Government Executive - Authors - Gadi Ben-Yehuda

Creating Innovation Offices That Work

Gadi Ben-Yehuda, IBM Center for the Business of Government — Mon, 27 Oct 2014 12:08:19 -0400

Innovation offices are being established by many governments—including cities (Austin, Philadelphia and Chicago), states (Maryland, Colorado and Pennsylvania) and federal agencies (the National Archives and Records Administration and the departments of Health and Human Services and State). But not all offices are organized the same way and not all have the same mission or metrics. In a new report from the IBM Center for the Business of Government, “A Guide for Making Innovation Offices Work,” Rachel Burstein and Alyssa Black detail how these various innovation groups fall into structural categories and how their success metrics map to their missions.

Models

The authors identified six basic structures of innovation offices, noting that many combined two more or more of these models:

Laboratory: An autonomous group charged with developing new technologies, products, fixes, or programs, sometimes in partnership with other groups and often with a public face. (Examples: New Urban Mechanics, Boston and Philadelphia; the Health and Human Services Department’s IDEA Lab)
Facilitator: One person or small group working to convene government departments on internal improvements or external projects. (Examples: Governor’s Innovation Office, Pennsylvania; Chief Innovation Officer, Kansas City)
Adviser: A small autonomous group or single person within government who provides departments with innovation expertise, assistance and leadership on specific projects. (Example: Chief Innovation Officer, Labor Department)
Technology Build-Out: Innovation offices specifically tied to a technology function that regard technology as both a tool for encouraging innovation as well as the innovation itself. (Examples: Chief Innovation Officer, Philadelphia; Chief Innovation Technology Officer, Los Angeles)
Liaison: Groups that reach out to designated communities outside of government, most often the business community. (Examples: Chief Innovation Officer, Davis, California; Colorado Innovation Network)
Sponsored: Innovation offices sponsored in whole or in part by third parties—universities, businesses, nonprofit organizations, philanthropic foundations or others. (Examples: Office of New Urban Mechanics, Utah Valley University)

Methods

Whichever model was created, the authors found that successful innovation offices implemented these key actions:

Commit to supplying real resources.
Choose leaders carefully and invest in and provide appropriate support to those leaders.
Create a specific mission tied to specific outcomes.
Communicate effectively with internal and external partners throughout the innovation lifecycle.
Find allies within government and committed partners outside of government.
Establish an innovation process from the outset, even if the exact details and specific projects change over time.
Seize opportunities to share lessons and information emerging from government innovation offices through both formal and informal networks.

Metrics

Noting that innovation offices have two distinct areas of influence—internal and external activities—the report details metrics that can be used to assess how successful the offices are. For internal innovation efforts—including achieving greater collaboration between departments, greater efficiency in government processes and possible allocation of saved dollars to new projects, and more systematized processes and funding opportunities for innovative projects—the authors recommend measuring:

Number of jointly proposed and executed projects.
Projections of cost saved over time, even with possible initial spending increases.
Number of projects that are evaluated mid-course and changed or canceled as a result.
Combined value of monetary and in-kind support for innovation-specific projects across the government entity.
Diversity of skill sets identified in job descriptions, compared to the past.

For external activities—such as achieving an improved relationship between public and government, an improved relationship between business/organizations and government, greater transparency in government decision-making, and greater accommodation of community need in service development and deployment—the authors suggest measuring:

Increasing scores on customer satisfaction surveys for targeted departments.
Number of businesses and organizations applying to partner with the government entity, compared to the past.
Number and value of monetary and in-kind donations from businesses and organizations across the government entity.
Number of downloads, views, data manipulation or other means of accessing government-supplied information.
Number of projects changed, abandoned or reassessed as a result of a partner comment.

Innovating Innovation

The future of innovation may look nothing like its past, but government leaders who are tasked with establishing innovation offices have a great deal to learn from their current configuration, and this report is an invaluable resource in surveying the current topography.

(Image via docstockmedia/Shutterstock.com)

]]>

Social Media Metrics for Government: A Manager's Handbook

Gadi Ben-Yehuda, IBM Center for the Business of Government — Tue, 10 Jun 2014 12:32:13 -0400

One of the most important questions to ask during a job interview or when preparing for an annual review is: "What constitutes success?" or "What does success look like?" For private sector organizations, there are often very easily quantifiable metrics: number and size of sales, or year-to-year growth. Even in the nonprofit sector, there can be widely understood metrics: rate of growth for membership lists, the volume of participants at events, or the number of calls made or postcards sent during an awareness campaign.

Unfortunately, in the public sector, there aren't always hard-and-fast metrics. Unlike many private sector companies, it's not as simple for public sector organizations simply to report that they sold more widgets than in the previous year, or that they kept sales constant while bringing down the cost of operations. Agency missions change and evolve, and while some agencies have predictable, stable workloads that are roughly the same one year to the next, others—say, disaster relief organizations—may literally have their activities dictated to them by the caprices of the weather.

For people who plan or execute social media activities, this question—"What does success look like?"—has a special piquancy. On the one hand, there are already many tools to measure many aspects of social media engagement, and many more coming online all the time. But the risk, as ever, is that agencies can look at the wrong metric and begin to tailor their social media practices in the wrong ways, distracting themselves from, rather than advancing, their goals.

A new report, "A Manager’s Guide to Assessing the Impact of Government Social Media Interactions" aims to help managers understand the tools that agencies are using to determine whether their social media efforts are advancing their strategic goals. The report is grounded in the Obama administration’s Open Government initiative and provides insights into how social media interactions can increase collaboration, participation and transparency by harnessing the use of new technologies. The insights derive from in-depth interviews with social media managers in the federal government, reviews of existing social media strategies and policies, and academic literature.

Written by Maxwell School professor Ines Mergel and released by the IBM Center for the Business of Government, the report is designed to be a manager’s guide to social media metrics, helping government agencies assess the impact of social media interactions. The first requirement is a well-designed social media strategy that supports the core mission as the basis for all online interactions. Second, government organizations should create online tactics to support their mission requirements and monitor and evaluate online interactions with citizens.

The report presents the most common measurement practices used in government:

Breadth
Depth
Loyalty
Sentiments through qualitative insights
Combining offline and online data

As a result of the monitoring efforts, agencies can adjust their social media behavior and abandon ineffective tactics or increase successful interactions.

The report provides a guide on how to make a business case with data to help top managers understand social media impact. The business case can serve as a basis for management decisions to build and allocate organizational capacity or initiate changes in social media strategies as well as daily tactics. The report includes a section with the most common and currently free social media measurement tools.

Though success will be measured differently from one agency to the next, chances are the tools to evaluate the effectiveness of an agency's social media activities are already in use. This report will help managers determine the right analytical lens to bring that picture—what does success look like—into sharper focus.

(Image via Quka / Shutterstock.com)

]]>

A Guide for Innovative Public Servants

Gadi Ben-Yehuda, IBM Center for the Business of Government — Mon, 07 Apr 2014 09:00:00 -0400

A new report offers guidance to government executives and innovators and finds that they are already changing how agencies operate and deliver services.

Released by the IBM Center for the Business of Government, “The Persistence of Innovation in Government: A Guide for Innovative Public Servants” mines data from the 28-year history of the Harvard University Kennedy School’s Innovations in American Government Awards. The author, University of Toronto professor Sandy Borins, seeks to discern how agencies have found ways to introduce innovations in the face of obstacles inherent to the process: the risk of failure, and the extra time, energy, persuasion and improvisation required to bring an innovation to fruition.

Borins finds that innovation is alive and well in government. He illustrates in the report how traditionally hierarchical government agencies can initiate and embrace change, and identifies ways that innovators can succeed within their organizations.

While “innovation” rarely appears in the title or job description of a public servant, Borins finds that many feel the urge to innovate—born of a belief in government as a solution, a belief that government can find better ways to deliver services. The report also finds that innovators are more likely to be strategic planners than adaptive incrementalists. They face bureaucratic resistance, external opposition and funding shortfalls—and frequently must overcome obstacles through persuasion, accommodation and persistence. In addition, innovations originate at all organizational levels and often result from proactive problem solving.

Data from the Harvard University Kennedy School Awards reveal that during the past 20 years:

Interorganizational collaboration has increased
Both shared and overall funding have increased
The innovation agenda has changed in every policy area
Media and public interest in innovation have increased
Innovations are being evaluated more often
Innovations are being transferred more frequently

The report offers numerous recommendations, both for government executives and internal innovators, who can influence an organization to change. For internal innovators, the report recommendations include:

Find and collaborate with kindred innovators
Be persistently flexible and flexibly persistent
Define indicators and measure progress
Recruit fresh perspectives to review the innovation program, and respond to critics

And for government executives:

Support local heroes
Protect public servants associated with unsuccessful innovations
Support performance management systems because they encourage innovative problem solving

The report concludes by emphasizing the importance of partnerships among awards programs, academics and practitioners as key to spurring innovations. Moreover, it calls for continued research on innovation in government.

Borins argues it is crucial to understand trends in innovation more deeply and to identify jurisdictions or organizations that support and encourage multiple innovations over time.

(Image via Lightspring/Shutterstock.com)

]]>

Mapping a More Participatory Government

Gadi Ben-Yehuda, IBM Center for the Business of Government — Thu, 20 Mar 2014 16:00:00 -0400

Kansas City has one, and so does Washington. Of course, New York and San Francisco have one. Miami used to have one, but now it doesn't. I speak about 311 maps: a data visualization that plots city service requests on a map of the area (sometimes run by city government, but not always).

There are other mashups of maps and data. The site Crime Reports needs little explanation, and new applications of geographic information systems are coming online all the time: Dog Parks in Chicago? Check. The roads of ancient Rome? Check. A year’s worth of data on ocean salinity? Check. And then there are the 800-pound gorillas of government GIS: Recovery.gov (zoom in on Washington) and the newer USAspending.gov (check out the construction projects).

Governing magazine is asking: “Is the Cost of 311 Systems Worth the Price of Knowing?” But the trend is clear: More municipalities are opting for Open311 systems. They are doing it for a variety of reasons, but perhaps the most important one is that Open311, like Gov 2.0 is a platform—one with an ever-expanding tool set. Today, people are marking dog parks and broken streetlights; tomorrow, people might be programming their cars to share pothole data with the city. In addition, as demonstrated by the Recovery.gov and USAspending.gov sites, financial oversight and participatory budgeting are greatly enhanced when financial data is mapped.

Open311 as a Platform

There are three attributes of Open311 that make it such a powerful platform for helping people understand data and make decisions:

1. Maps have become ubiquitous. We have them on our computers, we have them in our pockets, they are increasingly popping up in both indoor and outdoor spaces—malls, parks, bus stops, public buildings of all kinds.

2. Maps represent a very human way of understanding the world. People don’t think in spreadsheet format. But they do think in terms of geography and topography. Putting data in a table is a powerful, but artificial construct, it is hard to interpret and hard to remember. Putting data on map is an organic construct. It mirrors the way people actually remember and make sense of their world.

3. Open311 allows people to add their own layers of meaning to a map because of its nature as an open platform. Not only does Open311 allow people simply to add various data sets, it allows people to perform actual analysis on a map—one example is a map that couples population density with average income plotted by location. That’s not just data, that’s analysis, and it is striking.

Mapping State and Local Budgets

One question that people want answered at every level of government is: How is my tax money being spent? This one question carries others within it: Is tax money being spent equitably among constituencies and localities? Is it being wasted on projects that are intrinsically meaningless? Is it being lost through fraud or abuse? Is it being allocated fairly through a transparent process? Mapping expenditures helps answer all of these questions.

The story of Recovery.gov is elucidating. Prior to the Recovery Act’s passage, a congressional oversight committee asked about the typical rates of fraud, waste and abuse. The panel was told that between 5 percent and 7 percent of a program’s budget was often lost that way. For a program worth $700 billion, that would amount to tens of billions of dollars. Yet the program lost only tens of millions of dollars, in large part due to the transparency of spending that was achieved by plotting every contract award on a map that anyone could access.

With the advent and increasing adoption of participatory budgeting, being able to put spending data on a map allows for greater participation and more oversight—increasing the legitimacy and fairness of the program.

