It has been nearly a full seventy-two hours since President
Barack Obama and his team of celebrated techies opened the doors of
Recovery.gov for improvements. The crowdsourceing experiment is nearly
half-finished (or half-full for all you optimists out there) and so a
quick recap is in order.

The Recovery.gov Dialogue on Information Technology Solutions or the
“IT Dialogue” is meant to lure leading IT business, thought leaders,
developers and consumers to join the discussion on how Recovery.gov
operates. CivSource covered the story on Monday,
outlining the broad goals and objectives of the IT Dialogue. The
dialogue is being held in conjunction with the National Academy of
Public Administration, a non-profit, non-partisan coalition of top
public management and organizational leaders.

So, how are things shaping up thus far? How has the tech community responded to this open call for collaboration?

In a word: Poorly.

As of this writing, (April 29 PM EST) there have been a total of 260
ideas submitted to the IT Dialogue. 306 “discussion topics” or keywords
have been submitted to correspond with these 260 ideas. Among some of
the discussion topics, transgender healthcare programs, helping me with, and saving social security.
Miscellaneous topics and “ideas” are bound to happen in a setting such
as this, but if these are the kinds of things making it through the
moderator, they might be more desperate for ideas than anyone had
imagined. There are obviously others, more relevant to the overall
intent of the project, like cloud computing, semantic, and Web 2.0.

But what about the substantive part of the IT Dialogue – the comments?

The comments offered and the ones gathering the most votes or
creating the most chatter are definitely relevant and of the kinds I
envisioned. The top four ideas, in terms of highest rank, are: Open Data Will Enable Democratized Analysis and Accountability; Add National Online Mapping to Recovery.gov; Provide Enterprise Resource Planning Solutions to Local Agencies; and Use semantic technology to link data.gov and recovery.gov resources. These ideas all have four stars.

The top three-star ideas are, Count ACTUAL jobs created or retained with CertiClear Job Counter; Add Mapping and Geographic Analysis to Recovery.gov; and Tracking through Google Earth and web cam.

The most commented on thus far are: Online cascading performance budgets and performance reports; Tracking through Google Earth and web cam; and Add Mapping and Geographic Analysis to Recovery.gov.

Thus far, the ideas populating the top seats are not a terrible
batch of concepts and themes. There is interest in having geo-spacial
data integrated with Recovery Act funds and the top vote-getters have
some interesting ideas as far as how ERP and semantic technologies can
be utilized. There remains one hugely glaring problem, however.

Participation.

The top four vote-getting ideas have a combined 100 votes. The top
three, three-star ideas have 97 votes. The most commented idea has
thirty comments, most of which seem to involve two users engaged in a
sales pitch by the person who submitted the idea for CASCADE™
Performance Based Budgeting Software.

The Washington Post reports this morning that,

“The forum received more than 300,000 visits in its
first seven hours and more than 1.5 million by Tuesday night, according
to Earl E. Devaney, chairman of the recovery accountability board and
the site’s de facto managing editor.”

For all the hype behind the Obama administration’s technology
prowess, we are disappointed that industry leaders and developers are
not more engaged with this process. If so many people are looking at
the website, then word has surely spread to all corners of government
and industry. We know there hasn’t been wall-to-wall coverage of the IT
Dialogue on CNN or the New York Times, but we would have expected much
more participation from the Twitter, GovLoop, LinkedIn crowd.

Or is it simply business? Why try to promote an idea that may
possibly be adopted for government use when you can just as easily sell
it to them?

Go to http://www.thenationaldialogue.org/. Sign up, submit ideas,
vote and comment. There are four days remaining. Show the country that
our networking millions can leverage technology and creativity more
than once an election cycle.

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