{"id":329,"date":"2008-11-06T17:14:34","date_gmt":"2008-11-06T22:14:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/?p=329"},"modified":"2008-11-06T17:14:34","modified_gmt":"2008-11-06T22:14:34","slug":"arent-we-the-change-weve-been-waiting-for","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/2008\/11\/06\/arent-we-the-change-weve-been-waiting-for\/","title":{"rendered":"Aren&#8217;t We the Change We&#8217;ve Been Waiting For?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~r\/techpres\/~3\/444666844\/transition_site_echoes_campaign_pledge_of_open_government_by_the_people\">TechPresident<\/a> posts on <a href=\"http:\/\/change.gov\/\">change.gov<\/a>, a website the Obama campaign has created to encourage a more open, participatory governing process.  The site contains the standard fare, like a &#8220;share your vision&#8221; site where you can post your vision for the country.  The site, of course, also has a blog where I&#8217;m sure the president-elect will comment on the latest spat on <em>The View<\/em> or who Miley Cyrus is dating.<\/p>\n<p>What concerns me about this site is that it is set up to provide the appearance of a participatory culture without much of an infrastructure to deliver on that promise.  How do you go from collecting &#8220;visions for America&#8221; from random posters to leveraging the &#8220;wisdom of the crowds&#8221; to produce better policy outcomes?  There are innovative ways to get citizens directly involved.  One exciting example of this is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.publicmarkup.org\/\">publicmarkup.org<\/a>, a wiki site that allows users to markup legislation as if they were committee members.  This process of self-aggregating public input is more likely to lead to direct citizen input.  Another interesting experiment is the <a href=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~r\/techpres\/~3\/401071303\/future_melbourne_can_a_civic_wiki_redistribute_power_or_is_it_one_more_place_to_vent\">Future Melbourne<\/a> project (HT: TechPresident).  Where citizens were asked to contribute input to the Australian city&#8217;s master plan directly by making changes to it on a wiki.<\/p>\n<p>These projects do not guarantee direct citizen input, but if the campaign is serious about being more collaborative in its governance, and there&#8217;s no reason to suggest that they aren&#8217;t, there are more sophisticated tools they could be using to leverage the power of citizen input.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>TechPresident posts on change.gov, a website the Obama campaign has created to encourage a more open, participatory governing process. The site contains the standard fare, like a &#8220;share your vision&#8221; site where you can post your vision for the country. The site, of course, also has a blog where I&#8217;m sure the president-elect will comment [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":129,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/129"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=329"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":330,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329\/revisions\/330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}