Results tagged “expertlabs”

This week, many of the web's most popular sites shuttered their doors in protest of SOPA and PIPA, the pair of bills that had been winding their way through congress with the stated intent of fighting piracy and the unfortunate side effect of fundamentally threatening the web. After this concerted outburst of activism from the web community (which even extended to a first-of-its-kind offline protest by the New York Tech Meetup community), the sponsors of the bills have withdrawn their support, many undecided or former supporters of the bills changed their positions and in all, people who love the web are claiming a victory. Hooray! And it's still not too late to express your displeasure to your elected officials if you'd like to make sure they know how you feel.

But. There are a number of unanswered questions about this victory, and some important questions about what it means going forward, not just for web freedom, but for the technology community as a driver of public policy and legislation. We should start, as always with a brief look back.

Blogs Were Born To Do This

The entire modern social web was born from the blogging movement, and social activism has been part of the blogging medium since its birth. But ironically, the most common form of protest for our young medium has been self-censorship.

• One of the inarguable pioneers of blogging, Dave Winer, started his first blog as the news page of the 24 Hours of Democracy campaign. What was that about? Well, it should sound familiar — the leading voices and sites of the social web spent 24 hours protesting onerous potential legislation that they thought would significantly curtail free speech on the web. SOPA? Nope! It was the Communications Decency Act (CDA) which unified the nascent personal web sixteen years ago, and the protests that accompanied the 24 Hours of Democracy included the Blue Ribbon Campaign and the Black World Wide Web shutdown, which climaxed in an estimated 7% of all active U.S. websites changing their background colors to black in protest.
• Just a few years later, my late, lamented friend Brad Graham, who coined the word "blogosphere", also created one of the first blog-specific protests when he launched the Day Without Weblogs in 1999 in observance of World AIDS Day. Patterned after the Day Without Art, and named "Day Without Weblogs" because the word "blog" was not yet in common usage, this moving demonstration was an annual tradition for many years (eventually evolving into a more information-oriented project called "Link and Think") and carried on the social web's deep tradition of drawing attention by shutting itself down and forcing users to confront a black page. Sadly, it seems much of the early record of Day Without Weblogs has been lost since Brad's untimely passing.

Just at a cultural level, it's fascinating to me that our medium finds that the most powerful thing we can do is deny the rest of the world our voices and creations, and that this almost invariably takes the form of a black screen confronting unsuspecting, perhaps uneducated, and certainly confused non-geeky users.

How It Works

Does this form of protest work? It's hard to say — most of the CDA protests from 1996 took place after the law had already been signed. But we have some feedback on the more contemporary protests:

Seems blogosphere has succeeded in terrorizing many senators and congressmenwho previously committed.Politicians all the same.

— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) January 18, 2012

When Rupert Murdoch dog whistles "terror" about a topic, he's saying he wants some people illegally detained and tortured. So that's a good sign we had some impact.

This is a particularly stunning turn for a few reasons. First, as Bijan Sabet noted, congress members had considered SOPA and PIPA a done deal. Not "likely to pass", but "such a sure thing that I should sponsor it, even though I haven't read it and don't really understand it, so I can have my name on successful legislation".

This is especially remarkable because the tech industry sucks at 1. understanding how legislation happens 2. how legislation can impact their businesses and 3. actually responding to these issues before it's too late. John Battelle discusses this in depth, explaining "[T]he fight isn’t over. In fact, it’s only starting. And the folks who basically wrote SOPA/PIPA are pissed, and they plan on using the same tactics they always have when they don’t get what they want: They’re throwing around their money." Marco Arment continues, correctly, by stating that SOPA will keep coming back, over and over, in some form until it passes. Does that doom us to recurring bouts of black page syndrome? Maybe not.

The Infrastructure

One of the most unheralded successes of this week's SOPA and PIPA victories was the role that pioneering open government and government transparency efforts had in enabling the protests to take off. Just a few weeks ago, few online had heard of either bill, almost no one could understand their potential impact, and even fewer had read the actual bills.

But thanks to efforts like OpenCongress, which routinely creates valuable resources like this look at the money behind SOPA through its support from the Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation, the web was able to see who was helping pay for the law. Giving that information a place to live on the web was a fundamental step that enabled powerful demonstrations like the GoDaddy protests in which thousands of users moved their business from the company in protest of its support of SOPA. (I have some misgivings about the tactics and effectiveness of that particular protest, but overall as a first example of the organization and focus of those who would object to SOPA, it was inarguably powerful.)

Similarly, the Center for Responsive Politics powered detailed look at lobbying dollars which drove the bills, which organizations like MapLight could use to create a clear picture of how SOPA and PIPA were purchased.

