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The area that we worked on – Government Performance and Civic Engagement – really
is sort of, at the cutting edge of how Broadband is going to be used to improve government
performance and civic engagement in this country. I’m Vishal Doshi and I am an analyst with
the Government Performance team. I’m Eugene Huang and I headed up the Government Performance
and Civic engagement team. I’m Kevin Bennett I’ve worked with these two gentlemen on
the Government performance and civic engagement team. One of the things that we found was
that there were pockets of government inefficiency, certainly. But there were pockets of excellence
in government that we found throughout the country, and using the Broadband Plan to highlight
those best practice examples whether it’s in the area of government performance or civic
engagement, was a historic opportunity, in my estimation, to chart a new course for the
country, not just in the coming year, but in the next decade and years to come. We really
attempted to tap into the collective wisdom of this country. We’ve heard a tremendous
number of stories and for me it was very exhilarating personally to hear these stories and realize
there was a lot of great innovation going on in this country. We’re also seeing agencies
develop Open Government plans, so that each agency becomes more open to citizen engagement,
more approachable. There’s more information provided online to citizens. So instead of
government maintaining its often stereotype of being a Black Box – a place that’s
difficult to navigate, hard to understand - it becomes more open and engaging for citizens
and there becomes a more two-way dialogue developed. There’s a lot of great innovation
happening at the state and local government level. You see lots of cities moving forward
with things like fixmystreet.com or seeclickfix. And these are tools that allow citizens to
take a picture of a pothole, send it directly to the city agency that would be responsible
for fixing it, and get a response back. Data.gov at the federal level is one of those innovations
where the federal government is putting out a lot of data. The interesting thing is that
citizens, the private sector, non-governmental organizations, other groups are taking that
data and building incredible services on top of that. One of the services I’m pretty
fond of is something called FlyOnTime.us. And the federal government collects a lot
of data related to flight statistics. – whether a flights on time, whether its not,
gate changes, that sort of thing and in the course of a weekend, I believe, and individual
programmer was able to take the raw data feeds and turn it into an application for mobile
handheld devices. I think one of the other exciting things that we saw with the creation
of the Broadband Plan is that we really attempted to practice what we preached in the Broadband
Plan in terms of engaging citizens, seeking input, using new forms of new media. We have
blogs with over 130 entries, we have hundreds and hundreds of comments, we worked with crowdsourcing
tools like ideascale – had 450 ideas submitted, many of which ended up in the plan, thousands
of votes and comments. There was a great culture of participation around the plan and how it
was created. All of our workshops were streamed online, many people asked questions online,
so we really tried to make it not just the FCC’s plan, but America’s plan in reality,
and not just name. many of these innovations are sort of pushing the boundaries of what
is possible in terms of how government interacts with citizens. You hear these stories about
America being behind when it comes to broadband, behind countries like Japan, and Singapore
and others, some of the Eurpoean countries. I think that what we saw, if nothing else,
was a glimpse into the future, and the future is extraordinarily robust.