SF looks to hire a Senior Innovation Analyst

Wanted to share this great opportunity with the Gov 2.0 community. The City and specifically this team has done some really good work. And they have some big ideas for the future.

-Jay Nath

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Join a startup in the public sector and discover a wonderful opportunity to impact the lives of San Franciscans in ways large and small. We’re looking for talented individuals who are as passionate about helping others as they are with their career. We offer competitive salaries (up to $103K) and great benefits. If this sounds interesting, read on and send your resume and cover letter to: improvesf@gmail.com

Our mission is to transform San Francisco by:
• Empowering citizens through transparency
• Engaging and collaborating with our technology community
• Using innovative technology to solve business challenges

Some of our accomplishments:
• Demonstrating national leadership through DataSF, our open data initiative
• Establishing the country’s first open source policy
• Leading a national effort to create the Open311 API
• Learn more at http://bit.ly/cXpChg

What this means to you:
• Know that you’re making a difference in people’s lives
• Help create a platform that delivers world-class service
• Work with a fun and dedicated team

What we’re looking for:
• Analyze the needs of our customers to develop the best business and technology solutions.
• Ability and interest to work with a variety of technologies to solve varied types of problems.
• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills; strong analytical skills and a demonstrable bias toward action.
• Ability to scope and manage large projects.
• Previous experience in startups or consulting is a plus.
• Understanding of Gov 2.0 principles is a plus.

Why Twitter’s Gov’t Outreach is a Big Win for the Gov 2.0 Movement

For at least that past two years, a tiny yet fast-growing group of folks who call themselves “Gov 2.0 advocates” has worked tirelessly to spread a message that emerging technologies, low-cost communications and digital culture can reshape government to be more collaborative, transparent, efficient and connected to its citizens.

We have advocated for humanizing government, and for using new tools to bring more citizens into the deliberative process and to help shape the future of both our democracy and the bureaucracy. One of the main tools for the Gov 2.0 movement has been social media, as activists and line workers join technologists and political reformers in calling for more open communication between officials and agencies and the public they represent and serve.

Last week, Government 2.0 – a term first used by Bill Eggers in his 2005 e-gov-focused book of the same name, and that has become almost synonymous with Web 2.0 as developers have turned on to the promise of government-brokered data troves and universal open standards – won a significant victory. Twitter, the popular social media messaging service that has serves as a platform for thousands of startups using its architecture and user base, announced that it is hiring for its first field office, focused on the government sector.

Twitter Goes to DC
Twitter’s job posting and further remarks by corporate spokesman Sean Garrett explain the DC-based position as the first step towards a public affairs unit, with support for innovative and engaging uses of Twitter in politics and policymaking. A new blog by Garrett and his team has since March been highlighting interesting government uses of the platform, from San Francisco’s integration of Twitter and 311 non-emergency service requests, to construction updates and border crossing wait times by tweet, to the British Prime Minister’s communications usage.

Twitter, thanks to millions of active and aggressive content-sharers and innovators around the world, has transformative powers. Conan O’Brien took to the service to recreate himself after losing his show, creating numerous accounts, rallying his fan base and using the free and frenetic publicity it to launch a comedy tour. Legendary film critic Roger Ebert, after panning Twitter as trite, has become one of its staunchest advocates, using it to deliver and amplify commentary on everything from film to politics to sport and humanism. Newark Mayor Corey Booker has used it to spread a hands-on philosophy of hope far beyond his New Jersey township.

Twitter Grows Due to User Innovations
Twitter’s growth and popular features have often evolved from the minds and whims of its user base, from the intensely popular “retweet” convention for repeating and affirming others’ messages, to the hashtag form of semantic tagging in its short messages, to Follow Friday, the day that tweeps around the world recognize friends and favorites.

Government 2.0 – which first hit Twitter’s mainstream of “trending topics” during a March 16, 2009, pilot broadcast of the Gov 2.0 Radio podcast including govies, contractors and consultants calling in from South by Southwest and their DC-area homes – is now set to join the legacy of user-driven Twitter conventions. The first Twitter office outside of San Francisco will help connect politicians with their constituents and agencies with the public. It will help serve an engaged and innovative Government 2.0 movement, while that movement continues to shape and grow Twitter’s utility.

Government 2.0 and the use of social media for politics and public service are still in their infancy, but it’s safe to say that Twitter’s new focus on this arena is a milestone of which we can be proud.

 - Adriel Hampton

 References:

Clever Twitter Accounts – Government

How Conan O’Brien Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Twitter

Roger Ebert – Tweet! Tweet! Tweet!

