Virtual worlds, real cultures

Diplomacy doesn’t belong just to the physical world anymore. The project Digital Diplomacy: Understanding Islam through Virtual Worlds explores how foreign affairs policies can improve the engagement with Muslim communities all around the world, using complex opportunities provided through the use of immersive virtual spaces like Second Life.

In this video developed during the Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington, D.C. in September 2009, Rita J. King and Joshua S. Fouts, both Senior Fellows of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, talk to WebCitizen about their project and its mission.

King and Fouts chose the virtual world of Second Life as platform for their research due to many reasons, among them the fact that it is the most widespread international virtual world platform. That is their idea: how could people learn about other cultures in a experimental, authentic virtual space, and how this information can add or improve the diplomatic work in the physical and real world?

The project objective was to verify how much they could learn about Islam in a space that has the potential to bring new insights and to crush prejudices and boundaries cemented in the real world.

Rita J. King is Chairwoman and Creative Director of Dancing Ink Productions, and Senior Fellow of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs.

Joshua S. Fouts is Global Strategist of Dancing Ink Productions, and Senior Fellow of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs.

The Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs is a non-profit and non-governmental and educational American institution that through its programs, publications and website, aims to be the main destination for ethic decisions in international discussions. Since its foundation in 1914, the council has been focusing in the importance of ethic values in international affairs, and aims to be a “voice for ethics” all over the world.

See the video of the project here.

Innovation in service of communication between governments and citizens

After spending more than two decades working for technology companies in the Silicon Valley in California, Lewis Shepherd is today the Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft’s Institute for Advanced Technology in Government, besides writing for the well-known blog Sheperds Pi.

In this exclusive interview granted to WebCitizen during the Gov 2.0 Summit, Lewis talks about how new media technologies are today creating new social communication online channels between governments and citizens.

Social networks have the potential to connect everyone in a way that  wasn’t possible some time ago. Governments should mirror this social power by creating the opportunity to increase the trust between governments and citizens, in the shapes of the crescent trust existent between social network users. In Lewis opinion, there’s nothing like politics to force a new and creative way to think about the communication with a great number of people.

Microsoft wants to place itself as a pioneer and innovative company in this revolution, concerned about expanding public participation and strengthening citizenship in a collaborative way.

MySociety, building services that people want to use

Tom Steinberg is the founder and director of MySociety, a British open source NGO, which is world reference in websites pro-democracy and pro-citizenship. Among the many websites that the NGO manages, is the parliamentary transparency site TheyWorkForYou, which shows information about every British parliamentarians, and the FixMyStreet, which, as the name suggests, is a simple and clear site that allows British citizens to denounce, monitor and discuss local problems as defective traffic lights, bumpy streets, vandalism in their neighborhoods. Thousands of denounces were sent to the responsible rulers through the site.

This exclusive interview was given to WebCitizen during the event Gov 2.0 Summit, where Tom was one of the speakers. Here, he explained that the MySociety.org mission is to build simple websites that offer to people simple and tangible benefits in their lives, and to use new technologies to improve the quality of life of the citizens.

Spacebook, NASA’s social space

Emma Antunes is in charge of the development and implementation of Spacebook, an intern social network of NASA. Spacebook is kind of a Facebook created to stimulate the inter-disciplinary collaboration between NASA’s employees, with profiles, forums, groups and social bookmarking. Each employee does his or her own homepage where they can update their status, share files, collaborate in a Wiki, add other people and follow their activities, join communities, groups and forums of interest, and even to exchange equipment and information relevant to their jobs and functions.

In this exclusive interview to WebCitizen during Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington D.C., Emma discuss the challenges and benefits of a connectivity and collaboration tool like the Spacebook, and the impact of it in the professional functionality for the NASA’s employees.

Connection to change the world

Mark Drapeau is a scientist, writer, and consultant in the public and private spheres, focusing on the technology, innovation, government and society areas. Currently he’s deputy professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs of the George Washington University, in the American capital, he has received a lot of national awards and honors for his works.

