Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Policies, Politics, and the Human Dynamics of Government & Technology


I was interviewed recently by Alexandra Meis, cofounder of the education startup Kinvolved and a graduate student at the NYU Wagner School of Public Service. I met Alex last year when she and the Kinvolved team won the National Invitational Public Policy Challenge hosted by the Fels Institute of Government and Governing. Both Kinvolved and Alex are doing great work, some of which you can follow here. The interview was for her class Gov 3.0: Rethinking Governance and Re-Imagining Democracy for the 21st Century. Here's an excerpt:
Alexandra Meis: Beth Noveck’s Gov 3.0 class at NYU Wagner is focused on the notion that “technology has the potential to transform governance and produce a more open and participatory political culture with effective institutions that engender trust.” What are your thoughts on this? What, in your opinion, are the biggest changes with technology over the past 3-4 years? What will technology with regard to governance look like over the next 3 years? [In general?]
Dennis McKenna:  Certainly the movement to make government more open and transparent has been important and leaders like Beth (Noveck) and Aneesh (Chopra), have been pioneers in this and have done great work.
You see a great deal of activity today with organizations like Code for America and hackathons hosted by cities like San Francisco, Seattle and Philadelphia that are changing the culture of how governments engage with the public and in their use of technology. This is a significant shift. Certainly many leading political campaigns, whether for candidates or on issues, have become effective in building what might be called a more participatory political culture. Most of this innovation has been around the edges, however, and there remains a long way to go.
I’d like to mention something here. There are of course many factors that influence the current state of our political culture and Americans’ relationship with governments at all levels. One that is critical but overlooked is cultural and has little to do with technology but the two intersect.
Governments, taking a cue from private industry and the consumer movement in general have for decades increasingly approached their populations as “customers” or “clients” of public sector services.  In fact, “customer service” has become as important a term of art for public organizations as for private companies. Admirably, governments are harnessing smart technology to improve the “customer service experience”. Getting people “on line and not in line” as they say.  This is well and good and certainly routine services are a significant part of what governments do and technology innovation can be applied here.
What gets lost, however, is the notion of citizen. I have a colleague that likes to say that government is a barn raising and not a vending machine. Governments struggle with the problem of public engagement. I would argue that this arises, in part, from this diminished idea of “citizen” in our current government/public equation.
This is terribly oversimplified, but for example, in education we know that better outcomes come from ecosystems that engage parents, kids, and the broader community. If parents simply take the view that “I’m a client of a school and my kid is a consumer of the education system,” we can run into problems. A better approach is “I’m a citizen engaged in my child’s schooling and school.”  This is a more fundamental idea: “I participate” vs. “I consume” government services. Surprisingly, back in 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy In America called this participation out as a unique strength of the American people.
So social media and related technologies can improve trust issues and open up government data. But through all this it’s important to drive the notion that we’re all in this together.