Design State: A weblog about government web design

There is a very robust and lively conversation about eGovernment being held by government employees online. A lot of great ideas for improving citizen access, transparency and data distribution are being tested and implemented. Unfortunately, there’s an even larger group of government employees, officials, and managers who aren’t engaged in using the Internet to keep tabs on the newest trends.

I ran across the Technology Adoption Lifecycle the other day, and immediately started applying it to different people I know and different situations I’ve been in. The rest of this post heavily concerns the TAL, so it might be helpful to have that link open in another tab.

You’ve got the innovators, who come up with the great ideas in the first place, and then you have the early adopters, the people hop on the newest site, gadget, or trend as soon as it appears. The online conversation about eGovernment takes place almost totally between these two groups. Eventually they catch the interest of the early majority and you end up with the Feds starting to use social media to help expand their capabilities.

The problem with this paradigm is that the innovators and early adopters are too busy creating new envelopes to push and early majority folks are too busy settling in to their new digs to pay any attention to the two remaining groups: late majority adopters and laggards.

These are the CTOs, CIOs, PIOs and department heads who are still running Windows 98 at 800×600 screen resolution and using Netscape or IE6 as their browser of choice. They don’t use the Internet for anything but email (even though email has nothing to do with the Internet) and they get their technology news through print media trade publications.

The trade rags are fairly good at what they do, but it is in their nature to direct their content toward late majority adopters and laggards. You don’t read much about the possibilities of the Internet, information design, or web design in these publications. When you do read something about the Internet it is usually framed programmatically or in terms of infrastructure; how so-and-so used WiFi to make their job easier. From time to time they touch on Facebook (security risk!) or Twitter (security risk!) but the tone of the articles tends to run along the lines of “Look at this new-fangled contraption. Huh. Amazing what they can do nowadays.” Emphasis on they. There’s no encouragement, education or endorsement of what the rest of us are so gung-ho about.

The late majority adopters and laggards need to be brought into the conversation, and it is high time that the rest of us work on doing so. They aren’t going online to get their information, so we have to reach them through the channels they are used to. Working with trade publications to improve their reporting and coverage is a great way to start, since these new ideas will be presented in a familiar format. It also couldn’t hurt to send your boss, colleague, or peer links to relevant sites or articles online as a way of broadening their horizons. I’ll even start the email and let you fill in the links: “I noticed you read [Generic Government Trade Magazine], I thought you might be interested in the sites listed below, which offer a lot more content on similar topics. In particular, I found these articles to be very informative.”

Part of the reason the late majority adopters and laggards are who they are is because the rest of us aren’t talking to them. By engaging them in the work we do, it’s quite possible that we can increase the pace of the cultural change needed for truly effective egovernance.

Read Part 1 of this post here.

Yesterday I made it up to the Interoperability section of the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) eGovernment Interest Group Note: Improving Access to Government through Better Use of the Web.

I finished the document today, and instead of examining the remaining items in detail I’m going to just spin out some different summaries of what I see as the points of the thing.

The final four issues in the note; Open Government Data, Interoperability, Multi-Channel Delivery, and Identification and Authentication all deal with the technical side of eGovernment, the backend geekery that I love to jaw with the developers about for hours. These are important topics, well worth detailed consideration, but their success depends very much on maneuvering through the challenges of the cultural bureaucracy I described yesterday; the stuff that Gov 2.0 proponents end up jawing about to the decision-makers.

It seems like the W3C eGov group has a good handle on the current state of eGovernment as I understand it. The Note identifies socio-cultural and technological challenges to providing useful and cutting-edge eGovernment services and acknowledges that economic and legislative obstacles to implementing those services exist. At the same time, the note also describes the benefits that an engaged eGov action plan can have for both the efficiency of government agencies and the effectiveness of their interaction with citizens.

Basically, government entities need to simultaneously:

1. Focus on providing secure, open, useful and reusable data:
   1. while engaging with their citizens on mutual terms; and
   2. welcoming citizen interest, input, and feedback; and
2. Reassure senior decision makers that:
   1. the benefits of providing secure, open, useful, and reusable data outweigh the risks; and
   2. that welcoming citizen interest, input, and feedback will increase the trust and confidence that citizens have in their government.

This note isn’t meant to offer solutions or guidance for eGov proponents. It’s a State of eGovernment Address, an important calibration point for folks to use in their own quests to create their own solutions and guidelines for the future of eGovernment.

The W3C group knows just how big this eGovernment sandwich is, and has a pretty comprehensive list of all the ingredients it contains. Now all that remains is figuring out the best way eat it.

Today the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) eGovernment Interest Group published a Note which is the culmination of their first year of analysis on the history, current state, and hopeful future of eGovernment. Entitled Improving Access to Government through Better Use of the Web, the document serves as a great first step toward codifying the ways which eGovernment should be utilized to serve a variety of roles and interests. Much of the document provides an overview of the materials and assumptions used to develop the analysis and direction of the Interest Group; I’m just going to pull out a few of the ‘graphs that caught my eye and comment on them. This is the first of two posts on this note, as I’m only halfway through it.