Drapeau has created the term “goverati” to describe the group of people that understand the governmental mechanisms and how the new social technologies make possible better communication, transparency, participation and collaboration between citizens and governments.

He has recently found the Government 2.0 Club, an international organization that promotes events about the intersection between social technologies and the government. He also was the Co-chair in the schedule committee for the Gov 2.0 Showcase Expo, event that opened the Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington D.C. in September, 2009.

During this event that Drapeau gave an exclusive interview to WebCitizen, he talks about how the new media are causing irreversible ruptures in many aspects in the society, such as in traditional education and journalism areas, and how the social media are replacing newspapers and magazines as sources of information.

Mark Drapeau’s blog: http://www.markdrapeau.com/
Mark Drapeau’s Twitter: http://twitter.com/cheeky_geeky

Brazil has to grow social programmers

Last week I’ve attended, in Washington, to the Gov 2.0 Summit, a first attempt to articulate the discussion about how to use the huge potential of Internet to strengthen the citizenship and democracy, by applications produced by the civil society to improve the world. During a break, I managed to get near to the organizer of the event, Tim O’Reilly, and I asked him how this idea, that decentralizes the production of Web tools placing the responsibility on the citizens’ hands, could be applied in a country like Brazil, in which the number of Web-entrepreneurs is low.

“Well, you must nourish this community.” In short: it’s our problem.

The answer has bothered me. I thought O’Reilly was washing his hands of the subject. I was thinking about it since then and I reach a tough conclusion: what have bothered me wasn’t the O’Reilly’s smile. Was the fact that he was right. It’s really our problem. Although this discussion about Gov 2.0 is new even in the United States, is clear the Brazil’s situation regarding to development to Web is still very insecure.

As we Brazilians are analyzing if Facebook is good or not, or criticizing the noise produced by Twitter, the Americans are building tools to change the shape that we relate around here. We always had an important role to quickly adopt tools as MSN, Orkut, Blogger. Is calculated there are nearly to 63 million of Brazilians in Internet, which surpass even the number of developed countries as France, Italy and United Kingdom. However, despite all these people online, we still aren’t able to produce not even one application in national relevance, even less international. It’s not about time to show our creativity, to left the place to be only spectators to participate in this conversation?

If it’s up to us, citizens, to produce tools to solve society problems, which part is up to the government? After the conference, I notice that the change of the Brazilian government into an innovation platform to Web has to come in an attempt to solve a triad of basic needs.
1) We need to decrease the time and cost of experimentation. Startups are experiments. As any other experiment, there’s a great chance to go wrong. Well, “if the failure is unavoidable, it has to be quick and cheap” Eric Ries, from the blog LessonsLearned, says. The success formula is to decrease risks and increase agility then we can wrong to learn more. To offer free hosting for applications towards to welfare would be a great help from the government into this direction. The Brazilian government has the chance to make Brazil the first country to offer a public cloud computing service, which would break one of the great locks in the Web programming in the country: the lack of quality servers. No doubt that would be a milestone in the country’s infrastructure. The equivalent of roads and bridges from the last century is this infrastructure of the XXI century. A real Web-construction work.

3) We need people interested to produce citizens’ tools. If wasn’t enough the lack of entrepreneurs in the Brazilian Web, the situation gets worse by the disbelief in public causes. Some think the public sector is too rotten, others don’t believe that is possible to survive doing the good to society. Be whatever the disbelief cause, the government has to gain the interest of this new generation of innovators. We need incentives – be them discounts on taxes, prizes in money or simply opportunities to gain visibility so people can have as goal to help the society through Internet. What they’re doing in the United States is to award the best initiatives with prizes like the Apps for America and the Apps for Democracy. The North-Americans have as tradition to believe the awards can create a valor much greater than the amount distributed. But if you are like those that only believe in what you see (especially seeing numbers), the case of Apps for Democracy is an example. In just 30 days and offering a prize of only 50 thousand dollars, the challenge has created 47 applications, which the market total valor calculated is US$ 2.3 million. Invest 50 thousand to gain 2.3 million – isn’t that good business? The award is a way to stimulate the endeavoring and to recognize collaborations for the welfare (important intellectual achievements for our evolution). What about a Brazilian Prize of Online Public Innovation?