A More Participatory Government

Of all the benefits of using GIS for citizen participation, none may be greater than simply increasing the levels of participation in government. It is hard for people to see how their government affects their lives when all they have to look at is dry, text-based program descriptions. Show them a map, however, with discrete projects plotted in their neighborhood, and they will begin to appreciate that their tax dollars are being spent fairly and in ways that benefit them directly. And if given ways—both online and off—to participate in the allocation of their tax dollars, they will participate.

More eyes means more oversight, which means lower losses to fraud, waste and abuse. More eyes on spending will also mean more minds involved in budgeting, and more people involved in their own governance. That is the real promise of GIS for state and local governments.

]]>

Shark Tank: HHS Edition

Gadi Ben-Yehuda, IBM Center for the Business of Government — Wed, 19 Feb 2014 16:00:00 -0500

Earlier this month, 13 teams of government entrepreneurs made pitches in a "shark tank" environment to continue funding for their innovation programs through a new initiative at the Health and Human Services Department called HHS Ignite.

The HHS Ignite program "catalyzes early-stage project ideas that can be completed within very compressed time frames. Teams selected into HHS Ignite are guaranteed an appropriate amount of their time to complete the project. HHS Ignite provides a space in which small teams of employees can try something new in a startup environment by exposing them to networks of innovators and equipping them with the methodologies and tools used by successful startup companies.

"Representing operating and staff divisions from across the department and selected from a pool of 68 applicants, the beta class of HHS Ignite consists of 13 teams that are taking on a diverse set of problems, ranging from new applications of technology in bench research to business process improvement to citizen-facing customer service and more."

HHS Ignite is part of a suite of innovation initiatives that comprise the IDEA Lab, led by HHS Chief Technology Officer Bryan Sivak. The IDEA Lab's mission is to bridge the old world and a vision of a new, networked world, where value is found in an individual’s talents, as opposed to their position in a hierarchical structure. The foundational effort of the IDEA Lab is to overcome barriers to communication and collaboration between organizational silos and practices that prevent people from working together. The approach is based on four tenets:

Innovation is a direct result of the freedom to experiment
Design is critical to effectively communicate ideas
Entrepreneurship allows an organization to take advantage of underutilized talent
Action, above all else, is encouraged

The innovations presented at HHS Ignite fell into three sometimes-overlapping categories: Data innovations, workplace efficiency and mission innovations. Not all of these innovations are technology-focused, and some don't rely on technology at all for their success.

Data Innovations

Developing a Data-Driven ACF Workforce: This team at the Administration for Children and Families put together an impressive application that created data visualizations to help account teams assess the programs they've been tasked to evaluate.

Integrating Health Insurance Marketplace Data to Visualize Efforts and Impact: Creates data visualizations to help answer the question, 'Is there a correlation between people visiting a site and signing?"

Data-Driven Website Optimization Using Multivariate Testing: Offers a data-driven approach to testing government websites to see how efficient they are at communicating their strategic messages.

Workplace Efficiency

Increasing Efficiency in Rule Making with Natural Language Processing: Helps regulators sift through public comments by categorizing them and sending them to appropriate subject matter experts.

The NIH 3D Printing Exchange: The National Institutes of Health provides a database of 3-D templates that people can use to customize the printing of their own artifacts -- like a Thingverse, but for models of flu viruses.

Fast-Screening CE-MS Method for Bacteria Through Protein Pattern Recognition: Helps identify bacteria in food in minutes instead of days using Mass spectrometry.

CMS Coordinated Press Response Strategy: The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services creates a database of every cleared statement for release to the media, cutting down response time by 54 percent in the pilot study.

Moving Toward Energy Efficient NIH Laboratories: Installs energy-efficiency devices and more energy-efficient equipment at NIH labs, which are major consumers of electricity in the federal sector.

Mission Innovations

Recruiting Older Adults for Research (ROAR): Seeks ways to reach out to older populations to get them involved in medical research, especially for studies on relevant topics, such as Alzheimer's disease.

The NLM Pillbox -- The Benefits of Being Open about Drug Data: The National Library of Medicine creates the largest drug database in the world, including information on drug interactions, a visual database of pills, and other data and metadata.

IHS Workforce Development -- Going Lean to Understand Needs: The Indian Health Service breaks down organizational silos, connecting people who need information to those who have it.

The CDC Health Game Jam 2013: Tries to put into practice the popular saying "behavior is the next billion-dollar pill." The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention brings together coders and public health officials to create games in categories such as nutrition, wellness and food safety to help players understand the health aspects of their daily activities.

CDCOLOGY -- A Microtasking Project: creates an application similar to Task Rabbit, but reaches out to college students to perform mission-critical tasks, like literature review, that agency staff would normally undertake.

It will be interesting to follow these developments and see how other agencies iterate them based on HHS' example.

(Image via Andrea Izzotti/Shutterstock.com)

]]>

How the Government is Innovating (And You Can Too)

Gadi Ben-Yehuda — Wed, 20 Nov 2013 15:30:00 -0500

Innovation touches every facet of our lives, from transportation to communication, from personnel management to office automation. This is especially evident in the public sector in how agencies provide services and meet their missions. As it happens, technology has enabled much of this innovation, but it also requires smart leaders who apply these technologies and drive change within their agencies.

Weaving Innovation into the Fabric of Government Agencies

Many government leaders have found a way to weave innovation into the fabric of their agencies. At the federal level, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has hired an “Entrepreneur-in-Chief” while the Department of State has an Office of Innovation that reports directly to the Secretary. Further Maryland is but one state with a Chief Innovation Officer who reports directly to the Governor and ensures that the state government keeps pace with technology, citizens’ emerging needs while using innovative tools to effectively managing government programs and services. The single constant within these examples is that high-level officials are leading the charge to encourage and incorporate innovation within government.

They are doing so by articulating the value of innovation, fostering a culture of innovation, aligning innovation to mission, defining and measuring success, and distributing innovation. Further, their efforts are following a pattern of innovation often used in the private sector (where many of the current government leaders have spent some, if not the preponderance, of their careers).

Articulating the value of innovation

The old saw is “if you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.” What people can intuit is that if they want a different outcome, they need to change their methods. And the first step is for leaders to explain the value of adopting new methods and new tools.

Through polls and through their behavior, citizens are demanding a government that works differently—a government that encourages citizen participation, shares its information more easily, and delivers services more effectively and efficiently than in the past. Further, citizens do not want to pay more for that government, and most want to pay less.

The only way to accomplish these seemingly mutually exclusive goals is by changing some of the very fundamental assumptions and methods of government operations. Therefore, the first task for government executives is to articulate how innovation is necessary for the government of the 21^st century to serve citizens of the 21^st century.

Citizens of this century are different than their predecessors in two critical ways. First, today’s citizens have access to powerful mobile computing, so individual citizens can create, access, and analyze data at any time, and to tap into their social networks for advice or guidance where ever they are. Each individual is able to request and consume government services at any time and from any place, and governments need to meet that need.

Second, one result of that access to social networks is that citizens are part of a culture of participation. The social applications that run on phones, tablets, and now wearable technology impart the value of participation with every shared picture, every request for signers of online petitions, and every opportunity to fund a new prospective product or service before it hits the market. Governments must therefore make not only their services, but their very operations open to participation at any time and place.

Government leaders must harness citizens’ desire to participate and demonstrate how opening government to that participation can help deliver better services at lower cost. This is already being done, of course, at many levels: by involving citizens in co-creation, co-production, and co-delivery of services; and by tapping into the knowledge of crowds through programs like the Securing Americans Value and Efficiency (SAVE) Awards.

Fostering a culture of innovation

One of the first tasks for government leaders is to foster a culture that is not only open to innovation, but actively encourages it. Government leaders can develop and invigorate such a culture in a number of ways.

Appeal both to internal and external stakeholders for innovation. Many mechanisms have been set up at the federal level for public sector employees to offer their suggestions for innovation. All federal employees, for example, may contribute to the ideation platform called the SAVE award, which asks for suggestions on how to save money across the federal government.

On an agency-wide level, numerous platforms have been established to tap the ingenuity of employees for ways to improve agency operations, including the State Department’s Sounding Board, and HHS’ HHSInnovates. Both of these programs were established by agency leadership to ask rank-and-file employees for their input in improving or expanding how their agency meets its mission. Many municipalities have also been looking to the private sector to help them innovate through app contests, while the federal government is currently in the second round of bringing in outside innovators through the Presidential Innovation Fellows program.

Offer incentives for trying, and even more for succeeding. There are many ways for leaders encourage their employees to deliver more than their job description requires of them. Though money is an obvious incentive, given the fiscal realities of today government executives will have to use other means of motivator staff to be innovative. Often, simply acknowledging the importance of experimentation and encouraging it is enough to instill the spirit of innovation agency-wide. One effective way to accomplish this would be to include innovation as a routine part of employees’ annual review. Further, recognizing successful projects goes even further to demonstrate that leadership values the time and talents required to successfully innovate.

Allow people to fail. Government executives must sometimes provide cover for those who pursue innovation that fails. This is the necessary corollary to encouraging people to try new approaches and recognizing them when they succeed. The catchphrase in the tech industry is “fail fast.” Ideally, people learn from failures, use what they learn to enhance their next attempt, and share the lessons with others, so that each successive attempt at innovation is more likely to succeed. Punishing failure will inhibit innovation.

Create mechanisms for innovation. Many federal agencies have initiated one- off innovation programs, both for internal and external stakeholders. Programs like HHSInnovates could be replicated across government and then incorporated into each agency’s standard operations. Innovation programs will doubtless vary from agency to agency and each program should expect to evolve within an agency, employees are more likely to participate fully if they feel that their agency has an enduring interest in innovation.

Institutionalize successful innovations. Finally, after stakeholders have been encouraged to innovate, have been given permission to fail, and rewarded for success, and when they feel that there are opportunities to innovate and the avenues through which they can do so, government leaders should weave meaningful innovations into the fabric of their agencies. The most cogent example, perhaps never to be equaled, is email. A tool that few had heard of in the beginning of the Clinton Administration was indispensible before its end.

Aligning innovation to mission

Though it is important to encourage out-of-the-box thinking, it is equally important to ensure that innovations do not distract from an agency’s day-to-day mission. With new digital tools coming into existence every day, the allure of shiny, new engagement channels never dims. It is incumbent upon government leaders to act as filters, applying “test for relevance” on proposed innovations before even piloting.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) offers a good example of this type of “test for relevance” discipline in the way it adopts new social media channels. In its “New Media Request Form,” the USDA requires offices to specify: why it wants to establish a new media account/channel; what the office wants to accomplish; why the technology is the best tool for achieving stated goals; who the intended audience would be for the new channel; the content and information to be shared and events covered; and the evaluation and success factors associated with launching this new channel.

Defining and measuring success

The final piece is to define and then measure success. Unlike the private sector, success in the public sector cannot be defined solely through financial data. Even if costs rise slightly, a program could be successful if it advances other measurable goals such as reaching identified audiences; enhancing transparency; or developing new programs to address emerging mission components, among many others.

For each of these goals, agencies will have to identify specific metrics at the beginning of any innovation programs. Metrics may include web analytics, volume and relevance of online participation, or metrics that pertain specifically to the agency’s mission: the health of specific populations, for example, or compliance with new regulations.

Distributing Innovation

Paradoxically, for government leaders to harness the power of innovation, they must ultimately unleash the creativity and expertise of the employees in their charge.

Though some agencies are appointing chief innovation officers, and many more are adding an innovation component to the portfolio of existing CXOs, usually their chief technology or chief innovation officer, ideally the mantle of innovation should be taken up by as many people within the organization as possible. Innovation can be championed by individuals at any level, but it is most often effective when it is embraced by employees at all levels.

Read the other blog posts on Six Trends Driving Change in Government:

Introduction
Trend 1: Performance
Trend 2: Risk
Trend 3: Innovation
Trend 4: Mission
Trend 5: Efficiency
Trend 6: Leadership

]]>

Iron Man, Batman and Spider-Man: What We Can Learn About Privacy From Superheroes

Gadi Ben-Yehuda, IBM Center for the Business of Government — Mon, 26 Aug 2013 09:00:00 -0400

The explicit message of modern superhero stories is best summed up in Spiderman’s origin tale, “with great power comes great responsibility.” But the implicit message is that some people are able to exert greater influence over events than others. And, whether in the DC or Marvel universe, there is a relationship between the way someone can exert their influence and the kind of privacy they create for themselves.

