Here in upstate NY, driving miles of country roads to go hiking in an ancient gorge and plunge into the cool depths of the natural swimming pool is well worth the trip.
Visiting Stony Brook takes me back nearly 4 decades, to looking for fossils in the ancient walls, waterfalls, and the indelible memory of chilly, clear waters dappled with sun.
As forest baths go, this was restorative.
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I shared the piece I wrote for Medium about the need to preserve ephemeral updates by politicians & civil servants on my Page. I decided to experiment with boosting it.
Facebook did not approve the “ad,” classifying it as political.
When I experimented further by seeing what was required of me for “identity confirmation,” it simply…didn’t work for me in the Facebook app. Tap button, nothing happens.
Some irony here: I was at the tip of the spear pushing Facebook to adopt political ad transparency & worked with Congress on a law to mandate it!
And now, as a result of their ham-handed self-regulation, I can’t engage people on Facebook about my piece advocating Facebook creating a public interest file for politicians and civil servants who create ephemeral media (“Stories”) on Instagram and Facebook.
UPDATE: When I shared this on Twitter, Rob Leathern, the director of product at Facebook responsive for ads integrity and transparency, replied to my @mention, stating that “This is not blocked – this is an ad about an issue of national importance and so requires you to go through the authorization process, before it will run.”
This is not blocked – this is an ad about an issue of national importance and so requires you to go through the authorization process, before it will run
— Rob Leathern (@robleathern) December 22, 2018
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
When I said the feature wasn’t available on mobile, he told me to visit Facebook from a desktop computer to complete the process. When I did so, Facebook prompted me to enter a mailing address and upload images of my passport, driver’s license or state ID.
There’s an interesting wrinkle here, as I noted to Leathern on Twitter: I’ve been “verified” on Facebook for years now, with a big blue checkmark next to my name and a special signifier in comments. What, exactly, does being “Verified” mean if Facebook still needs to identify who I am?
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On May 29, senior officials from the White House Office of Management and Budget and the State Department confirmed that the United States will developed a new National Action Plan for Open Government for the Open Government Partnership this spring and summer, hosting two “co-creation” events in June and re-opening an online forum for public comments on Github. The State Department announced that the U.S. would be restarting the consultation process for building a new plan.
Today, in an email sent to the open government and civil society working group email listserv, GSA analyst Alicia Yozzi shared noted about the remarks delivered by the three officials, who were
I’ve published the notes in full, below:
From: Alycia (Piazza) Yozzi
Date: Wed, May 30, 2018 at 5:20 PM
Subject: Save the Date & Notes from the 5/29 Inter-Agency Open Government Working Group Meeting
To: US Open Government <us-open-government@googlegroups.com>, OpenGov@listserv.gsa.govHello OpenGov Community,
Yesterday morning, we convened the public U.S. inter-agency Open Government Working Group meeting with civil society in the offices of General Services Administration (GSA) and launched the process to develop and ultimately publish the Fourth Open Government Partnership (OGP) U.S. National Action Plan.
Thank you to those who joined us by phone and in-person. If you could not make it we’ve captured notes and I’m including them below.
SAVE THE DATE(s) – We will be hosting 2 Co-Creation Sessions to develop the 4th U.S. National Action Plan (NAP 4) and would love to have you join us. Space is limited so please register in advance. Passcode: OpenGov2018
You can register for either:
Thursday, June 14 from 9:00 am – 12:00pm
Thursday, June 21, from 1:00 pm – 4:00 pm
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/nap-4-working-session-registration-46585789350 Passcode:OpenGov2018
RESOURCES – Here are links to a few of the key resources mentioned at the meeting:
- NAP4 Co-creation process Github repository
- OpenGov Google Group
- https://open.usa.gov/
- Independent Reporting Mechanism (IRM) Report on the Third U.S. National Action Plan
OpenGov Civil Society Meeting Minutes – 5/29/18
- Matt Lira – Special Assistant in the White House Office of American Innovation
- This Administration is committed to open government in the United States. Today we are here to renew the process of drafting and publishing the Fourth National Action Plan.
- Empowering American citizens to hold their government accountable is a core function of any democracy and a priority for this Administration. A core objective is to ensure that our government is efficient, effective, and accountable to the American people.
- We view this as a whole-of-team effort. The U.S. government will have a number of offices within the State Department, the GSA, and other agencies working on the fourth OGP National Action Plan.
