If you’re less optimistic than Newsom that Americans would compete over something as mundane as civic-mindedness, recall that Salman Khan has millions of kids frantically working for virtual badges in mathematics on his website. Compared with awards for dividing fractions, or for that matter for tending a virtual vegetable patch, getting rewarded for snapping a picture of an undiscovered pothole could be downright exciting.
Citizenville, however, should be able to do more than collect pictures of potholes for government employees to fill. Although Newsom doesn’t go so far as to say it himself, it’s not hard to imagine a version 2.0 in which players could capture the pothole on their phones and upload it to the Citizenville app, which could immediately shoot out a request for bids to local contractors and automatically select the highest-rated one. They could fill the pothole by the end of the day, a few citizens could verify, and the contractor could be paid automatically. A similar process might apply to any number of public services in Citizenville, from plowing snow off the roads to maintaining the community basketball courts.
Newsom even theorizes that Citizenville could re-create in the real world some of the magic that led that Dane to purchase those 3,700 flamingos. “In Citizenville,” Newsom writes, “people would spend money on actual improvements in the player’s neighborhood—say, an hour of professional landscaping or fresh paint to cover up graffiti. In both FarmVille and Citizenville, players have the enjoyment of the game. But in Citizenville, instead of taking pride in a virtual world, players would be making a difference in their own neighborhoods.”7
Is all of this too crazy to work? Absolutely not—in fact, it’s already happening. The prototype of Citizenville, or maybe its forerunner, has been up and running for four years—and not in spacey Silicon Valley, but in a tiny suburb of Austin, Texas. The city of Manor is pushing the frontiers of what government can be in the internet age. As Newsom describes, in 2009 the city launched a web-based platform called Manor Labs, which invited citizens to propose solutions to problems of local government. Instead of virtual points like in FarmVille, the program rewards participants in “innobucks”—one thousand for each suggestion, plus a bonus of one hundred thousand if the city actually adopts it. An online scoreboard keeps track of which citizens have acquired the most.
With suggestions rolling in, Newsom reports, the town took the experiment one step further: “The City of Manor came up with real rewards you could buy with your innobucks. For varying amounts, you could buy a police ride-along or even be mayor for the day. Local businesses and restaurants also got in on the fun, offering coupons for discounts or free appetizers in exchange for innobucks. It’s not fake currency—it’s civic currency.”8
The “game” was a hit, building a group of active citizens who were addicted to improving local government. “When people went away on vacation,” Newsom says, “they’d immediately interact with city government upon returning, trying to make up for lost time and build up their innobucks stashes.”9 Some of their suggestions really did make government more efficient and better for the citizens, such as automatic payments on utility bills.
A number of other cities have adopted a platform called SeeClickFix. Using a website or smartphone apps, citizens of Chicago, Houston, Richmond, Albuquerque, and other cities report problems to their local governments. On a recent day in Houston, city officials responded to reports on SeeClickFix of a traffic light outage, a missing stop sign, and a broken manhole cover, acknowledging them all within minutes.
Manor Labs and SeeClickFix—and, for that matter, Citizenville—are just the earliest hints of how the internet and ubiquitous smartphones could transform government. Even the most basic public functions that we didn’t think offered much room for improvement, the “meat and potatoes” like road maintenance and trash removal, are open to whole new frontiers.
As mayor of San Francisco, Newsom was aggressive about bringing the ethos of a California entrepreneur to government. The city started taking suggestions from citizens through Twitter. Then it launched “Open 311,” a computer protocol for submitting complaints to government. It created an iPhone app, EcoFinder, to help residents find the closest recycling locations. Newsom opened the city up for “hackathons,” marathons of computer coding in which people created public tools (apps) for, say, coordinating carpools or reporting the GPS location of city buses. He distributed handheld devices that let people vote on budgeting decisions from the comfort of their living rooms.
Newsom has also stockpiled dozens of other great ideas for using technology to return government to the citizens. He cites House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s YouCut, which lets citizens vote on which spending cuts Cantor brings to the floor. The project drew between five hundred thousand and a million votes a week. The majority leader’s office launched Citizen Cosponsors in 2012, which lets Americans endorse and follow legislation they care about using Facebook. There are now more than three thousand bills available to cosponsor, covering everything from foreign aid to Egypt to requiring members of Congress to read legislation before passing it.
Newsom sees the potential of this technology to disrupt the administrative state right out of business. In words any Republican would applaud, he writes about using the connective power of the internet to revive the ethos that Tocqueville detected in America. “We need to allow people to bypass government,” he says. “We must encourage them to take matters into their own hands, to look to themselves for solving problems rather than asking the government to do things for them.” In another passage, Newsom quotes the most famous Republican about “thinking anew”: “We have to disenthrall ourselves, as Abraham Lincoln used to say, of the notion that politicians and government institutions will solve our problems. The reality is, we have to be prepared to solve our own problems.”10
The bureaucracy, Newsom recognizes, is obsolete. We would do well to replace it with a twenty-first-century upgrade: “We have managers of managers, supervisors of supervisors, and enough committees, subcommittees, groups, and subgroups to make a bureaucrat’s head spin…That’s completely unnecessary in this technological age. Our government is clogged with a dense layer of bureaucracy, a holdover from an earlier era that adds bloat and expense. It’s like a clay layer, a filler that serves only to slow everything down. But technology can get rid of that clay layer by making it possible for people to bypass the usual bureaucratic morass.”
