The Three Forces of Positive, Leaky Government

At @Gov20LA this weekend, Wayne Burke (@WMBurke) hosted a session on "Technology for Citizen Engagement". After some lively discussion, I noticed what seem to be three distinct forces promoting Leaky Government:

1. Government Open Source technologies to reach and provide services for citizens, e.g., web services.
2. Citizens using technology to access government, e.g., web sites and mobile app clearing houses for government records, services, or other contacts.
3. Corporations creating value using openly published local government data in innovative ways, e.g., pothole data and other concrete (pardon) civic issues.

These three categories are broad and overlapping. However, the discussion did tend to polarize due to the separate categories until we broke into informal groups.

Leaky Government

These three poles of categorization cover the border of access to government by citizen. Government Open Source (#1) aims to mobilize government services from government to citizens. Citizens using technology (#2) aims to mobilize access to government services from the citizen side of the divide. Corporate data services (#3) exist along the border to provide new value from existing open data from government to citizen. All three of these approaches increase the leakiness (in a good way) of government service, access, and value to the citizen. I believe what we are seeing is a progression of Leaky Government: the usual control of government is leaking into the citizens hands. Each of the three categories provides an important role to increase government service, access, and value. And each is governed by a different entity: government, citizens, and (largely) innovative startups (e.g., SeeClickFix.com).

@Gov20LA: The Grundfest Manifesto: Start With Clear, Jargon-Free Communication

@Gov20LA_: In response to Mark's Cheeky Posterous blog critique of communications session advice.

I look at the Bill Grundfest (@BillGrundfest) & Alan Silverberg (@You2Gov) recommendation to drop jargon and speak plainly as inspired for Gov20LA. Any activist can lose their message in jargon. Often it takes many attempts to create a workable message. Then it can take many attempts to cross the chasm to the customers who need the message most, e.g., the electorate. If information and communication were perfect, we would not have entire industries based on them.

So I see the Grundfest Manifesto more as practical insight from his TV and screenwriting experience: first, make an elevator pitch.

I never heard Grundfest mention "elevator pitch" (probably because it's screenwriting jargon), but the pitch is what it takes to get in the door in screenwriting which has some of the same cutthroat and passive aggressive qualities as politics: no producer wants to waste their own time or say No to any screenwriter, but neither does any producer want to miss a good thing. So screenwriters need to give producers a quick one-liner taste (elevator pitch) of their story. The jargon-free elevator pitch is the door opener.

So I believe producer Bill Grundfest and Gov20LA organizer Alan Silverberg are just being realistic about communication in screenwriting... and politics. Drop the jargon, and find the elevator pitch for Gov20(LA). Define Gov20 in language that resonates. Jargon-free is an important and inspired message to help define the movement now, rather than later when poor communication habits could make any jargon harder to shrug off.