Of course, I've got a dog in this fight; Expert Labs was founded specifically to conduct experiments about getting people on social networks to organize in ways that would allow them to impact policy makers. And we had some amazing successes in unexpected ways — Clay Johnson on our team educated hundreds of thousands of people on how techies can effectively engage with the policy-making processin his piece "Dear Internet: It's No Longer OK to Not Know How Congress Works". And despite her well-earned misgivings about having a disproportionately large social network, Gina Trapani demonstrated the best potential of that network with a result that is best illustrated in a single tweet:

Thx for your input @ginatrapani on #sopa - you, and many others, have asked for our views and we've responded - bit.ly/y8ihzu

— Aneesh Chopra (@aneeshchopra) January 14, 2012

That's the CTO of the United States, Aneesh Chopra, directly thanking Gina for her honest, forceful feedback about SOPA and linking to an official White House response to a petition asking for a veto of SOPA. Despite the well-intentioned skepticism of folks like Felix Salmon in response to my admittedly optimistic visions of "#OccupyWhiteHouse", the idea that this sort of direct online feedback could have a meaningful impact was validated by none other than the Director of the White House's Office of Public Engagement:

Ever wondered if White House is taking @WeThePeople seriously? We are. This #SOPA petition made a big difference bit.ly/wWW82s

— Jon Carson (@JonCarson44) January 14, 2012

Still, amidst the web-nerd triumphalism, it's worth noting: This isn't how I thought it would work. While I've always believed in the potential of the open government and transparency movements, I predicated our work at Expert Labs on the idea that the type of large-scale, effective, (relatively) well-organized demonstrations we've seen against SOPA and PIPA online were unlikely to happen. I was, perhaps, too willing to assume that change would only happen through more traditional channels. While we've made an amazing tech platform in ThinkUp, I was trying to push it to conform to the lobbyists-and-big-dollars world of D.C. today, and this week's victory gives me hope that I was wonderfully, delightfully, completely wrong about that decision.

So Now What?

What we've gotten so far, with our SOPA and PIPA demonstrations, is a first, rough beta test of the power to impact policy online. What we don't have is the way to use this power effectively. We are missing a few key things:

1. The ability to organize for issues that aren't life-or-death for big tech players
2. The ability to clearly and quickly form communities of interest around particular issues that are complicated
3. The desire and willingness to stand up for issues that aren't simply about the self-interest or self-preservation of technology experts

This final point is my biggest concern and greatest wish for our industry. We now know we have the power bend the law to our will, and to make legislators respect our values, if we can just coordinate our efforts and focus our attentions. But there are many issues which have to do with the soul of our nation that may not galvanize a redditor who's only concerned with legislation that might interfere with watching movies online.

We have discovered that our biggest companies, our most popular sites, or most passionate communities on the web are willing to stand up and have a powerful impact on the laws that govern our country. But we're on the fence. Google's spending somewhere around $10 million dollars on old-fashioned lobbying this year. Maybe that's useful — as Clay said, we need to know how the old system works before we can reform it.

But maybe we should be darkening our sites for deeper, more profound issues. We have the ability to affect marriage equality and reproductive freedom and immigration reform and many other issues where those of us who love technology tend to have similar values regardless of which of the traditional political parties we list on our voter registrations.

This is the power we were promised the web would give us. Let's use it.

Today, ThinkUp is out of beta and available for free. If you have a presence on Twitter, Facebook or Google+ and know how to run a PHP/MySQL app on a web server (or on EC2), you should install it and get it started now. ThinkUp will collect all of your activity across these networks and give you great analytics, search and archiving for them.

I'm incredibly excited about the launch of this app, of course. Gina Trapani has been shepherding ThinkUp's evolution through 25 releases, three names and five dozen contributors over the past two years, ably assisted by a phenomenal community that I'm proud to be part of. ThinkUp is also the flagship platform for our efforts at Expert Labs, enabling some incredibly powerful new ways of connecting citizens and their government, which we'll be talking about soon.

But today, ThinkUp's launch matters to me because of what it represents: The web we were promised we would have. The web that I fell in love with, and that has given me so much. A web that we can hack, and tweak, and own.

Where We Stand Today

1. Picture everything you've ever written on Twitter
2. Now add in every photo or status update you've ever posted on Facebook
3. Add to that every message you've ever sent on Google+
4. And then include every response you've ever gotten from anyone to any of those messages

Now understand: The companies behind these networks can, and someday will, destroy all of those moments. Delete them from the record. Forever. With no advance notice. I want you to understand, and really truly believe that. Read the terms of service yourself if you don't think they can do that.

Sand Castles

Why would I ascribe such awful behavior to the nice people who run these social networks? Because history shows us that it happens. Over and over and over. The clips uploaded to Google Videos, the sites published to Geocities, the entire relationships that began and ended on Friendster: They're all gone. Some kind-hearted folks are trying to archive those things for the record, and that's wonderful. But what about the record for your life, a private version that's not for sharing with the world, but that preserves the information or ideas or moments that you care about?

I'm not saying this destruction is always deliberate or malicious. I'm friends with a lot of nice folks at the companies that run our big social networks. I think they mean well, and when they can, they do the right thing. And most people wouldn't be that upset if their online presence were destroyed.

Beyond the Numbers

But whether everyone cares about the risks of today's social networks isn't the point: Vast and important parts of our culture are bring destroyed in the digital domain. ThinkUp can't help everybody, yet. But it should help anyone with more than 1000 connections on their network, or anybody who cares about what they're creating online.

Right now the only way we have to show that we care about our networks is to quantify them, and assign metrics that aren't as meaningful as the conversations they're meant to represent.

Of course ThinkUp has great analytics — but it does not, and will never display some arbitrary score to your profile. We want you to better understand who you're talking to on your networks, and to better share what you discover by letting you publish a pretty, embeddable version of your Twitter or Facebook conversations.

And while those features are unique and valuable, simply being able to look back and search for the things my friends and I have shared on our networks is the driving force for enabling all of the amazing things that are built, or will be built, on top of ThinkUp.

