Long overdue, but here’s the video of the Progressive Space Policy panel I convened in August ’08 at Netroots Nation. Note: No audio till 12:30. First of two parts.
Vodpod videos no longer available.
Long overdue, but here’s the video of the Progressive Space Policy panel I convened in August ’08 at Netroots Nation. Note: No audio till 12:30. First of two parts.
Vodpod videos no longer available.
Part II of the Netroots Nation panel on Progressive NASA on 7/18/08…
Vodpod videos no longer available.
We need humor in these trying times– preferably didactic humor that gives us a new perspective or that makes us feel liberated and inspired. There are few clandestine organizations on Earth today who provide that too us as consistently and dramatically as The Yes Men.
Thanks to them, 1.2 million copies of newspapers appearing to be the New York Times appeared throughout New York and Los Angeles this morning. Reactions ranged from elation to shock to laughter as commuters read headlines such as “Iraq War Ends” and “Maximum Wage Law Succeeds” and advertisements purportedly from companies such as HSBC, which featured three identical pictures of Barack Obama in their famous triptych format with the captions “epoch-making – pivotal – squandered.” An online version visually identical to NYTimes.com was also created.
The Yes Men are famous for their past satirical impersonations of major enterprises such as The World Trade Organization, McDonald’s, Dow Chemical, and the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. They typically use fake websites and impersonate senior representatives of enterprises they wish to spoof at public events. To my knowledge, this is the first time they have produced a physical spoof product and distributed it successfully throughout major cities.
Prior to Wednesdays “release” of the paper, a network of volunteers was recruited online. They were mobilized by text message Tuesday night and Wednesday morning to pick up sets of newspapers at central locations for broader redistribution.
Recently I was asked to reflect on how the lessons of online organizing by those of us who worked in the 2004 Presidential campaign have impacted not only the 2008 Presidential campaign (in which Dean ’04 and Clark ’04 veterans teamed up to create Blue State Digital, the technology backbone of Obama’s online operation), but also the Federal Government, over the past four years.
Many 2004 veterans have been working in the realm of making government more open in order to enable watchdog oversight of it. I have been working more in the realm of trying to make government more efficient and effective through technologies and organizing techniques that promote openness. I’m personally mostly focused on the cultural and policy side of things– trying to get people inside NASA used to being more open and sharing by default rather than only when explicitly forced to. There is also a great deal of work being done by reformers in the CIO’s offices and elsewhere on the communications technology side of NASA’s operations. They’re working on open APIs, open-source licenses, etc. I’ve told a bit of this story, in the context of NASA, in several presentations over the past year. Here below I’ve attempted to break down the problems, implications and solutions I see in a more structured format, again using examples we have encountered at NASA.
Note that none of these observations below are specific to NASA… They apply to any large government bureaucracy, and we are working with our change agent peers in other Agencies as well. We simply have the luxury/curse at NASA of a high-profile brand and significant public interest and goodwill to use as a lever for this change.
I. INTERNAL COMMUNICATION / COLLABORATION IS INEFFICIENT:
EXAMPLE:
IMPACTS:
SOLUTIONS:
II. EXTERNAL COMMUNICATION IS CONTROLLED, CENSORED, AND UNIDIRECTIONAL
EXAMPLES:
IMPACTS:
SOLUTIONS:
III. KNOWLEDGE, DATA, AND IP CANNOT EASILY BE SHARED
EXAMPLES:
IMPACTS:
SOLUTIONS:
This video is of my panel presentation to the PSFK San Francisco conference on July 17th, 2008… I greatly enjoyed the conversation with Ezra Cooperstein of Current.tv about how to transform large enterprises in stodgy industries.
Vodpod videos no longer available.