Matthew Burton

Because this is timely, I reserve the right to say some presumptuous/incorrect things that I never would have said had I had time to think it over, as I usually do when I post things here.

The Washington, DC Chief Technology Officer just launched a project called Apps for Democracy, a contest to create apps with DC’s data catalog.

I love this project. DC doesn’t get much revenue to work with, so this project makes a lot of economic sense–the tools they will get out of this contest would, through the standard contracting route, cost about 40 times the $20,000 in prize money they’re giving away.

But the economics, I’m guessing, is what sold the mayor on the project. I bet the initial motivation was much different: the CTO’s office understands that the public will create better tools, and more quickly, than government contractors can. They know that the benefits of opening their data far outweigh the speculated, yet unproven, pitfalls.

Also, I can tell the CTO likes to experiment. That’s really gutsy, because an inevitable byproduct of experimentation is failure. This is why most bureaucrats hate experimentation and would prefer to coast: sure, you won’t make progress by doing things the same way, but at least you can’t screw up!…

The below was written with large organizations in mind. If you’re a techie, most of it will be old news, but you might find the intelligence stuff interesting. There’s also a PRINTABLE PDF version.

Recently, I was a panelist at the Director of National Intelligence’s Open Source Conference. The title of my panel was “Young Analysts Talk About the Value of Open Source.” The intelligence field’s definition of “open source” is different from what you might think: all it means is “information derived from public sources”: newspaper articles, television broadcasts, Web sites, etc.

To outsiders, it might seem odd to have a conference about this: doesn’t everyone understand the value of information? But when your desk has piles of secrets stolen from the enemy, it’s understandably difficult to spend time reading about things the whole world already knows. And because those secrets are transmitted over private, physically impenetrable networks, the Web isn’t available at everyone’s desk. So the Intelligence Community is slow to realize the power of publicly available information in anticipating threats.

Judging by the product booths in the exhibit hall, the conference revolved around helping analysts navigate the Web, and harnessing Web content en masse so that it can be delivered to analysts on a non-Web network.…

Now that Joe Biden is finally getting some attention, a lot of people are thinking, “Who? A senator? For 35 years? Was running for president this year? Never heard of ‘em.”

Below are two interviews from last August–one video, one audio–during the middle of the Democratic nomination race. I think they provide a great primer on who this guy is.

I followed Biden really closely this year. I don’t agree with him on everything, but what I found great about him was his critical mind and his willingness to tell us things we don’t want to hear (especially regarding Iraq and health care). Because of this, he was the only candidate I contributed money to.

BUT…these are critical interviews that ask pointed questions about Biden’s experience and views. That is, I’m not simply peddling pro-Biden propaganda. If you want to be an informed voter, give these a look/listen:

On Point with Tom Ashbrook: Joe Biden (will open a page with a dedicated audio player)…

A few updates to report on the Open Source Developer-Government Co-op project (but nothing new to report regarding a better name for this thing).

1. Early on, I said my big concern was avoiding the legal landmines that forbid the federal government from accepting free work. Tom Bruce at Cornell’s Legal Information Institute felt my pain and connected me with some former government IT acquisition executives. They have been incredibly helpful, making light of technicalities that would have taken me months to discover on my own. The gist of what they’ve told me:

• The federal government is loathe to accept products for free, unless they are also offered to everyone else for free.
• Charging the government $1 for a service or product is better than giving it away; that means the buyer and seller have agreed on a price, a point that may not be disputed in the future.
• You cannot attach for-profit maintenance/service agreements to a low-cost sale or giveaway. That’s rightly seen as non-competitive.
• Educational institutions are great vehicles for ideas like this one. They are funded outside the government and have the public interest at heart. When working with such an organization, government buyers can be confident that the sellers do not have any plans to make a mint off of taxpayer dollars.

…

The essay I submitted to the Rebooting America essay contest was chosen as one of the three winners. Hooray!

This means it was published in the resulting book (Amazon) along with essays from Clay, Doug, Aaron, Susan, Esther, Yochai…quite a group.

If I had it to do over again, I would have summed up my chapter like this:

Despite being one of the top physics minds of his generation, Richard Feynman once admitted in a lecture that “nobody really ‘understands’ quantum physics.” The world has had the Web for 16 years, and I think I can safely say that nobody really understands it, either. Even when we think we do, we wake up the next morning and it surprises us with something new. But we’re ready to propose Constitutional changes based on our elementary knowledge of it? Such changes would become obsolescent as quickly as the Web churns out new surprises. So let’s not get too eager to cure our net anxieties. Instead, let’s prepare our government to face all tech revolutions, not just the current one.

