What if you could go online to tell the government you cared about something, and it would actually listen?

In a blog post and video this morning, White House digital director Macon Phillips announced that President Barack Obama's administration would soon launch a tool to do exactly that.

Called "We the People," the to-be-launched petitioning tool would allow anyone with a valid email address to float a petition to the executive branch. If that person can collect over 150 electronic signatures, it becomes "searchable" on WhiteHouse.gov, for non-strangers to join in on. If the petition collects 5,000 signatures, the administration promises an official response.

Today's announcement raised many eyebrows among thinkers and doers where politics, government and technology collide. It's an idea that sounds like it ranks up there with universal suffrage and apple pie as positive evolutions in American life — a way for regular folks to demand a response from their government on something important, and get a response. Folks who deal with online petitions and online organizing for a living have responded to the announcement with cautious optimism — it sounds nice, they say, but without substantive responses, no one will have any motivation to build a petition. Wait, these organizing pros say, and see what comes of this before passing judgment.

Photo: Craig Nagy / Flickr

TechPresident will be pretty slow through the Labor Day weekend as we all take a last chance to find some sun and recharge before things start to get serious in politics-land. There won't be a Daily Digest until Tuesday, and while there will probably be a post or two tomorrow, things will taper off after that.

In the meantime, use the comments to let us know what we're missing.

In the wake of a shutdown of cellphone service earlier this month the San Francisco Bay Area's commuter rail provider, BART, in order to stop a political protest, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others have asked the Federal Communications Commission to clarify that the shutdown was a violation of federal law.

The petition was sent Monday. GovTech has more information:

An emergency filing sent Monday, Aug. 29, to the FCC is asking the commission to swiftly rule that local governments don’t have the authority to shut off wireless communications systems — a direct rebuke of an incident earlier this month on San Francisco’s public transit.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Center for Democracy and Technology in Government, and several other organizations asserted in the emergency petition that Bay Area Rapid Transit’s (BART) purposeful shutdown on Aug. 11 of wireless service used by passengers engendered public safety and infringed on citizen rights.

In the wake of the BART shutdown, an FCC spokesman said in a statement that the commission was gathering facts on the incident. The spokesman, Neil Grace, did not say the FCC was conducting an official inquiry. Reached Wednesday, Grace said the FCC's assessment was ongoing but declined to offer further comment on the record.

Photo: Trilok Rangan / Flickr

On the occasion of the Indian Economic Service's 50th anniversary, the government agency has launched Arthapedia, a wiki to define obscure economic terms.

Launched yesterday, Arthapedia is maintained by officers of the IES and covers terms like "skewflation" ("in which there is a price rise of one or a small group of commodities over a sustained period of time"), "abuse of dominance" ("an anticompetitive business practice in which a dominant firm may engage in order to maintain or strengthen its position in the market") and AYUSH ("AYUSH includes Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homeopathy"). There are plans to open up access to edit the site over time.

"The objective of this portal is to increase transparency in government by simplifying indigenous concepts or by introducing domestic institutions to support the professional development of public policy economists," a message on the wiki's website reads. "It is meant to enrich and enhance citizen friendly policy formulation through dialogue and collaborative action."

The release comes at an opportune time: On Monday, the day before the launch, India's central bank released proposals that would allow more private banks, the first opportunity for new banking licenses in nearly a decade, according to an Agence France-Presse report.

Update: And, of course, this isn't the biggest news coming out of India lately. Anti-corruption activist Anna Hazare, a 73-year-old man who found supporters online and off, recently won his crusade to move Parliament to endorse the creation of a wide-ranging anti-corruption agency. He fasted for nearly two weeks until Parliament gave in, in an account passed along by my friend and colleague Sam Rubenfeld on the Wall Street Journal's Corruption Currents blog.

For people in Pakistan, if the government can't watch what you say on the Internet, ISPs are now required to report it, per the Guardian:

The Pakistan Telecommunications Authority legal notice urged ISPs to report customers using "all such mechanisms including EVPNs [encrypted virtual private networks] which conceal communication to the extent that prohibits monitoring". Anyone needing to use this technology needs to apply for special permission, the notice said.

Authorities in Islamabad insisted that the ban on VPN access was intended to stem communications by terrorists.

However, banks, call centres and many other businesses use encrypted connections to communicate with their branches and customers, to protect sensitive data such as account numbers and passwords.

Pakistanis are banned from social networks, the Guardian reports — but using tools like virtual private networks or proxy-like substances such as Tor, it is possible to circumvent such bans without the government easily finding out.

Via Slashdot.