In comic books, power is usually attained in exotic ways: by accident, life-long training, technology, or alien birth. But whatever the cause, what makes the person who possesses that power a hero or a villain is whether they exert their outsized influence in malevolent or beneficial civic acts. Heroes rescue kittens from trees, help solve crimes, protect others’ rights; villains do the opposite.

In the real world, some people have always had more influence in the civic space than others, especially those in elected or appointed government positions. Two emerging trends, however, are allowing people who are neither elected nor appointed to act like superheroes, exerting outsized influence in the civic space.

Pervasive, open computing coupled with a government increasingly open to citizen participation are, together, allowing more and more people to leverage various powers of government to their own ends. And these powers are conferred not by radioactive spiders, but rather because government managers open up the processes and resources of their offices to app developers, and through them, to any and all citizens.

Together, the pervasiveness of digital social media and the opening of government for civic engagement, have given rise to tools like SeeClickFix, PublicStuff; to sites likePopVox.com, Regulations.gov, We The People, and Americans Speaking Out; and to initiatives like RFP-EZ and, more generally, the Presidential Innovation Fellowsprogram.

The benefits of having more people involved in government speak to our values as a nation: we want a less expensive, more effective government, and one that draws legitimacy from broad-based participation. As government managers try to meet the needs of a diverse polity, allowing individuals outside the government to execute both mission-critical and mission-support tasks is often the only way to keep costs low while delivering promised services. And more eyes on government functions often translates to greater trust and legitimacy in that government.

But the apps and Web sites through which people will participate are not dreamed up by Stan Lee. Government managers write up requirements for those tools, and in doing so, must address privacy concerns. If citizens are required to yield too much privacy, they may not participate at all. But given too much privacy, citizens’ trust in government may suffer as some people abuse the system.

The example of superheroes can help managers and private citizens by illustrating three approaches to privacy.

The first is that of Tony Stark, immediately recognizable as himself, and public about his role as Iron Man. In contrast, Peter Parker and Clark Kent are innocuous alter-egos for Spiderman and Superman, but the actions they take as those heroes are public. Bruce Wayne, however, limits the extent to which Batman is ever seen and much of his work is completely hidden from view. These privacy regimes have corollaries in the civic actions that mobile computing and open government are making available to any member of the public.

Iron Man model: Authenticated Identity

Tony Stark is as recognizable in a t-shirt and jeans as he is in his suit of armor. Nearly alone among the pantheon of superheroes, he has been dragged before a congressional committee to account for his actions. This openness (of identity) is necessary, however, because both as Tony Stark and as Iron Man, he acts in explicit partnership with the government, in the form of its military. Tony’s billions are the result of public sector contracts, and in each of the three recent movies, he depends both on military personnel and materiel to act.

Likewise, when citizens are full partners in developing or delivering government services, they are often required to use an authenticated identity. This does not mean, however, that they give up all their privacy. Tony’s fortune allows him to have a private estate with guards and gates, but individuals who only occasionally volunteer their time and talents should expect that when they are not actively participating in the civic space, they can resume a private life. Examples: Government contractors, Online commenters on federal rules.

Spiderman/Superman model: Authenticated Pseudonymity

Sometimes, however, it is necessary to create an alternate identity through which to act. Spiderman and Superman both work with civil authorities, but they complete entire functions on their own: they apprehend criminals, though they do not try them, for example. Spiderman does this because he wants to be Peter Parker as well, and he can’t have all the villains in the world constantly harassing him. Superman, likewise, wants to have a life beyond his civic duty, which is impossible with a red ‘s’ emblazoned on one’s chest.

When people—especially those with technical specialties of one kind or another—want to get involved in civic action, but do not want it to dominate their lives, they will find it easier to do so if they are offered the option of using a persistent pseudonym rather than being forced to use their real names. Pseudonyms could prove useful in discussing topics that divide a community, or in acting as a recognizable figure but being able to maintain a completely separate non-public life. Examples: Petition signatories, participants in social media discussions.

Batman model: Anonymity

While Superman strives to be an example for the people he protects, Batman wants more than anything not to be needed at all. One of the ways that he tries to accomplish his mission is by letting the various systems within Gotham work, helping them behind the scenes, and allowing them to take credit for what he does.

Interestingly, a lot of what Batman gives the police is information. There is an obvious real-world corollary in crowdsourced intelligence: where Batman is often depicted in his cave, viewing dozens, if not hundreds of monitors, outside the comic pages, hundreds, if not thousands of individuals are capturing and viewing images and videos of nearly every event from many angles. And while all of them together might help piece together a crime scene, none of the contributors needs to be identified. Examples: DC’s 311 app, Online permitting complaint for Montgomery County, MD.

Privacy, Participation, and Trust

Privacy should be as important to government managers and app designers as it is to the citizens who will use their services. Too little privacy will deter participants, while too much privacy will encourage bad behavior and erode legitimacy. Some types of civic engagement is possible only if people are willing to be upfront about who they are; talking about the openness of identity in petitions, judicial reporter Dahlia Lithwick asked: “what happens to democracy when everyone's too scared to show up?”

Still, private citizens may legitimately want to retain some aspects of privacy even as they participate in the public sphere. Using persistent pseudonyms is one way to do that, but other ways exist as well. TrustCloud offers an intriguing model: assigning a kind of score that people can append to various online identities and attributes to vouch for their veracity.

While it might have been true ten years ago that on the internet, no one knows you're a dog, that's certainly not the case today. But if we want people to use digital tools to participate in their government, privacy has be a feature, not a bug.

This topic is the subject of a SxSW proposal. Vote for it here.

Image via ollyy/Shutterstock.com

]]>

5 Instagram Feeds the Government Needs to Start

Gadi Ben-Yehuda, IBM Center for the Business of Government — Tue, 16 Jul 2013 16:30:00 -0400

When Pinterest was approved for government use, I shared 10 boards I’d like to see (note: #8 is now live!). Now that GSA has approved Instagram for use by federal agencies, here is a more modest five users/feeds I’d follow:

Department of the Interior. Look at this. Or this.
Forest Service. By at least one count, there are more than 2,200 types of trees indigenous to North America. The Forest Service could do well to help amateur botanists by tagging the leaves of each type of tree to an image thereof.
Agriculture. The agency already has a Farmer’s Market app and API; how about a hashtag with geolocation so people share images of their favorite markets along with their address?
Defense. Using Instagram’s video feature, demonstrate basic field medicine for campers, using the tag #fieldmed. How to make a splint, for example.
NASA. Because they’re just not active enough on social media, how about an Instagram feed with constellations or images of recently-past astronomical events? (or just things like this)

What Instragram users would you follow?

]]>

Better Decisions Through Smart Disclosure

Gadi Ben-Yehuda, IBM Center for the Business of Government — Fri, 12 Jul 2013 11:00:00 -0400

A review of the report from the National Science and Technolgy Council, "Smart Disclosure and Consumer Decision Making: Report of the Task Force on Smart Disclosure"

Access to data has been WD40 to the wheels of the US economy.

Companies like Facebook and Google derive their value from the data they collect and analyze. Manufacturers and retailers are able to optimize and streamline their operations becuase of the data they have at their disposal. And of course, consumers are able to make the best choices--not only for electronics and household staples, but also for education, health care, and financial services--becuase of the data they can easily access and visualize online.

But where does all that data come from? How can consumers and businesses trust the data's veracity? Who is promulgating the standards that ensures (or at least encourages) interoperability of the data, and its ability to be manipulated easily by competing or complimentary applications?

A new report by the National Science and Technolgy Council, "Smart Disclosure and Consumer Decision Making: Report of the Task Force on Smart Disclosure," outlines the benefits of opening data stores ("Smart Disclosure") to consumers and then details the actions various government agencies have been undertaking to realize those benefits.

What is being disclosed

The report breaks "data" into four categories based on what the data is about and who makes it available: data about individuals that the government makes available, data about individuals that the private sector makes available, data about government products or services, and data about private sector products or services.

Understandably, the administration has much greater influence over the rules that pertain to its own data, and especially over the data of its products and services, than over any data generated by and used for the private sector.

The distributed benefits of disclosure

The report details the benefits of smart disclosure as "Promoting Consumer Choice," "Empowering consumers with their own personal data," "New data-driven service," and "Broader economic impact." further, it details which sectors have seen some or all of these benefits, listing:

Education, including "data sets and online tools available to help students and families choose a college and decide how to finance their children’s education."
Energy and the Environment, including "energy efficiency of products, environmental compliance and enforcement, and consumers’ own personal energy usage"
Finance, including data sets that "can help employees better understand their retirement options and employers better understand the quality of the plans they offer, with the help of third parties that analyze the data"
Food and Nutrition, including nutrient profiles for common foods, inspection and other food-safety data, and location-based data about food options, such as the locations of farmers markets"
Health Care, including data that "[d]evelopers can use the data to create applications that make health information more useful to consumers, communities, and service providers in areas such as disease prevention, health promotion, and the measurement of health care quality and performance."

Also mentioned are data about safety, telecommunications, and transportation.

Privacy and security are critical elements of smart disclosure, and the report explains sevral methods through which the administration is ensuring that data is accessible only to appropriate users, and that it is housed securely.

Smart Disclosure Initiatives

Since 2009, the administration has begun a number of smart disclosure initiatives, including:

Blue Button: This health data initiative "is a public-private initiative [gives] individuals the ability to download their personal health data by clicking on a “Blue Button” on the website of the institution that is providing access to the data (e.g., a Federal agency or health care company). Individuals [can share] data with their health care providers or using an increasing number of services that use the data, such as personal health apps."
Green Button: An energy data program, "Green Button, gives consumers timely access to their own energy usage and utility bill data in machine readable form, via the click of a “Green Button.” Armed with usage information, consumers can use a growing array of new Web and smartphone tools to make more informed energy decisions."

Other initiatives have begun to spur activity that uses finance, energy, and education data.

Conclusions

The report makes two recommendations for the future of smart disclosure. First, that federal agencies "should incorporate smart disclosure as a core component of their efforts to institutionalize and operationalize open data practices," and second that agencies "[d]evelop a government-wide community of practice."

For consumers--of goods and services, of financial instruments, of education or health care--data, like logic, may be the beginning of wisdom, not the end. But it is an indispensible beginning, and this report catalogs the ways in which the administration is trying to free more of it up to the benefit of all.

The full report can be read here.

Image via Tudor Catalin Gheorghe/Shutterstock.com

]]>

4 Trends Shaping the Tech-Driven Workforce of the Future

Gadi Ben-Yehuda, IBM Center for the Business of Government — Thu, 30 May 2013 17:12:00 -0400

The FOSE convention was held this month, and I had the pleasure of moderating a panel on the future of the workforce—specifically how technology is changing the work environment and will enable people to succeed within it.

There were four technologies that I saw as coalescing to transform the workplace: Mobility, meaning both the end-devices that people use, but also the infrastructure (more wifi, better security for information) they run on; collaboration, both in terms of applications and management methods to allow for distributed tasks; agile development and open software, which are affecting overall organizational culture at least as much as software development—making offices quicker to adopt and adapt new methodologies, to inspire a sense of experimentation, and to spur meaningful innovation.

And these four technologies are changing what the workforce will look like, making it more: entrepreneurial, networked, porous, and multidisciplinary.

1. Entrepreneurial

Though some agencies (e.g. DoD) will always be hierarchical, the confluence of the four technologies will make it easier for individuals to find or create opportunities for themselves and for their supervisors to approve them. A more collaborative and open culture will reward self-starters and mobile will enable them to keep people notified and also to ask for help when and where they need it.

2. Networked

As this beautiful graphic shows, even the smartest don’t act alone. So it is with the current workforce and so it shall continue into the future. As entrepreneurial as workers will be, their next project—even should they start it themselves—will depend on attracting a network of supporters, advocates, enablers, supervisors, and subordinates to help ensure success. As the saying goes, you’ve got to build your network before you need it.