In ThinkUp, I can find the message where I announced my son's birth. On Twitter or Facebook, I can't.

I'm Old-Fashioned

Caring about these issues on the web isn't, frankly, very fashionable in the tech world right now. Building apps that are open source, decentralized, and require the pain in the ass of installing a PHP app on your own web server is certainly not in vogue. But, being built by a non-profit and a community of volunteers, we have the luxury of creating something valuable even if it's not what's currently in favor amongst the Techmeme set. Plus, we've got great hackers adding all kinds of cool features every day.

This isn't just some nostalgia trip for me, though. I take a long view of the tech industry and of the web as a medium. I know we swing from centralized to decentralized and back again. If everyone's headed to one giant centralized network, then somebody oughtta be looking the other way, too.

But we're not making some shiny, loud app that's designed to get TechCrunch coverage. What Gina started two years ago, what Expert Labs has been proud to support, what an incredibly enthusiastic (and, importantly, extremely diverse) community has been moved by is that ThinkUp is software with a purpose. It is technology with a set of values.

ThinkUp's values are simple:

• Meaningful conversations are important
• People's self-expression is valuable and worth preserving
• Technology meets its highest use when in service of people's desires instead of big institutions
• Well-built networks can empower people in a way that counters social imbalances
• Good tools can impact culture in a positive way

Get Going

I know there's still some of us out there that believe in these ideas. If you do, block out some time during your lunch hour or this weekend, and install the app. Don't have time? Run it on your EC2 account; It'll only take about 5 minutes — as easy as when you first set up WordPress. You'll find some bugs and some rough spots, and we'll be eager to see both your bug reports and your code over at Github.

• If you'd like to see a ton of screenshots in an app walkthrough, Gina Trapani's post has you covered.
• For the official announcement of ThinkUp 1.0, hit the Expert Labs blog where there are complete details and a changelog.
• And do take a look at ReadWriteWeb's review, one of the best of the early looks at the app, which opens by calling ThinkUp "the social media management tool that matters most".

The conventional wisdom is that the American people are too cynical, too jaded, and too burnt out on politics to ever engage with the actual governance of our country by getting involved in discussions of policy. I don't believe that's true; I think if it's made engaging and accessible enough, ordinary citizens will directly engage in how policy is made, and improve its workings through their insights and expertise.

The evidence of the passion of ordinary citizens is ample; people have been taking this energy to the streets, for a few years in the form of Tea Party demonstrations, and more recently through the various Occupy movements that have branched off of #OccupyWallStreet.

But what about making substantive changes in actual regulations happen? Can we leap from posters and platitudes to policy changes? The answer is absolutely yes. And the reason is obvious: Networks powered by technology are having the same transformative effect on the hierarchical, slow institutions of government and public policy that they had on media, communications and information. This was the point of my post a few days ago on our Expert Labs blog:

[T]he White House announced a program to make it easier for Americans who have student loans to meet their monthly payments on those loans; Named "Pay As You Earn", the program promises to offer 1.6 million Americans a bit of a financial respite on their loan service, and to put a few more dollars in their pockets every month.

But what was much less heralded in the story was exactly how this policy change came to be: An ordinary New Yorker had proposed some form of student loan amnesty on the White House's "We the People" petition platform.

Because traditional media cycles understandably focus on the changes to the school loan policy, it's been easy to overlook that the mechanism of that policy change is as interesting as its substance. In short, something remarkable happened here:

1. A regular citizen, not a lobbyist or politician or CEO, made a suggestion of a smart idea on the White House's petition website.
2. That idea got promoted through social media, filtering its way out through Twitter and blogs and Facebook.
3. One month later the administration endorsed a variation of the idea, making it actual policy and helping over a million and a half Americans to have more money in their pocket at the end of the month.

Some Don't Want To Believe

Every time these milestones and successes are achieved, skeptics want to scoff. "Maybe this guy's a plant!" "They're only gonna accept ideas they already agree with." "I bet most of the ideas are stupid." "Why would they really listen to us?"

In this example, we see refutations of many of these objections. Judging by the phrasing (and the fact that no media circus has descended on him), the school loan forgiveness proposal seems to have been submitted by an honest, well-intentioned Staten Island man with no political portfolio. We certainly can't expect that any administration is going to enact policies that go directly against its stated goals (c.f. "elections have consequences") but looking at the other petitions that the White House has received reveals some heartening examples.

For every cockamamie "tell us about the space aliens!" petition or every obligatory "legalize it!" appeal, there are detailed, thoughtful, respectful responses. The White House can't be delighted that those were among the first policy conversations to cross the threshold of earning a response from a policy maker, but there they are.

And this is the key thing: These conversations are visible.

I'm no pollyanna about the Magical Power of Transparency, but I know it has an important role to play in fixing the ways that government is broken. Systems that require policy makers to be accountable even on uncomfortable or inconvenient topics, simply due to the prominence of those conversations, can be very effective at raising the priority of those topics.

This is the power of the network. Not that the White House is going to say yes to every petition that pops up on the site. But that they have to say something about every petition that reaches critical mass. Sure, the cynics have their petitions too. I hope they succeed; If that pointless, spiteful petition earns a response, maybe a few of the people who have cynically endorsed it will have to confront the fact that they were asked for their biggest, most important ideas, and instead chose to invest their time in something that helps no one.

