery on our mobile device and walk our avatar to the virtual grave while we walk to the real one. This would allow us to experience whatever was placed at the virtual grave while we are standing at the real grave.

As an add-on: @RogerSmolski passed along a link to an interesting post about the use of QR codes in cemeteries in Japan: QR Code from The Grave

Also I am trying to add at the end of each post a disclaimer indicating that the opinions expressed here are my own and are not meant in any way to reflect those of my employer.

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Open Government: A New Type of Reality Show?

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There’s been a lot of talk lately about open and transparent government, public data collection and distribution, and freedom of information. People are excited about online tools that allow for sharing of data. And politicians are eagerly answering the cries for open government by passing new FOIA laws and demanding data sets be released online.

But back behind the doors of city hall, those of us working in government are a little more cautious. Even though most support an open and transparent government, many are concerned over the delivery. We see the potential for all this to turn government into a new type of reality show. Mark Drapeau recently posted an exploration of always-on government that hints at this type of situation.


So how can we deliver relevant information to the public while maintaining and maybe improving the dignity of government and its people?

Establish Data as a Governmental Function
One of the first steps is to decide data collection and delivery for public use really should be a function of government. Government traditionally provides public safety and public works and does so under a set of state and federal laws. These same laws regulate what local government can and cannot do. If government is to elevate data to the same level as a utility, this needs to be a public decision supported by legislation. President Obama’s declarations and mandates coupled with a public push for open government should facilitate adoption of this first step at the state and local levels.

Choose the Data Types
Next the public and the government need to collaborate and settle on what types of data should be initially collected for public consumption. There should also be a mechanism for considering and approving the inclusion of additional datasets in the future. Right now, the public is demanding that all the data within the walls of government be released. But they might not really be aware of what is there. So lets look at some of the information held by a typical state or local government:

List of complaints, names and addresses of those complaining, issue about which they filed a complaint

Copies of building permits along with detailed plans of homes (makes it easier anonymous thiefs to case homes)

Names of those delinquent or late on paying water/electric/sewer bills.

Names of those who have submitted a check or credit card payment and had notices of insufficient funds or late payments or credit card denials.

Names of those paying property taxes and date by which their payment is made.

Driver’s license numbers and vehicle license expiration dates with names and whether they were paid on time.

Name and address of all who have permit violations

State income tax returns with names, income, etc.

Traffic accidents with driver and passenger names, insurance companies, etc. (imagine someone using these reports to create a daily accident blog for a community!)

Names on all utility bills, amount of water/sewer/electric used each month

Should government blindly release all of this data to anyone? Some states like Illinois have already decided. In typical non-Gov2.0 fashion, legislators passed a new FOIA law that goes into affect Jan. 1, 2010. It requires government to release just about everything including a lot of the information listed above -even if the request is made anonymously. One exception to note is data that would compromise someone’s safety. But should an “in-the-trenches” employee have to make the decision about which data compromises someone’s safety? Absolutely not. Instead there needs to be clear guidance on what data should be distributed. In Illinois, this guidance could have easily been developed using Gov 2.0 tools with input from the public and government. Instead the reality show for Illinois government begins Jan. 1, 2010.

Develop Data Standards and Formats
So back to our open government plan: after choosing the type of data, the next decision involves the standards by which each dataset is collected and the formats in which it is distributed. Here is an example: government already collects the number of vehicles traveling along a roadway on an average day. How often should this collection take place? Once a year, every day? Should we collect the type of vehicle? It’s color? Should this collection take place on all roads? The point is there is an endless amount of data to collect, and not all of it would be relevant or worth collecting. A standard helps find the most efficient and beneficial method. And a standard ensures someone can compare data across all agencies.

Carry These Standards Across All Agencies
A national standard would help create meaningful sharing and comparisons, and the federal government is best poised to develop this standard. There are signs that federal agencies are working in this direction and taking a more considered and thoughtful approach than what was done in Illinois. But at this time, federal agencies are more focused on delivery of their own information. There needs to be an initiative by state and local governments, with guidance by the federal government, to bring this open government plan down to our level.

Find a Way to Pay for Data Collection & Delivery!
Finally, we need to find a way to pay for all this. Because just handling one FOIA request could take several full-time staff members working for weeks depending on the amount of information involved. Unfortunately some citizens have the misconception that this cost is minimal. Here is an exchange of comments from a recent online news article reporting on Illinois’ new FOIA law:

neogenesis said: “You people have no idea of the amount of work it takes to respond to just one FOIA request…….. ”

BobJudd/Chatham said:
“We people don’t care…Just do it..
People get paid to hide the records ? Just reverse the process..”

As someone working in government I understood what neogenesis meant: filling one request can shut down your whole department taking up tax dollars that could be spent delivering other services. And this is caused by the request of one person.

Unfortunately the simple quote does not adequately convey this to someone who does not work in government. This lack of understanding of the scope is shown in the response by BobJudd/Chatham who indicates no one cares about the time involved. Then BobJudd/Chatham goes on to express a typical misconception the public has about government – that we are spending our whole day trying to hide information.

Get Involved!
These types of exchanges fit right into the reality show mentality and do nothing to ensure successful delivery of a truly open government. Over the next month or so, I believe agencies will come together in an effort to develop an open government plan that can be implemented at the local level. If you have thoughts on this issue, feel free to share in the comment section below. And I encourage anyone interested in working towards this effort to stay tuned as we try to turn this reality show into a documentary.

(The post above reflects my own personal thoughts and opinions and are not necessarily those of my employer.)

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A GPS Twist on Overweight/Oversize Permits

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Each city seems to have set up some form or policy for issuing overweight/oversize permits. But other than filling out the form and securing necessary certificates of insurance, what else should be done to perform a proper review? And how can GPS eventually help improve this process?

My thoughts on the overweight loads are that engineering can figure out the load on the pavement and the strength of the pavement. But for most urban streets, the base becomes the primary concern. And if the base is the controlling factor, the engineers performing the review have to rely on their knowledge and experience with their own street system.

But what happens if a certain delivery is necessary for a business, and the only way is along a road that can’t handle the weight. Can you or do you deny the permit? If you deny access, this can quickly move to a political situation. Because how can the city prevent a critical business in town from receiving equipment or product needed for an important expansion?

As for the oversize loads, the issue seems somewhat more straightforward. For this situation, the primary concern is the ability to navigate the width and height of the roadway. And if lines or signals have to be moved, the freight company takes that responsibility.

The other concern with these permits is how to verify that the load followed the route specified by the permit. Some cities require a police escort. However, many do not have the staff to provide this service. So I was wondering the other day if GPS could be used to improve the permitting process. Many trucks have GPS already installed. What if a city required all permitted loads to submit a route map to prove their vehicle took the correct streets? If the map did not match the permit, a fine could be issued. Would it also be possible to allow real time, online viewing of the truck driving once it got within a certain range of the city?

Do you have a specific review process for overweight/oversize loads or do you have any thoughts on the use of GPS to improve this process?

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