- We want to hear from you – citizen engagement and public participation is a critical part of this process. To help focus these discussions, the President’s Management Agenda will serve as a guiding document for our commitments. In particular, we will look forward to your input on the following areas of interest:
- Modernizing Government Technology to Increase Productivity and Security
- Leveraging Data as a Strategic Asset
- Developing a Workforce for the 21st Century
- Consistent with OGP’s feedback to all of its participants, we expect the fourth National Action Plan to include fewer – but more impactful – commitments relative to previous years.
- Matt Bailey – Acting Policy Unit Chief, OFCIO, OMB
- Highlighted that the OpenGov team really wants to get agencies and civil society together for the co-creation events, especially those that are able to make commitments for the new NAP.
- We want to be able to have frank, open discussions with the public and the agencies that will be able to implement the recommendations.
- Save the date for 6/14 and 6/21 for the co creation events. More information coming soon. [Note that 6/14 and 6/21 are now the confirmed dates.]
- Cross-agency priority goals constitute the President’s Management Agenda (PMA) which, along with previous public input will serve as the starting point for this process
- Chanan Weissman, Special Advisor, Department of State
- Chanan provided a very brief overview of the soon-to-be released Independent Reporting Mechanism (IRM) Report on the Third U.S. National Action Plan and the status of the upcoming OGP Global Summit.
- He thanked open gov representatives throughout the inter-agency for their feedback on the pre-publication version of the Report. Agencies provided 60 plus distinct comments, edits, clarifications, etc. back to OGP IRM researchers.
- IRM cited three noteworthy highlights:
- Modernization of access to information
- Open science
- Police open data
- IRM Report’s five main recommendations included:
- collaboration with the public,
- fewer and more transformative commitments,
- ethics reform,
- service delivery and infrastructure, and
- legislation branch involvement.
- IRM Report information can be found online and out for release soon.
- TheOGP Global Summit in Tbilisi, Georgia on July 17-19. The last one was in Paris, France in December 2016. This year,they are streamlining the number of attendees (1000-1500 versus ~3,000 in years’ past) and limiting the number of panel discussion themes to three: anti-corruption, public service delivery, and civic participation.
Questions/Feedback
o There is a Google Group to share information and a Github account. Unfortunately, Github is not accessible to everyone. Can the group be sure to use the google group to share?
- Yes. We will be sure to leverage the Google group to include the majority of people.
o Can you talk more about the OGP co-creation events?
- We’d love to hear feedback on how to structure that process most effectively
- We are still developing the structure but want it to be productive
- Both events will at GSA, one in the morning and one in the afternoon
- We are considering ways to include folks who cannot be present in person
Regrettably, I could not attend nor participate in this public meeting due to illness, or I would have asked several questions. Thanks to the GSA for taking these notes and circulating them online.
Whether the United States government actually follows through engaging the public almost a year later in an open process that involves that “collaboration of citizens, civil society, political and official champions and other stakeholders” is an open question that will be answered over the next month — but there’s ample reasons to be skeptical, given political polarization, partisan rancor and low trust in government.
After historic regressions on open government, the Trump administration committed to continued participation in the partnership last fall, only to delay building a new plan after short, flawed public consultation.
Almost a decade ago, we saw what the Obama administration at least attempted to do with Change.gov and then the Open Government Initiative. Two government-hosted events in DC and a Github forum are not going to be meet the more robust standards for public participation and co-creation that OGP has promulgated after years of weak consultations.
The Open Government Partnership was designed to be a platform that would give civil society an equal seat at the table. That would means not just voting on a pre-existing management agenda or pre-populated commitments from closed workshops, but getting commitments that are responsive to the great challenges that face American democracy into the plan, including ethics reforms.
In the Trump era, until we start seeing seeing federal agencies, Cabinet members, and the White House itself using social media, mobile devices, radio, and TV appearances to not only inform and engage the public but to incorporate public feedback into meaningful government reform proposals, unfortunately there’s little reason to trust that this newfound commitment to open government is serious.
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Fascinating new research from the World Economic Forum offers more insight about how using mobile apps leaves people feeling — and how moderation can reduce regret:
Here’s the key contention: for many of the apps that people uses the most, there is a time when the law of diminishing returns kicks in, after which time more use begins to leave us with increased regret.
That’s about 20 minutes a day, for Facebook. I do wonder if Facebook’s internal data would show about how happiness changes over time, across different interactions. I suspect more time interacting with friends and less time passively consuming pictures and video is correlated with more positive feeling.
