In recent years, I’ve been amazed by all the exciting new ways of developing idea that are emerging new technology. I spend way too much of my time writing and editing articles on Wikipedia; I read blogs, and ask questions in the comments; and obviously, I’ve taken a crack at keeping my own blog. I check in on what my friends are saying on Twitter.com a couple times a day; I listen to talk radio shows, and call in or email when it seems like they’re missing something. And pretty often, I meet and get to physically shake hands with someone that I’ve known for months or years, and worked with extensively.

But at the same time, I’ve been pretty disappointed by how little government seems to take advantage of these kinds of tools for innovation, policy development, disseminating information, and generally keeping people up to date with what’s going on in their world and how they can change it. There are some rays of hope, but by and large, government approach to the Internet is still struggling to catch up to 1995.

This January, with a fresh crop of legislators heading to Salem, we have a chance to work for a kind of change that will help us all stay better-informed about what our government is doing, and about how to influence it in our areas of passion and expertise. The Obama supporters among us may be shouting “Yes We Did,” but I believe that “Yes We Can” remains the better phrase. We may have succeeded in electing a president who will be more open to innovative ideas, but our job of supplying those ideas — and developing the same kinds of conditions on a local level — is just beginning.

The bill I’m working on — and hope you will help us work on — will address at least four areas:

Public domain

The law should assert unequivocally that works of state government are in the public domain, and are not subject to copyright protection by the agencies that produce them. Readers of this blog may recognize this concept, as it ties in with what we accomplished with the Oregon Legislative Counsel Committee last spring.

Spending

The public has a right to know how government money is being spent. This bill should establish a web site that discloses contracts entered into by state agencies (like the federal USAspending.gov).

There is precedent for this on a federal level (Obama/Coburn act, 2006), and in several states.

Economic development

Many policies and programs are adopted in the interest of economic development. However, there is rarely public evaluation of these programs and their efficacy. This bill should establish guidelines and procedures for evaluating economic development spending, and how effectively they achieve their desired results.

See Senate Bill 518 of 2007, introduced by Senator Vicki Walker, but not passed.

An envorinment for innovation

There are many public- and private-sector organizations (nonprofits, universities, Internet-based communities, neighborhood associations) that aim to work in the public interest. To the degree that government initiatives are available for scrutiny, these organizations may lend their own innovative approaches to the process. But when it’s difficult to discern what government is doing, this sort of innovation is stifled.

This bill should aim to establish an environment conducive to innovation.

In drafting this bill, we hope to model the sort of collaborative, open process that it seeks to enable. We have lots of smart and dedicated people committed to getting this done; but there are a lot of details to sort out, and strategic decisions to be made.

Where do you fit in? Come add your name to the page, and if you like, leave a note about what aspect you want to work on!

For instance:

• A wiki “user page”: This is a page associated with a certain member of a wiki community, but (usually) viewable and editable by anyone. People can be contacted without disclosing any personal information; and the public nature of discussions enhances collaboration. This works really well on Wikipedia, where editors working closely together often chime in on one another’s projects.
• A MySpace “comment”: Often used for comments like “happy birthday” or “sorry your cat died.” It’s a nice way to keep up to date on what’s going on in your friends’ lives.
• The Facebook “wall”: essentially the same thing as a MySpace comment.
• Twitter messages directed “@” somebody: This is distinct from a “direct message,” which is private. If I type “@BobSamplename Have a nice hike!” it will be visible to Bob, but to anyone else, as well. If I type “d BobSamplename Sorry to hear about the genital warts”, nobody else sees it (oops.) Having the easy choice between public and private is very convenient.

Status messages on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc. are similar, but usually not directed at anyone in particular.

Using all these services means there’s a lot of “chatter” in my life lately, but it opens up all kinds of new possibilities. In editing Wikipedia, I often find other people who are at odds, and am able to jump in and help someone figure something out and move forward. Other times, I see that somebody is working on a topic that’s interesting to me, and we’re able to collaborate on improving an article, and learn a lot in the process.

On the social networking sites, it means I’m able to keep up with what people are doing. This is nice for social reasons — birthdays, hiking trips, etc. — but it’s also very useful on a professional level. It means I find out about interesting events, conferences, networking opportunities; it also lets me jump in and help someone with a problem, which builds my business reputation. That individual may become a client someday — or, another acquaintance who sees my helpful response may consider hiring me.