He puts it delicately, but it’s hard to miss that Newsom is talking about a dramatic downsizing of government bureaucracy: “Technology allows us to disintermediate,” he writes. “To disintermediate just means to get rid of the middleman.… I’m talking about people organizing themselves to solve problems, rather than complaining that the government isn’t doing it.”11 What conservative could put it better?
Newsom has no illusions about how the bureaucrats will respond to the innovations he’s proposing. He sees that they will try to kill the future if we let them have the chance. He agrees with Joe Trippi, Howard Dean’s former campaign manager, that “[b]ureaucracy wants to stop innovation,” adding that it’s “slow to adapt at best. At worst, it’s openly hostile to change.” (Of course, the solution to that willful resistance would be simply to defund it.)
A government that returned power from Washington to connected citizens would put a stop to much of the idiocy that Senator Coburn cataloged in his “wastebooks.” After all, citizens engaged in local self-government are unlikely to spend their money on sidewalks to nowhere, robotic squirrels, or caviar advertisements. Nor do they sit around thinking up how to regulate themselves silly.
Of course, technology can’t replace every government agency. The executive branch isn’t going to disappear. But Newsom also has some fascinating thoughts about how to introduce competition into the functions of public administration that citizens can’t take on themselves. One idea is to set up “an intracity competition among departments, with a Yelp-style scoreboard showing who has the highest rating.” A public system for r
eviewing and scoring agencies, giving citizens a forum to praise good service and criticize bad or apathetic treatment, would go a long way toward improving departments of motor vehicles, building permit offices, and even courts. Newsom thinks it would fire the competitive instincts of public employees, but the awareness that bad interactions could quickly become public knowledge would also foster better behavior. There’s already some evidence that it does. When Rialto, California, started requiring some police officers at all times to wear video cameras that kept a record of their actions, there was an 88-percent drop in the number of complaints filed against officers in one year.12
The truly revolutionary uses of technology aren’t possible unless citizen computer whizzes can get the data they need out of government and into their apps. As with Facebook, Google Maps, or WebMD, the data are everything. Easy, real-time access to detailed information about government expenditures, for instance, would make it much more difficult for Congress or the bureaucracy to throw millions away on pancake restaurants and pet shampoo. Senator Coburn employed a staff spending hundreds of hours compiling that information. But if Amazon can follow you around the internet to identify your tastes and Visa can notify you instantly if someone uses your card to buy a television at a Best Buy across the country, transparency in federal spending should be a matter of routine.
Unsurprisingly, bureaucrats are not always eager to make data about their performance and spending accessible on every iPad. To its credit, the Obama administration has been moving in the right direction on this issue: the federal government does have a number of initiatives to open up federal data, but the sets published on data.gov often serve little purpose, like maps of clean energy companies, charts of electricity prices, satellite images, and census data. They are useful, perhaps—maybe even necessary—for Citizenville to become a reality, but they have little to do with holding government accountable. The useful data are often overly aggregated, or released in file formats that are useless for analysis (like PDFs). Typically Americans have to file Freedom of Information Act requests to get the kind of detailed information that would make citizen oversight possible.
Government’s first step into the digital age is ensuring that state and federal agencies release all their data in standardized, machine-readable formats. In 1995, when I was Speaker of the House and only a few Americans had internet access, we created THOMAS at the Library of Congress to track legislation and make it available for the public to read online, along with voting records, sponsors, and other relevant information.
More recently, Representative Darrell Issa, the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, has championed the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act (DATA), which would improve the information that bureaucracies submit to the federal spending database at usaspending.gov. The Democratic-controlled Senate has killed the measure once already.13
Tim O’Reilly, who publishes a popular series of handbooks for computer programmers, thinks the next big step is turning that one-way stream of data into a two-way dialogue. He coined the term “Web 2.0” to refer to a new kind of web services in the mid-2000s, sites like You Tube, Facebook, and Wikipedia. It’s hard to remember now, but these websites were radically different from earlier internet sites. Instead of simply downloading pages from the web, as when you read an article at NYTimes.com, for instance, users were suddenly uploading information of their own as well. Contributing to Wikipedia, posting on Facebook, and adding videos to YouTube made the web a two-way street. The internet was taken over by its users.
In 2009, O’Reilly was perhaps the first person to suggest that the internet could bring the same transformation to government. He called his vision “Gov 2.0.” Instead of sucking down whatever programs and services government provided, he thought, the users—the citizens—could make government a two-way street as well. They could take it back.