What's Next

There's still a lot of work to do here. The White House, in all reality, doesn't have that much power. There's two other pretty serious branches of government, one of which is often batshit insane and the other of which is fairly unaccountable to things like public opinion. Even within the executive branch, none of the other federal agencies have the public profile of the White House, and few have anywhere near the resources to engage in petitions and social media the way the innovators at the White House New Media team have. (As should be obvious, we're hoping to help with that a bit at Expert Labs.)

But a few clear first steps show that there's potential for something truly meaningful to change about the way we make policy more responsive to ordinary citizens.

Groups like #OccupyWallStreet and the Tea Party and the many other issue-focused organizations whose messages and memberships don't map neatly to our major political parties have an opportunity to route around broken, corrupt systems by making their platforms visible on systems like We the People and the many others that will doubtless follow in its footsteps. Just as importantly, these can be models for independent versions of the same documents of accountability to community, to fill in the absences of similar systems to make state and local governments, and someday institutions like businesses or other organizations, accountable to citizens as well.

I have nothing against marching in the streets. I am inspired by, and admiring of, those who have the passion to do so. But I prefer a more modern version direct action to today's general demonstrations. I hope those who are moved enough to march can be focused enough to build networks that sustain their ideals, extend beyond the boundaries of the communities they already belong to, and connect together unexpected or unanticipated allies in the name of making policy bend to the will of the people who these institutions currently find it too easy to overlook.

This morning, I was extraordinarily excited to get to witness Mayor Bloomberg and our city's new Chief Digital Office Rachel Sterne unveil New York City's "Road Map for the Digital City". It's an extraordinary document, and as someone who loves the web, civic engagement, public infrastructure and New York City, it feels like a momentous accomplishment, even though it marks the beginning of a years-long process, not just the end of a months-long one.

But the single biggest lesson I got from the 65-page, 11.8mb PDF is a simple one: The greatest city in the world can take shared public spaces online as seriously as it takes its public spaces in the physical world.

As you'd expect, there's a press release about the Digital Road Map, but more reassuringly, the document demonstrates the idea of the web as public space throughout, making the idea explicit on page 43:

Maintaining digital ‘public spaces’ such as nyc.gov or 311 Online is equally important as maintaining physical public spaces like Prospect Park or the New York Public Library. Both digital and physical should be welcoming, accessible, cared for, and easy to navigate. Both must provide value to New Yorkers. And for both, regular stewardship and improvements are a necessity.

Why is that declaration so promising? Well for me, it goes back to the post that I wrote last September 11th:

[T]his is, in many ways, a golden era in the entire history of New York City.

Over the four hundred years it's taken for this city to evolve into its current form, there's never been a better time to walk down the street. ... {I]n less than half a decade, the public park where I got married went from a place where I often felt uncomfortable at noontime to one that I wanted to bring together my closest friends and family on the best day of my life. We still struggle with radical inequality, but more people interact with people from broadly different social classes and cultures every day in New York than any other place in America, and possibly than in any other city in the world.

And all of this happened, by choice, in the years since the attacks. We didn't withdraw, we didn't say "we can't build bike lanes because the terrorists will use them", we didn't abandon our subways en masse because we feared some theoretical attack that might strike us there. It could just have easily gone the other way. Many predicted an exodus from New York City after the attacks, with our once-proud citizenry retreating to the theoretically-safer environs of smaller towns or lesser cities. It didn't happen. ...

We have not conceded our public places or our shared spaces where we marry and play, eat and dance, walk and shop, or just sit quietly by ourselves. Maybe it seems like a small thing, but it's a beautiful and meaningful and brave thing, and I am nothing but thankful for those who've made the choices to enable this evolution of our city. And I hope that making New York more livable for those of us who are here is an appropriate, albeit humble, tribute.

So the New York City you see today is the safest, most vibrant, most livable version of the city that's ever existed because we've invested in making it so. And at a time when the web is in danger from an array of forces that match the social pressures that nearly tore New York City apart in the 70s, seeing a city seriously invest in treating the web as a valuable public space for its citizens is both provocative and inspiring.

What's the plan?

Now, any plan of this scale is necessarily going to have some vague parts. But a few highlights really jumped out at me:

• New York City hears loud and clear the cries from the entrepreneurial and startup communities for more engineering talent being needed in the city. While it's an area we're focusing on with the NY Tech Meetup community, I have to admit it's a thrill to see the NYC Economic Development Corporation also addressing the issue with their challenge to bring more engineering talent to New York by establishing new engineering schools in conjunction with top universities. (And announced on their Tumblr blog, no less!) As Andrew Rasiej said to me after today's event, New York City startups have an advantage in this wave of technology because they are born right at the intersection of media and technology. It's the exact same premise that we've built Activate around, so I obviously wholeheartedly agree with his assessment.
• We're going to make the best 311 system in the country even better. Beyond stuff like accessing 311 via Skype or SMS or Twitter or an iPhone app (which you can do today), there's a three-phase plan which first gives access to basic data dumps like taxi complaints, then makes existing 311 answers available to developers through an API, and in its final phase actually makes the API read/write so that developers can enable citizens to ask and answer each other's questions. The idea of connecting citizens with one another to solve problems instead of having the city have to answer everything itself is exactly in keeping with the can-do attitude New Yorkers expect from one another.
• We've gotta be connected. The city will try to help by broadening access to wifi, including in public parks, and by encouraging broadband availability. These are basics, but the plan that's outlined in the Digital Road Map seems specific and achievable.
• Geek service! The city is doing the stuff that might not have the biggest impact for normal citizens, but will please geeks in a way that encourages them to get involved. Foursquare badges for visiting NYC's public spaces. A Tumblr vertical just for NYC. A hackathon in coordination with NYC-based startups to encourage use of city data (a great followup to the already-inspired work made as part of NYC BigApps). A new @nycgov Twitter account to act as one central place to get info. A custom bit.ly URL for city info. Even today's announcement was broadcast as live video on the web, across multiple networks.
• And last, but certainly not least, better transparency and public engagement through technology. At Expert Labs, we've already begun working with several groups in NYC government, helping to enable public feedback and response to make sure the wisdom and expertise of every New Yorker can filter in to the policies and decisions that are made in City Hall. We have a high degree of confidence the city can make its information easily accessible using social networks, and want to raise the bar even higher to having the city rely on social networks to give citizens a voice in the way the city runs.

