Government 2.0

Here’s some more great stuff on the idea of the using web 2.0 principles (e.g. user generated content and openness) to strengthen democracy and improve public policy.

Mark Surman is the head of the Mozilla Foundation (MoFo) and is really at the forefront of pushing innovative use of Web 2.0 and the principles of openness, in Canada. He recently spoke at the City of Toronto’s 2.0 Web Summit, in front of the mayor and other city councillors, on how we can turn Toronto into a city that engages its citizenry in these types of projects. He even managed to convince the mayor to commit to some of these ideas on the spot!

Check out his slide-show here (with accompanying audio):

Great examples include:

Fix My Street: Individuals go on the website to point out problems around the city. Convenient way for citizens to express their opinions and concerns about certain neighbourhoods. Low cost way for the city officials to find out what needs to be done.

They Work For You: A British site that let’s you see how your MP has voted and what they’ve said in Parliament. Great use of technology to improve transparency and accountability. All this information is publicly available, we just need a platform to access it from. How\’d They Vote is the Canadian equivalent, but it’s not quite as easy to navigate.

Apps for Democracy: This is a really cool project started by some forward thinking government officials in Washington D.C. The city released a bunch of data and challenged individuals and companies to use it, offering $20k in prizes to the best web applications, widgets, Google-mashups, etc. Cool things that came out of this include:

Park-it-DC- a Google Maps mashup that let’s you figure out where to park in the city.

Carpool Mashup- which let’s you live a little bit greener by finding out who’s carpooling where.

Ilive.at-that allows you to enter and address and see everything about a specific neighbourhood- from the location of bars to local crime statistics.

Check out all the winners here.

In ending his speech, Mark challenged the city in three ways:

1. Open our data. transit. library catalogues. community centre schedules. maps. 311. expose it all so the people of Toronto can use it to make a better city. do it now.
2. Crowdsource info gathering that helps the city. somebody would have FixMyStreet.to up and running in a week if the Mayor promised to listen. encourage it.
3. Ask for help creating a city that thinks like the web. copy Washington, DC’s contest strategy. launch it at BarCamp.

Anyways, I think Toronto is on the cusp of becoming one of these cool open cities. There’s already been some movement towards stuff like this, particularly with Transit camp, which collected a group of local “transit enthusiasts” to talk about how to improve the TTC in Toronto. The beauty of all of this is how little effort the city has to put in to receive tangible results. This is public consultation at its finest- passionate users of the system volunteering their time to make things happen.

The important thing here is to realize that the you don’t need to be a tech-whiz to get involved in this stuff. Technology just provides the platform so that everyone can be involved if they want to be. The principles of web 2.0 and openness are pretty transformative when we think about how they might be applied to other areas of our life.