3. Porous

Many agencies are iterating on the Presidential Innovation Fellows program, now in its own second iteration. The idea is simple: invite innovators from beyond government to work within it for a limited time (6- to 9-month stints) to solve finite problems. Then, those innovators go back to the private sector. This type of program is completely of a piece with the “gig economy,” an idea that Tina Brown used as a headline, and described as a negative in 2009, but which many serial entrepreneurs embrace as both a path to and indicator of success.

Having a porous work environment leaves people to come and go between government agencies as their expertise and enthusiasm allows and as the needs of their office change. Porosity also enables people to enter and leave government agencies more easily than they currently can.

4. Multidisciplinary

Forget about hedgehogs vs. foxes; offices will always have (and need) both. But the internet makes everyone a fox, and can help most anyone approach hedgehog-like expertise. Success in such a work environment will both create and reward a workforce that understands how to expand their skill-set quickly, so they can move easily in a porous environment, so they can staff their own projects, so they can be of greater value to their network.

Leadership, Management, and New Hires

While new hires may be champing at the bit to spread their wings and get their hands dirty (to mix corporal metaphors), and while agency leadership may be equally enthusiastic to reap the benefits of new operating procedures, it will be left to management, as ever, to incorporate new technologies into current operations and to transition office culture so that these new rules can be applied. As an example, Wikis may not have ‘lead editors,’ but by the same token, they don’t write themselves.

As technology advances, and as those entering the workforce depend upon it and expect that it will be available for them, the workplace and workforce will be better for it. And every level of government can start to prepare for that future now.

Image via Toria/Shutterstock.com

]]>

3 Reasons Federal Managers Need to Understand Identity Management

Gadi Ben-Yehuda, IBM Center for the Business of Government — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 12:46:00 -0400

Robust identity management can help government managers.

In my last post on emerging trends , I wrote about online identity management and how it could benefit individuals, governments, and the economy. For this post, I want to concentrate on how a more complete identity management scheme would benefit government managers in the three ways that have been the focus of this series: Real-time data collection and analysis to drive decision-making; efficient use of physical and communication networks; and managing citizen participation in agency activities.

In some ways, identity management is like mobile: at this point, it's almost like an infrastructure - invisible except where it breaks down. But it's also disappointingly inefficient and, in some ways, beside the point: identity management is not a means to an end, and sometimes what is necessary is not ever verifying every aspect of a person's identity, but only discrete components.

For example, municipalities might need only to ascertain that a certain user lives within the city limits. The user's "real name" doesn't matter, nor does her (or his) social security number, or twitter handle. Likewise, age matters only in as much as the user is above a certain age--but a 25-year old is essentially the same as a 52-year old or a 75-year old in terms of legitimacy to use the system.

The internet's famous capacity for obscuring identity was captured in an only slightly-less famous New Yorker cartoon, the caption of which reads "On the internet, no one knows you're a dog." The advent of such tools as TrustCloud --a trust-management site--allows anyone, including government managers, to see if users really are dogs.

How understanding, and fully harnessing, identify management will benefit government managers is becoming increasingly clear. There are three ways that particularly stand out:

1. Real-time data collection and analysis will help drive decision-making

As I've written before , the volume of mobile computers and the ever-expanding universe of sensors that can be attached to them are creating a bonanza of data for government managers whose mission is to react to events as they happen. But it all depends on the trustworthiness of the data, which itself can depend on the trustworthiness of the human operator. With verifiable identity, government managers can know which sources have proved reliable in the past, and which have not.

2. More efficient use of communication networks

A key component of using physical and communications networks is allocating bandwidth (both real and metaphorical) appropriately--and sometimes that means restricting use of the network to specific people. Robust identity management (or, again, verification of certain credentials) means that government managers can keep communications channels open for types of people, even if those people may not have previously acquired credentials from the government.

Emergency management provides some of the clearest examples. During and immediately after an extreme weather event, communications channels may need to be cleared for medical personnel, or holders of commercial truck licenses. In more prosaic circumstances, government agencies might want to reach out to software developers, or people with fluency in a certain language. These are attributes of our identity that could be part of an online identity management system that would benefit both individuals and public sector organizations.

3. Easier management of citizen participation in agency activities

All of this leads to better management of citizen participation. At the highest level, it enables citizens to manage themselves because government managers can more easily establish a framework, outlining agency needs and tasks, and then allow citizens to organize themselves within the strictures of that framework.

Government managers can then verify the relevant aspects of participants' identities and parcel out tasks as they arise. Identity management undergird and acts as a force multiplier for mobile, networked sensors, Products-on-Demand, and advanced sharing.

How do we get there?

I’ve written previously about the activities of " NSTIC ," the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace . Whether people decide to entrust their identity data to a private-sector organization (like a bank), an identity service (like Personal), a government agency (like the DMV), a quasi-government organization (like the Postal Service) or simply keep it themselves (as in a browser extension), I’m hoping that the standards are based on NSTIC’s criteria—that the system be:

Privacy -enhancing: users relinquish as little privacy as possible when they opt into the system
Voluntary: users must not be required to opt into the system to manage their identity
Secure: identity administrators must fortify the system against breaches
Resilient: in the event of a breach, administrators must be able to recover quickly
Easy to use: users should not have to have a password like this: J8JΒΝzγΨfΛδ@6%vΤfShr57w/
Interoperable: the system should work on a tablet, a phone, or a computer running any major operating system and should work for any online tool that requires a login
Cost-effective: the system must not impose undue financial strain on businesses or consumers that use it

Ultimately, I don’t think there will be an “end state” for identity management, but rather we’ll see a constantly evolving market, similar to the one we see now for computer operating systems. The goal, then, is not a perfect identity system, which is all but impossible, but a highly flexible, and constantly-evolving system that can adapt to fit people’s needs whatever they might be.

Image via Tkemot/Shutterstock.com

]]>

3 Ways Tech Is Changing Washington (and One Way It Isn't)

Gadi Ben-Yehuda, IBM Center for the Business of Government — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 15:00:00 -0500

tech is changing the culture in the nation's capital.

All of the panelists had interesting points and perspectives--espoused by Microsoft's Dr. Mark Drapeau, Carousel30's Greg Kihlstrom, and PageLever's Jesse Channon. For my part, I talked about three ways in which tech is changing the culture, and one important way in which it isn't. The three ways tech is changing DC is that it is breaking down silos, specifically:

Operational silos: information about multiple streams of operations is now available to everyone within an organization, so everyone can participation in--and be responsible for--communications, HR, customer relations, and innovation.
Time/location silos: depending on the organization, it is feasible for people to shift where and when they work.
Identity silos: whether people intend it or not, private lives, personal lives, and professional lives will mingle in ways and to a degree that they never have before.

And how tech is not changing culture: even though tech is "democratizing information," making it accessible to nearly everyone, there will still be information specialists--digital researchers, journalists (and especially data journalists), and social media professionals will still be necessary in a world in which everyone has Google in their pocket, publishing platforms at their disposal, publicly-available data feeds, and how-to guides for using social media.

What I mean by "tech."

There are a lot of kinds of tech, but in this instance, what I mean is: always having access to a computer, camera, and GPS device that are connected to the internet and being surrounded by people who also have such devices.

A majority of Americans ages 18-49 have smartphones, which means that any of them, at any time, can be contacted by their employers, our children, parents, and spouses, and any of their hundreds (if not thousands or tens or hundreds of thousands) of friends and followers. Being surrounded by other people with always-on connected devices also means that anything we do can be recorded and shared with a global audience in real-time. For better or worse.

Breaking Operational Silos

Even after the Web was on every computer in a workplace, say, in 2004, people still had to find and visit sites that hosted information pertaining to their work. Many, but not all, employers had intranets, and the social Web was in its infancy.

Today, however, many people use Twitter as a social news aggregator, while others subscribe to their employer's Facebook feed to see what is happening throughout the organization. Intranets and extranets extend the knowledge base of organizations to every employee, and other social media tools like internal blogs and microblogs, social networks behind the firewall, and instant messaging applications are connecting employees to one another across organizational divisions.

Some benefits are obvious: employees can learn from one another, can more easily find forms and other actionable items, and have a greater sense for the organization as a whole. But other benefits accrue as well: project teams that were separate, and may seem disparate, can still share best practices on common problems. Also, every employee can essentially function as a communications or customer-facing operative. For better or worse.

Breaking time/location silos.

Many workplaces, mine chief among them, have a strong culture of teleworking (for more: see these two reports). A recent article on Slate.com outlines the benefits of working from home while Fast Company discusses the rise of coworking spaces. The Slate article quotes As David Fullerton, who manages teleworking employees: “As a manager, I can’t easily know how many hours each person on my team is working. This is actually good for me because it forces me to look at what they’ve done.”

For employees themselves, teleworking means they can schedule their work around the rest of their lives, shorten their commuting time, and ultimately be more productive. Of course, when work necessitates all hands coming to a meeting, nothing precludes that--but such meetings are infrequent at most organizations.

An important aspect of breaking this particular silo is that it enables people to remain in the workforce as other aspects of their lives demand that they be away from an office at specific times of the day. For example, people caring for young children or aging parents might need to provide care at inflexible times in the morning or afternoon. Though providing that care may take only an hour or half-hour, it is impossible to reconcile with working in an office. By using technology to shift the time and place that work occurs, however, valuable employees need not drop out of the workforce when the temporary demands on their lives emerge.

Breaking Identity Silos

The first two silos that I mentioned were organizationally-constructed and their crumbling may be seen by many to be overwhelmingly positive. The dismantling of our carefully-constructed identity silos, however, can produce anxiety. Yet, when anyone can take our picture, tag us at a location, mention us on Facebook or Twitter, and collapse the distinction between who we are on the weekend and who we are at work, we realize that our multiple identities cannot be as distinct as they were even ten years ago, to say nothing of twenty or thirty.

In a city such as Washington, DC, in which public personae are closely scrutinized and meticulously constructed, the breaking down of this silo is sure to cause as much disruption as the prior two combined. But as new workers and leaders emerge who have had to navigate the confluence of personal and professional identities, denizens of the District may find it easier to operate in this new environment.

How Culture Will Not Change: Still a Place for Digital/information Specialists

It is tempting to think that people will become as adept at using smartphones as they are at using the equally-ubiquitous land-line phones. It is tempting, but it is also wrong.

The volume of information--including misinformation--the speed at which it is delivered, the new channels through which it will flow, and the implications that can be deduced only through constant, discerning attention will require that organizations and offices invest in people whose portfolio includes managing information and information technology. If everyone knew what online content was real and what was fake, we wouldn't need Snopes.

Collaboration, Crowdsourcing, and Culture.

There are a lot of ways in which tech is changing culture, more ways in which it isn't, and my fellow panelists and I answered questions from a smart, engaged audience (or tried to), and you can see the whole session here. My portion starts around 0:51:00. Let me know how you think tech is changing culture in DC.

]]>

Who Are You? Four Trends in Identity Management

Gadi Ben-Yehuda — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 10:24:00 -0500

So far in this series, I’ve written about mobile technology, connected sensors, 3D Printing (which I called Products-on-Demand or PonD), and Advanced Sharing. Each of these is important, but the capstone, what will act as a force-multiplier for each, is a better understanding of and method for identity management.

Think about an average week for yourself. At 10:00 a.m. on Monday morning, who are you? What are the critical parts of your identity? If you work for the government or a large company, chances are you have a badge that will remind you of your primary identity, and which will grant you access to most parts of your building. You likely also have at least one (and perhaps many more) logins to various computer systems.

And then it’s 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday. You’ve been to the gym (great for you—keeping that New Year’s Resolution!) and now, of course, you want to order a pizza. You’ve just assumed at least your third identity for the day: employee, gym member, Pizza hut customer.

On Friday, I’m sorry to tell you, your child has an ear infection. You go to the pediatrician where you are the father of the patient: caring, only slightly exasperated, and ready with your black ball-point to fill in form after form.

Identity Management in a Hybrid World

As mobile devices and the software they run permeate more spheres of our lives—from our work, to our gym, to the supermarket and restaurants, to doctor’s offices, and our interactions with all levels of government—identity management can become either the keystone bridging our various identities with their respective places and times. Conversely, if we do understand or adhere to a comprehensive identity management scheme, it may become the single point of failure that denies us the benefits of the hybrid world we are creating, where the digital and the material constantly interact.