In all, it's a great day for New York City's tech community, for those of us who think technology can make cities run better, and for all New Yorkers who want their city to be more responsive, accessible and accountable. And while I'd like to congratulate Rachel Sterne, Mayor Bloomberg, and all the people involved in NYC Digital at City Hall, instead I'd tell them the same thing I'd tell any other tech entrepreneurs: Let's get to work.

Summary: The White House is looking to build a web community to get its questions answered, sort of their own Quora, and they're trying to do it the right way. They're asking those who would participate to help shape how the community itself works. They're not trying to create a network from scratch, but instead trying to connect to networks that already exist. And they're not just making a community for the hell of it — they're trying to build one with purpose.

But they've asked for our help, from those of us who build, and know, and love web communities. We're being asked to share our expertise in what does, and doesn't work on successful web communities. Our deadline for participating is on Monday Sunday. Giving them insights into our hard-earned lessons will only take 15 minutes of your time this weekend, and will keep us from having to wonder, "Why wasn't I consulted?"

You can go get started, or read on to find out more.

ExpertNet

The White House is advancing this project under the working title "ExpertNet". (There's no official link between ExpertNet and Expert Labs, except that we at Expert Labs are trying to help in the effort, too.) In short, ExpertNet as it stands right now is a spec for a platform for getting questions answered by experts, similar to what sites like Quora and Stack Overflow do. The project was announced in December, and the deadline for responding was extended for two more weeks, but those two weeks are up on Monday Sunday, and we're running out of time.

Submitting ideas to ExpertNet is as easy as editing a wiki. Many of the key questions they're trying to address are straightforward:

• Decisions around participation: How do you tap in to existing networks of experts?
• Should there be leaderboards for things like a Top Ten? I don't happen to think so, but if not, then what are the right motivational methods?
• How do you get people with the right expertise and knowledge to know about, and use, this network?
• What's the best way to demonstrate the qualifications of people who submit ideas on such a network?
• And, from a purely tech standpoint, what tools exist to already perform some or all of these functions? Are they free/open source? (Obviously, at Expert Labs, we think ThinkUp is a great answer for many of these questions, since it was meant to address many of these particular requirements.)

We Have The Information They Need

The community of people who care about web communities have a responsibility to share what we know. We know what works on Quora or StackOverflow, and what goes wrong on Yahoo Answers. We've learned for years from Ask MetaFilter. Andy Baio collected a short list of links to best practices just today. But none of those lessons are obvious to people who've been busy defining policy — they haven't been in the trenches like we have.

And it's important to remember that perspective, because even if we don't help, this thing is going to get built. And if we don't help, it's going to be broken or wrong or weird or a failure. The White House has already done one amazing thing, by defining the budget for the technology as zero. The official notice in the Federal Register says:

To be clear, there is currently no funding identified for building this platform nor is it clear if future funding will be available. Hence, respondents should be sure that feedback, when possible, addresses opportunities for implementing solutions at little to no cost, including multi-sector partnerships.

That's government-speak for "if you're just reading this to see what you can sell to the Federal government, bug off." They've reduced the chance of vendors getting in and taking control of the process, which reduces the chance that we end up with some sort of National SharePoint Network. In short, they've met us more than half way and avoided a major pitfall, and now all we have to do is guide them to the tech they should use.

If you care about web communities, and think the right web community with the proper design could positively impact the way our elected officials work, then dive in. I'll make note of some of the people making valuable contributions to the effort, so that we can track this as it evolves. You can get started by following these few simple steps:

• Register for an account on the wiki
• Find one of the relevant topic pages and contribute your insights. Simply adding relevant links could be very valuable here, and of course writing out longer ideas would be great too.
• Tweet or blog with mention that you are participating in helping with ExpertNet, so that we can let people know what you did, and prompt them to respond. We've been using the #expertnet hashtag.

My Agenda

Obviously, there are some disclaimers to throw in here. I'm an unabashed fan of the ideas behind ExpertNet, and it aligns very closely with the mission of Expert Labs, so we're hoping our work and our tech is a big part of the solution. We're a non-profit and all our work is free, so we're not motivated by anything except the desire to see our efforts go to their best possible use. And one of the sites I've mentioned learning from is Stack Overflow, where I'm an advisor. But I think anyone who cares about these things can clearly see that they are succeeding in getting highly technical questions answered by expert responders, and I hope our government can learn from that as well.

