Whitehouse.gov

If you forward an inaccurate email or write an inaccurate blog post, the White House wants to see it.

There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care.  These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation.  Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.

What, exactly, does the White House plan to do with this information? 

UPDATE: The White House responds...

"There is a lot of misinformation about health insurance reform circulating on the Internet and elsewhere,'' she explains. "Some of it is intentionally misleading.

"We want to be sure people have the facts about health insurance reform that will lower costs, protect consumers from insurance regulations that deny them coverage and assure quality and affordable health care for all Americans,'' she adds. "We are not compiling lists or sources of information. We may post fact checks from time to time to be sure Americans know the truth about health insurance reform.''

I believe that is the case. This was simply an inartful way of asking people to help them figure out which new claims they need to be addressing.  The White House should respond to inaccurate arguments.  But I hope they will do so in a transparent way.  Instead of responding to private emails, they should be linking and responding to claims made publicly online.  Better yet, they should be participating in a dialogue - responding to the better criticisms made by important critics in the internet media and blogosphere. That would be transparent and valuable.

The second edition of the Washington Post's Grading Whitehouse.gov series is up.  The panel includes David Weinberger, Ellen Miller, Craig Newmark, Andrew Rasiej, David Almacy and myself.  Our bottom line...

The group's average grade on first assessment in March was a C+, far from the mostly glowing early reviews of the Obama administration. As one of the graders summed up, Obama's WhiteHouse.gov "still has a long way to go to meet the expectations that the President himself set during the campaign."

In this second report card, the site's grades range from C to A-, with the average grade rising to a solid B.

More of our comments are contained in the story.  My own grade and response were based not on the technical and design aspects of the site (which, as far as I can tell, are excellent), but on their success in achieving the substantive transparency, accessibility and engagement goals.  I genuinely believe the people involved want to do that, though I also think it will be difficult for reasons mostly outside their control.  Still, though it probably won't get me invited to the White House Christmas Party, I think that is the standard against which Whitehouse.gov should be evaluated. Here is the response I gave Jose Antonio Vargas.

Grade: C

I'm going to judge Whitehouse.gov against what they can become.  They have made good progress - the design and features are solid, and their use of outside tools has been groundbreaking for government.

However, their accomplishments have been more technical than cultural. Bringing genuine transparency to Whitehouse.gov will be a monumental task.  The blog has made some real progress towards giving us some insight into what's happening in the White House.  The White House online Town Hall was an interesting experiment.  They deserve kudos for being willing to address crowdsourced questions.  It is a good first step towards more authentic public interaction with the White House.

On the other hand, it's been around 2 months since Presidential speech transcripts and appointments have been updated.  I'm pretty sure Obama has given a speech since February 27th, and he's made plenty of appointments since February 12th.  So why are the transcripts and appointments not updated the same day?

More importantly, as Cato's Jim Harper has pointed out, Whitehouse.gov seems to be breaking Obama's campaign promise not to sign any non-emergency legislation until we've been given an opportunity on the Whitehouse.gov website to read and comment on the bill for 5 days.  That suggests a troubling lack of commitment to transparency.

At TechPresident, Nancy Scola offers a good summary:

On the plus side, the Obama White House's web operation is moving into "advanced" level web work with gusto. In a little more than three months, they've expanded what's expected from a presidential administration to include interactivity like online town halls, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and blog posts from a range of administration officials.

But the White House is losing points for completeness. Getting lost in the process is a strong grasp of the basic ABCs of government web work. The daily tedium of press briefings and presidential remarks and details on planned events has often slipped through the cracks on WhiteHouse.gov. That record-keeping might not be sexy. It is, though, a box that a modern presidential administration needs to vigorously check first before moving on to far more fun and attention-grabbing online experimentation.

The long awaited MyBO and Change.gov mojo is back on WhiteHouse.gov. Tomorrow, President Obama will be responding to questions posed through the latest iteration of Open for Questions, a community-moderated style townhall.

With a little organizing, this is an opportunity for Republicans to vote up questions that hold Obama accountable for ballooning the national debt to $20 trillion by 2019. And this time, many already have. Based on my rough sampling, about a third of the questions come from Obamabots, a third are from Republicans, and a third from marijuana legalization advocates.

Here are a few questions I screencapped just from 5 minutes perusing the random question generator:

(Full screen version.)

Thanks to Katie Favazza and Sean Hackbarth who brought it to my attention, one of the most popular questions right now comes from Peter V. of Oregon, who asks:

I appreciate the efforts of the administration to fix the economy quickly. However, why aren’t you giving the American public the chance to review these bills? In your campaign, you promised we would have at least 5 days.

Indeed, the White House has brazenly walked back this transparency pledge, signing legislation hours after it was passed by both houses of Congress and blowing off the promised five-day cooling-off period. Had we had a real 5-day review period, an intrepid citizen would have had more time to uncover the AIG bonus provision before the bill was signed, potentially sparing us the current tedium.

Community moderation isn't perfect as the self-appointed moderators are more likely than not to be Obama supporters -- but dissenting questions are now appearing on the White House site, and there is a chance that with a little organizing they could be asked of Obama.

Now that we are in opposition, we need to hold the Administration's feet to the fire in demanding perpetually more web-enabled transparency (which, because of the nature of government, it will not always be able to give) -- and be ready to live by it ourselves.

The Washington Post's Jose Antonio Vargas is doing "a monthly feature that invites five thinkers across the online political and cultural spectrum to grade President Obama's WhiteHouse.gov."  Vargas was kind enough to include me in his panel, along with Craig Newmark (Craigslist), Andrew Rasiej (Personal Democracy Forum), Ellen Miller (Sunlight Foundation) and David Weinberger (Harvard Berkman Center). The first column went up yesterday.  Read the whole thing to see the grades it was given.  

