I’m a bit disappointed in myself, but long-form blogging just isn’t happening for me these days.  Twitter is a much more manageable thought-sharing and amplifying medium for me at the moment.  I hope to return to this space when I get to a new period of calm!

Video of my panel at the PSFK Asia conference in Singapore in October 2008. My presentation begins 3:45 min into the video.

Within the past few weeks, several top global news stories have involved prank phone calls in politics. Two were funny: Sarah Palin was punk’d by hosts of a radio show in Canada posing as French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and Florida Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen hung up on Barack Obama– twice. One was not: a prank call to Pakistani President Asif Ali Zadari from someone claiming to be India’s Foreign Minister put Pakistan on high alert for war on December 28th.

We would hope that major world governments already have redundant systems in place to ensure that they know who they’re talking to. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and say that, at a National Capital to National Capital level, among Nuclear Powers, they’ll figure it out– soon. My guess is that plenty of technology is already deployed and the human diligence in using it is the problem.

But what about all the other communications that impact government that transpire every day between people and places that are difficult to verify? Obama ought to be able to call any Congressperson and have them KNOW it’s him. Any Congressperson ought to be able to call a constituent and have them KNOW who it is. Any politician ought to be able to call a reporter and have them KNOW who it is. The NSA may KNOW who it is in all of these cases- I have no idea but wouldn’t be surprised– but often, even in 2008, the people on both ends of the phone having the conversation, do not.

We are used to receiving email spam, so, by and large, we have trained ourselves to be skeptical of email, and, though we don’t use it rigorously, modern email systems support both message encryption and digital signature technology that are relatively easy to use and relatively secure.

On the phone, however, most of us don’t have the same instinct of skepticism, and, unless you know the caller’s voice well,  identity is typically verified only by the phone number that the caller is calling from.  If the phone number that shows up on caller ID is in my address book, then I also know who I believe the phone belongs to. This does not, unfortunately, protect against number spoofing or phone theft. Indeed, the hoax call to the Pakistani President was ‘verified’ to have originated from a ‘verified’ official phone number within the Indian Ministry of External Affairs.

So we need to both improve and also democratize access to more sophisticated identity verification technology for voice telecommunications. And we need to do so without further raising the specter of Big Brother, so use of any improved voice ID technology should be enabled at the option of caller and recipient alike, and evident to both parties.

I have no clue how to achieve this, but I do hope that great entrepreneurial minds are working on it, and not just leaving it to the minds of government Intelligence Services. If I were to tackle it, I would start with established public key cryptography protocols such as PGP that are inexpensive, effective and relatively easy to use in the realm of email, and develop an analogous system for voice over digital cellular networks. Remember, we don’t need to achieve 100% accuracy from any line to any line at any time– we just need to have caller and recipient know if their level of trusted identity is high or not, and we need to make it relatively easy and inexpensive to choose to place a high-identity-trust call when it really matters to do so.

Video of my panel at the PSFK Good Ideas in Collaboration breakfast last week in New York. PSFK events get me up early better than any alarm I’ve ever had. Thank you PSFK. I think.

Long overdue, but here’s the video of the Progressive Space Policy panel I convened in August ‘08 at Netroots Nation. Note: No audio till 12:30. First of two parts.

Part II of the Netroots Nation panel on Progressive NASA on 7/18/08…

We need humor in these trying times– preferably didactic humor that gives us a new perspective or that makes us feel liberated and inspired. There are few clandestine organizations on Earth today who provide that too us as consistently and dramatically as The Yes Men.

Thanks to them, 1.2 million copies of newspapers appearing to be the New York Times appeared throughout New York and Los Angeles this morning. Reactions ranged from elation to shock to laughter as commuters read headlines such as “Iraq War Ends” and “Maximum Wage Law Succeeds” and advertisements purportedly from companies such as HSBC, which featured three identical pictures of Barack Obama in their famous triptych format with the captions “epoch-making – pivotal – squandered.” An online version visually identical to NYTimes.com was also created.

The Yes Men are famous for their past satirical impersonations of major enterprises such as The World Trade Organization, McDonald’s, Dow Chemical, and the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. They typically use fake websites and impersonate senior representatives of enterprises they wish to spoof at public events. To my knowledge, this is the first time they have produced a physical spoof product and distributed it successfully throughout major cities.