Many people might think of identity management as an issue restricted to online activity only. But, in a recent article I wrote for TechPresident, I said, “identity isn’t just something that should be getting us into our email accounts. There is so much more that a robust identity management system could streamline.” And that is especially true when citizens interact with their government. The convenience of entering our identifying information only once for every interaction can actually be measured in dollars. We simply think about the time it takes (that is—time wasted) filling out the same fields on multiple forms and then multiply that across every form for each citizen.

But before any discussion of identity management can get off the ground, everyone wants to talk about one thing: privacy. And in order to talk about privacy, its value must be placed in context of two other elements of identity management, convenience and cost. Think of these three facets as a triangle, from which, currently, we can pick only two. Various combinations form the backbone of different companies’ business models.

Cost + Convenience – the Facebook/Google Model

When we log in to any number of Web sites, we are given the option of using our Facebook or Google identities to bypass the registration or login scheme. The Web site accesses those parts of our profile that it needs (name, email address, and avatar, most frequently) and Google or Facebook gets to know the sites we visit. We give our privacy so that we can login quickly for free.

Privacy + Convenience – The Personal/LastPass model

If we don’t want Google or Facebook to track us, but we also don’t want to fill out every form by hand each time we go to a new site, we can pay for services that will hold our identifying information in its vault and use their software to figure out how to fill in forms as we travel the Web. Personal, as but one example, encrypts the information on their servers and decrypts only on users’ systems. By storing only encrypted information, to which not even Personal has the cipher, they ensure the privacy of their customers’ data. But because they cannot sell their customers’ data, they have to charge the customer directly for the storage and utility of their data.

Privacy + Cost – The “I’ll Fill in My Own Forms” model

The final scheme is simply to keep all the information in our heads. Eschew all identity-management systems so that (1) Google can’t track us and (2) we do not have to pay for a service, even one that streamlines our interactions not only with government agencies, but a host of private-sector companies as well (think: ticketing agencies, schools, medical offices, etc).

Within this model, however, there is another option: using browser extensions to store personal data. While this maintains privacy (since the information is not stored on a server of a company that can either analyze it in aggregate or sell it to a company that might), it is not always as protected, since it now lives on a computer, which itself may be stolen.

Breaking the Model: a Public-Private Solution?

Gathering personal data and analyzing online behavior is a viable business model, and one that competes directly against selling convenient and private identity management. But both models are threatened by the rise of an identity management system that is not only free and easy, but private as well. The question is, who would provide that service, and why would they offer it at all?

As I wrote in an article for TechPresident, there is a group of public- and private-sector organizations that are working to create a system for standardizing how identity-management tools operate. Called “N-STIC,” for National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace, the group is charged with developing a set of standards for managing identity that are:

Privacy-enhancing: users relinquish as little privacy as possible when they opt into the system
Voluntary: users must not be required to opt into the system to manage their identity
Secure: identity administrators must fortify the system against breaches
Resilient: in the event of a breach, administrators must be able to recover quickly
Easy to use: users should not have to have a password like this:J8JΒΝzγΨfΛδ@6%vΤfShr57w/ (My friend John Bordeaux alerted me to this harrowing fact: we’ve made passwords hard to for people to remember, but easy for computers to guess! also: it takes only 6 hours for this computer to guess all Windows passwords.)
Interoperable: the system should work on a tablet, a phone, or a computer running any major operating system and should work for any online tool that requires a login
Cost-effective: the system must not impose undue financial strain on businesses or consumers that use it

But the question remains: who could develop a free, convenient, private identity-management tool, and why would they do so?

I would argue that when N-STIC is finished developing its standards—ones that any company can use to create it’s own specific tool—a new public-private organization form to develop its own tool. The benefits are truly economy-wide in terms of work-hours saved, inaccuracies reduced, transaction costs diminished, and barriers to entry lowered.

The chief impediment right now is that no single industry benefits enough to justify the cost of developing and deploying such a tool. But when N-STIC is finished with its task, it will be easier for a consortium to coalesce, pool resources such that each industry will see a net gain from its participation, and offer a free, private, convenient way for people to manage their identity online.

In my next post, I’ll outline how government agencies can benefit from a population that has trusted identity in cyberspace.

Image via Peshkova/Shutterstock.com

]]>

The Secret to Restoring Trust in Government

Gadi Ben-Yehuda, IBM Center for the Business of Government — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 13:50:00 -0500

2013 Edelman Trust Barometer.” The findings, especially those that pertain to US citizens, industries, and institutions, are striking.

Who we trust now

The Trust Barometer examined how various countries’ populations viewed a number of industries, including tech companies, financial service companies, and government as a whole, among others. People had the highest levels of trust in the technology sector, followed closely by the automotive industry. The lowest levels of trust were found in the banking and financial services sectors.

Interestingly—and tellingly—trust in every sector has gone up over the past year, though some more than others. Trust in government, business, the media and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) has increased by five percent; of those, NGOs enjoy the highest levels of trust.

One important point that I cannot find in the executive summary of the report, but that Edelman’s CEO related in his opening remarks is that what he called “the elite” have a 47 point higher level of trust in the government than everyone else.

Why we trust

It is important to understand why people place their trust in people and institutions, because in doing so, organizations can take steps to earn the trust of their customers, clients, or constituents.

When I look at the data, what strikes me is that people have the greatest level of trust in people and organizations to which they have access and over which they have at least some level of influence. In short, the more people can see what an organization is doing, and how it is doing it, and the more they feel that they have a voice in the organizations goals and activity, the more trust they have in that organization.

Access and influence: open government is a part of this, but only the beginning. People want to know what is happening at all levels of government, but that’s not all. They also want to affect those organizations’ activities, as the Republican House discovered when they launched “America Speaking Out” and the Obama Administration realized when they were overwhelmed by the response to their ePetition site, “We the People.”

What makes the difference

The American people right now have an historically low level of trust right now in their government. Numerous polls have shown very low levels of popularity with Congress, in particular, but individual representatives are fairly popular in their own districts. What makes the difference is that people feel that they have access to and influence over their individual representative, but little access to and no influence over Congress as a whole. And what gives them that access? Social media.

Through social media, citizens can earn the attention of their mayor or governor (for better or worse), and government is expanding the tool-set through which it can engage citizens. As it does, I expect to see levels of trust increase further.

(Images via 2013 Edelman Trust Barometer, Executive Summary)

(Cover image via Steve Heap/Shutterstock.com)

]]>

3 Ways Social Media is Improving Government

Gadi Ben-Yehuda, IBM Center for the Business of Government — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 15:59:00 -0500

last post, I wrote about advanced sharing—basically the idea that the things and the way we share online are becoming as diverse and sophisticated as the things and way we share off-line. Offline, we donate our time, we lend our friends and neighbors our tools, we check books out of the library, we talk about personal matters with one friend and shopping or style with another, we confide in our spouses exclusively in some areas (our finances, a possible example), and don’t have to talk with them about others (our bunions, a possible example).

But I left the question unanswered: how does this advanced sharing help government agencies in the ways that I laid out at the beginning of this series? Here’s how:

Real-time data collection and analysis to drive decision-making

One of the critical components in real-time data collection is knowing where to go to find the data. As people become more adept at how to share various kinds of information and goods online, government agencies can use those tools as well to answer more finely tuned questions.

For example, an application called Park Circa allows urban residents to rent out their parking spaces or drive ways—that is, they can share them in exchange for money. By seeing where and when commuters are using the app, government managers can better understand real-time parking needs in their cities.

Government managers who are looking for citizen-generated data also have more options than ever to solicit it. The US Geological Survey, as I’ve written about before, used Twitter to help track earthquake information, for example. But there are other, more tightly-focused social networks where people share other types of information.

Patients Like Me is an example of a community in which people share information that they may well be unwilling to discuss in open forums like Twitter or Facebook. An organization like the NIH, CDC, or FDA might have an interest in seeing how patients are reacting to new medications, treatment regimens, or recall notices. Seeing, in real-time, how people are responding to new information allows agencies to adapt their own operations quickly.

Efficient use of physical and digital communication networks

What makes advanced sharing so powerful is that instead of sending out the same message through different social media channels, hoping to find the desired audience, agencies can see how their target audience is using social media and tailor both their message and their medium.

An example I noted recently was how government agencies could use Pinterest in ways that were more efficient than using other social media. A case in point could be the US Mint putting up a Pinterest board with all of its collectible coins. Amateur numismatists could scan the page visually, looking for additions to their collections in a way that they cannot do through a text-based interface. They can also share their collection more easily online, sparking interest in the coins the mint is selling. The US Postal Service already has many Pinboards dedicated to stamp collections that encourages philatelists in this manner.

Government agencies can also benefit from sharing things as well as information online. In my post on Products-on-Demand (PonD), I demonstrated how people can share things at a distance by putting their code online, either for free or for a price. Peer-to-peer car sharing may also appeal to some agencies, for example, if a four-wheel drive vehicle is needed near necessary personnel in the aftermath of a snow emergency.

Managing citizen participation in agency activities

When government managers fully understand how their audiences share online, they will be much better able to manage their activities easily—often with a much lighter touch than was possible even a few years ago. Communities can become self-organizing and self-managing, as is happening around the Old Weather program, which has a robust community forum.

Of course, as people become more sophisticated about sharing online, and as the places that we share and the activities we engage in both broaden and deepen, we find ourselves faced with a new, urgent need: to manage our identity. Do we need to provide our credentials—where we live, our educational history, our professional qualifications, our age, gender, medical conditions—to every community?

Identity management, which I wrote about here, is the final emerging trend that I’ll write about in this series.

Image via Peshkova/Shutterstock.com

]]>

10 Awesome Pinterest Boards The Government Should Start

Gadi Ben-Yehuda, IBM Center for the Business of Government — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 15:45:00 -0500

This post has been edited to reflect that "Interesting Things for Sale" is a personal pinboard, not an official GSA Pinboard. Here are the Official GSA Pinboards.

In January, the General Services Administration approved the terms of service for Pinterest—meaning that federal agencies could start to use the site to engage with citizens. Since then, a board has been created that lsits “Interesting Items for Sale,” and has pins including lighthouses, LearJets and helicopters, and a phoropter.

I spoke with FCW about some other boards that I think should be created by various agencies. After a little reflection, I was able to think of 10 Pinboards that I think would be useful both for agencies and for Pinterest users. Agencies should create boards only if doing so helps achieve the goals as stated in their mission, a part of which may be to show people what falls under their purview. For Pinterest users, the boards must help them explore, deepen, and share their interests with friends.

With these criteria in mind, here are 10 Pinterest Boards I think would be useful for agencies and engaging for the Pinterest community that could go up today and expand for years to come:

NASA: Space-faring Equipment. Pictures of all the rockets from Loki to the Saturn, and beyond, all of the rovers, all of the shuttles, every machine that we've sent into space.
National Park Service: Flora and fauna for each park. For each park, there would be a single Pinboard with images of all the trees, bushes, and flowers as well as the birds, lizards, and mammals that visitors are likely to find.
EPA: Historical comparisons of superfund sites. What did hazardous sites look like before the EPA cleaned them up? This Pinboard would have side-by-side images of superfund sites from before and after EPA's intervention.
FBI: Most Wanted.
DARPA: Grand Challenge vehicles. What do all those driverless vehicles look like? This Pinboard would collect them all for easy viewing and sharing.
Treasury Department (US Mint): All collectors' coins ever minted. The US Mint produces collectors' coins with great regularity. This Pinboard would display each coin (and of course have links for people to buy them).
NOAA: Fisheries. Like the National Park Service Pinboards, the NOAA Fisheries Pinboards would display images of each of the species of fish in certain locations. This board could also show information about the health of the fish population and other facts about the species.
USDA: Healthy Meals. Supertracker is already a very popular tool, and having a Pinboard showing a complete healthy meal would give poeople another way to find nutritious recipies and share them with friends.
Department of Energy: Energy Efficiency Products. Have you seen some of the new programmable thermostats? LED Lights? Even tankless water heaters have managed to start looking cool.
Department of Transportation: Vintage & Experimental Aircraft. There are actually quite a few interesting Pinboards the DoT could produce including railcars, bridges (yes, even of Madison County), and even air control towers.

