Civic Technology Community Group
Adam Sobieski
There is a new W3C Civic Technology Community Group and joining it is free, fast, and easy to do.
In order to join the group, you will need a W3C account. Please note, however, that W3C Membership is not required to join a Community Group.
Artificial intelligence is already having a big impact across domains, including government services. Users will soon be able to ask natural-language questions and engage in multimodal dialogues about large-scale public-sector financial, accounting, and budgetary data while receiving responses comprised of language, mathematics, charts, diagrams, figures, and graphs.
This Community Group will bring together those interested in civic technology, open government, and artificial intelligence to share and discuss how to ensure that the Web is well-suited for these applications.
This new group will discuss topics including, but not limited to:
- how existing and new standards could benefit civic technology and open government,
- software interoperability scenarios involving Web browsers,
- how chatbots in webpages, in Web browsers (browser sidebar chatbots), and in desktop and Web-based office software (e.g., Copilot) may interoperate with one another,
- how recent developments in AI can enhance public-sector websites,
- multimodal dialogue systems or chatbots which can provide, beyond natural-language responses, charts, diagrams, figures, graphs, and so forth,
- multimodal dialogue systems or chatbots which can answer questions which involve processing data from multiple governments, federal, state, county, and city governments,
- how users can embed data from dialogue systems or chatbots into documents and websites,
- how users can share responses with one another on social media, e.g., Twitter,
- differences between static and dynamic, updating, refreshable AI-generated content,
- other technical requirements from the domain of civic technology.
Interested participants are invited to enter an election process to serve as group Chairs.
According to Wikipedia, “civic technology enhances the relationship between the people and government with software for communications, decision-making, service delivery, and political process. It includes information and communications technology supporting government with software built by community-led teams of volunteers, nonprofits, consultants, and private companies as well as embedded tech teams working within government.”
“Open government is the governing doctrine which maintains that citizens have the right to access the documents and proceedings of the government to allow for effective public oversight.”
Recent advancements to artificial intelligence technology, e.g., large language models and GPT, can equip: (1) accountants, auditors, analysts, comptrollers, public officials, legislators, oversight committees, and members of their staffs, and (2) the public, journalists, and government watchdog organizations, to better make sense of and interact with large-scale public-sector financial, accounting, and budgetary data.
Users will soon be able to ask natural-language questions and to engage in multimodal dialogues about large-scale public-sector financial, accounting, and budgetary data while receiving responses which include language, mathematics, charts, diagrams, figures, and graphs. Users will soon be able to copy AI-generated content into document authoring software and to share such content with one another using social media.
Award-winning government websites include those of Mississippi (https://www.ms.gov), which provides a chatbot, and Utah (https://www.utah.gov/), which provides live chat support.
There are opportunities to assist in the modernization of federal government websites such as data.gov, performance.gov, and usaspending.gov.
A 2021 GAO study (https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-22-104127) determined that “the Secretary of the Treasury should add a broad website search function to USAspending.gov to help users find content on the website.” The study indicated that Treasury officials responded to the GAO that they were “in the process of laying the foundation for a broad (‘global’) search function across all USAspending.gov content. However, they expect the design work for a global search function will not begin until FY2024 at the earliest.”
Such a broad search function would be greatly enhanced by modern artificial intelligence technologies.
Above are indicated but some of the initial civic technology and open government topics of interest to the new group. Hopefully, this document has inspired you to explore joining and participating.
In order to join the group, you will need a W3C account. Please note, however, that W3C Membership is not required to join a Community Group.
The new group’s present website is available at: https://www.w3.org/community/civics/ .
Thank you and please feel free to help to spread the word!