I urge you to join the folks who are participating in ExpertNet, whether it's working on building a platform, or simply coming up with a better name for the project. They're asking for our help, and it's our fault if we don't give it to them.

In my blog here, I'm mostly a textual dude. I've made a few little video clips or animated .gifs over the years, but basically, I'm a writer. But today, today! We're going all futuristic streaming internet video with it. If you like it, then maybe I'll do more.

I got to be on The Pipeline, Dan Benjamin's awesome tech interview podcast (subscribe in iTunes, or download the MP3) and join the company of some amazing people that Dan's interviewed. I'm really pleased with how it came out, and if you've got an hour to waste, please do give it a listen. Tip: You can listen at double-speed on your iPod and only waste half an hour.

Then today, I had a great conversation with Ryan Sarver, who's Director of Platform for Twitter, as a keynote Q&A at the Web 2.0 Expo here in New York. We only had a short period of time, but I feel like we covered a lot of really interesting technical questions while considering them in a larger context.

Right after that, we continued the conversation by having Bret Taylor, CTO of Facebook, join Ryan and I. There, I tried to ask broader questions that applied to the efforts of both of these social networking titans.

Finally, I followed up with an interview about our work at Expert Labs, describing the mission a bit and hopefully offering a note of optimism about where Gov 2.0 is headed.

I like to play Words With Friends and Scrabble! Other folks do too. Sometimes I play well.

Finally, here's Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake with a medley of great moments in hip hop history. I'm not involved in this, but I thought it'd be good if people could see why I like these guys, and also there should be something in this post that I'd actually enjoy watching.

I stopped working at Six Apart over a year ago. At the time, I didn't blog about it because the departure was completely amicable and I knew I wasn't sure what I would be doing next, so I figured I'd step back and watch the company for the first time as an outsider and see how it evolved.

It seems like that next step for the company is now clear: Six Apart's become part of SAY Media, by being acquired by VideoEgg. I don't honestly know much about the new entity except that they seem to be primarily focused on doing some clever things with ads, and are well poised to be very successful there, while they've also said they'll be keeping Movable Type and TypePad running along. It's certainly not the end of what Six Apart has become, but it's obviously the end of a chapter, and worth observing.

For me, I'm taking an optimistic wait-and-see attitude about the new company, but I mostly wanted to mark the moment because the company that Six Apart has been has played such a big role in my career and my personal evolution. I learned a ton about business and life and products and communities in my time there, and made many of my closest friends through that work. So, as someone who is again just a fan, and as a person who was part of the larger blogging community that had such deep affection for a humble little startup called "Six Apart" when we first heard the name back in 2002, I just wanted to take a moment to note a milestone that's a bit bittersweet for me.

I was surprised that a lot of folks didn't seem to know I'd moved on last year, so it seemed appropriate to mention what I do now. These days, I advise a few startups and non-profits (see my about page), and split my time between two incredibly challenging and rewarding jobs:

• I'm the founding director of Expert Labs, a non-profit organization that is trying to improve policy making decisions in the Federal government by helping them crowdsource policy ideas on newtorks Facebook and Twitter. Our first project was designed to enable regular citizens to share their expertise directly with the White House to help inform priorities in science and technology policy, and we plan to do that kind of thing for every other Federal agency if we can. The way we're making that all possible is by having our (awesome, beloved) Project Director Gina Trapani lead a community in creating an absolutely ass-kicking new open source app called ThinkUp that anybody who reads this blog should probably be using.
• I'm also a partner in Activate, the new strategy consulting firm that I've co-founded with Michael J. Wolf. Other than having an absolutely awesome URL, we've been mostly under the radar since our initial announcement because we've wanted to let the work we do for our clients speak for itself when it's time. But you can get a sense for what our style of consulting looks like by skimming some of the stories that have been written about projects like Gourmet Live for hints of the kind of really interesting combinations of tech and strategy that we get to collaborate on.

But all of these exciting opportunities that I have wouldn't be possible without all the lessons I learned and relationships I made during my time at with Six Apart. On any given day, I'm trying to create a useful web app that people can install to make their communications more efficient, or I'm trying to help a media company be more thoughtful with the way it's building a business on the web. All of that work is directly informed by having spent years exploring those ideas.

I'm enormously proud of that legacy, and I have to say thank you to my friends Ben and Mena Trott (Ben's birthday is today, by the way; Mena's was six days ago) for allowing me to be part of that story. I've got my fingers crossed that the new SAY does well to honor the incredible talent, spirit, history, passion, and promise of a company I will always care deeply about.

When there's no time for original content, we link! These are the places I've popped up lately, or things that caught my eye:

• We published our initial results from the Grand Challenges initiative over on the Expert Labs blog, including a full data set of responses. If you're a data hacker and can think of ways to analyze or present this data, please help out! Gina Trapani has also been leading the community in making huge strides with the ThinkTank platform; It's well worth checking out and joining the mailing list if you haven't.

• Alex Howard reports on how government works better with social media, offering five ways that the U.S. government is using social media to deliver services or engage citizens in making better policy.
• Mark Drapeau also described the three phases of Government 2.0, including the transition from today's experimentation to tomorrow's solutions.

• Both of those pieces were written in anticipation of this week's Gov 2.0 Expo, where I'll be making an appearance on Thursday afternoon to talk about crowdsourcing and participation, and how we bring startup-style innovation to the government realm. I'd also recommend Susannah Fox's list of what to see at the conference.