However, in the interests of transparency and because there were a number of important points I wanted to make, I will post the questions from Vargas and my complete answers. (and note that Whitehouse.gov has continued to evolve since I first wrote these comments)

1) In your own words, how would you define transparency? Accessiblity? Engagement?

Transparency: For many politicians, transparency simply means disclosing (a) what they are legally obligated to disclose, and (b) any additional facts that help the politician.   That is important, but it isn't really transparency.   Transparency is about disclosing the process and details.  Authentic transparency is about disclosing that information immediately and automatically, without having to be asked, regardless of whether it helps or hurts the political office.

Accessibility:  Accessibility is simply the degree to which Whitehouse.gov is understandable and navigable.  It is important for users to be able to figure out how to get where and what they want, but it is also important for users to be able to understand what Whitehouse.gov is trying to communicate.  It is both, "Can I find what I want?" and "Do I understand what they want me to do?"

Engagement: Engagement is the difference between brochure-ware (a website that simply talks at you) and community (a website that also listens and involves you in the product).  Engagement at Whitehouse.gov is about bilateral responsiveness between the Obama administration and the community of users, but also about communication within the community of users.   Most importantly, engagement is not simply about giving people a chance to speak and vote, but giving them a chance to choose.

2) In your mind, what's the mission of WhiteHouse.gov?

The mission of Whitehouse.gov should be three-fold:

• Whitehouse.gov should provide citizens with a window into the process and product of government.
• Whitehouse.gov should provide the Obama administration with a platform to communicate thoroughly and quickly.  Rather than simply providing an archive of old news, Whitehouse.gov should be used to respond to and make news.
• Whitehouse.gov should give the public a chance to participate in the process of government and interact with the Obama administration in ways previously only available to a very few people.

3) As it stands, what grade would you give the site?

If I were to grade the site on what it could be, I would give it a D.  It is clean and clear, but impersonal.  The blog is more of a White House PR Feed than what we generally think of as a blog.  Opportunities for interaction are virtually non-existent.  So far, the water looks promising, but you can't swim there.  Yet.

But on the progress they have made so far, I give them a solid B.  There are things they could do better, but I have faith that the brilliant team they have working on the site have their heads and hearts in the right place.  I hope their good intentions and good ideas can overcome the practical problems they will encounter.

Mike Turk and Dave Winer discuss the new Whitehouse.gov website, each concluding that it looks good but has the potential to be much better. Winer writes...

The new whitehouse.gov is a nice looking site, it's centered around a blog. They promise lots of media, podcasts, videos, etc. In 2001 or 2004 even, it would have been a wonderful breakthrough and I would be singing its praise. But this is 2009, and we know so much more about the web.

Perhaps they're right, and the site can become more than it is now.  I'm eager to see what the brilliant people working on Obama's web team will do over the next few years.

However, we're going to have to adjust our expectations. 

There are just too many perverse incentives for a political office, contradictory incentives among the bureaucrats and officials and prohibitory rules within the bureaucracy for a government website to be too innovative.  The Obama team is going to do some remarkable things, but they will be "innovative for government", not "innovative for the internet".

And that's the key.  The Obama team doesn't need to focus on bringing new, cutting edge ideas to the internet.  They need to focus on bringing the government up to speed on the things that are already commonplace for average people on the internet.

Remember, Obama was widely applauded for putting the Democrat's weeky radio address (and eventually the President's weekly radio address) on YouTube...even though putting a speech on YouTube has been quite ordinary for a few years now. 

The new White House web team can do cutting edge work on the internet, but what they really need to do is cutting edge work on the government.  To do that, they'll have to dial their expectations back to around 2005.  We need to remember that these small steps for the internet are major leaps for the government.   And that is success.

Dan Froomkin has written a provocative piece on how the Obama administration should use the internet.  Unfortunately, he's got a bit more internet triumphalism than clarity about how the important cultural dynamics of the internet are relevant to, and practical for, a political office.  An "absence of dissent and lack of accountability" were not aspects of the Bush administration"; they are inherent characteristics of any political office.  The emergence of the internet just threw them into sharp relief.

Froomkin's suggestions are interesting, and many are good; but others (those I've bolded below) are almost delightfully naive...

Imagine a White House Web site where the home page isn't just a static collection of transcripts and press releases, but a window into the roiling intellectual foment of the West Wing. Imagine a White House Web site where staffers maintain blogs in which they write about who they are and what they are working on; where some meetings are streamed in live video; where the president's daily calendar is posted online; where major policy proposals have public collaborative workspaces, or wikis; where progress towards campaign promises is tracked on a daily basis; and where anyone can sign up for customized updates by e-mail, text message, RSS feed, Twitter, or the social network of their choice.

And that's just for starters. Because the Internet doesn't look kindly on information that just flows one way. To live up to their promises, the president and his staff are going to have to do more than just talk -- they're going to have to listen, and respond. So imagine a Web site where the president regularly answers questions sent in by citizens; where ordinary people can vote up or down items they want brought to the president's attention; and where Americans from across the political spectrum engage in honest debate.

Froomkin gets the important cultural dynamics of the internet, but he doesn't seem to get the incentives of politicians.  Accountability is a useful campaign promise, but actual, elected politicians only support it for their opponents.  It would be a wonderful thing to measure and evaluate politicians, programs and policies, but the barrier to that consists of the entire political and bureaucratic class of the US government.

The Obama administration can do a number of innovative new things with Whitehouse.gov and the internet in general - indeed, I am convinced they will do so; they have an incredible team - but don't confuse an administration with a campaign.

Obama's victory did not empower "The People".   It empowered Obama.