Putting the Future of eGovernment in Context

The first phase of eGovernment was all about providing online access to basic transactional capabilities--renewing car tabs or paying a license fee. Today the big buzz is about making public data available in machine-readable formats so government, private and NGO developers can build useful apps for mobile devices. But even as eGov 2.0 is gaining momentum, some tech policy activists are looking beyond the basic transaction and app model to the kind of innovation that can improve the function of government at its most essential level: the ability of elected representatives to respond to constituents, and for citizens to make their voices heard.

Sarah Schacht, executive director of the Seattle-based nonprofit Knowledge As Power, has been working closely with public officials and private IT services companies to increase the reach and depth of the city's eGovernment systems. Earlier this week, she and her team were recognized by the Mayor and the city's CIO for a usability study that helped streamline the city's data portal, data.seattle.gov.

Schacht is pleased that the city is following through with commitments around data disclosure and transparency, but believes that the real potential of eGovernment for citizen engagement won't be realized until government bodies and administrative agencies make their documents available in searchable format, not just the raw data. Data, she says, is largely impersonal and uncontroversial, whereas documents reveal the actual actions of legislators and bureaucrats that impact the lives of citizens.

Currently, government policies and willingness to share information contained in documents lags the technology. There are international standards for machine-readable documents emerging in Europe and Africa, and organizations like Knowledge As Power are trying to promote their adoption in the U.S.

Schacht believes that government needs the human element to be effective and responsive. Earlier in her career, she led a research study to identify the best ways for citizens to break through the clutter of mass communications and actually engage their representatives on the issues that matter to them. Legislators, she said, really do want to make a difference, but it is hard for them to identify and respond to their constituents when they are inundated with a barrage of mass-mailings, institutionally-generated form-letters, and boilerplate talking points repeated from the media.

"What really gets through to a representative is a personal story, told in a couple of paragraphs," she said. The problem is that most elected officials are working with old email systems that lack the kind of capabilities to sort the personal communications from the blasts and robo-mails generated by advocacy organizations.

The technologies do exist to allow representatives and citizens to see each other more clearly through the haze of mail and documents, but they are not the kind of investments that most governments are making. They fall more in the areas of semantic search, data mining, markup and tagging -- the sorts of applications that would make it easy to extract word clouds from 800 pages worth of environmental testimony or help legislative aides hear the authentic voices of constituents buried in the "add your personal story here" sections of pressure-group form letters.

Today, all the creative energy and dollars are going into ideas for presenting public data in new and interesting ways--a necessary step, but not in itself sufficient to bring the real promise of representative government into the 21^st century. In the meantime, organizations like Knowledge As Power are quietly pushing ahead with the eGov3.0 agenda of making digital democracy a reality.