To have the government as a platform means to create an environment to exercise the Webcitzenship. Just in this way we’ll have the critic mass for the society to use the Internet to solve our problems. Only one initiative won’t change Brazil into a digital nation. Nevertheless is required to have commitment with idealization and performance of solutions. It’s required to begin.

Text and pictures by Helder Araujo. WebCitizen’s co-founder.

The first day

Phew. My head is spinning due to so much information. (It could be maybe because of the wine they gave me at the reception offered by Google at the late afternoon.)

It was a busy day here in Washington. It has started at 8 o’clock in the morning and just finish now, after midnight – I wrote it inside the subway, going to the house where I’m lodged. Was the first day of the Gov 2.0 Summit conference, this is an event to discuss ways to change the world through technology.

Today was the “Expo Showcase” – short presentations of innovative small projects from the entire world, 25 projects in total. A city, it has invited the population to discuss in a website, the municipal budget. A state, it has created virtual communication channels. Security agencies that are changing paper sheet reports for wikis. The environmental agency, it has developed a site in which is possible to find the ecological risks in your neighborhood. The transport company which uses twitter to be closer to its users. A lot of entrepreneurs are getting incomprehensible public data and turning it into outstanding sites. We finish the night having dinner with two of the winners of the projects – an attempt to use Second Life to decrease the distance between West and East.

Suddenly, at the end of the day, what looked like a bunch of isolated initiatives is turning in my mind into a huge movement. A movement that is just beginning – for more transparency, for more participation, for more openness, for a government that trusts in the population and avails data for each person to decide what is best for them.

It was a busy day, as I said – and it was only the first of three. But was enough to notice that we’ll back from Washington different than we were when we first arrived here. And I’m looking forward to see this wave of changing bursts on Brazilian shores.

Denis Russo Burgierman

Palestrantes do Gov 2.0 Summit

See here the full list of event lecturers. And follow everything that is talked in real time through twitter @webcitizen_

Susie Adams Federal Civilian Chief Technology Officer: Microsoft Corporation

Carlos Castillo Co-Founder: Warfighter Technologies

Vinton Cerf Co-Inventor of TCP/IP: Google

Aneesh Chopra CTO: Federal Office of Science and Technology Policy

John Clippinger Co-Director, Law Lab: Berkman Center Harvard University

Alan Cohn Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy (Strategic Plans): U.S. Department of Homeland Security

Casey Coleman Chief Information Officer: U.S. General Services Administration

Michael Coppola Winner: United States Cyber Challenge, SANS Netwars

Peter Corbett CEO: iStrategyLabs

John Culberson U.S. Congressman: 7th District of Texas

Jack Dangermond Founder and President: ESRI

Russ Daniels Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, EDS: Hewlett-Packard Company

Chris DiBona Open Source Programs Manager: Google, Inc.

Jack Dorsey Creator, Chairman and co-founder: Twitter

Mark Drapeau Associate Research Fellow: National Defense University

Carol Dumaine Deputy Director of Energy and Environmental Security : Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence at the U.S. Department of Energy

James Fallows National Correspondent: The Atlantic

Elliott Fisher Director, Population Health and Policy: The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice

Alex Fishman Lead Engineer, Regulation and Oversight: Palantir Technologies

Price Floyd Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs: Department of Defense

Julius Genachowski Chairman: Federal Communications Commission

Bev Godwin Director, USA.gov and Web Best Practices, Office of Citizen Services: U.S. General Services Administration

Robert Greenberg CEO: G&H International Services, Inc

Monica Guzman Newsgatherer: SeattlePI.com

Dean Halstead Collaboration Architect: Microsoft

Carleen Hawn Co-founder & CEO: Healthspottr

Scott Heiferman CEO: Meetup

Susan Heystee Vice President, General Manager: Global Strategic Alliances, Novell

James Heywood Co-Founder, Chairman : PatientsLikeMe

Chris Hoenig President and CEO: The State of the USA, Inc.

