A Face in the Crowd

GovFresh is a great new web service which aggregates live feeds of official news from U.S. Government Twitter accounts, YouTube channels, RSS feeds, Facebook pages, Flickr photostreams and more, all in one place. It is one of a new class of interactive Government 2.0 services, portals, and tools – many of them just launching in 2009 – which have the potential of revolutionizing the way citizens get and share information about their government.  (I mention several others below.)

At a time when the Iranian people are battling to keep their access open to Twitter, Facebook, and even phone lines in order to mobilize their anti-dictatorial protests, it is heartening that individuals in the United States and many other corners of the world find their governments increasingly willing to share information widely.

Luke Fretwell is GovFresh’s founder, and he’s becoming a welcome new voice in the debates around government technology policy. Luke recently wrote a blog post arguing “Why Gov 2.0 means the U.S. Government must centralize its Web operations.” A heated debate arose in the comments, including my own strenuous disagreement, and yet I became a fast admirer of Luke, his entrepreneurial energy, and the site’s information value.

GovFresh has been running a great series of profile-interviews in its blog section of leading individuals in the “Gov 2.0” movement, and today I was the chosen subject. The article has the unfortunately exaggerated title (in my case): “Gov 2.0 Hero Lewis Shepherd.”  Here’s an excerpt:

What’s the killer app that will make Gov 2.0 the norm instead of the exception?

Can’t tell you because we’re building it in the lab right now, ha! Seriously, the killer app may be something big and powerful, from an enterprise perspective, though I’d put the odds on something less obvious, but more pervasive. Here’s what I mean. I think often about the roots of the original Progressive movement at the dawn of the 20^th Century, and their advocacy of direct-vote referendums, championed by Hiram Johnson and the like. Those give the people a direct say over particular issues, but the downside is that “the people” don’t always exercise informed judgment, and popular opinion can be manipulated and swayed by malevolent interests. So I’m looking to Gov 2.0 capabilities that maintain the representative aspect (the elected official, exercising his or her judgment) while incorporating real-time, structured, unfiltered but managed visualizations of popular opinion and advice. I’m intrigued by new services along these lines like www.you2gov.com, www.govfresh.com, www.govtwit.com, and the like, but I’m also a big proponent of semantic computing – called Web 3.0 by some – and that should lead the worlds of crowdsourcing, prediction markets, and open government data movements to unfold in dramatic, previously unexpected ways. We’re working on cool stuff like that.

At the end of the full interview, I observed that “You can’t watch what’s gone on with social software use in Egypt’s Facebook Revolution, our own 2008 campaign, or Iran’s election protests, without feeling that Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson would have been prolific twitterers with awesome blogs.”

In the spirit of empowering the people, instead of lauding one person, I’d like to thank GovFresh for the Hero honor but share the title with those I have worked with in the past few years, and with everyone else around the world engaged in the Gov 2.0 movement – whether they realize that’s what they’re doing or not.

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John Brennan’s Approach as the New CIA Director

Barring unforeseen Washington politicking at the last minute, John Brennan is being announced later today as President-elect Obama’s choice to replace Mike Hayden as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Currently in Cairo

Cairo Tower, or Gezira Tower, on the Nile

I’m currently in Cairo and am trying to carve out time to finish some tech-focused blog posts, in the middle of spending time with the great technologists here and also just wandering around Cairo.

On the former point, I’m spending time with the Cairo Microsoft Innovation Center, in Smart Village just on the western outskirts of town. CMIC is working on some interesting stuff, much of it web-based, including some leading-edge automated translation solutions beyond the neat stuff we’ve already deployed in Windows Live.

On the latter point, i.e. wandering, this is only my second visit, of what I hope and expect will be many in coming years, so I’m still a wide-eyed tourist.  Here are a couple of photographs on Flickr which I took yesterday and last night, from my hotel and walking up and down the Nile through central Cairo, on main avenues and back streets.

On my first visit here in May, I took a bunch of the usual touristy pictures (see them here), including the Pyramids, Sphinx, Museum, etc. Won’t get to do that stuff this trip.