Fast Company explores the Department of Defense's latest foray into openness as it begins to make data on past conflicts available to researchers:

Academic studies of wars and conflicts have been around for centuries, but a new one funded by the U.S. Defense Department could change our fundamental understanding of war and peace. The massive, publicly accessible conflict data archive called "The Empirical Studies of Conflict (ESOC)" project, headed up by Stanford and Princeton University academics, will also publish working papers and other research showing their findings.

The project, around for a few years now, is ramping up its outreach, per Neil Ungerleider in FastCo. Expect an online portal into data on the wages of war:

Data from ESOC will be made available to academics and the public through a yet-to-be-created website; access to some data, however, will require vetting by ESOC depending on government restrictions. A white paper on the project obtained by Fast Company notes that data to be made available to researchers will, in some cases, “be extracted, sanitized and compiled in a format suitable for analysis by the academic and policy community.” In other words, the project will be paying close attention to anyone accessing information of particular relevance to current combatants.

This post has been updated.

Here's a preview of Nordic Techpolitics, a conference that will focus on how technology is changing politics, government and societies in the Nordic countries.
The conference will take place in Oslo, next September 2nd. It is presented by Norwegian organizations Origo, Friprog, IKT-Norge, MediArena, in cooperation with Personal Democracy Forum.

We have all heard of the Nordic model that combines the welfare state with capitalism. But are you aware that there is also a Nordic model for techpolitics?
Nordic Techpolitics conference happens next Friday in Oslo and will help you explore the topic and create a map of what is going on in the Nordic countries.
Technological changes affect every aspects of society, and institutions and policy makers are struggling to catch up with the latest tools and possibilities. This conference – the first of its kind happening in the Nordic countries - will explore how we can use technology to improve politics and governance, increase participation and create smarter solutions in everyday life.

On Code for America's blog, their communications director, Abhi Nemani, picks apart the use of crowdsourcing in New York City around Hurricane Irene and comes out wondering if crowd submission platforms, while they invariably attract a lot of buzz, wind up doing more harm than good.

There was a map from the New York Times and WNYC soliciting indicators of preparedness or lack thereof; there was the city's own specially created CrowdMap, built on an adaptation of the Ushahidi incident reporting platform; and, leading up to the storm's arrival, back when it was still a hurricane, a group of New York local geeks built their own CrowdMap instance but later deferred to the one created by the City Office of Emergency Management. CrowdMap is a tool that allows people to submit incident reports online, allow others to verify and respond to those reports, and map all of this out geographically and over time.

These were not official channels to submit problems to the city, though — the city offered its map, for instance, only to make it easier to understand what was going on. It was either that or have to piece together an idea of what people were reporting in places other than 311 by looking at several maps instead of just one, and be seen as not willing to play nice; if the city didn't propose a central place to crowdsource incident reports out in the open, digital activists would surely start up one or more instead.

Here's the takeaway for Nemani, who spends his days figuring out how to promote the work of civic hackers building tools to connect governments to citizens and citizens to one another:

This disconnect between information and action acts as a hollow barrier for meaningful civic participation. Not only is there a skewed perception then of the actual damage, there’s also a bad image of hundreds of seemingly unresolved problems. Just putting dots on a map is sometimes a bad thing. Especially in the context of service requests and citizen/government interaction, where it’s said that so much trust is built through two-way dialogue and conversation.

A counterpoint to that is that the city never promised the CrowdMap would be a conversation; rather, the administration was nudged towards standing it up so intelligence about what was happening would be open and shared. There's no telling whether or not the city was going to knock down the real-world problems behind each of the dots that citizens put up.

New Yorkers could be forgiven for being uneasy about the city's response to the hurricane. Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration, by its own admission, categorically flubbed response to a snowstorm in January that left much of New York with unplowed streets and hazardous conditions for days; that was the disaster response from city officials foremost in Gotham's mind. Because the administration was clearly not going to make the same mistake twice and because the hurricane was not nearly as bad as it could have been, that didn't happen this time. But it could have. And if 311 was the only place people were sending their reports, people might not know right away if their block was the only one with tree limbs the city had yet to remove or power Con Edison had yet to restore.

In this case, no one appears to be holding the city to task for the dots on its CrowdMap, which represent 166 issues reported online in the metro area. Streets are, by and large, clear, and damage picked up. But if they weren't, advocates and other elected officials would know where to look to find things to ask the city to fix.

It should be said that the Bloomberg administration has made gestures towards wanting to get better at dealing with service requests that are made out in the open, and at working in the digital world, although it's clear to all that it isn't there yet. For instance — while it wasn't working for me today, natch — the city has launched a map offering a window into most service requests submitted via 311. But Nemani is right that there are no apparent results or concrete outcomes from the CrowdMap effort — so maybe digital activists on the other side of the equation don't have it all figured out yet, either.

