Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

3.23.10 | Booth is the author of “Peer Participation and Software: What Mozilla Has to Teach Government” (PDF), the eighth report in the MacArthur Series on Digital Media and Learning. Read a summary at Spotlight.

Spotlight: What first sparked your interest in Mozilla as a model of participatory government?

David Booth: I’m a middle school teacher and an adjunct professor at the University of San Francisco. My background is in literature and creative writing. So the production of open-source software as it relates to participatory government was at first a bit of stretch for me. Then I dug in.

My interest in the Mozilla Project came about for several different reasons. I’ve always had an interest in American civic life, especially at the local level, here in San Francisco. How do we as private citizens communicate with our elected representatives? To what extent does what we say count?

In my ramping up to writing about open source, I was reading a lot of books about civic life in California and the United States at large. One title that has stayed with me is Michael Schudson’s “The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life.” I found it very clear and beautifully written. It addresses (and also left me) with a very simple question: How are the means we’ve always had as private citizens to weigh in on governmental policymaking—voting, letter writing, signing petitions, attending meetings—updated by the internet? 

“Updated” is kind of a dull word, but it is the right word, in that all I was asking was: How best do we do it now? By sending emails and signing online petitions, I had on some level already been engaged in the political process for years. But I still had questions about organization.

My reading of history led me to the many books that had been written about the role of technology in increasing public participation in governmental decision-making in the 21st century. This was initially challenging for me because I was a late bloomer when it came to the internet. I persisted. My reading of early articles by Beth Simone Noveck—her writings would later culminate in her book “Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger, and Citizens More Powerful”—led me to some of the hacker classics published by O’Reilly Media, and to books about the influence of technology on democracy by such writers as Christopher M. Kelty. In all of this, I caught wind of the Mozilla Project and downloaded their Firefox browser.

My experience with the browser is the point of my report. To explore Mozilla.org is central to the question of what sparked my interest in their project as a model for governance. They invite participation from programmers and people like me, a veritable Luddite before the internet became inseparable from my daily life. The Mozilla Manifesto—another inspiration for my writing of this piece—identifies the internet as a public resource that should remain free and open. This is what I write about in my report.

Spotlight: What is the best example of this model in action now in re: crowdsourcing government?

DB: When I search for exciting projects online, I find it helpful to look at both the federal government and local governments. In writing about the Mozilla Project, I was focused on the potential for open source in the Obama administration. That said, cities like Portland, San Francisco, Austin, and New York (to name a few) seem a little more nimble than Congress or the administration when it comes to implementing crowdsourcing programs.

For an exciting example on the federal level, check out the Department of Veterans Affairs website, specifically the feedback forum. The VA is blogging with its community. Members post their ideas and have them ranked by the community at large, so that the most popular ideas rise to the top of the list. The idea of ranking is an important aspect of participation, but this practice is incomplete by itself when considering the Mozilla Project as a model. 

Successful crowdsourcing in government is a “pull” strategy, which is to say that the crowdsourcing organization must pose targeted, specific questions if it is going to entice project-specific experts and qualified enthusiasts to participate. This is the concept of self-selection. Private citizens qualify themselves to tackle a specific problem in government based on their expertise and their enthusiasm. 

We can see an example of this at the VA. In August of last year, the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) launched the VBA Innovation Initiative. Through a web-based “idea management tool,” the 19,000 employees of the VA were invited to give feedback on the problem of the backlog of veterans claims. How can the VA reduce the number of days it takes to process a claim? In the first two weeks, the website collected some 3,000 ideas and 6,000 comments from nearly 7,000 employees. Here, the specific problem was published by the VBA and the question was targeted.

There are a growing number of crowdsourcing programs in local government. The city of New York invites private citizens to share their ideas on how best to cope with rising property taxes. The City of Santa Cruz, Calif., is asking private citizens for ideas about how to coordinate public services with other local jurisdictions as a way of streamlining agencies whose services overlap with the work of other agencies. Seattle is asking its citizens about the expansion of light rail in the region. St. Louis is asking for feedback about the development and maintenance of an online crime incident map. There are many examples of crowdsouring in local government.