Prior to Wednesdays “release” of the paper, a network of volunteers was recruited online. They were mobilized by text message Tuesday night and Wednesday morning to pick up sets of newspapers at central locations for broader redistribution.

Recently I was asked to reflect on how the lessons of online organizing by those of us who worked in the 2004 Presidential campaign have impacted not only the 2008 Presidential campaign (in which Dean ‘04 and Clark ‘04 veterans teamed up to create Blue State Digital, the technology backbone of Obama’s online operation), but also the Federal Government, over the past four years.

Many 2004 veterans have been working in the realm of making government more open in order to enable watchdog oversight of it. I have been working more in the realm of trying to make government more efficient and effective through technologies and organizing techniques that promote openness. I’m personally mostly focused on the cultural and policy side of things– trying to get people inside NASA used to being more open and sharing by default rather than only when explicitly forced to. There is also a great deal of work being done by reformers in the CIO’s offices and elsewhere on the communications technology side of NASA’s operations. They’re working on open APIs, open-source licenses, etc. I’ve told a bit of this story, in the context of NASA, in several presentations over the past year. Here below I’ve attempted to break down the problems, implications and solutions I see in a more structured format, again using examples we have encountered at NASA.

Note that none of these observations below are specific to NASA… They apply to any large government bureaucracy, and we are working with our change agent peers in other Agencies as well. We simply have the luxury/curse at NASA of a high-profile brand and significant public interest and goodwill to use as a lever for this change.

I. INTERNAL COMMUNICATION / COLLABORATION IS INEFFICIENT:

EXAMPLE:

• no internal searchable database of people, projects, skills and technology assets

IMPACTS:

• internal inefficiency and redundancy; internal competition for resources and a culture of sequestering information because having information that no one else has is perceived as having power

SOLUTIONS:

• reforming human resources policy to permit and encourage more open communication (internally and externally) and bottom-up innovation, and reforming management structure to create a more flat more networked organization
• foster cultural change, including renovating NASA’s physical plant to create inspiring workspaces that foster openness and collaboration
• creation and implementation of systems to capture knowledge and make it searchable

II. EXTERNAL COMMUNICATION IS CONTROLLED, CENSORED, AND UNIDIRECTIONAL

EXAMPLES:

• slides for any Powerpoint presentation to be given to a public conference are supposed to be submitted for review well in advance to make sure that no sensitive information is included in them, rendering it onerous to speak openly or to include recently updated information
• policies for NASA employees to spend their own time working on other projects, communicating through social media about their ideas and work, etc. are restrictive and at best fuzzy, and the burden of proof rests on the employee to prove WHY they should be able to communicate with the public, rather than the burden of proof resting on the Agency to prove why not
• NASA.gov reaches millions but is all processed edited moderated content; very difficult to mash this content up and re-share it, and no opportunity for user-generated content either from the public or from a broader array of NASA employees than just authorized Web Content Managers.

IMPACTS:

• less public interest and awareness and inspiration and educational benefit than otherwise possible, because content consumption is passive
• NASA unable to benefit from the innovation and work cycle leverage that could result from leveraging the goodwill, technical skills, time and creativity of members of the general public, and entrepreneurial private sector
• NASA has difficulty attracting and retaining talent that is used to working in a more open environment in the private sector

SOLUTIONS:

• agency-wide deployment of the Web 2.0 communication tools, communications policies, and processes used by the world’s leading private technology enterprise
• build communities and create formal processes to leverage the time and skill of these communities for practical benefit to NASA
• highlight and build on the few examples of successful crowdsourcing at NASA
• create sustainable professional relationships between NASA and non-NASA personnel that shift NASA’s internal culture through co-working and open-space format events
• shifting the budget and skillset of NASA Strategic Communications staff to focus on encouraging, training and supporting non-StratCom staff in their public communications role, including hiring staff with corporate blogging and online organizing skills
• set communications policy that mandates open publication of all internal Agency communications such as meeting minutes, absent demonstrable and internally verified need to maintain confidentiality; shift the burden of proof from the need to show that information is “safe” to publish, to the need to show the information “is not safe” to publish.