My takeaways:
1) intentional use & discipline can have a real impact on someone’s sense of well-being and reported happiness. (That sounds a lot like a doctor recommending a healthy diet and daily exercise, to me. Common sense but not always easy to do.)
2) lots of time spent on some apps are strongly enough associated unhappiness that people struggling with depression should probably delete them if they cannot moderate use.
3) In aggregate, this likely adds up to unprecedented combination of cognitive loads for people who spend a lot off time every day staring at their smartphones (ahem!) which may explain our complex relationship we have constant connectivity.
I think I’ll try to adapt Michael Pollan’s mantra for eating to a healthier “digital diet” this year:
Use apps.
Not too much.
Mostly productivity.
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In this ad campaign for Facebook Live at DC bus stop, they’re urging users to film people with no caveats or ethics.
If Facebook is going to encourage its users to livestream strangers, it would be responsible to educate them about privacy, security and minimizing harm.
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After hours of fierce debate over a report that Twitter was building a way to expand its famous character limit to 10,000 characters, Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey responded by tweeting a picture of a statement, embedded below.
— Jack (@jack) January 5, 2016
I ran the image through free online optical character recognition software to get the following text:
At its core Twitter is public messaging. A simple way to say something, to anyone, that everyone in the world can see instantly.
We didn’t start Twitter with a 140 character restriction. We added that early on to fit into a single SMS message (160 characters).
It’s become a beautiful constraint, and I love it! It inspires creativity and brevity. And a sense of speed. We will never lose that feeling.
We’ve spent a lot of time observing what people are doing on Twitter, and we see them taking screenshots of text and tweeting it.
Instead, what if that text…was actually text? Text that could be searched. Text that could be highlighted. That’s more utility and power.
What makes Twitter, Twitter is its fast, public, live conversational nature. We will always work to strengthen that. For every person around the world, in every language!
And by focusing on conversation and messaging, the majority of tweets will always be short and sweet and conversational!
We’re not going to be shy about building more utility and power into Twitter for people. As long as it’s consistent with what people want to do, we’re going to explore it.
And as I said at #flight, if we decide to ship what we explore, we’re telling developers well in advance, so they can prepare accordingly.
(Also: I love tweetstorms! Those won’t go away.)
Quick thoughts after reading this:
1) What are users with disabilities to make of this tweet by Twitter’s CEO? No <alt text> for a screen reader. No blog post. No text at all. Social media platforms should be accessible to everyone.
@digiphile +1. @twitter oughtta offer built-in alt authoring like @EasyChirp or @Wordpress. But isn’t screenshorts the problem >140 solves?
— Eric Wright (@ewaccess) January 5, 2016
I don’t think this is a great look for Twitter, on this count, but maybe its developers might fix this issue for the website & apps.
2) Twitter’s cofounder used a screenshot of text, or “screenshort,” to get around the very 140 character limit that’s being discussed. There’s enough demand for this feature that ex-Twitter staff built an app just for that called One Shot.
3) Twitter deserves credit for watching what its users are doing on the platform to get around the character constraints.
“We’ve spent a lot of time observing what people are doing on Twitter, and we see them taking screenshots of text and tweeting it,” he said. “Instead, what if that text…was actually text? Text that could be searched. Text that could be highlighted. That’s more utility and power.”
You don’t need to imagine what that would look like: Google+ had no such character limit and amazing text search from the start. (Google’s effort had other issues, leading to a complete redesign and relaunch of Google Plus in November.)
Or consider Facebook, which announced universal search last October after years of development.
4) Can you recall Twitter ever effectively asking its users what we want?
Is Twitter adapting to perceived need or an implicit feature request? Enabling people to tweet more text in that could be searched would indeed be more powerful and useful.
Frankly, I welcome the death of the tweetstorm, and Twitlonger hacks, and walls of text in images. 140 characters and a “read more” link? 👍
— Andy Baio (@waxpancake) January 5, 2016
Is that what users want, versus, say, an edit button?
@jack just give us the edit button then we can talk characters mkay?
— Brian Ries (@moneyries) January 5, 2016
Or is it better search of the billions and billions tweets sent over the last decade, now that Topsy is gone and the Library of Congress archive hangs in limbo?
Or the quality filter that only Verified users (like me) have?
If a beta "Quality" filter had been provided to targets of abuse *1st*, I'd cheer on @Twitter. Giving it to @Verified users feels tin-eared.
— Alex Howard (@digiphile) March 24, 2015
//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Dorsey said that “as long as it’s consistent with what people want to do, we’re going to explore it.”
I read that as good news. Let’s see what happens next.
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