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

Thu Aug 6 22:25:42 UTC 2015

Perfect, thanks Josh!

On Thu, Aug 6, 2015 at 2:15 PM, 'Josh Tauberer' via PMO Network <
pmo-network at googlegroups.com> wrote:

> 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 from OpenCongress <http://opencongress.org/>’s
> blog (mostly by Donny Shaw), Jim Harper’s blog posts on WashingtonWatch
> <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’s producing 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 to collaboratively 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 largest linked 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 at Code 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
> bot tweeting 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 been building 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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-- 
Júlia Keserű
International Policy Manager

1818 N Street NW, Suite 300
Washington, DC 20036
(1) 202-742-1520 *246

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