Global Gov 2.0 – A Twitter List

It’s About Everything, Not Just Technology – Part 1

I returned last Thursday from O’Reilly’s Gov 2.0 Expo in Washington DC with a long list of “next steps” and action items for myself. One of the first people I met there asked the familiar question we all hear at conferences, “So, what do you hope to get out of this conference?” and my answer wasn’t something I had rehearsed since it just seemed natural that I would be part of Gov 2.0 Expo. After a short pause, I told her that I wanted to develop a better understanding how we, local government, could get citizens to engage with us. This seems pretty straightforward and there are plenty of vendors whose products “engage citizens” but that’s not what I’m talking about. The technology is there, I work on a technology team, we know the technology in the space. I want to know about everything else, not just technology. I want to know how to get citizens to wake up and think to themselves “I want to engage with government today.”

With the simple goal of learning how to get citizens to want to engage with San Francisco’s government, I set-off to Dan Zarella’s presentation on “Creating a Social Media Strategy: The Data Shows Why It’s Important.” For government a social media strategy typically includes addressing all the legal implications of social media, rather than a strategy for reaching the broadest group of people and making the largest impact on them. Social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, are tools used by large companies to reach their audience where they are already engaged. As such, government should be using the same tools to market ourselves and services by going to the places they are already engaged and active.

Dan Zarella has compelling data and insights on how to best market yourself or company using social media. Most of Dan’s examples were not specific to government, however the overall marketing strategy can apply. For starters understand the audience using the different tools. Once you know your audience you can properly engage them, use them to make your marketing message viral.

From Dan’s presentation I realized people are motivated to action, whether it be re-tweeting or actual volunteering, when the message is clear, there’s a call-to-action, and they are being engaged in their own communities. The first “next step” on my list is to create a social media strategy for my next project and ensure that I apply Dan Zarella’s advice to the strategy.

Law.gov Project Comes to SF

In a webinar about Gov 2.0 on Tuesday, publisher and conference convener Tim O’Reilly referred to Carl Malamud as the father of the Gov 2.0 movement. Wednesday, Malamud was in San Francisco at the Mitchell Kapor Foundation offices for the 10th in a series of 15 workshops he’s hosting around the country for his current project, Law.gov, which aims to create an authenticated bulk data feed for all primary legal materials in the U.S.
Malamud is not a lawyer, but he’s met plenty – allies and adversaries – in his time as the nation’s “rogue archivist.” If you want open government, Malamud’s your go-to guy.

Wednesday’s series of panelists balanced open data dreams with hard truths about privacy in the globalized infoweb. Bob Berring, a UC Berkeley law professor, summed up the core issue: Carl is working on a 10 year old’s question: Government has laws. We have to obey those laws. Where are they?
Twitter in-house counsel Alexander Macgillivray talked about the difficulty for legal staff’s at small companies to afford basic research because of high Westlaw and Lexis fees – fees that units of government pay as well for access to legal documents.
Malamud believes that the law is one area that the disintermediating promise of the Internet has barely touched, and he brought in friend O’Reilly for a lunchtime discussion with California Secretary of State Debra Bowen. “What are we missing as a society because we are denied access to what is essentially the open source of our democracy?” O’Reilly asked.
A recurring theme was the problem of authentication of legal materials online, and the implied authority of the two major vendors. Erika Wayne, a Stanford law librarian, asked if anyone had seen an “informational only” disclaimer – common on web legal materials – on a physical book.
Chris Hoofnagle, a privacy researcher and UC Berkeley law professor also had a stark warning about the need to protect individual privacy as advocates seek to put more government information online. He argued that believers in “Big Brother” powers for the government – “I’m serious” – will use the language of the transparency movement to accomplish their goal of a surveillance society.
Despite the serious mission and very real challenges, the promising theme of open data, Law 2.0 mashups and lowered barriers to legal knowledge was not lost. Said Macgillivray, imagine a statue with its own Twitter account, tweeting its revisions. Another common theme was that local governments are some of the most open – creating universal standards for data release is the challenge.

- Adriel Hampton

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Lean Lessons for Local Gov

You might not think that local governments are primed to be hotbeds of innovation. Then again, you may not yet have heard of Manor, TX, a little town that’s repeatedly garnered attention from the White House for its innovative ways. And you may not have heard entrepreneur-turned-scholar Vivek Wadhwa give one of his frank talks about the demographics of startup founders: 40, educated but not Ivy League, experienced.
Kind of sounds like an average government employee.