“The key idea is this,” O’Reilly explained to Gavin Newsom, whose Citizenville is an imaginative example of what O’Reilly has in mind. “The best way for government to operate is to figure out what kinds of things are enablers of society and then make investments in those things. The same way that Apple figured out, ‘If we turn the iPhone into a platform, outside developers will bring hundreds of thousands of applications to the table.’ Previous smartphone development platforms looked like government does now: vendors talking in a back room and deciding what features to offer. But then Apple turned the iPhone into a platform in which the killer feature was that other people can make features.”14
O’Reilly thinks that by treating government as a platform, we could replace many of the top-down functions of the bureaucracy with bottom-up solutions created by citizens. To do so, we have to let citizens compete directly with the lumbering state. “What if there were a market for government services, or government-like services,” he asked Newsom, “where people could say, ‘Oh, I can actually meet that need!’ and there was a government apps store that wasn’t ‘Here are a bunch of apps the government developed’ but ‘Hey, we’re gonna let you figure out how to compete with the government’?”15
This will mean more than opening up government data to the public, although that is an important step. O’Reilly thinks the government needs to create APIs (the technology that lets your iPhone apps give commands to, say, Twitter, on your behalf). Government needs to enable citizen apps to “plug in” to its services so that they can, for example, process forms, obtain permits, or pay taxes. A Citizenville app, for instance, would need to interface with local government to submit the pothole report, to authorize a contractor to fill it, and to pay them when the job was done. The government might have systems it uses for each of those tasks. O’Reilly wants to give programmers access to them as well.
With enough capabilities, citizen-created apps could begin to manage government better than the bureaucracies do themselves—not a high hurdle by any stretch. What would Kickstarter for government look like, to let citizens take direct control of a portion of the budget? What would Google Now for government look like, or Groupon, or eBay, or AirBnb?
The main barrier to this computer-driven decentralization of government isn’t the technology, it’s the policy. Government has to open up. O’Reilly gives the example of GPS, the now-ubiquitous location technology. “It’s easy to forget that GPS, like the original internet, is a service kickstarted by the government,” he says. “Here’s the key point: the Air Force originally launched GPS satellites for its own purposes, but in a crucial policy decision, agreed to release a less accurate signal for commercial use. The Air Force moved from providing an application to providing a platform, with the result being a wave of innovation in the private sector.”16 When we’re talking about a platform that could transform government and shrink the massive federal bureaucracy, however, there’s little doubt that citizens will have to force this change themselves. The prison guards aren’t simply going to surrender.
Both Newsom and O’Reilly seem optimistic, and they both—somewhat unexpectedly—seem excited by the promise that technology will carry America not just into the future, but into a future closer to the ideals of our founders and to the vibrant civil society Tocqueville so admired.
“The more actively engaged citizens are, the closer we come to the original vision of the Founding Fathers.… Aren’t these the principles our country was built on?” Newsom asks. “Throughout the country, people took an active part, whether formally or informally, in the running of their towns—a kind of bottom-up democracy that served to strengthen the new nation.”
O’Reilly echoed a similar sentiment. “If you go back to the Founding Fathers, you realize, ‘Oh yeah, government was very small.’ You go back to volunteer fire departments, to mutual insurance companies, to subscription libraries,” he said. “But now we’ve created—government is like this special category of thing.… As opposed to, it’s a set of things we do for each other.”
“We’ve gotten very far away from that notion in re
cent decades,” Newsom concludes, “a trend we’d do well to reverse.”
Taming the Bureaucracy
Gavin Newsom is right. We have gotten very far away from that notion in recent decades. To give you some idea of how far and how fast: in 1929, federal spending accounted for just over 3 percent of GDP, and by 2010, that figure had exploded to 24 percent—a sevenfold increase.17 And reading Senator Coburn’s wastebooks, we know exactly how it has grown and how much it wastes.
Much of Washington has forgotten that government is not the whole society. It is just a small piece of it—or at least it should be. What communities and citizen volunteers can do, government should leave to them to do. What state and local governments can do, the federal government should let them do. That’s the only way government can be dynamic enough to give ideas like Citizenville a chance to compete and flourish.
To shift responsibility from Washington to the states and local communities will require real political action. One of the most important policy proposals of my presidential campaign was a Tenth Amendment enforcement act. The Tenth Amendment provides that any powers not explicitly granted to the federal government under the Constitution “are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Yes, you read that correctly. The bureaucratic and regulatory monstrosity that we call the federal government is impossible to reconcile with that principle, which is why the prison guards want you to forget all about the Tenth Amendment. We the people will have a fight on our hands to bring about a genuine breakout from the failing government that holds us prisoner. While we’re hacking away at the bureaucracy, we have to grow citizens at home. This is how Citizenville, Gov 2.0, and similar ideas will replace the bureaucrats that fill all those buildings along the National Mall.
Breakout: Pioneers of the Future, Prison Guards of the Past, and the Epic Battle That Will Decide America's Fate Page 18