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Egypt’s Supreme Court

FACT: Last month Egypt’s parliament passed a new law on public demonstrations in the vicinity of religious facilities (churches, mosques, etc.).  Already, lawyers are planning for an appeal and review of the law before Egypt’s Supreme Constitutional Court (photo left), the nation’s highest judicial body.  

 

ANALYSIS: I wrote earlier that at the Microsoft Institute we’re thinking about ways to help improve the operations and capabilities of the judicial branch of government, at various levels. 

Perhaps my interest has been piqued by the fact that, for quite a while, I’ve been sleeping with a brilliant lawyer – oh, that would be my wife Kathryn. While she’s retired from active practice, she spends some volunteer time each week at the U.S. Supreme Court, giving public lectures on the history of the Court and its justices for the Curator’s Office.

Update on Facebook-in-Egypt

FACT: According to a Sunday Washington Post front-page story today recounting the events leading up to May 4, a “day of strike” called for by social-networkers as a protest against government policies, “By late afternoon, of the 74,000 people who had registered on the Facebook protest page, only 15 – three men and 12 women – were still eager to gather for a protest.”  [Note: the Facebook page had only been launched in late March.]

ANALYSIS: Last week I wrote about media coverage of Egypt’s Facebook affair, and noted that the Post and others had only covered it on media blogs, not in the actual newspaper.

This morning I picked up my Sunday-morning Post and saw the story, “Fledgling Rebellion on Facebook Is Struck Down by Force in Egypt,” right on the front page, which means that across Washington this morning, and other capital cities through clipping services, many in the foreign policy elite and punditocracy may be reading for the first time about the Web 2.0 facet of these events. 

Reporter Ellen Knickmeyer also posted today a related online “Field Notes” column about the challenges of covering the Facebook activists.

 

Social Networking in Egypt Takes a Political Turn

FACT: In the past two days, reporters for the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post have each written accounts of the ongoing confrontation in Egypt between the government and online activists – the “Facebook Revolution” as the Post reporter terms it, hyperbolically. One interesting aspect: the two accounts are not carried as actual news stories in the “newspaper” (real or virtual), but as blog posts by the reporters on dedicated foreign-correspondent blogs. The Washington Post account is on the “PostGlobal” uber-blogsite, under Jack Fairweather’s “Islam’s Advance” blog, while the L.A. Times account is on the “Babylon & Beyond” blog, which carries a sub-head of “Observations from Iraq, Iran, Israel, the Arab World and Beyond.”

ANALYSIS: Up to now there’s been little coverage in traditional American media outlets of the emerging political tenor of some social networks in Egypt over the past several months. Major newspapers and the cable-news channels have not explored the topic, but I just returned from some time in Egypt and I learned that of course it is a widely covered and discussed topic there.  One young woman in her 30s, an urban professional, told me “I’m on Facebook all day long!”

Every morning outside my hotel room I would find an English-language newspaper, and for many days in a row it was a different paper – often because they were weekly editions.  That gave me the opportunity to read a variety of opinions from a somewhat broad band, as measured in “distance to/from the government position.”  

Helpfully, on May 6 2008 the Egyptian Mail included a summary of the raging controversy over Facebook, noting that “In Egypt, Facebook is the stage for the latest twist in the generation gap, playing host to politically hungry young Egyptians eager to take on their ageing leader.”  Only at the end of the article did I notice that it was reprinted from a New-York-based Egyptian blogger, the respected Mona Eltahawwy.

Some Photos from Cairo

I’m in Cairo this week, my first-ever trip to Egypt, visiting the Cairo Microsoft Innovation Center (CMIC) – they’re doing some really interesting work particularly in Information Retrieval, Collaborative Content Services, and Digital Content Services – a very web-minded, web-services driven set of research and development activities with some real payoff in areas like machine translation and collaborative practices.   More information on their work at http://www.microsoft.com/middleeast/egypt/cmic/.

I love Cairo already, on just my second day here.  I’ve posted some photos at a Flickr collection, and  I’ll keep adding to those….

 

 
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