[open-government] [PMO Network] Dare to talk about your mistakes -- submit your failure story

[Josh Tauberer]

On 08/05/2015 10:28 AM, Julia Keserű wrote:
> We at Sunlight have long been thinking 
> <http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2015/05/05/a-new-approach-to-measuring-the-impact-of-open-data/> 
> about what works and what doesn't workH in civic technology, but our 
> emphasis so far has mostly been on the success stories 
> <http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/series/wednesdays-winners/>. 
> Inspired by the CodeforAll summit last week in NYC and some of the 
> most recent announcement about retiring civic tech projects, today 
> we're trying to get the other side of the story with a short survey 
> <https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1zVVwCIgy-EJ6RPau-2hX6xXwrK-gSMVHBkfrv8-G4EM/viewform>, 
> to paint a more complete picture of the landscape.

I've got a lot of failure stories! I've just written up some of them here:

https://medium.com/@joshuatauberer/my-failures-civic-technology-ideas-that-didn-t-quite-work-c73ecf730032

Excerpting below my signature. (There are more stories in the Medium post.)

Josh


      The First GovTrack Insider (2009–2010)

In the midst of the debate over healthcare back in 2009–2010, and while 
GovTrack usage was reaching an all-time high, I quietly launched what 
was the first/GovTrack Insider./

The 2009–2010 GovTrack Insider

I hired a small team of “reporters” (I think I found most on craigslist) 
to watch congressional hearings and write up what happened. I combined 
this with aggregated content fromOpenCongress 
<http://opencongress.org/>’s blog (mostly by Donny Shaw), Jim Harper’s 
blog posts onWashingtonWatch 
<http://from%20november%202009%20through%20may%202010%2C%20at%20the%20height%20of%20the%20debate%20over%20healthcare/>, 
and some other sources in an attempt to create a deep-dive picture of 
what Congress did each day.

This went on from November 2009 through May 2010.

No one read it.

Obviously.

To be sure, I didn’t promote it on GovTrack very well or very much. No 
one wanted to read about what committees were voting on anyway.


      Real Congress: Like C-SPAN, but C-SPAN

Around the same time, I decided that the most important value of my work 
on legislative information is explaining to the American public not what 
our government is doing but how our government/actually works/.

So in 2009 I began planning an interactive media project to take 
Americans inside the halls of Congress. I called it a reality TV show 
about Congress. Everyone just said that was C-SPAN.

At that year’s Transparency Camp West I met MAPLight’s research director 
Emily Calhoun, who — in a stroke of massive luck — had experience in 
documentary film making. (She’sproducing a cool film 
<http://www.seedandspark.com/users/emily-29>right now.) So I recruited 
Emily and Jay Dedman, who I think had produced Transparency Camp 
(East)’s event video, to work on this project with me.

It was an ambitious idea that would have relied on deep access to 
insider meetings, lots of time and expense on video production, and 
community development.

We wrote a grant proposal and I started to contact folks that might 
help, but Knight Foundation’s super insulting rejection letter made me 
realize I did not want to spend my time begging for money. That was 
pretty much the end of that. I also didn’t have the access to Congress 
that I thought I had.


      A Collaboratively Written Petition

Everyone has long known that petitions are not effective for legislative 
advocacy. So when David Stern and colleagues launched MixedInk, a 
collaborative writing platform, I was interested to see how it could be 
used for legislative advocacy.

We tried a hybrid of a written letter and a petition. 450 GovTrack users 
came together tocollaboratively write a letter to Congress about a gun 
control bill 
<https://www.govtrack.us/blog/2009/05/22/delivering-the-hr-45-group-letter/>using 
their MixedInk tool, and then later over 3,000 other users signed the 
letter.

David and I delivered the letter personally to nine congressional 
offices to see what their reaction was.

David Stern delivering a letter to Congress with me in 2009

The staffers we talked to while delivering the letter didn’t think what 
we did was interesting. To them, it was a petition. Maybe we just didn’t 
have enough participants.


      The Semantic Web for Legislative Data

Back around 2005–2006 I was a big believer in the semantic web. I took 
the legislative data on GovTrack and produced the largestlinked open 
data <http://linkeddata.org/>database at the time. My conference talks 
around this time discussed how linked data would make it easier to build 
great tools for civic technology.

That never happened.


      ANCFinder

ANCFinder <http://ancfinder.org/>is a project I work on atCode for DC 
<http://codefordc.org/>, primarily with Steven Reilly, Kelli Shewmaker, 
Leah Bannon, and a handful of other generous volunteers. The site is 
about the District of Columbia’s hyper-local Advisory Neighborhood 
Commission system.

Our site is kind of like a GovTrack for a very narrow and local aspect 
of DC municipal government.

We built a shiny website explaining the ANC system and linking to 
documents produced by the ANCs (meeting minutes and so on), and we have 
a bottweeting when there are ANC meetings 
<https://twitter.com/ancfinder>. The project began in early 2013.

No one uses the website. We do have some actual Twitter followers though.

What happened? We didn’t get any buy-in from ANC commissioners or the 
city government. Did we try? We had some meetings, but we didn’t 
follow-through very well.

The bottom line is, we’ve beenbuilding for, instead of with 
<http://www.buildwith.org/>.

Which isn’t to say there was no value here. In fact, working on 
ANCFinder has been very valuable for me personally and for Code for DC 
as an organization. We’ve learned a lot about DC in the process — that’s 
hugely important — and the DC government has learned about us. But on 
its own terms, ANCFinder hasn’t really done much.


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