Social Silos: How Government Builds Walls Using Social Media

This morning, about the same time I was on Fox Business’ Opening Bell talking about the President’s Job Summit, NPR was running a story about the launch of Citizen Connect. It’s a pretty interesting looking app, but it got me thinking more about whether governments should be running out and building projects like these right now.

As I have said before — just yesterday — projects like these are a risk to Gov 2.0 because they muddy the conversation. I admire their desire to innovate, but for now, it’s inappropriate for non-trivial government dollars to be spent on projects like these. If they are to be built, let regular people build them for free until the dust settles.

Why? There are a few reasons:

• First of all, every time an agency builds a city-based application, it drives that agency into further isolation from other agencies. If I am a resident of Boston and never leave, there’s no problem. But most people commute. When I lived in Somerville, I commuted into Cambridge, but went to Boston all the time. Do I need to download separate apps for that? Three apps, with different processes, different nav, different capabilities? What if I go to New York? New Haven? New Jersey? And now, how do we get to the metadata?
• Secondly, it’s really expensive for each instance and in the aggregate. Is every municipality in the country really going to develop the software expertise or ask a private vendor to build it? Let’s look at the costs: dev time, licenses, integrators, personnel, benefits….the list goes on. That’s why the LAPD spent more than $350,000 on a crime map, and why Oakland PD, Boston, LA County, San Francisco, Salt Lake City and more than 700 other law enforcement agencies throughout the country spend between $99-$199/month by working with CrimeReports.com and get far superior results.
• The combination of what I will call these government “social silos” gives the suboptimal end result: a more expensive, less featured, less integrated app.

Now, let me step off my soapbox and sincerely congratulate the City of Boston on the app. It looks great, and I think it’s important to paint the vision of how citizens can jump in and contribute to government. I think it’s a far better paradigm to have people lock arms with government and take a “we” approach rather than our current “they” approach in solving community problems. It’s just that right now is not the time to use government dollars to innovate at the very edge.

I hope I’m not alone, and there’s some evidence, like Tim O’Reilly’s conversation Beth Noveck at Web 2.0 a couple weeks ago (start watching at 18:00), that tells me I’m not. Beth is a visionary, but I worry about her recent comments about state CIOs sharing apps across states. It’s a good idea in some ways, but that perspective dissolves when you get to the local level, where municipality objectives aren’t always aligned with states. In fact, sometimes they are in direct opposition.

There are a lot of ways to move Gov 2.0 forward, and experimentation is right up at the top. At this point, which Tim eludes to, what we really need is for government to alter their disposition, and get in the business of optimizing the conditions to help Gov 2.0 and transparency flourish. Although the one-offs are good, they are far better built by small groups of private individuals — for free, or close to it — until we’ve come up with the an initial Gov 2.0 Manifesto, which will be the subject of my next post.