• I'll also be expounding on the topic of startup-style innovation for government at the Personal Democracy Forum next week. Between Gov 2.0 and the PDF event, I'll be providing a lot more insights into what we've learned from our first initiative at Expert Labs, beyond just the data set I linked above.

• Finally, I was really pleased with how well my talk at Fast Company's Innovation Uncensored event went a few weeks ago. You can see a summary of the conversation on the link there, or just watch the highlights here (though you'll sadly miss some of the gratuitously baroque animations I'd littered throughout my presentation):

The White House tweeted that they want feedback on the Grand Challenges in science and technology that face our country. That's not so new. But today, if you reply to the White House's tweet to share your ideas, the White House will actually see your response.

Wait, what?

These days, I often sound like a skeptic or a curmudgeon when it comes to the technology industry. But ultimately, I'm profoundly optimistic about what the Internet can be, and today is one of those days where I hope we can demonstrate exactly why so many of us love the web.

For the past several months, I've been leading an effort at Expert Labs to help policy makers use social networks to collect feedback on policy. Today marks our first experiment. To participate, all we have to do is suggest ideas as ambitious as the moon landing or the human genome sequencing, or like the X Prize or the Netflix prize — ideas so inspiring that they prompt a ton of new innovations.

So do it. Just reply to the White House on Twitter or Facebook, and they'll hear your suggestions and if you've got a good idea, they'll use the feedback to help shape policy. The President has eight items on his list of Grand Challenges but there's no reason your idea couldn't be number nine.

This is just a first step, but it's a pretty good one.

How'd We Get Here? Where Next?

It's been a long, interesting road to get to this first tentative experiment in broad-scale policy feedback on social networks. Fundamentally, one of the biggest opportunities has been that the current administration has embraced the President's Open Government Directive, encouraging public feedback using every avenue possible, with a special focus on new technologies.

But if you dive in to the specifics of some of the plans, it's even more remarkable what's going to be possible in the future. For example, the White House's Office of Science & Technology policy posted its own open government plan, which includes a specific nod towards Expert Labs, acknowledging that we can be a small part of their overall effort to allow for public feedback.

And we've been working like crazy to step up to the challenge. Gina has been leading an amazing community that's built one hell of a little app called ThinkTank. It aggregates all those tweets and Facebook replies and will collect them for sharing back with the White House and with the public. It's even matured quickly enough that we're a Google Summer of Code project, with some fantastic proposals coming in from students who want to make ThinkTank even smarter. Gina describes the potential brilliantly in her post on Smarterware, too.

How You Can Help

Here's the thing: I need your help. This is a complicated, unfamiliar new idea to explain to people. So I need help in telling people a few things:

1. The White House wants to hear policy feedback through channels like Twitter and Facebook.
2. Expert Labs has built tools that will let them do this.
3. The success of this first question about the Grand Challenges in science and technology will do a lot to demonstrate how every part of government could use these tools.
4. This is just the start; We're going to be doing this in bigger and better ways in the future.

So, if you've got a blog, or a Twitter account (and if you don't, what the hell are you doing here?!) please share the word with your readers. Reply to the White House's tweet using hashtag #whgc, and then stay tuned as we start to share our findings with the world.

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, a wonderful idea that was started to help us celebrate our heroes in technology and science, and to identify female role models. I'm using the day instead to talk about how the women I know (or don't know yet) in the tech industry can pursue some interesting opportunities in the future.

Nearest and dearest to my heart is ThinkTank, the open source social network insights application that we're creating at Expert Labs. Besides being created by a woman, we've been able to start up an active, vibrant community that is supportive and inclusive of new members. I think that our habit of mentoring our newest contributors is part of why we were one of the youngest apps to be selected for Google Summer of Code students to participate in, and I think it also explains why we have a mailing list and community that's never had a single flame war, personal attack or ego battle. It also helps that we're doing meaningful work that helps government make better decisions every time we fix a bug in our application. Even if you've never considered yourself a coder, there are instructions on how to participate that make joining the project as easy as editing a file in Google docs.

Put simply, at Expert Labs we'd love for ThinkTank to be the most woman-friendly open source effort that exists.

Open For Submissions

As someone who's been on the Advisory Board for the Web 2.0 Expo NYC since its inception, I'm also eager to point out that the call for proposals is currently open, with just three weeks left in the window for submissions. Make a note to spend some time this weekend to write up a proposal — don't put it off and then kick yourself for not submitting! My contact info (phone number and email) is right on this page if you want to get in touch with any questions about how to make your proposal better. I'd be eager to have much better representation on stage this year, and O'Reilly has committed to this goal as well.

A side note: I've been highlighting on my Twitter account when events that I participate in make diversity a priority, as with O'Reilly's statement, Kevin Werbach's Supernova event, and others. Previously, my policy had been to simply decline participation in events that had speaker lists that weren't representative of our industry. Instead, I've decided this year to accept some of these opportunities to speak, but use some of my time on stage to (respectfully) mention the issue to the participants at the event. I'm still not sure whether boycotting or speaking up will be more effective, but clearly it's time to try some new strategies.

I've also been following the PHPWomen open source project partnerships, which provide another set of mentoring and guidance opportunities for projects that want to encourage women to participate in their work. It seems like a good model that more open source efforts should embrace.

