I was thankful to have showed up in my tux tie good shirt and pants, since the crowd of about 75 to maybe 100 people were a mix of Liberian Archivists, Lawyers/Politicians and government business partners. It was a day of buzz words with “social media”, “tweeting”, “the cloud” and “web two zero” being almost uttered in every breath. David S. Ferriero head of the national archives spoke first and way generally impressive, actually mentioning that government could benefit from using more Open Source. During question and answer session issues of privacy were raised but not sufficiently addressed. The big insight that he put forward was that when he was the head of the NYC library he observed that only 50% or less of NYC patrons had internet access at home while 100% had cell phones. Thus he understood that government archives need to be accessible from a mobile media platform that most if not all people use.
With this political crowd “open” means “Some level of transparency” or “communicate with our constituents” not in the same sense that we view open. This was clear when the panel on “Meaning of Open Government in the Digital Age” turned in to just a self promoting talking head session except for Michael Karasick from IBM who kept to the topic unlike the others. What annoyed me was when the topic of Open Source was raised, Stuart McKee a VP level person from Microsoft candidly recalled the story about how he donated source code to a government project, but that it did require that it was deployed on the MS platform and it also required MS Excel to run. Beth Simone who is in the Obama administration, Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government had an interesting speech. It was more motivational then technical borderline political. The talk on “Citizens Expectations for Access in the Digital Age” was presented by the best and brightest speakers. It took about 10 minutes to introduce the three listing all the massive achievements in the field of computer science. They like most academics seemed to show that they live in there own world and at some points seemed to poke fun at us common folk. I would say they must have been just pandering to the audience, since they never mentioned citizens but concentrated on what the policy maker topics. They actually picked my question, “Will there be equal access for all platforms or will just a select few be supported” but promptly made fun of it. The answer is since it's all in the browser what does it matter? Again they just did not get the point, since my question was asked over and over, but only lip service was given. Bottom line is that State and Federal government is starting to get the Social Media, Web 2.0 thing, but big business partners are also there to guide them in deploying the technology. What concerns me is that will the FLOSS community be left out and not have equal access as the focus seems to be to support Windows and Apple alone. Currently this may not be an issue since the Linux community currently has the tools necessary to access government and interact. The issue at stake is will I need to own an iPhone to access government sponsored applications? Sounds crazy right? Well one of the speakers from NYC technology office was proud to gush on and on about 3 to 4 iPhone applications that are extensions of data the parks department collects and exposes ( the data is accessible via the web but only as web services not as a web page). I'm sorry that I did not cover all the Liberian discussion, but this is not a library list. On the plus side was the audience effectively communicated privacy and security concerns. I can say “they get it” when it comes to basic privacy and security, that part was reaffirming. Also the fact that at the federal level the want to expose data and archive in a way that can be consumed by our community as in web API's etc. Synopsis: - Government seems to get that there is social media and people use there cell phones to access it. - Government gets that there needs for privacy and security ( implementing it is a different thing ) - Government is deploying on the face book and twitter platforms - Government wants more interaction with the citizen and for the citizen to be a consumer of the data the government has collected to build on. - Unfortunately there just is no support for diversity of platforms, I did not see any speakers understand that there was anything other then Windows and the Smart Phone.
_______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium Apr 7 - Nagios May 5 - Android Jun 2 - June 2010 Meeting