This stuff is very exciting, and it’s all changing very quick. My mom emailed me last week, concerned because she hadn’t seen me updating this blog in a while; so she checked my Wikipedia contributions, and didn’t see a lot of activity there, either.

So I told her about Twitter, my latest obsession.

10 years ago, I’d exchange an email or phone call with my mom once or twice a month. It’s a whole different world now.

Thankfully, I wasn’t selected this time — what with the Oregon Revised Statutes issue I got embroiled in, I don’t know where I would have found the time to get a presentation prepared!

So I got to attend as an audience member, which was much more my speed. Here’s my favorite of the 5-minute presentations I saw, by Jenny Andrews:

But according to the Legislative Counsel Committee (LCC), we don’t own the laws we make; they do. And they get to decide who can and can’t publish them.

They’ve been saying this, apparently, since 1953, but it came to a head last April. That’s when when the LCC — a committee of several prominent legislators — issued a “takedown notice” to Justia.com, ordering them to stop publishing the Oregon Revised Statutes (ORS) on the web. Justia is a company that publishes laws from various U.S. states, in a standard and well-indexed format. (Here’s an example from another state.)

Public.Resource.Org (P.R.O.), a non-profit partner of Justia, took exception, and made the case for a change — both out in the blogosphere, and by retaining counsel and challenging the decision on legal grounds.

P.R.O. got the committee’s attention; this Thursday, June 19, the LCC will hold a hearing, and will consider their arguments. I’ll be giving the case on behalf of Oregon Wikipedians and bloggers. Here are two key points:

Internet offers new opportunities

Our newly Internet-enabled democratic society has a chance embrace its civic duty in new and promising ways. The efforts of Justia.com, making the law more accessible to any interested party, only scratch the surface of what’s possible. Given the ability to publish Oregon’s laws, innovative organizations (for-profit, non-profit, and non-organized alike) will continue to find ways to make them more accessible to Oregonians. Increased access allows citizens to embrace their role as lawmakers, and as law abiders, to an extent never before possible.

Other early efforts include the List of Oregon ballot measures on Wikipedia, the Meyer Foundation’s recently launched, and acclaimed project Connec+ipedia, and the publication of specific laws as supporting exhibits on any number of blog posts.

Accuracy concerns are legitimate, but copyright law is the wrong tool

Those defending the LCC’s decision have expressed concern that nefarious web publishers might post inaccurate versions of the ORS.

While it’s true that this could happen, copyright law is the wrong tool for defending against it.

First and foremost, anyone publishing a public resource stakes a piece of their own reputation on its accuracy. An organization like Justia.org has plenty of incentive not to falsify the law: they would lose credibility and clients if they were ever revealed to have messed up.

If some unknown publisher were to post something called “Oregon law,” the public would (rightly) be skeptical of its accuracy. Publication does not confer truth; I’m sure we all remember our parents and teachers telling us “not to believe everything we read.” If we haven’t yet internalized that message, it’s high time we corrected that.

Not good enough? Fine — pass a law, then! I’d be happy to help get the word out. It’s perfectly reasonable to prohibit deliberate falsification of the law — but copyright law is far too crude an instrument for that. Claiming copyright prevents good faith organizations and individuals from advancing the public discourse; but a more targeted law, independent of the spurious “ownership” issue, could more effectively single out the “bad guys.”

Oregon law already takes this approach, in the case of the Seal of Oregon. The Seal’s design, enshrined in the 1859 Constitution, is clearly exempt from copyright, as it was created well before 1923.

But its use is restricted by ORS 186.023. Not by copyright law, but by a law pertaining explicitly to this valued resource.

A law prohibiting the publication of inaccurate versions of the ORS would make sense. But that’s not what the LCC has done here.

So let your legislators, and the members of the LCC, know that we need to keep the entire ORS in the public domain, and available for various advocacy groups to expand our civic discourse. Here’s a list of LCC members:

Senators: Peter Courtney; Kate Brown, (running for Secretary of State); Ginny Burdick; David Nelson; Jackie Winters; and Floyd Prozanski.