…

I’ll be doing an online interview with Dave Witzel on July 23. I’m expecting it to center around the Man essay and the “Govzilla” project (I should come up with a better name), but you can submit a question about anything you like.…

Yesterday, Dan Phiffer and I launched Speechology.org. Think of it as an online fact checker for political ads and debates. Here’s the backstory:

A few months ago, I was watching the New Hampshire Republican debate. Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee got into an argument when Huckabee accused Romney of not supporting the surge:

MR. ROMNEY: Number two — number two, I did support the surge. On the same day the president announced the surge, I also…laid out my plan that I thought made sense — actually, even before the president’s speech — calling for additional troops; I called for a different number. So I also supported the surge from the very beginning.

But look, I — you know, Governor

MR. HUCKABEE: I’m way over.

MR. ROMNEY: Don’t try and characterize my position. Of course, this war has

MR. HUCKABEE: Which one? (Scattered laughter.)

MR. ROMNEY: You know — you know, we’re wise to talk about policies and not to make personal attacks.

MR. HUCKABEE: Well, it’s not a personal attack, Mitt, because you also supported a timed withdrawal. And Senator Pryor, from my state

MR. ROMNEY: No, that’s

MR. HUCKABEE: — was praising you for that, and

MR. ROMNEY: I do not — I do not support and have never support a timed withdrawal.

…

The first draft of my most recent essay had a big chunk on politicians: running for office was the final of three suggestions I made to people who want to reform our government. I removed that chunk, but with PDF 12 hours away, I figured I’d post it anyway, as its own little musing. So here it is:

===

“Suppose two politicians are running for president, and one goes through the farm section and is asked, `What are you going to do about the farm question?’ And he knows right away – bang, bang, bang. Now he goes to the next campaigner who comes through. `What are you going to do about the farm problem?’ `Well, I don’t know. I used to be a general, and I don’t know anything about farming. But it seems to me to be a very difficult problem, because for twelve, fifteen, twenty years people have been struggling with it, and people say they know how to solve the farm problem. And it must be a hard problem. So the way I intend to solve the farm problem is to gather around me a lot of people who know something about it, to look at all the experience that we have had with this problem before, to take a certain amount of time at it and then to come to some conclusion in a reasonable way about it.

…

Three years ago, when I told a mentor from the tech sector that I was soon leaving my job as an intelligence analyst to start a technology Masters program, she replied, “It’s good that you’re getting out of that field.”

She didn’t like the Intelligence Community’s work, and in her eyes, the longer I stayed, the more it would corrupt me. I’ve always thought of it in reverse: the longer I stayed involved, the more opportunities I would have to change it. Afterall, if you want something to get better, should you entrust the job to those who caused the problem in the first place? Or should you take care of the problem yourself? To me, it’s a pretty simple question. (That’s why I still work with the Intelligence Community as an outside consultant.)

Unfortunately, among my colleagues—fellow politicos and geeks who are trying to reform the U.S. Government—my mentor’s philosophy seems to be more popular than mine. It’s a philosophy that won’t get us very far. By not engaging our government directly, and instead choosing to merely blog about it from afar, we are surrendering the most important, most influential roles to the very people we want to get rid of.…

Personal Democracy Forum and TechPresident recently sponsored an essay contest:

When the Framers met in Philadelphia in 1787, they bravely conjured a new form of self-government. But they couldn’t have imagined a mass society with instantaneous, many-to-many communications or many of the other innovations of modernity. So, replacing that quill pen with a mouse, imagine that you have to power to redesign American democracy for the Internet Age. What would you do?

Below is my blue sky response, which was selected for publication. You can order the whole book from Amazon.

NOTE: The first three paragraphs below were inserted post-publication and do not appear in the printed version.

======

Richard Feyman—possibly the most brilliant physicist of his generation—once said that “nobody really understands quantum physics.”

We’ve had the Web for 16 years, and I think I can safely say that nobody really understands it, either. Sometimes we think we do, but then it surprises us with something new. We know a lot about what it’s done so far, but none of us know what lies ahead.

In spite of this, here we are, proposing Constitutional changes based on our elementary knowledge of the Web. Such changes would become obsolescent as quickly as the Web churns out new surprises.…