Allan Holmes Executive Editor: nextgov.com

Adrian Holovaty Founder: EveryBlock

Lloyd Howell Senior Vice President: Booz Allen Hamilton

Eugene Huang Government Operations Director: National Broadband Task Force – Federal Communications Commission

Steven Berlin Johnson Executive Chairman: Outside.in

Clay Johnson Director: Sunlight Labs

Brad Jupp Senior Program Advisor: Office of Secretary of Education

Nickolas Justice Program Executive Officer, Command, Control and Communications-Tactical: US Army

Mitchell Kapor Founder & Chair: Mitchell Kapor Foundation

Bryan Kirschner Vice President for Corporate Strategies: Greenberg Quinlan Rosner

Vivek Kundra U.S. Chief Information Officer: Office of Management and Budget

Paul Lin Co-Founder: Warfighter Technologies

Carl Malamud President & CEO: Public.Resource.Org, Inc.

John Markoff reporter: New York Times

Mikel Maron Human: OpenStreetMap

Bruce McConnell Counselor to the Deputy Under Secretary for NPPD: U.S. Department of Homeland Security

Michael McDonald President: Global Health Initiatives, Inc.

Grant McLaughlin Principal with Organization Change Team: Booz Allen Hamilton

Ellen Miller Co-Founder and Executive Director: Sunlight Foundation

Craig Mundie Chief Research and Strategy Officer: Microsoft Corporation

Kojo Nnamdi Host : “The Kojo Nnamdi Show” & “Evening Exchange”

Beth Noveck Deputy Chief Technology Officer: Executive Office of the President/OSTP

Richard O’Neill Founder & President: The Highlands Group

Tim O’Reilly Founder and CEO: O’Reilly Media, Inc.

Alan Paller Director of Research: SANS Institute

Alex “Sandy” Pentland Toshiba Professor of Media, Arts, and Sciences: MIT and Sense Networks

Macon Phillips Director of New Media: The White House

John Podesta President and CEO: Center for American Progress

Eric Rasmussen CEO & Managing Director: InSTEDD

Eric Ries Venture Advisor: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

Hal Roberts Fellow: Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School

Ola Rosling Co-founder of Gapminder Foundation & Product Manager: Google, Inc.

Mary Ruddy Founder: Meristic, Inc.

Laurel Ruma Editor: O’Reilly Media, Inc.

Shyam Sankar Director: Palantir Technologies

Andrea Seabrook Congressional Correspondent: NPR

Clay Shirky Writer and Consultant : shirky.com

Walton Smith Senior Associate: Booz Allen Hamilton

Jeffrey A. Sorenson Chief Information Officer/G-6 : U.S. Army

Tim Sparapani Director of Public Policy: Facebook

Judith Spencer Chair, Federal Public Key Infrastructure Steering Committee: General Services Administration

Tom Steinberg Director: mySociety

James Stogdill CTO: Gestalt, now part of Accenture

Michael Tiemann President: Open Source Initiative

Lena Trudeau Vice President: National Academy of Public Administration

Andrew Turner CTO: FortiusOne

Hal Varian Chief Economist: Google

Werner Vogels Chief Technology Officer: Amazon.com

Dave Warner Director of Medical Intelligence: MindTel

Linton Wells, II Force Transformation Chair: National Defense University

David Wennergren Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Information Management and Technology & DoD Deputy Chief Information Officer : Department of Defense

Kevin Werbach Professor of Legal Studies at The Wharton School: University of Pennsylvania

Michele Weslander Quaid Chief Technology Officer, Senior Advisor, Outreach: US Government

Rick Wesson CEO: Support Intelligence