And don’t expect to get sympathy from Wadhwa regarding the lack of monetary incentives (bonuses) for innovation in government. Wadhwa points out that fledgling entrepreneurs generally work outrageous hours for little or no pay, motivated more by a dream for a better world than the short chances of financial success.

Shouldn’t public servants have some of that same sort of motivation?

Wadhwa spoke to more than 50 San Francisco employees Monday in the first of the Department of Technology’s “Innovation @ Work” lunchtime talks. Most of the attendees heard about the event through an e-mail to anyone who participated in a recent electronic suggestion box exercise on fixing the City’s budget woes.

Joining Wadhwa was Eric Ries, startup vetran and adviser, who advocates the “lean” model of getting a good idea off the ground, where the unit of progress is in lessons learned about meeting customer needs.

“Stop building stuff nobody wants,” Ries said. He also put the burden of successful innovation in government on the shoulders of managers. “Entrepreneurship is management,” he said.

Whether veteran public IT managers went back to their offices today with dreams of remaking their legacy systems in the lean model or not, Ries, a San Francisco resident, and Wadhwa stressed that the group was unusual in that San Francisco is embracing the need for critical change.

“The US is in serious trouble,” Wadhwa said. “While we were sleeping, the world changed. … If you started to rebuild your systems, you would become the innovator.”

 

Postscript: I heard a bit of tittering when Vivek Wadhwa asked how many of us were tweeting from the event (I know of two). Why Twitter? Direct communication with the speakers. Cross-continental thought pollination. Notes for this blog post.

Onward and upward.

~ Adriel Hampton

WordCamp 2010

The Emerging Technologies team from the City and County of San Francisco are looking forward to attending WordCamp San Francisco 2010 tomorrow. I have personally blogged WordPress for about 5 years. When I joined the City and County of San Francisco, I introduced our team to the platform and we have been using WordPress as a WCM system for two years. Our experience using WordPress has been phenomenal. WordPress is a flexible and easy to use platform and has become our goto platform when a website must be put up quickly. The Emerging Technologies team have put up some very recognizable sites on WordPress such as:

• Mayor Gavin Newsom’s Website
• Jobs Now SF
• PolicySF
• RecoverySF
• CivicDB
• DataSF Showcase
  

We have found the community remarkably dynamic and eager to help support, creation of themes, widgets, and plugins. The vastness of the WordPress ecosystem is beyond comprehension. We celebrate WordPress as one of the truly great open source projects on the Internet and are very excited to be a part of this great event!

5/6 at City Hall – Support Open311

One of the most promising areas for open government efforts is cross-gov collaboration on standardized APIs, enabling interoperability of civic apps wherever one goes.

From San Francisco to Edmonton, AB, city IT leaders and developers have been signing on to a key effort on this front – building out an Open311 API for access to non-emergency city services. It’s an effort that will not only benefit large cities and app builders, but has the potential to jump start digital 311 efforts in smaller cities.

May 6 at 6:30 p.m. in San Francisco City Hall, Twilio is hosting Gov 2.0 thought leaders from government and the private sector in an event benefiting OpenPlans, the nonprofit leading Open311 efforts.

RSVP here.

Speakers include SF CIO Chris Vein, Craig Newmark, Tim O’Reilly, Mitchell Kapor and OpenPlans’ Philip Ashlock. The event is still open to sponsors and donations directly to OpenPlans. Additionally, Twilio is seeking four volunteers to help with registration and even coordination – if that’s you, e-mail danielle (at) twilio.com. Hope to see you there!

(Also, SF311 is seeking your opinion on what you want from a 311 web portal. Hit them up @sf311.)

~ Adriel Hampton

Twitter Strategy for Agencies and Causes

There are as many social media strategies as there are active social media users. This strategy outline provides a roadmap to proven methods for targeted outreach on Twitter. Remember that nearly all of the Twitter accounts with huge follow counts reached that status through Twitter.com’s “suggested user list,” which automatically signs new Twitter users up to follows a select groups of accounts.  However, any purposeful Twitter user should be able to target and grow a significant and relevant follower list of hundreds or thousands using these methods. This strategy is comprehensive and parsing it is likely to produce substandard results. There are alternatives to most of the tools explained here, many of which work just as well or better and can be substituted. Please add any suggestions in the comments.

Growing followers: There are three proven ways to generate followers: Be famous outside social media; tweet A LOT; and, follow lots of people. We’ll tackle the latter two, especially following targeted users.

