The next list I'd like to tackle is citizen-led or citizen-driven
coordination efforts, relating to government reform and technology.  We've
often remarked that there are more listservs to join than one can easily
metabolize, and that, even in as specialized an area as government reform,
some fragmentation is inevitable.  I'm collecting a bunch of lists like
these (see here<http://www.theopenhouseproject.com/2008/08/11/public-legislative-part...>and
here<http://blog.sunlightfoundation.com/2008/08/08/executive-transition-pr...>,
for example), but reading this
post<http://stuartsierra.com/2008/08/27/fragmentation-and-the-failure-of-t...>makes
me feel like this particular one -- citizen coordination -- will be
particularly helpful.

As usual, the boundaries are not easy to define cleanly, but grouping these
similar things together so that they can feed off each other is more
important.

   - *Open House Project *- I think the
listserve<http://groups.google.com/group/openhouseproject>counts here.
   - *IGOTF* - Carl Malamud's Independent Government Observers Task Force.
   (link <http://groups.google.com/group/igotf>)  Heavy focus on legal
   information publishing and municipal data.
   - *GovTrack.us* listserv <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/govtrack/> -
   GovTrack focused, free ranging discussion on parsing legislation and related
   development issues.
   - *ODOG* - (link <http://groups.google.com/group/odog>) Open Data Open
   Government listserv with lower activity level.
   - *Open Government* -
Listserv<http://groups.google.com/group/open-government>from Carl
Malamud's Sebastopol meeting that formed the 8 Open Government
   principles <http://resource.org/8_principles.html>.
   - *Political Parsers* - New and active political parsing tech-centric
   data wrangler list <http://groups.google.com/group/poliparse>.  (Aaron
   Swartz)
   - *Hansard Prototype* - Dev
list<http://groups.google.com/group/hansard-prototype>about digitized
visualization tool for British version of Congressional
   Record (the Hansard).
   - *DoWire.org* - Very well subscribed international democracy and
   technology lists <http://dowire.org/> from Steven Clift.
   - *OGosh* - Open Government Open Source Hacking from Josh Tauberer (of
   GovTrack.us), with an active wiki and (hopefully) regular irc chats. (
   link <http://wiki.opengovdata.org/index.php/OGosh>)
   - *theinfo* - development centric set of email lists for users of large
   data sets.  (Aaron Swartz) (link <http://theinfo.org/>)
   - I can't wait to add Matthew Burton's open source government IT
   coordination project, when it becomes real.  :)

There are a bunch of sites and projects that play a role in coordinating
citizens, but these are those that come to mind first when I think of
process and public access reforms.  (I'm probably missing several, perhaps
even that I'm on -- if so, sorry!)

In a sense, the entire business-lobbying-influence world, all trade
associations, and the entire public interest non-profit sectors could be
seen as playing a coordinative role.  My question, then, is why has such
reform coordination only flourished in response to technology?  Most
traditional groups must periodically have an interest in transparent
accountable government at one time or another, but still process reform has
been reactionary, and scandal driven.  I wonder why they've been so bad at
representing their own collective interests.

The pressures relating to technological change in government are of a
different order, however, since their success can enable all the other
efforts to be successful or to fail.

I don't want to commit what I'd call the fallacy of the fundamental, though,
for example: a Chemistry teacher who says "look around! everything is
chemicals!", and the English teacher who then responds "you've used words to
make that sense!."  I find this sort of fundamentalism tiresome: "money is
the root of all evil", "without campaign finance reform...", "unless you've
a good education system, then..." "we're all just vibrations..." "and it all
comes down to confidence..."     Meh.  You get my point.

There is, though, a specific sense in which technologically driven
government reform is different from other reform efforts, and I think
Christopher Kelty's concept of a "recursive public", as I'm currently
reading in *Two
Bits*<http://www.amazon.com/Two-Bits-Cultural-Significance-Software/dp/0822...>,
makes the point well (thanks Joshua Gay): "A recursive public is *a public
that is vitally concerned with the material and practical maintenance and
modification of the technical, legal, practical, and conceptual means of its
own existence as a public; it is a collective independent of other forms of
power through the production of actually existing alternatives."*

I think that description fits the Open Government community well -- advocacy
that also has a recursive component, enabling more effective advocacy.

Please share other similar community efforts you come up with!

John