House members: Jeff Merkley, (running for the U.S. Senate); Greg Macpherson; Dave Hunt; Andy Olson; Dennis Richardson; and Diane Rosenbaum.

(Oh, sorry, maybe you shouldn’t take my word for it…after all, I might have made a fake list! Here’s a link to the official list.)

The stories are cute, but the full video is epiphanic. It made me think about all this stuff in whole new ways. It’s a little long by web standards, but totally worth the time.

John had done his homework before our conversation, and had some interesting questions. The central foundation for his story was the opinion of many conservatives that Wikipedia articles, in general, have a liberal bias.

To illustrate the point, John brought up the articles on David Vitter (a “conservative” U.S. Senator accused of soliciting prostitutes) and Eliot Spitzer (New York’s “liberal” former governor, accused of the same). (Note: linked articles are the old revisions that were current at the time of our interview.) John pointed out that the prostitution scandal was mentioned in the first paragraph on the Vitter article, but that Spitzer’s scandal was buried several paragraphs deep.

(video: a humorous take on political bias on Wikipedia)

I wasn’t familiar with those specific articles (although I’d done a little work on Vitter’s a while back). I took a look, and immediately recognized that the articles were simply at two different stages in their natural evolution.

Natural evolution? What the heck is that? Well, once you’ve worked on a whole lot of Wikipedia articles, you start to notice some patterns in how they get developed. One of the most significant elements of an articles is the lead section — essentially, the introduction to a subject. Wikipedia actually has a guideline on writing good lead sections; among other things, it recommends that a lead section have several paragraphs, and that it should generally be comprehensive enough to serve as a complete summary of the article, capable of standing on their own.

But meeting that guideline can be one of the most difficult tasks involved in writing an article, because the author needs to understand the subject pretty thoroughly to even attempt such a task. Anybody can add a detail to the appropriate section of an article, drawing facts out of a newspaper article or other source; but writing a concise overview at the beginning takes deeper comprehension.

So often, articles go through a cycle where numerous facts are added to the body, while the lead section remains very short. Often, the details that wind up in the lead section are those that are currently in the news. This was clearly the case in the Vitter article; but with the Spitzer article, somebody had already taken the initiative of writing a more complete lead, so the (recent) prostitution scandal was in its chronologically proper place, near the end of the lead.

What’s the lesson in all this? I’m not entirely sure. As I told John, I’m not sure anyone — myself included — is in a position to draw conclusions about the general bias of the encyclopedia. Articles vary widely. Some subjects have diligent editors watching closely. Other subjects, often overlapping, have highly biased editors working hard to establish their points of view. Wikipedia does have highly effective procedures in place to address this kind of “point-of-view pushing,” but highly effective is a far cry from perfect.

My opinion — more or less reflected in the Daily Show video above — is that Wikipedia levels the playing field for all potential contributors (with Internet access), so in a certain respect, its structure allows it to be unbiased in a more organic and reliable way than any other information source. But by the same token, a system as open as Wikipedia allows for all sorts of gamesmanship. So like I said, I’m really not sure what the “true state” of Wikipedia is. All I can say is, the more prominent areas I work in appear to improve in their quality and balance over time, due to the contributions of a variety of people. More obscure subjects are slower to evolve, and are more likely to reflect an individual enthusiast’s point of view.

At any rate, the article John wound up writing (unfortunately not available online) is one of the more thoughtful and accurate pieces I’ve seen produced by a general interest publication. He offers advice to conservatives looking to bring balance to overly liberal articles, and that advice is measured and appropriate, largely mirroring the advice seasoned Wikipedians offer to newcomers. Near the end of his article, he quotes a self-identified conservative Wikipedia editor as saying: “Conservatives shouldn’t whine about bias because they can correct it themselves.”

Oh, and the Vitter article? Not wanting to interfere directly, I left a note on the article’s discussion page, encouraging those familiar with the subject to write a more comprehensive lead section. A few weeks later, it was taken care of.

NATIONAL REVIEW
issue date: April 21, 2008
Liberal Web: In the Battle of Wikipedia, we must not surrender
JOHN J. MILLER

The basic premise of this 3 minute presentation: Lewis Strauss once predicted that nuclear technology would make electricity so inexpensive that it wouldn’t be worth charging for it. He was wrong, but today, we’re seeing other resources become that cheap: bandwidth, digital storage, processing power. Successful companies like Google and Yahoo offer all their products for free. What is this strange new economy we’re moving toward?