III. KNOWLEDGE, DATA, AND IP CANNOT EASILY BE SHARED

EXAMPLES:

• NASA hires contractors to write code and doesn’t mandate that is be open-source and often doesn’t even acquire the rights to modify, repurpose, or release that code
• IP created within NASA is unknown and unsearchable internally, let alone externally, and it is extremely labor intensive and relationship-dependent for internal business development staff to collect data, identify IP licensing opportunities, and execute those licenses
• petabytes of data collected by NASA that is legally in the public domain is extremely difficult to find, search, interpret, and share, due to slow data processing and archiving and limited APIs

IMPACTS:

• the inability to get more eyes on code eliminates an opportunity to reduce the likelihood of failures such as the Mars Climate Orbiter explosion
• NASA pays more $ for code to be written by contractors than it would have to if it leveraged existing open-source projects (including its own)
• NASA returns less value to the taxpayers because IP assets aren’t easily licensed or contributed to the public domain where they could yield ancillary benefit to society

SOLUTIONS:

• increase the use of open-source software by improving the language of the NASA Open Source Agreement, changing procurement policy to require that contractors use and create open-source software whenever possible, and by creating clear policy guidelines, communities of practice, and hosting infrastructure that make it easier for NASA staff to use and produce open-source
• reform the International Traffic in Arms Regulations
• build (and mandate adherence to) standards and open APIs for all NASA data sets and an upcoming (not yet funded) “NASA.net” initiative
• improve internal knowledge sharing between technical and business groups within NASA through co-working, community building, collaboration tools, and improved knowledge management systems

This video is of my panel presentation to the PSFK San Francisco conference on July 17th, 2008… I greatly enjoyed the conversation with Ezra Cooperstein of Current.tv about how to transform large enterprises in stodgy industries.

‘Tis the season, as happens every four years, that I start receiving emailed narratives every day, passed through friends, family and neighbors virtual and literal, that tell the story of a Presidential election and the choice before us, the American people. Some are better than others, and some of the best I’ve ever received I’m receiving this time around. I’m deeply disturbed that this election, at the moment, appears to be to close, because the choice for me has never been more clear. That clarity, and my commitment to work to ensure that Barack Obama is elected President, gets reinforced every time I read one of these good narratives about the election. So, in hopes that it will be of service in motivating others as well, I’m planning on posting the best I receive here. If there is an author, I’ll ask their permission before posting. If there is none, I’ll post it as anonymous. To kick it off, here is my response (slightly edited) to a friend of mine who wrote me from Australia– wrote to all of her American friends in fact– with a subject line of “your politicians are scaring me.”

———

Dear Mei,

Yes it’s pretty scary to me that McCain-Palin can be polling equal to or ahead of Obama. Obama isn’t doing a perfect job on the campaign trail, but I say “so what”…. This election is NOT about Obama. He has some of the smartest most principled Americans I’ve ever met surrounding him, and I believe he’d be an outstanding President. So would Biden.

But the bigger issue, to me, is how horrendous the alternative would be.

McCain is even older than Ronald Reagan was in his 2nd term as President, and we now know as a historical fact that Reagan was senile by the time he left office. Members of my family the same age as McCain cite this fact as one of their primary reasons for being so worried about the prospect of electing him.  McCain admits that he knows little about economic policy, at a time of severe economic pain here in the US. And McCain is in many ways to the RIGHT of George Bush on foreign policy. He was bound and determined to go into Iraq three days after 9/11, the facts about who attacked us be damned. Iran is next, if he becomes President.

And I find the prospect of Palin as President, should anything happen to McCain, absolutely terrifying– someone who had never had a passport or traveled outside of North America in her life until last year, leading the world’s most powerful nation for the next four years? She would not only be ignorant about the rest of the world, but apparently also about the rest of the USA– she and her husband supported a political party that advocated secession for Alaska from the USA! And on domestic policy, she lies unapologetically about her public service record (regarding seeking “earmark” money from the Federal government from Alaska), and she would like to make it illegal for a raped woman have an abortion, even if her life is in danger.

If they’re elected, I think the US will continue to be perceived as belligerent around the world, will continue to spend far more than we can afford further destabilizing the world’s largest economy, will have the most conservative Supreme Court in modern history for the next 30 years, and will take no serious action on climate change. The choice couldn’t be more clear.

I think it’s likely to come down to Ohio in the election once again, and the best way I know to impact that State’s election is through my friend Billy Wimsatt’s “get out the vote” initiative: http://www.votetodayohio.org . Send your American friends there and they’ll make a difference in this election– and/or get them to support it financially at http://www.actblue.com/entity/fundraisers/21134

Thanks for your concern and your support!

Andrew