list: citizen coordination

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John Wonderlich

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Aug 27, 2008, 5:38:34 PM8/27/08
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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 and here, for example), but reading this post 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 counts here.
  • IGOTF - Carl Malamud's Independent Government Observers Task Force.  (link)  Heavy focus on legal information publishing and municipal data.
  • GovTrack.us listserv - GovTrack focused, free ranging discussion on parsing legislation and related development issues.
  • ODOG - (link) Open Data Open Government listserv with lower activity level.
  • Open Government - Listserv from Carl Malamud's Sebastopol meeting that formed the 8 Open Government principles.
  • Political Parsers - New and active political parsing tech-centric data wrangler list.  (Aaron Swartz)
  • Hansard Prototype - Dev list about digitized visualization tool for British version of Congressional Record (the Hansard).
  • DoWire.org - Very well subscribed international democracy and technology lists 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)
  • theinfo - development centric set of email lists for users of large data sets.  (Aaron Swartz) (link)
  • 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, 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
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