Our first post gives some background and advice on how to publish a photo on Wikipedia; future topics may
include highlighting some of the better articles and photos about Oregon, sharing techniques for researching Oregon history, and calls for help in areas that aren’t covered too well yet.

I hope you’ll check it out — at least those of you in Oregon!

(Please post any comments in the first thread over there.)

There’s all kinds of good info on Oregon’s official web site, right? Yes, there is. But can you find it? How about your grandmother, or your grandson? How about the web searcher’s best friend, Google — can it manage to index the info so it shows up in searches? Is it easy to cite in a Wikipedia article? Can I, a blogger, even show you, my readers, where it is?

The answer to all these questions is, essentially, “no.”

Take, for instance, the summary page for Senate Bill 10, mentioned here in an earlier blog post. I would have liked to link Oregon.gov’s overview page on the bill, so you could learn about the bill yourself. It has lots of links to various versions of the bill, amendments, the minority report, etc. (See screen capture above.) But I wasn’t able to link to it; the page that showed up when I simply copied the page’s address was an error message.

If you want to see the page below (after the jump), you’ll have to go through most of the same steps I did: go to Oregon.gov, navigate to the legislative page, find the search box, and then enter “Senate Bill”, “10″, and “2007 session” into it.

So, pop quiz: in the year 2008, what’s wrong with this picture? No, strike that. How many things that couldn’t be addressed by a reasonably technical high school student, for a few hundred bucks, are wrong with this picture?

Here’s the page I’d have liked to be able to link to:

Senate Bill 10

Senate Amendments ( html | pdf )

A-Engrossed ( html | pdf )

Senate Amendments to A-Engrossed ( html | pdf )

B-Engrossed ( html | pdf )

House Amendments to B-Engrossed ( html | pdf )

( html | pdf )

C-Engrossed ( html | pdf )

Minority Report C-Engrossed ( html | pdf )

Enrolled ( html | pdf )

Introduced ( html | pdf )

In a democratic society, it seems natural that decision makers should be forthcoming about who they are, so that the society as a whole can draw its own conclusions about their motivations, possible conflicts of interest, and general suitability for decision-making. We see this value reflected in laws about public service; for example, a recent extension of Oregon’s ethics laws (SB 10 of 2007) has attracted a great deal of attention. Public officials — even volunteers — are expected to disclose not only their names, but often their business affiliations and other personal information, to the public whose lives they stand to impact.

In many public forums, though, anonymity is commonplace. Talk radio callers, bloggers and blog commenters, and contributors to projects like Wikipedia are often completely anonymous; or, if they disclose any information about themselves, it often can’t be verified.

But public forums often have a big impact on public opinion, and on public policy. Those in charge of such forums — blog administrators, radio hosts, the Wikimedia Foundation — often staunchly defend their participants’ right to anonymity, both in terms of their individual rights and in terms of the public good. Valuable observations and opinions often come from anonymous contributors, who might be putting their careers or their personal safety at risk if they disclosed their identities. Legislation protecting whistleblowers shows that these values run through our legal system, as well.

So, from the perspective of the public interest, where is the line? Where do we, as a society, have an interest in defending an individual’s ability to stay anonymous, and where should we require disclosure of information? This is important to me as I consider how to structure the Open Lobby project, which will aim to generate policy reforms in a broadly transparent way.

A few thoughts:

• Fact-finding research can benefit from anonymous contributors, and it’s possible to defend against abuse (at least to some degree) with clear policies about sourcing.
• Policy recommendations, however, can easily be gamed by people who misrepresent their identity, in either overt or subtle ways. It can be difficult to detect or counteract this sort of thing.
• Sometimes, a community’s treatment of anonymous contributors can be more effective than official policies. For instance, sometimes simply pointing out and shaming anonymous bloggers who make personal attacks can deflate their efforts.

What do you think? How should blogs, talk radio, Wikipedia, or other public forums best approach anonymity? When and where do individual rights come into play, or is the public good the main factor we should consider? Is it acceptable for a forum to protect anonymity out of self-interest — i.e., to foster the kind of controversy that often attracts an audience?