I was asked about the “best” example of government crowdsourcing. Any innovation dependent on decentralized participation requires experimentation and, as such, the understanding that any one project may fail. Because of this, in a sense the best example is the one that is being tried right now. Open source promotes experimentation. Open source tolerates failure.

Spotlight: You find that even Mozilla needs a chain of command to get things done efficiently. Does such a hierarchy and structure conflict with the spirit of participatory culture online?

DB: Look at Mozilla. On the level of code, the Firefox browser is modular in nature, meaning that the maintenance and improvement of the browser comprises many projects in the development of a single product. Each of these modules requires managers who are both experts and (final) decision makers. Most of these people are volunteers, but they have advanced to the position of “module owner” by way of a formal application process, the advocacy of their peers, and their visibility (reputations) in the community at large. 

In a sense, Module Owners are elected representatives. This is very much in line with our own democracy, which of course is representative.

When I look at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and its crowdsourcing program, Peer-to-Patent, it is hard for me to imagine that program supplanting the role of the patent examiner as a final decision maker. If I share information with the EPA about watersheds in the county where I live, I do so to aid the experts at the EPA. If I weigh in on the issue of taxation in my city, my concern is that my input will be taken seriously—and not whether or not I will be able to circumnavigate the work of elected officials.

Spotlight: What does this hierarchy look like? Is it a new government agency or a public/private hybrid organization?

DB: To my mind, this hierarchy is not necessarily a new government agency, as much as it is an established government agency (like the USPTO, The Department of Health and Human Services, the EPA, NASA, etc.) implementing contemporary technologies and online structures that invite and maximize the effectiveness of feedback from private citizens.

In the federal government, agencies become innovation centers that chunk their projects into modular enterprises. In the same way that the Firefox browser is modular, the work of a government agency is modular. To go back to my example of the VA, the problem of the claims backlog is a module, as is the related question of a veteran’s ability to view the status of his or her claim online.

A series of related projects is a modular service or product, where each module is managed by the employees of that agency, and may be a subject ripe for crowdsourcing. Feedback from private citizens is moderated by representatives in government. Every agency has its decision makers. Feedback is ranked by the private citizens that populate the community around any given service. The vetting of input by volunteers is a resource for the government official, who would otherwise be limited in her ability to organize so much feedback.

The idea of public/private hybrid organizations is an exciting one—and one that has been with us for a long time. An accurate history of public participation in the United States depends on the contributions of organizations from outside of government that we may call participation brokers—organizations that act as intermediaries between government and its constituencies.

With regard to the specific issue of transparency, there are many examples of such brokers. The League of Women Voters, C-SPAN, The Sunlight Foundation, and Knowledge As Power (KAP) each aim to increase civic engagement through citizen education. Their collective purpose is so obvious and so aligned with government’s supposed responsibility of transparency that one would think they were the innovations of government. But they were not; they came from outside government.

With regard to crowdsourcing, public/private collaborations can be quite willful. Peer-to-Patent was brokered by New York Law School, an NGO that built and manages peertopatent.org, the website that enables the USPTO to enlist private citizens (to form small, task-oriented groups) to participate in the evaluation of patent applications.

Spotlight: Will this be a generational thing? Will younger people—more attuned to collaboration and participatory learning—take to this more quickly than the older generation?

DB: Clearly, people who are more attuned to collaboration and participatory learning will embrace online participation as almost second nature. Younger people will have formed the habit of seeking information online. The use of social networking tools, which are part of the daily lives of so many young people, is part and parcel with the online tools that make participation and collaboration possible.

That said, participation seems to be as driven by issues as it is by a wherewithal with technology. I may be more interested in responding to a problem about how to care for my aging parents than someone would be who is 10 years younger than I am. Homeowners have a vested interest in property taxes or rules about the conversion of hotels into condominiums. The concerns of veterans are not relegated to young soldiers. I don’t assume that the people who submit their feedback to questions about governmental policymaking are of a certain generation. The beauty of all of this is that participation is subject-specific.

If it is in any way a generational thing, this points to of a larger challenge to our democracy—the so-called digital divide. Why do some people not have access to the internet or to broadband? The answers to this question have a lot to do with demographics—with age and class, and with race (where issues of race and class are interrelated). I actually think that as innovation centers, government agencies would be well served by addressing some of these tough questions, especially as access to their services go increasingly online.