These are my ideas - what are yours?

]]>

RIP Social Media 1.0: The Rise of Advanced Sharing

Gadi Ben-Yehuda, IBM Center for the Business of Government — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 15:14:00 -0500

In our daily lives, we are confronted with numerous opportunities and requests for sharing all sorts of things: our yard tools, our time, specific types of information. And in our daily lives, whether we’re asked to share a rake or an apple pie recipe, we quickly perform a complex calculation to determine if we are willing to share the item in question and on what terms. Online sharing tools are quickly catching up, offering ways to share new types of information (even objects) and new ways to grant or restrict access to groups or individuals.

We Are All Advanced Sharers

I recently began a presentation on the topic of Advanced Sharing this way: I spoke into the microphone, saying, “My name is Gadi Ben-Yehuda, and your name is,” and then I held the microphone out to the audience. A cacophony of names was spoken. “I am the innovation and social media director for the IBM Center for the Business of Government and you are” and a chaos of titles and organizations rose up. “My social security number is,” and I gave my real, actual number.

Silence.

“No one? I thought we were sharing!” And then laughter.

The truth is, in the real world, we have a very nuanced, very advanced scheme for sharing information and experiences, and different vocabularies for sharing them. The basic variables of that formula are: the context or platform, the audience, and the specific content. In other words: where are you sharing, whom are you sharing it with, and what is it that you’re sharing?

This seems straightforward to the point of blindingly obvious, but until very recently, online social media has not accommodated this kind of approach to sharing, and even now, people do not always apply the same heuristics to online sharing that they do to sharing at, say, a presentation on online sharing.

As online sharing more closely approximates how people share in the rest of their lives, government agencies will need to adapt their own methods. Though there will be new barriers, the benefits of engaging online will only increase as both people and government organizations begin to inhabit more fully the new digital landscape.

The Old Approach to Sharing Online

It’s strange to talk about how people behaved from 2006 – 2011 as belonging to “the old approach,” but this is the internet we’re discussing. On Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter, there were basic models for sharing. The first one, exemplified by Facebook and MySpace, was to open certain information to everyone and to keep all the rest hidden from everyone except those the user placed on a whitelist. The Twitter approach was to open all information to everyone except those people whom the user put on a blacklist.

Advanced Sharing Moves Online, Or: How Google+ Succeeded (in Making Facebook Better)

Google+ made the idea of groups of friends central to its platform, and it made the activity kind of fun—dropping and dragging contacts into circles on the screen. This forced Facebook to revamp the ways people could group their friends and to add a feature to their sharing function to make it easier to switch between those groups. Currently, Facebookers use drop-down in the status-update pane to switch between sharing a note of encouragement with their coworkers, a picture of their children with their family, and a picture from a rowdy holiday party with a few close friends.

Though Google+ may never seriously compete with Facebook, let alone supplant it, the newer network succeeded in changing online social networking by adding a level of sophistication to the way that sites allowed their users to share information among their many tiers and types of friends.

Where We Share Matters

Parents of young children often have to state explicitly that we have “inside voices” and “outside voices.” Or that there are some words that we can use in the bathroom, but we replace with other words when we’re in a restaurant. But everyone implicitly understands that context determines what can be shared and how—even when it’s the same people we’re sharing with. Colleagues who meet for a conference are very likely to use different vocabularies during the formal presentations than they will when the meet for drinks afterwards to talk about the day’s activities, as one example.

Online, this translates to people using different language and even entirely different media (pictures, videos, or links as examples) on different sites (Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, or Pinterest, as examples).

Our Audience Matters

Remember when you were sharing URLs by calling them “Web addresses” and telling people (perhaps much older people) over the phone “OK, type “h-t-t-p-colon-slash-slash-w-w-w. . .”? Of course, as people became more acquainted with the language of the Web, it became easier simply to say “just go to Fandango” or, even better, “You can Google that.” (or, if you’re passive-aggressive, you can offer: “let me Google that for you.”)

In a more serious vein, when we talk about scientific data, or emergency preparations, or nutrition, or cybersecurity, even though the content may be the same, we will use different terms, different metaphors, and different media (charts for some, visualizations for others) to communicate most effectively.

What We Share Changes How We Share It

The most obvious variable in how, with whom, and even whether we share something is exactly the “something” we are going to share. What is not obvious, however, is that nearly everything will soon become something we can share. And what follows is that there will be more- and less-effective ways to share different things.

Currently, what we share though online media is information: where we are, who is joining us, what we think about current events, what our dinner looks like. But, as I discussed at length, 3D printing may usher in an era of Products-on-Demand, (PonD), in which we’ll be able to share physical objects as information, transforming them into nonexclusive, nonrival goods.

The universe of what we can share is expanding, as is what we can do inside that universe. On Facebook, we can share events, which allows people to signal their attendance and puts the event on their calendar, or we can share notes, which are like blog posts, or we can comment on other’s status updates, or we can send personal messages through it’s private-messaging function. And what is likely to determine which method of sharing we use is the content we are trying to share.

What This Means for Government Agencies

Ultimately, what this means for government agencies is that it won’t be sufficient simply to have a facebook page on which the agency posts links to its press releases (actually, that’s already true). What it means is that agencies will need to upgrade, update, and adapt their sharing procedures as established sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ have more nuanced sharing tools and new sites, like Pinterest, acquire a critical mass of users.

Finally, it’s important to note that the government has a comprehensive information-sharing program and strategy that addresses homeland security, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies. The same strictures that apply to those functions of government will apply to other agencies as well.

I’ll write more about these topics in my next post.

]]>

Bigger Than Apps: Our 3D Printed Future

Gadi Ben-Yehuda, IBM Center for the Business of Government — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 15:54:00 -0500

Last week, I wrote about 3D Printing Plus and the creation of a market place that I call “Products-on-Demand” (hereafter, "PonD") This week, I’m going to write about what that market will look like in, say, five years when it’s much further along. Specifically, I’m going to explore what the technology will enable (with emphasis on some of the other trends I’ve detailed: always-on connected computers and networked sensors); how people and companies will use that technology for personal and professional ends; and government’s role in fostering and participating in the space.

What the technology will enable

Right now, you can use a few different materials for 3D printing, ranging from chocolate to glass to skin. You can even print a single form out of many different materials. But the real revolution will start when users will be able to design and print electronics—especially those with semiconductors (researchers are already moving down this road).

Amateur and professional engineers who have access to 3D printers will be able to design or adapt objects that will be able to complete very specific tasks, upload their files to sites like ShapeWays or ThingVerse, and either sell the files or the printed objects or give the designs away.

What makes this so exciting is that the raw materials for many advanced objects are literally all around our homes and offices: that old cell phone? It has a battery that can be scanned and used to power a new device. The computer mouse no one uses? It has a laser. Your calculator from senior year? Photovoltaic cells. All of these are standard parts that can be incorporated into designs and used to make objects that can perform advanced tasks.

The difference between 3D printing and Products-on-Demand is the difference between fabricating a model of the Eifel Tower and making a spider-legged, self-propelled housing for a camera phone and attaching it to some spare speaker wire to enable live video feeds in previously-inaccessible locations. From 3D printing, we get a handful of Lego Masters. From PonD we unleash an army of McGuyvers.

How entrepreneurs and businesses will use the technology

Much as iTunes and Google’s Android Market have proven to be a boon both for start-ups and well-established companies, the emerging market for physical objects is likely to become a vibrant spot in our economy. Inventors may create Products-on-Demand based on the Freemium model, or they may sell the designs, or they may create products only in response to RFPs from the government or private-sector companies. They might also create objects on spec.

Imagine an inventor using spare parts (cell phone cameras, for example) open-source software and adapted open-source design to create a small robot that crawled along air ducts using thermal imaging to look for leaks. Network that device into a building’s smart grid, and GSA and IBM might build the purchase and deployment of that device into their Smart Buildings project.

One of the most powerful aspects of PonD is the same as in a software market: as the product is essentially code, it can be created once and “shipped” instantaneously anywhere in the world. Further, upgrades can be made and sent out as soon as new capabilities are required or developed.

The government’s role in fostering and participating in the space

In my next article, I’ll show how PonD benefits government leaders in the three tasks that are central to this series: Real-time data collection and analysis to drive decision-making; Efficient use of physical and communication networks; and Managing citizen participation in agency activities.

Before I can delve into those, however, it is necessary to discuss how governments at all levels can play a role in helping the PonD market develop. Here are five activities that governments can do now:

Include PonD as components in larger contracts. The ultra-customization that PonD can offer may enhance some projects, and if there is a clause and a budget included in a contract, bidders are more likely to design and deliver those objects. As more people gain experience designing objects, and as they universe of open-source objects expands, objects of greater value can be created at lower costs.
Hire and/or develop intrapreneurs for PonD. In the past four years, governments at all levels have been bringing on board or promoting from within its own ranks people with application development skills. Chief Information Officers and Chief Data Officers have been trumpeting the value of and successes in software development to drive up efficiency, enhance productivity, and expand capabilities. Professionals with a background in 3D design and development would do the same for PonD.
Create open-source objects and putting the designs on ThingVerse. In my last post, I shared the link to GSA’s GitHub page. Here’s HHS and the White House. The reason for sharing the code to their applications is two-fold. First, as a matter of fairness: the American people paid for this code through their taxes and they should enjoy the maximum benefit of the code. That means anyone should be able to see it, to use it, to adapt it to their own purposes. And following on this, it’s good for the economy. People who adapt code that the government paid to develop (or to have a third party develop) can turn around and sell their version of the code, as one example. Or they can simply use the code in their own businesses or organizations to streamline or enhance their own operations.
Sponsor competitions like Apps for Democracy. Upon its completion, Apps for Democracy was hailed as a success (though there is room for disagreement). What is undeniable, however, was that the program has been emulated elsewhere and has brought attention to how coding can make a difference in civic life. Already, the federal government, through DARPA, holds competitions centered around robotics. What would help move the needle on PonD would be competitions that spark innovation around small-scale objects.
Participate in discussions around copyrights and other issues raised by PonD. Talking about the copyrights in an age of 3D scanning might be few people’s idea of a good time, but for the market to thrive, inventors (and investors) have to know the rules they will be following. As with setting the standards for identity management, the government should have a seat at the table, but should not fill every (or even the majority) of chairs.

As this market develops, it will become every bit as essential to the economy and to our society as the app market is now. And PonD will touch as many aspects of our daily lives as Software as a Service does now, which is to say, just about everything.

Image via ollyy / Shutterstock.com

]]>

3D Printing and the Rise of Products as Service

Gadi Ben-Yehuda, IBM Center for the Business of Government — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 15:50:00 -0500

Governments at many levels have proven themselves to be instrumental in developing both a national and local software-developing community. Competitions like The Big App and Apps for Democracy have spread knowledge of government data sets as well as provided money and recognition to software-development firms. Forward-looking CIOs and CTOs realized that software—both its development and the finished product—could spur innovation and economic activity. They also realized that government could help the software-development community.

Subscribe :
Newsletter
Facebook
LinkedIn

In the next few articles in my emerging trends series, I’ll show how we are on the cusp of a similar era in the development of physical objects, whether simple objects or electric and/or networked devices.

Though it might sound futuristic, consider: this weekend, you could print your own circuit board . And here’s how you could print a wrench . If you to use or modify someone else’s circuits, just look here , and if you need 3D designs, here are a few. As a bonus, here’s a way to turn a $10 laser into a communications station and, related, the GSA repository on GitHub.

Keep this in mind—it’s the inchoate future coalescing around us: the scent on the breeze, and a taste of things to come. This future will include something beyond merely 3D Printing, but rather what I call “Products as a Service,” where the objects printed will be functional, made of different components, perhaps networked, and possibly open-sourced. More about this in future posts.

The Rise of Software and the Return of Hardware

A little more than a year ago, Marc Andreesen wrote a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed, “ Why Software Is Eating the World ” In it, he demonstrated how software had permeated, if not subsumed so many industries—entertainment, finance, national security, photography, transportation, music—and offered some reasons why software was still ascendant, as well as some barriers the software industry faces.