This post has been updated to fix a formatting issue.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg has a limited command of the Spanish language and no compunctions about showing it off, two traits he revealed again to the world during his series of press conferences about Hurricane Irene. After watching Bloomberg stumble through a few lines of Spanish during one such presser, stay-at-home Inwood mom Rachel Figueroa-Levin decided Hizzoner was due for some ribbing — and the Twitter account @ElBloombito was born, a process my friend and colleague Emily Anne Epstein chronicles in an item for Metro New York:

“I was stuck in my apartment watching Hurricane Irene updates and Bloomberg started speaking Spanish,” explains creator Rachel Figueroa-Levin, 25. “It was really funny.”

Figueroa-Levin, a self-proclaimed “Jewyorican,” started tweeting on Aug. 27 with an instant classic: “Hola Newo Yorko! El stormo grande is mucho dangeroso!”

“Spanglish is hard to pull off if you’re not Latin,” she said, adding: “I think it’s good that he tries.”

Bloomberg even referred to his online alter ego yesterday at a press conference.

“My Spanish skills, I can tell you, get better little by little, but it’s difficult — I’m 69,” he said, en Espanol, in his trademark monotone accent, responding to a reporter’s question about the Twitter character. “It’s difficult to learn a new language.”

Not only did Bloomberg respond to the question, but his Twitter feed also gamely linked to a video of his response for Figueroa-Levin's benefit.

At Personal Democracy Forum 2011, @MayorEmanuel creator Dan Sinker floated a sort of theory of inevitable parody.

"For every Osama bin Laden death we get an Osama in Hell," Sinker said. "For every quasi-presidential candidate we get a Fake Sarah Palin ... and for every public event that captures some media attention whether it's the rapture or an escaped snake there's a Bronx Zoo Cobra ... and for every politician, large or small, there's a Mayor Emanuel waiting in the wings."

Called it, I guess.

The folks at MySociety.org went big Tuesday morning with their rollout of FixMyTransport.com, a project to collect and track citizen complaints about public transit in Great Britain, then put them in front of the agency responsible for each given issue — oh, and also to try and get people involved in civic life:

The second goal – the subtle one – is to see if it is possible to use the internet to coax non-activist, non-political people into their first taste of micro-activism. Whilst the site intentionally doesn’t contain any language about campaigning or democracy, we encourage and provide tools to facilitate the gathering of supporters, the emailing of local media, the posting of photos of problems, and the general application of pressure where it is needed. We also make problem reports and correspondence between operators and users public, which we have frequently seen create positive pressure when used on sister sites FixMyStreet and WhatDoTheyKnow.

In a longer post on O'Reilly Radar, here's how Steinberg discusses his approach to providing civic services through technology:

What people never, ever do is wake up thinking, "Today I need to do something civic," or, "Today I will explore some interesting data via an attractive visualisation." MySociety has always been unashamed about packaging civic services in a way that appeals directly to real people with real, everyday needs. I gleefully delete the two or three emails a year that land in our inbox suggesting that FixMyStreet should be renamed to FixOurStreet. No, dude, when I'm pissed it's definitely my street, which is why people have borrowed the name around the world.

MySociety.org was one of the earliest entrants into the field of civic hacking with projects like FixMyStreet and, in 2008, WhatDoTheyKnow. On the organization's blog, founder Tom Steinberg says this is their biggest rollout since WhatDoTheyKnow — and explains a lot of thought that went into the combination of technological wizardry and political implications of this new tool.

FixMyTransport's most explicit goal, talking governments into solving transit problems, is no mean feat. Civic Commons' Andrew McLaughlin notes that it promises to do the heavy lifting of taking all requests at a single point of entry, and putting each one in front of precisely the right official, no matter where in Britain the request is from — pretty clever in and of itself. (h/t Alex Howard on that.)

That's supposed to be done in a fairly straightforward way: Users meander down a stone-simple engagement path to pick out the problematic conveyance in question, identify the problem, and drum up support from friends and neighbors. The problem is then mapped and logged in an issue queue and flagged for response from public officials, community members or the site's own transit buffs. (Across the pond, apparently, it's "boffins.")

But there's political programming to be done as well.

In another post on the Open Knowledge Foundation blog, Steinberg emphasizes the way the tool is designed to discourage bad behavior from transit operators by making public every email exchange between the original complainant and the transport operator.

"This is useful for all sorts of reasons, partly because it gets recent status information that might otherwise be hidden inside operators out onto the Googleable web, and also because it create a dicencentive[sic] for operators to send emails simply designed to make email authors go away," Steinberg writes there.

For more details, you can also check out this Guardian piece for a third-party perspective from inside Britain.