Ever wonder why more politicians haven’t hopped on the Web 2.0 bandwagon?
Sure, a lot of them have blogs, and President Barack Obama has earned high marks for building a vibrant online community in the campaign and for bringing some of that tech-savvy to the White House.
Still, when it comes to the nuts and bolts of writing policy, the real essence of the world of Wikipedia — the so-called “wisdom of the crowds” — is a rare find indeed.
But it doesn’t have to be that way, says Vanessa Scanfeld. Scanfeld and two friends from her undergraduate days at Cornell University founded MixedInk, a collaborative online writing tool that combines the entries from multiple authors and uses a Digg-like voting system to create a finished document.
The MixedInk founders have been meeting with numerous government organizations and nonprofit groups to demonstrate the application and discuss how it could help policy makers build a pipeline to their constituencies.
“The government and advocacy organizations are basically created to help people talk with a single voice, and that’s what our tool does,” Scanfeld told InternetNews.com.
With the glut of opinions kicking around the Internet, that single voice can be hard to find. For all its successes in democratizing media, the Web 2.0 revolution gave rise to a labyrinth of blogs, Wikis, tweets and profile pages where trying to make yourself heard can seem a little like shouting into a waterfall.
“During the 2004 presidential campaign, we were inspired by the amazing impact the Internet was having on politics,” Scanfeld said. “As the blogosphere emerged and evolved out of that, it became a very noisy space.”
To get a sense of the scale of that space, Nielsen Online has a buzz-tracking tool called Blogpulse, which analyzes content in blogs throughout the Web. Blogpulse’s index recently added its 100 millionth blog.
As the blogosphere continues to swell, Scanfeld describes an atmosphere where because everyone had a voice, no one would be heard, at least not by the decision makers too busy to sift through the cacophony.
“It also became clear that those who would most benefit from listening to them … couldn’t get a clear message,” she said.
MixedInk attempts to get around that problem by bringing as many voices as possible into the creation of a document. Just like a Wiki, users can write and submit their own content or edit the work of others. The tool democratizes the process by making everyone’s entries available to view and enabling users to vote them up or down in much the same fashion as Digg determines the most popular news stories.
Launched in beta earlier this month, MixedInk partnered with Slate magazine and enlisted its community to draft the inaugural address they would have liked to hear from Obama on Jan. 20.
In an experiment last year, Netroots, a coalition of liberal bloggers, used the MixedInk tool to draft a Democratic policy platform, which they submitted for consideration at the party’s nominating convention.
Next page: Reaching out to Congress.
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Citizens could use the MixedInk tool to draft letters to Congress, policy papers and other documents that Scanfeld said members of the government might be obliged to consider because they would be the work of a large number of people.
But with a password protection and other security measures, it could also be used internally among an agency’s staff members.
MixedInk is just the latest entrant into a much larger movement of groups developing tools and pressing policy makers to bring government into the Web 2.0 era. The Sunlight Foundation, for instance, is a nonprofit group in Washington that advocates for public access to government, with a very specific definition.
“For us, public means online,” Garbiela Schneider, Sunlight’s director of communications, told InternetNews.com.
Because Sunlight is a nonprofit, it does not pitch its online tools to members of Congress like MixedInk. Rather, Schneider said the group meets with people on the Hill and models technologies for making government more transparent.
Among the many initiatives Sunlight has launched or funded are bill-tracking sites OpenCongress.org and PublicMarkup.org, as well as Metavid.org, a searchable video archive of all legislative proceedings. Metavid, still in beta, enables users to retrieve footage of a floor speech by searching by the name of the Congressman or keywords in the speech.
Another Sunlight-funded site, LilSis.org, bills itself as an “involuntary Facebook” for public officials. Drawing on user submissions, various government sites and sources LilSis contains Facebook-style profiles of members of Cabinet, Congressmen and other government heavyweights with the intention of making available information about their professional associations, such as the people they used to work with or the groups that contributed to their campaign, in an effort to encourage accountability.
The efforts of MixedInk and Sunlight tackle the two sides of the open e-government equation. MixedInk is trying to get the communication flowing the other way, distilling the din and clamor of the Web into a coherent, collective call to action.
Meanwhile, Sunlight, through its many advocacy initiatives, is pressing lawmakers and agencies to offer all of their public data in an easily-accessible online format.
But will the government listen?
“It’s starting to get a little easier,” said Schneider. “It has to do with people now in Congress who used the Internet to campaign.” But fully open e-gov, she added, remains very much a work in progress.