“While increasingly cognizant of the opportunities afforded by social media, typically governments are still operating a broadcasting paradigm. Web sites are a vehicle for mass communication and for the delivery of transactional services. In this environment statistics showing the scale of usage are celebrated as indicators of success in themselves. The structure of a government Web estate is often organizationally driven. This is problematic as the structures of government continually change, resulting in significant disruption to the presentation of government on the Web. Government departments can be surprisingly transient entities. Transposed to namespaces and URIs this is quick sand [sic] on which to build an essential information infrastructure using the Web.

…

Firmly in the provide mode many governments have devised a channels strategy for their Web estate. This has been developed primarily from a communications perspective. What is more generally absent is a data strategy from a Web engineering perspective. It is rare in government to think about Web site development as the engineering of basic information infrastructure.

…

The reality is that not many officials responsible for commissioning or managing government Web sites are familiar with the basic principles of the Web‚ for example Architecture of the World Wide Web [WEBARCH]. Unfortunately, lacking a government context and being aimed at a more expert audience, the W3C guidelines and specifications are almost impenetrable to many Web decision makers in government.”

Trends and Modalities of the Web and the Information Consumer

This essentially boils down to the idea that most government entities are stuck talking at their constituents instead of to or with them. It’s like watching the evening news, citizens have to take whatever is given to them, and don’t have easy means of responding or interacting, other than passively. It’s a Web 1.0 mindset, but one that government entities are very comfortable with; it provides total message control and requires the least amount of overhead both in terms of the work required to post and thought required for how useful the content will be. That sounds pretty harsh, but I’m building a picture here. (I think it is the same one that the Interest Group is building as well.) Consider that

“David Weinberger, one of the co-authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto [CLUETRAIN], observes that, “there is an inverse relationship between control and trust”. If true that has profound implications for government. Governments may seek to trade a loss of control through greater transparency and openness in return for an anticipated increase in public trust.”

What Is Participation and Engagement?: Participation

and that

“Public servants need to be given access to the Web sites that citizens are using in order for them to be able to engage. The “lock-down” culture that exists in many government IT departments often restricts access to the more interactive Web sites for security reasons. This badly hampers the effective engagement with online communities by public servants. Many governments are blocking employee access to Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, and others where conversations occur, interaction is embraced, individuals align around similar goals, issues, and interests, and participatory and engaged communities are formed. Security issues, employee rights and misdeeds, and lack of familiarity with the tools are impacts that governments must content [sic] with, however, in taking time to do so limits the amount of participation, feedback, and interaction from constituents.”

(emphasis mine) – Access of Public Servants to Web Sites that Citizens Are Using

and it becomes obvious that

“There needs to be training and support for public servants in the use of appropriate tools and techniques to use the Web to engage, particularly for the development of public policy. Engaging with online communities over the development of public policy will involve significant culture change in government. To achieve it will require clear leadership at senior levels. As the use of the Web for engagement is so new in government there are few people with both the practical knowledge and the seniority and experience to provide this leadership.”

(emphasis mine) – Training, Support and Cultural Change

The emerging picture is described quite tactfully, but the easiest way to explain it is by being quite blunt. Many senior decision-makers at government entities are any number of the following:

• Ignorant of the opportunities that the Internet has to offer them in terms of engaging their citizens;
• Aware of the opportunities, but afraid or ignorant on how to implement them;
• Unwilling or afraid to release control over their message in order to provide additional services outside of the “broadcast paradigm”; and
• Unable to implement or utilize these options due to budgetary, personnel or various other economic or bureaucratic reasons.

This is a great justification for continuing the W3C eGovernment Interest Group. As I saw on a Twitter feed today, someone needs to be able to “translate tech to wonk.” That’s definitely something that this Interest Group can do, by

• Providing guidance for senior officials – walking them down the path to more effective use of their web presence;
• Defining best practices and standards for the implementation of current and developing web technologies; and
• Offering direction toward other possibilities that will encourage further innovation in eGovernment practices.

One last quote for today:

“When government information is made available through portals, e.g. the so called one-stop shops, the government intends to build the consumer’s view in order to provide the information in the most usable way. Even when the PSI is provided by means of an API, the methods to access it are often restricting the view that a given consumer can have or need of that information.

Providing Open Government Data allows the consumer to use the information in the most appropriate way to achieve the intended goal.”

What Are the Main Benefits of Publishing Open Government Data?: Multiple views, not just one

This is exactly what Jeff Veen talks about when he encourages folks to not tell users a story with your site or application, but instead allow visitors to use your site or application to tell their own story. I talked a bit about this in my post about Jeff Veen & Hay Net. User-empathy is definitely something that many government websites could use a bit more of.

More on all of this once I’ve had a chance to read the rest of the note. You can read Part 2 here.