Finally, J-Lab and the McCormick Foundation are sponsoring a New Media Women Entrepreneurs challenge, to offer $12,000 to a female entrepreneur who has a great idea for a media business. There's only three weeks left to apply to this challenge as well, and while I'm not involved in it and have no connection to the organizers, I'd be happy to volunteer my help to anyone who wants to submit a proposal as well.

Why It Matters

In all, there is a ton of opportunity for the brilliant and talented women in our tech industry to excel despite the pervasive and persistent obstacles in the way. I urge everyone to support these efforts, and am always happy to be a resource to point out that the reason I embrace diversity and opportunity for everyone in our industry is because it leads to the best, most innovative, and most successful new creations. Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

A few months ago, I started as director of Expert Labs, a new independent non-profit effort with the goal of improving government by letting policy makers tap into the collective wisdom of the public. We're part of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and because our goal could have seemed a bit nebulous I've held off on explaining the full vision of the effort until today, when we're announcing our first project, platform and project director. Here's the highlights:

• We'll be collaborating with the White House in support of the Grand Challenges initiative. The President has defined a list of the biggest scientific and technological challenges facing America, as part of his Strategy for American Innovation. But they need our help, especially from those of us in the scientific and technological community: What should our highest priorities be for the biggest technological challenges of our time? What items have been omitted from the President's list of priorities? In short: If you had to pick the next project on the scale of the moon landing, or the human genome sequencing, what would you suggest? And how would you find the leadership and community that would achieve that goal? These are the questions we want to help answer.

• To help get answers for these questions, Expert Labs will be sponsoring the development of a technology platform that allows policy makers and community members to ask questions across the existing social networks that exist on the web. My guideline for the technology platform was that it be free and open source, make smart use of existing technologies and APIs, have a thriving developer community, and be appropriate for use in cloud environments for easy deployment by government agencies, private industry, and even individuals. So I'm excited to announce that we've selected the ThinkTank application as our first official technology platform project at Expert Labs.

• And, as you might expect since we've agreed to sponsor her application, I'm ecstatic to announce that Gina Trapani is joining Expert Labs as our Project Director for the Grand Challenges project, overseeing our technology efforts around ThinkTank and making sure that the platform is a good fit for the community of policy makers, scientists, technologists and the general public that it's designed to serve. Gina is of course the founding editor of Lifehacker and publisher of Smarterware, a best-selling author, and a co-host of This Week in Google, one of the most popular podcasts on the Internet. She's also an incredible talent and a woman of remarkable character and I couldn't be more excited to have her on the team.

Phew! That's a lot of great news. Since I announced my role at Expert Labs two and a half months ago, we've been hard at work meeting with folks across the Federal Government to find out how we could be of the most value. The truth is, when I started this project, I really only had a hunch that there was something amazing happening at the confluence of technology and government. But the months since have shown that my optimism there is well-founded, even if it is still just early days for this kind of effort.

The Startup Mindset

You see, Expert Labs sits at an interesting intersection. We are not part of the government, don't take any money from the government or any tax dollars, and don't take orders from anyone in the White House or any other part of the administration. In the early days of refining Expert Labs, I saw us as something like a "gCombinator", creating technology that serves government needs, but with a model that looks a lot more like an entrepreneurial technology incubator.

And while we're proudly independent, we've also been given a remarkable amount of access. The federal government as a whole is making an incredibly rapid evolution towards becoming more open and accessible, particularly to technologists. You can look at something like the OpenGov Tracker and see the results of this in real time. That's not to say things are ideal; Only 611 ideas for improving government have been submitted in total thus far. But I think that we can get orders of magnitude more Americans to participate in, and suggest ideas for, better governance if we make it as easy as just using Twitter or Facebook. And I think we can provide great motivations for them to do so if we show that their ideas and inspiration have direct impact on the policy decisions that are made.

This is a time of remarkable opportunity for the tech industry that I have spent my career working in. I'm just a regular guy, who was working just a few years ago as a PHP coder building content management systems. Today, I've been able to go to the White House and help make the case that a better technology platform, connected to the social networks we already use, could have the same transformative effect on policy making that it did on the world of media or business. And they were ready to listen, not just to me, but to our entire community. (I'm not saying that to name drop; In the new world of open government, things like visitor records for the White House are actually easily accessible.) I mean, hell, I got excited just knowing that my project's website got linked to from the White House blog — imagine when that's a two-way conversation for all of us!

And if you're a web programmer today, you can have a huge impact, even if you don't know the first thing about government or policy. You don't have to work for the government to work for your country. All you have to do is follow the ThinkTank project and make submissions of any code fixes or improvements that you have. Or join the mailing list and become part of the community. Or simply run the app for your own business and submit your feature requests about how it could be better suited to answering large-scale questions on various social networks. Simply by playing with new technology, participating in an open source project, and sharing what you've learned about what works in crowdsourcing ideas online, you can make a huge impact in our government's ability to listen to our ideas.

Just Getting Started

I'm incredibly excited to get started with our first official project at Expert Labs, and there are more to come in the future. Today, I hope you'll read over the Grand Challenges Request for Information from the White House and understand a bit more about what this project is about. Then you can visit the Expert Labs site (or follow @expertlabs on Twitter) and keep up to date with us as both the technology platform and the overall Grand Challenges effort progress.

• Check out Gina's own announcement of coming on board with Expert Labs.
• We also have an official announcement on the Expert Labs site.