There are five main reasons that software has eaten the world (and, as we’ll see that hardware may start to eat some of it back). They are:

1. Robust Ecosystem : inventors are no longer working in solitude or starting from scratch

2. Diminishing Cost : the monetary barriers to entry are coming down

3. High Return : inventors have a way to earn a lot of money and/or to make a steady living

4. Intrinsic Motivation : the incentive structure supersedes monetary compensation

5. Wide Application : The possibilities within the field of software development touch most interest areas

I'll detail these reasons in this post and continue the conversation in future posts--outlining government's role in creating the market place for "Products as a Service," and addressing issues such as advanced sharing (which covers how patents would work for open-source objects) and identity management (which is necessary to claim ownership and to have faith in the quality of designs).

Robust Ecosystem

One of the key reasons for the rise of software that Andreesen does not mention, is that the tools for creating it are practically lying all around us. Schools, libraries, and homes are all filled with computers that can create and test sophisticated software, and there are innumerable online resources to help people learn Python , Ruby on Rails , Kodu , and even Perl . Or you could visit Code Academy or Google’s Developers University Consortium .

Further, with the increasing acceptance of open source software, people who want to create their own applications don’t have to start from zero—they can adapt existing software, adding features, or slimming the application down to run on different platforms.

To date, this has stood in stark contrast to hardware. Want to make a circuit board? You’ll need a dremel press (oh, and a dremel ). And if you wanted to build a wheel, you had to literally re-invent the wheel!

However, as 3D printing moves into home offices and schools, it is not unreasonable to expect that the number and variety of objects in digital repositories will also grow. Future hobbyist-engineers will be able to adapt physical objects the way that hobbyist-coders can adapt software right now. Also, as more people create (or “code”) hardware, a more lively community will self-organize.

Diminishing Cost

At major retail chains, you can buy a laptop for less than $300. Though it won’t run graphic-intensive games, it is more than enough to get a hobbyist started coding. If even that price is too high, most DC Libraries and schools have technology labs that people can use for free. Using the internet as a means of disturbing the software is free. If you create an application that you want to sell—say, on the iTunes or Android marketplace—posting the application is free, you pay only as the application is purchased. Cost, then, for developing, disseminating, and even selling software is very low.

Conversely, the cost for creating and selling hardware has been high, but even now there are free 3D-design applications that beginners can use to create their own physical objects. And as more homes and institutions invest in 3D printers, inventors will not have to fabricate their objects, but rather post the design files to sites like Thingverse and or sell them through ShapeWays . The latter is an example of how inventors can begin to reap the monetary rewards for the efforts.

High Return

Games like Angry Birds and Draw Something demonstrate the power of the economies of scale in the mobile app marketplace. One dollar at a time, these apps manage to accrue high-six figures for their creators. Though they are by far the outliers, but the promise of a high return on the investment of time and creative energy still lures people into learning to code. Further, companies now exist for people who are more risk-averse and want to earn a steady pay check, rather than strike out on their own. (The New York Times recently ran an article on making a living instead of a big splash in mobile apps.)

What we’re going to discover, and quickly, is that kids still like to play with real-world, physical toys. In fact, two of the areas that could be easily accommodated through 3D printing—building sets and toy vehicles—are the only two that saw growth between 2010 and 2011 . In short, there is the possibility for high return in selling physical objects and physical object designs as that marketplace matures.

Intrinsic Motivation

Some people are motivated to create software for non-monetary rewards. They do it to solve complex problems, or to demonstrate mastery. They do it to preserve or exhibit independence or autonomy. Daniel Pink talks about why people behave based on intrinsic motivators, if you want more detail.

Because there were communities set up for software sharing, these kinds of motivations came into play for hobbyist-coders. Now that communities exist for trading in physical objects and their designs, the same motivators apply.

Wide Application

Whatever your interest, there is software. In fact, one of the most famous iPhone commercials sells the hardware by virtue of the range of its software. Andreesen’s article goes to lengths (literally, column inches) to show how software has transformed so many sectors of our economy and so many facets of our lives.

And there’s no reason that hardware cannot be the same. From a computer mouse shaped like a Chevy Camaro to hyper-designed coffee mugs , there are innumerable places in our lives that can be enhanced by open-sourcing physical objects and having an army of citizen-designers tinkering with them.

The Technology and Its Ecosystem

There are two changes that I see as necessary to bring “Products as a Service” into maturity, and I’ll write about them in the coming posts. The first is technological. Right now, we can print only on certain material, and none of it conductive or semiconductive. When that changes, the horizon for inventors will be truly limitless. The second is the cultural understanding of what things are and how we order, make, purchase, and distribute them—an understanding that the government can help shape.

Indeed, just as governments have opened up data, established competitions to spur the development of public-minded applications, and opened up their own operations to citizen-created software (think SeeClickFix), the government has a role to play in developing the community for open-source objects.

Ultimately, this will help government just as the apps marketplace is helping the government. Agencies will be able to order physical objects either in bulk or in small quantities that fulfill very specific needs, and may even benefit from objects that solve problems they didn’t know they had—much as some applications streamline processes that governments didn’t know they needed to address.

More on all of these in the coming posts.

Image via Michelangelus/Shutterstock.com

]]>

Emerging Innovation and Social Media Trends: Networked Sensors

Gadi Ben-Yehuda, IBM Center for the Business of Government — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 12:43:00 -0500

It's 1991, and some computer science professors are tired of walking into their computer lab of the University of Cambridge only to find an empty pot of coffee. Their solution: install a camera and connect it to the server so they could ascertain the status of the coffee pot from their desks. The rest is internet history.

Today, there are literally innumerable such cameras linked to the internet, many showing traffic, others surf conditions, and at least one streamed lice content from the ocean floor. But cameras are only the beginning of the story. Today, it is easy to connect a home or office thermostat to the internet, or even a door lock; and anyone can purchase a weather sensor and connect it to the internet. Parents of teen-age drivers can see their car--and many of its metrics--online and in real-time. Smartphones in themselves have become sensors: tracking their owners' movement (à la Waze) and tying it to their identity (a la Latitude, FourSquare, Facebook, and other applications).

The profusion of sensors poses both risks and rewards for government leaders, and has applications in the three areas of focus of this series, real-time data collection and analysis to drive decision-making; efficient use of physical and communication networks; and managing citizen participation in agency activities.

One of the greatest risks involved in the expanding network of sensors is running afoul of privacy laws. This is definitely one area of government operations in which the law is not entirely keeping pace with technology, and recent court cases--for example on law enforcement using GPS devices--have only begun to help government and citizens understand the roles and limitations of sensors in civic life.

Real-time data collection and analysis to drive decision-making

In dynamic situations, such as times of extreme weather and its aftermath, leaders are more able to make optimal decisions when they have accurate, up-to-the-minute information at their disposal. And more sophisticated sensors are being developed all the time to help in emergencies--for example, this FEMA-subsidized system to help firefighters understand what's going on inside a burning building. That's not not the only example.

Routine operations, too, can benefit from networked sensors. Only in February of this year did the FAA receive the funding necessary to switch from navigation based on radio to GPS, streamlining their day-to-day operations. Another example of sensors assisting in routine operations is an initiative by GSA and IBM to incorporate energy sensors into some government properties so that building managers can see real-time energy use and make adjustments accordingly to help bring down costs.

Efficient use of physical and communication networks

One of my favorite apps for my Android phone was the TriCorder (it has since been deleted from the Google Play store for copyright infringement). The app bundled a lot of different sensors together, including a wireless-signal detector, elevation, and sound meter. While the application was frivolous (but cool), other companies are using those same kinds of energy-wave sensors to do important things, for example, to optimize spectrum usage, especially in rural areas--an issue commonly referred to as "white space." The topic is contentious, but the ability to monitor that portion of the communications network and make decisions about their use in real-time would greatly increase their utility, both during ordinary and extra-ordinary circumstance.

Of course, monitoring traffic--by way of cameras or on-board sensors for trains and buses--helps governments at all levels make the most efficient use of traffic networks.

Managing citizen participation in agency activities

Perhaps one of the most sophisticated sensors that can be connected to the internet--especially through a mobile device--uses only millivolts of electricity and has two opposable thumbs. Indeed, humans interact with online sensors so seamlessly, they can be considered as a kind of sensor themselves. Because so many people carry always-on connected devices, they become part of the network that agencies can use to make decisions at the same time as they are helping to implement those very same decisions.

I alluded to one of the best examples of this in my last article: the USGS tracked tweets from people who were experiencing an earthquake. The Did You Feel it? program asks internet users to augment the USGS's sensors with their own experience of a seismic event..

The future of sensors

It is imperative for government leaders to begin to understand both the capacities and limitations of sensors now, so that they can be improved upon in the future. As I'll detail in a coming article on 3D Printing Plus and expand upon in Advanced Sharing, we are at the cusp of an age of open-sourced things, just as we are in the throes of open-sourced software. Sensors represent a prime target for tinkerers and products-on-demand manufacturing. But to be useful to government leaders, they need to be easily integrated into existing networks, which means carving a place for sensors now and building a place for real-time data into every decision-making process.

(Image via Digital Storm/Shutterstock.com)

]]>

Always-on Devices and Mobile Technology are Enhancing Government Management

Gadi Ben-Yehuda, IBM Center for the Business of Government — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 17:28:00 -0500

Subscribe:

> Newsletter

> Facebook

> LinkedIn

How will the wide-scale adoption of always-on connected devices change the environment for federal leaders?

Of the five trends I outlined in my last post, the first, Always-on connected devices, is so fundamental, so important, so paradigm-shifting, that it is quickly becoming invisible.

But if federal leaders are to harness the power of a citizenry and a workforce who are always connected to their social media and digital communications, they need to understand both the capacities and limitations of this still-emerging trend. (see this series I wrote about "smart policies for smartphones" at work)

The most recent survey by ComScore found that there are 110 million smartphones in the US – and the Pew Research Center found that 46 percent of US adults own smartphones. Add in feature-phones, which at least are capable of sending and receiving text messages and the number soars to greater than 85 percent. And the pace of adoption, according to Pew, is only accelerating.

And of course, government leaders are among those who carry powerful, connected computers in their pockets all the time. Whatever their operating system, whomever the manufacturer, these devices are changing the way that federal executives are collecting and analyzing data to help make their decisions; determining the most efficient use of physical and digital networks; and managing citizen participation in agency activities.

Further, the wide-spread (and soon nearly-universal) adoption of always-on connected devices will enhance (at the very least) or enable (at most) the other emerging trends: the expansions of public and private networked sensors; 3D printing plus; advanced sharing; and identity management and the collapsing border between personal, professional, and civic lives.

Collecting and Analyzing Data to Drive Decisions

One of the first questions people ask on cell phones is one that would never occur to a land-line user: Where are you? That simple question, asked perhaps millions of times a day, is a data-gathering exercise. On the popular TV show, “24,” Jack Bauer, a US anti-terrorism agent was constantly up- and downloading information from his phone and conveying or receiving intelligence by talking on his phone (it does other things, too, it would seem). And imagine if Tom Hanks' character in Cast Away had found a satellite phone instead of ice skates in one of the packages that washed ashore.

All of these point to the ability of connected devices to help us make better decisions—if not to enable us to make certain decisions at all. Free apps give us up-to-the-minute information on flight departures and arrives from most airlines. Storm trackers and emergency planners help us get ready for weather events up to three days away.

For federal leaders, phones can connect them to email while they’re out of the office, with sensors and real-time reports of all kinds, with quickly-developing situations—whether across town or across the country.

Not only do devices connect leaders to other people and to digital assets, increasingly they are capable of performing functions that were once the province of desktop PCs.

Determining the most efficient use of physical and digital networks

On Aug. 23, 2011, an earthquake occurred on the east coast of the US, centered in Mineral, VA, and sending seismic waves that reached Washington, DC, and New York City in a matter of minutes. What was even faster, however, were the tweets from people who experienced the earthquake, leading to a popular comic and a commercial for twitter:

While this is a good example of phones enabling real-time decision making, it is also an example of using the best communications channel for various kinds of communications. Though a text message might have reached more people (since more people have SMS on their phones than Twitter), there was no service established to warn people of an earthquake via SMS. Conversely, many people had already established accounts on Twitter, so it was able to send messages to many people when the quake hit.