If you’ve not already been tweeting regularly, skip down to “Strategic messaging” and make sure you’ve got at least 30 good tweets before you start following anyone. Be sure to put in a photo, a link to your main website, and a complete bio – including the Twitter or full names of everyone responsible for the account.

Following people
Twitter has limits on how many people you can follow in a day, and in total. You may also be suspended as a spammer for randomly following people or for unfollowing too many people at once (“churn”). The strategies outlined here work best over the course of several weeks or months – don’t try to rush them.

Regional campaigns/causes: To identify and follow local tweeps, use LocaFollow and Twellow

Issue campaigns/causes: To identify tweeps who are likely to be interested in your agency or cause, search keyword tags at Listorious and TweepML. TweepML will save you substantial time by allowing you to follow up to 250 people from a list with a couple of clicks and a few minutes of processing. You can take also lists straight from Twitter and follow the users through TweepML, and you can also create custom TweepML lists using Twitter Search on keywords or hashtags.

Identify key supporters/influencers in your target community and see if they have lists on their Twitter page. You can also find accounts with similar messages to yours and follow the people who follow them.

Pay special attention to locating and following all tweeting journalists who might write about your agency or cause. Remember that even small groups of followers can be very valuable if they are influencers who have blogs, write for newspapers or have their own large social media communities.

Do not follow people randomly unless your only purpose is to generate a large number (sometimes good for traditional campaigns, but generally ill advised). If your intent is to simply amass followers, there are many popular lists on TweepML for reciprocal following.

Unfollowing people
While you should monitor an engage the people you follow with some regularity, for an agency or cause account, you won’t want to follow many, if any, people who do not follow you. Because Twitter discourages unfollowing and has shut down many sites that facilitate mass unfollowings, take care. Unfollow only after you have at least a few hundred followers and limit it to 100-200 a day or 10-20 percent of the people you follow. Use ManageTwitter daily to ratchet down the number of accounts that are not following you back (an alternative with more manual selection is MyTweeple).

If you don’t want to lose connection with someone by unfollowing, ask them with an @ message to follow you, and/or add them to a public Twitter list.

Disciplined, consistent following and unfollowing is key for building an influential account.

Autofollowing: You can automatically follow people who follow you using tools like Twollow, although manually screening the people you follow back is a quick process and advisable. Twollow also allows you to autofollow using keywords (though this can also get pretty spammy). If you use Twollow’s free trial, note that it automatically bills if you don’t cancel.

Essential engagement
Spending 30-60 minutes a day reading the stream of people you follow and retweeting (RT) or messaging them with authentic responses to what they are talking about is key to building a successful Twitter community. You can also use this time to search for people talking about relevant issues and to engage with them. This is simply not done well by most agency and cause accounts, but you can look at tweeps like @kim (arts community), @MayorSamAdams (Portland Mayor), and @CoryBooker (Mayor of Newark) for examples of highly interactive Twitter practices. Following and engaging with people may get you some interesting responses – often it will lead to positive messaging or even blog posts about your campaign. If it gets a bad reaction, just ignore it and keep going.

It is absolutely essential to respond to relevant replies and direct messages, and in a timely manner.

Strategic messaging
You’re tweeting for an agency or a cause, so you know the message you want to send. Remember that Twitter runs on immediate gratification – many people like to RT or even donate. It’s also a busy ecosystem and if you don’t tweet often enough you will not be seen. Three to 10 original tweets a day should be the minimum, plus RTs and replies. Tweet messages and links to interesting and relevant articles. You may need a community before you need a community, so be consistent.

(Note: Tweets that start with @ are parsed by Twitter as replies and are seen only by that user and people following both you and them. @s within a message are seen by all following you.)

Scheduling and managing: Use HootSuite on the web and on your smartphones to schedule tweets in advance and manage multiple accounts or share duties. Avoid repeating the same message more than twice a day or 5 times a week; however, building up to an ask or breaking a message into several tweets spaced by 10-30 minutes is good, too. Alternatives to Hootsuite include CoTweet, TweetDeck and Seesmic.

Automating: You can use Twitterfeed to keep your account going with relevant content, 24-7. Never schedule more than 1-2 messages every half hour, and consider spacing these automatic tweets out even more. Use the feeds to RT as specific user, or users tweeting about a hashtag or keyword (however, the latter can be dangerously random and is not suggested for most accounts). Twitter does not allow you load an RSS feed directly, so you need to create a simple Yahoo Pipe and then run the RSS and paste it into Twitterfeed. You can also link your blog’s RSS to a feed and set up several for an account. Setting up feeds can be a little tricky, so make sure to monitor it for funny business at the outset.

