They’ve Lost That Loving Feeling: The Government We Date, and the Government We Marry

By: Sam Ford, PepperDigital

Awhile back, my dad told me a joke he heard at church.  Perhaps some of you all have heard a variation of it.  In short, a man arrives in heaven and is told that, contrary to traditional Christian beliefs, he has the chance to choose between Heaven and Hell.  He spends a day in Heaven and finds it relaxing but a little boring.  Then he goes to Hell and finds it captivating, energizing, and stimulating--entertainment and partying rather than fire and brimstone.

The dupe ultimately chooses Hell.  When he travels back down for his eternal stay, however, he finds a desolate wasteland.  In despair, he questions Satan why reality was so different from what was offered.  Satan answers simply, "Well, yesterday you were voting..."

If you're wondering whether there's a point to that anecdote, it's related to an ironic double-standard we've been talking about here at Peppercom of late.

Those running for political offices seem to be proving themselves increasingly savvy in terms of how to use digital tools.  There's nothing like a presidential campaign to get serious money poured into finding new ways to reach the general U.S. population, from online video to Twitter. (Maybe not as revolutionary as Jacob's frisbee updates, but I digress.)  We can find out where candidates are at every moment of every day.

Yet, when we look at our national, state, and local government sites, the transparency is a little less impressive.  We can know what many people running for office had for lunch, their favorite bands, and how tired campaigning makes them, yet try to figure out your city's sanitation rules, or the TSA's travel rules.  So, we've learned that those who are marketing politics are quite digitally savvy, but the nuts and the bolts of the governments elected officials are in charge of often has a long way to go.

I'm not saying I want to know what flavor of gelato my local planning and zoning commissioners like, but I might like to know what major issues are on their agenda, have a public forum where members of the staff answer questions for local citizens, and so on.

Some groups are doing something about this lack of digital transparency.

Back in April, over on the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium blog, I wrote a piece about some interesting research Marsha Ducey from the State University of New York--Buffalo has been doing on complaints filed to the Federal Communications Commission in response to soap operas.  She presented her work at this year's Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association national conference, and we talked about how time-consuming and confusing the process of obtaining governmental records can be—something we spent quite a bit of time talking about back in my J-school days.    Turns out, she was lucky enough to have a nice employee working on her case, who gave her more than she was looking for, but it was a reminder that you never know what to expect when dealing with processes that sometimes seem to be more complex than they should be.

After I ran that post on Marsha's work, I was contacted by someone who directed me toward a site called TVShowComplaints.org.  The site's creators say they believed the FCC template for requesting records was not particularly user-friendly, so they've developed a site that helps you fill in the blanks for an official records request and then e-mail or mail that request to the FCC.

The same group also has sites called Get My FBI File, Get Grandpa's FBI File, and Government Attic, likewise aimed at trying to streamline the process of getting public information from the government, using simple digital tools that make the process less complicated and intimidating.

The person who contacted me about the site said the hope is that sites like this will encourage governments to make more of these public records available to the public directly in a digital age.

Perhaps it's not surprising that tools like these are citizen-developed rather than innovated by government, but it's still intriguing to me that, while party political machines are able to pour so much energy and funding into digital innovation for campaigns, many government institutions are still years behind in using online communication tools for their full potential.

Comments

[Best Government Related Sites Websites Guide]

Alas Visitthebest is a good site to work ...got my important information about Government Related Sites through your user friendly site….keep your good works yar