Drivers on the road that afternoon could have used Google Maps with a traffic overlay to see how the quake had affected her commute. Or they could have used Waze, an application that uses sensors in the phone (again: I’ll be talking about sensor in greater depth later) to create a real-time picture of transportation networks.

Indeed, though driving and using a cell phone is never a good idea, many radio stations across the country have “traffic tips” lines so commuters can share information about their commute in real time.

In the near future, with the emergence of advanced sensors capable of interacting with and through connected devices, other physical networks will “come online” as completely as our transportation network, giving federal leaders of all stripes greater ability to manage them.

Managing citizen participation in agency activities

Perhaps the greatest impact will be felt in the area of managing citizen participation in agency activities. And at no time is this aspect of connected devices more important than during an emergency.

Citizens interact with their government—especially state and local government, but also federal—all the time and often without realizing it. Weather reporting, as one example, is based on data from NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

And of course, during disasters, citizens who want to help or who are receiving that help, can talk to federal workers from FEMA, the National Guard, or any number of state and local agencies. Coordinators from those agencies, as well as citizens and nonprofit organizations, can use both the one-to-one communications of smartphones as well as one-to-many applications (like Twitter or SMS lists) or applications and mobile sites to streamline recovery efforts.

One trend to rule them all

In the coming weeks, as I explore the other four trends in this series, always-on connected devices will show themselves to undergird and enable all the other trends. It is easy to forget, in fact, just how fundamental these networked computers have become to our lives, even though they are, relatively speaking, very new additions to our technological toolboxes.

(Image via Stephen Finn/Shutterstock.com)

]]>

Five Emerging Innovation and Social Media Trends and Why They Matter Now

Gadi Ben-Yehuda, IBM Center for the Business of Government — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Subscribe:

> Newsletter

> Facebook

> LinkedIn

Social media and a renewed emphasis on innovation and DIY—exemplified by the Maker Movement and the rise of intrapreneurs—is transforming how government agencies operate and how they interact with citizens. Within the past four years, the number of networked computers that can connect to public or private sensors and feed into or draw from massive databases has exploded, both in terms of absolute numbers and relative to the population.

The effect of these converging factors is that governments at every level are finding new ways to improve three critical tasks:

Real-time data collection and analysis to drive decision-making
Efficient use of physical and communication networks
Managing citizen participation in agency activities

When each of the above actions are done well, mission-critical activities are developed thoughtfully and implemented effectively. These characteristics contribute to the creation of an effective government. While governments have long sought to execute policies through thoughtfully developed and effectively implemented programs, the current environment presents a new challenge for governments at the federal, state, and local level.

Awash in data and the sensors for gathering it; surrounded by expansive and expanding networks through which information and material can flow; and assisted by innumerable people connected to those networks, governments today must comprehend and command increasingly complex and dynamic systems that affect how they make and implement decisions. Further, citizens—especially during an emergency, as we have seen this week—expect to participate in these recovery efforts in meaningful ways. At the very least, they demand to remain informed about their conditions in a more transparent and immediate ways than ever before.

The following five emerging trends in innovation and social media will require government attention if agencies are to achieve the levels of responsiveness and effectiveness that Americans experience in their professional and personal lives and have come to expect from their government. Throughout the next few weeks, I'll examine each of these trends in detail and demonstrate how it influences data collection and analysis; challenges or enhances the efficient use of networks; and alters the citizen participation dynamic.

Always-on Connected Devices
Public and Private Networked Sensors
3D-Printing Plus
Advanced Sharing
Identity Management and the Collapsing Borders between Personal and Professional Life

The importance of social media and innovation has moved many agencies to create positions that focus on those tasks. Since the issuance of the Open Government Directive in 2009, many government leaders have sensed an intrinsic value in social media and innovation; it is my goal that throughout this series, I will demonstrate how these five trends have specific value both in emergencies and during normal operations when they are incorporated thoughtfully.

Further, these issues only gain currency during an emergency, like Hurricane Sandy. That's because in an emergency, many Americans feel a desire to become part of the relief team--to answer to "all hands on deck." At the same time, many people in the affected areas become recipients of that charity, often an unfamiliar role. And all the while, public- and private sector actors as well as nonprofit organization—like the Red Cross and the Humane Society—do their part to provide assistance. All of this occurs against a backdrop of dramatic and dynamic conditions in which lives may, quite literally, hang in the balance.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll explore how these trends will change how agencies operate both in routine and extraordinary circumstances.

Follow Excellence in Government on Twitter | Facebook | Google + | LinkedIn

(Image via Warakorn/Shutterstock.com)

]]>

Hurricane Sandy: How Government Uses Social Media for Disaster Response

Gadi Ben-Yehuda, IBM Center for the Business of Government — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 13:22:00 -0400

Learn how to prepare for Hurricane Sandy.

As Hurricane Sandy approaches, how are government agencies using social media to prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters?

The Federation of American Scientists posted on its Web site last year a CRS report, "Social Media and Disasters: Current Uses, Future Options, and Policy Considerations," by Bruce R. Lindsay. The report argues that social media may be used in a "systematic" way as "an emergency management tool.

Systematic usage might include:

"using the medium to conduct emergency communications and issue warnings";
"using social media to receive victim requests for assistance";
"monitoring user activities and postings to establish situational awareness"; and
"using uploaded images to create damage estimates, among others."

Of these four prospective uses, the first can be applied both to pre-event planning and inter-event communication. The second two can be understood as inter-event response activities, and the last for recovery efforts after the event has ended.

In each phase, agencies are turning to a different mix of tools to help them achieve their goals. Of course, all government agencies at every level should adhere to the roles and responsibilities laid out in the National Response Framework, which lays out the responsibilities of the federal and state governments as:

"Coordinating with private-sector and nongovernmental organizations involved in donations management and other recovery activities."
"Establishing Disaster Recovery Centers. Federal, State, tribal, local, voluntary, and nongovernmental organizations determine the need for and location of Disaster Recovery Centers."
"Coordinating with the private sector on restoration and recovery of CIKR [Critical Infrastructure and Key Resources]. Activities include working with owners/operators to ensure the restoration of critical services, including water, power, natural gas and petroleum, emergency communications, and healthcare."
"Coordinating mitigation grant programs to help communities reduce the potential impacts of future disasters. Activities include developing strategies to rebuild resilient communities."

Planning To prepare for a disaster, such as Hurricane Irene, agencies on the federal level (such as FEMA) and local level (such as Montgomery County, MD) have turned to social media to help prepare their residents. FEMA operates a Web site, Ready.gov, to which it links from its Facebook page and Blog. It also runs a Twitter feed, on which it gives safety tips in Spanish and English (helpfully tagged #saftytip and #consejo). Montgomery County has an SMS/email alert system that sends out messages in advance of an event telling residents what they can expect and giving links to pages on the County Web site with detailed information.

CRS's Lindsay also writes that "According to [FEMA] Administrator [Craig] Fugate, possible future applications include using smartphone-friendly mobile versions of FEMA websites to allow users to access information and request assistanceand using social media to facilitate communication between citizens, first responders, volunteer groups, the private sector, and all levels of government."

Responding Social media have dramatically changed how the government can respond in the dynamic environment of a disaster. Lindsay writes that social media can be used to:

alert emergency managers and officials to certain situations by monitoring the flow of information from different sources during an incident;
increase the public's ability to communicate with the government;
[allow members of the public to communicate with one another because] information can flow in multiple directions (known as backchannel communication); and
supplement to "911" emergency system lines.

Lindsay notes that a "study commissioned by the American Red Cross, younger people generally use social media more frequently than older segments of society. They are also more likely to request help through social media, believe agencies should monitor their postings, and have high expectations that agencies will respond quickly to their requests"

Recovering Social media has yet to play a major role in recovery efforts, Lindsay writes, but he also notes that "if FEMA adopted social media use for recovery, the agency could provide information concerning what types of individual assistance is available to individuals and households, including how to apply for assistance, announcing application deadlines and providing information and links to other agencies and organizations that provide recovery assistance, such as the American Red Cross, or Small Business Administration (SBA) disaster loans for homes and businesses."

The federal government's role in recovery, however, is usually circumscribed, and consists largely of coordinating and facilitating activities of local governments, nonprofits, and private-sector organizations, as noted in the excerpts from the National Response Framework (NRF), above.

There are groups that have robust social media tools to aid in recovery. One example is Hands-on-network, which, according to its Web site, "inspires, equips and mobilizes people to take action. . . ." The site offers visitors the ability to "start a project," which other people may then join.

In a slightly different vein, the National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster (National VOAD) describes itself as a "forum where organizations share knowledge and resources throughout the disaster cycle-preparation, response and recovery-to help disaster survivors and their communities." Their Web site features a map where people who are interested in volunteering can find local coordination centers all across the US.

Additionally, many other organizations allow people to assist government agencies both in routine maintenance and disaster recovery. An example is SeeClickFix, which some government agencies used to collect information about the damage from Hurricane Irene. The site ran a pilot program through which citizens could not only report issues, but to self-organize to address them directly.

As part of their coordination responsibilities, government agencies could partner with groups like these during disaster recovery activities.

Platforms
Perhaps the strongest case for using social media for disaster planning, response, and recovery, however, is that it is available even in the midst of almost any kind of event. Through home computers, people far from an event can keep track of the details and the latest information, and through mobile technologies, people affected by an event can communicate with first responders, each other, and their extended networks beyond the event's perimeter.

Learn more about preparing for Hurricane Sandy.

]]>

Smart Policies for Smartphones in the Workplace

Gadi Ben-Yehuda — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 12:00:00 -0400

New college graduates entering the workforce this year may have gotten their first iPhone in high school and their first email address in middle school. While the class of 2007 used laptops for research in their dorm rooms, this year's graduates could fact-check.

Surely, these new hires will have different expectations for the technology employers will provide and how it will be used.

Though many businesses have detailed use-policies for technology that they provide, few explicitly address the BYOD (bring your own device) activities that many employees – not just recent hires – practice.

Some private-sector organizations and government agencies restrict the Web sites that computers on their networks can visit. Facebook, YouTube, and even personal-email sites may fit under that rubric.

The reasons for that restriction include both a productivity rationale (i.e. employees should be doing their work, not checking up on their friends' activities) as well as a concern for data security, network integrity, bandwidth issues arising from data-intensive applications, or damage to the company's reputation through the misuse of social media. But the conversation around employees' use of their own technology cannot be grounded in an organization's control either of connectivity technology nor of the network it uses.

With respect to connectivity, IT departments have two interrelated functions: (1) to monitor network and end-user technologies so that they can (2) help troubleshoot, repair, or replace dysfunctional technology.

However, when employees come to the office with their own smartphones or tablets, they are using both a network and a device that are outside a company's traditional scope of control. Because of that critical difference, the tone and terms of a personal-technology use policy will be very different than the policy that governs the use of official technology.

Whether or not an organization embarks on a BYOD program, it must address four topics with specific regard to employees' use of their own connectivity technology (including both the network and the device). I'll explore each of these issues in depth in following articles:

Data security: Employees may not even understand how third parties access the data on their devices, much less how to choose applications that will not compromise the security of information they store. Policy guidelines should be tailored to individuals' job requirements, allowing for maximum flexibility while maintaining rigorous security.

Connecting personal technology to employer networks or devices: The functioning and integrity of an organization's network and devices is an even more critical concern than the security of employees' devices. To maintain adequate security, it is essential to have clear and consistently-applied rules governing whether and how employees can connect to an organization's network and devices.

Productivity: Reputation is not the only currency that can be squandered through online activity. Actual currency can be lost through lost time. It is important to tie the policies governing the use of technology to a larger discussion of productivity.

Acceptable online activity during work hours: Appropriately, it was a film about the founding of Facebook that popularized the line, "The internet is written in pen, not pencil." What employees say online, especially during business hours, may reflect on their employers, rightly or wrongly.

Graduates of class of 2012 have always been their own sysadmins.

Gadi Ben-Yehuda (Twitter: @GBYehuda) is Director for Innovation and Social Media at the IBM Center for the Business of Government.This is the first in a five-part series examining the issues that governments and organizations need to address in the absence of a BYOD policy, originally published by the IBM Center for the Business of Government.

(Image via Rangizzz/Shutterstock.com)

]]>