Pipe to RT a user or hashtag (remove your account name to avoid loops). Example: @Govwiki, which RTs the hashtag #gov20 twice every 30 minutes

Linking your Facebook account(s) to update Twitter can also be a good move to keep content fresh, though the reverse is a major faux pas because it overloads the news feed of your Facebook friends.

If you’re still working on the basics of Twitter for organizations, check out this helpful guide from Learning Pool.

~ Adriel Hampton © Creative Commons

Open Gov West SF Meet Up April 12th @6pm

Open Gov West (OGW) was a two day conference in Seattle, Washington, bringing together government, business, and citizens together to examine regional open government opportunities and practices. OGW focused on three core areas for open government work: open government policy, data standards across governments, and emerging partnerships between governments and new partners such as nonprofits and social entrepreneurships.

“Open Gov West brought together an essential group of change agents from all over the region. At the conference we were able to collaborate and share ideas in a meaningful and productive way, one that will move open government forward as a result,” said Alissa Black, Senior Business Analyst with San Francisco’s Emerging Technology Group.

Black will be at Open Gov West’s San Francisco meetup on April 12th at Citizen Space, with other local San Francisco OGW attendees, reporting back to local open government supporters on the conference’s regional recommendations and ideas for local open government work. Other OGW attendees who will speak at the meetup include Tim Bonnemann, Founder and CEO, Intellitics, Inc., and Dave Geller of San Francisco’s Emerging Technology Group.

Sarah Schacht, executive director of Knowledge As Power and Open Gov West’s chair, will be at the meetup. Schacht will attend each Open Gov West meetup across the west coast in April, including Portland, Vancouver, and Seattle.

Schacht said, “We’re hosting Open Gov West meetups across the west to bring the OGW experience to those who weren’t able to join us in Seattle, and to connect local open government enthusiasts and innovators. Opening up government information, modernizing government and civic technology, and producing meaningful tools for citizens isn’t easy—you need a community of people working together to make it happen. Hopefully, these meetups will help build that community and power the Bay Area’s important open government work.”

Open Gov West: San Francisco
6 to 8 PM
Citizen Space
425 2nd Street #100

Register online at: http://ogwsf.eventbrite.com

Press Contact: Sarah Schacht at director@knowledgeaspower.org or 206.909.2684

Let’s Do It San Francisco – Next Steps

The Let’s Do It movement is inherently grassroots and requires a massive volunteer effort. Since I publicly floated the idea on Thursday, the response has been positive, with support from the director of the SF Neighborhood Empowerment Network, line-level SF city employees, Craig Newmark, and, very importantly, Ben Berkowitz of SeeClickFix (a Web, phone and mobile app that allows citizens to track and report blight and municipal infrastructure issues), just to name a few. Ben and his co-founders are going to be in town in mid-April, and it makes sense to have an initial volunteer team meeting at that time.

The volunteers who kicked of Let’s Do It in Estonia started with a team of 20 that grew to more than 600, with 40,000 taking part in the culminating day of action. My first goal is to have at least 20 of us at an initial meeting mid-month.

To clean graffiti, we’re looking at a couple big issues. Some of the worst of it is on state-owned and private property. That means getting permissions from the property owners to remove it. And we’ll need ladders, not just paint and paint supplies. I think the permission part is pretty easily dealt with as we create an opt-in for property owners, who will greatly benefit from this effort (they are legally responsible for removing graffiti on their property). We need muralists on board for hot spots, a trash transport plan, and, as we pick up steam, there may be opportunity to address other blight as well.

There already are commercial paint matching apps, and we’ll want to work to tie them into the mapping system as well as seek partnerships with paint companies that can provide mobile paint matching services for the day of action.

Alissa has pointed out that we can tap SF’s 311 system to identify outstanding complaints before the day of action (thinking about at September or October for the date).

I’ve created a Twitter account and hashtag for LetsDoItSF, and we should also agree on an open shared space for online collaboration: Google docs, Wave, GovLoop, here?

Thoughts?

To get more insight on what we’re diving into, check out the Let’s Do it World action manual. What we are doing here will not only dramatically improve blight in San Francisco and show the power of collective civic action, it is also critical infrastructure building in one of the world’s most earthquake-prone regions.

The technologies for pulling this off have only advanced since 2008 and Estonia. Let’s do it!

~ Adriel Hampton