The relatively new Federal government website Data.gov has made a lot of waves and gotten many people excited as part of a larger government transparency movement. But who really wants all this data?

Primarily, the people I see excited about Data.gov and similar efforts are what I call "tech elites." Bloggers, evangelists, startup companies, software developers, former CTO's, large tech company execs, and the like. They hold apps contests, they run BarCAmps on weekends, they create new websites with open data, they get consulting contracts with local, state, and federal government. I see nothing wrong with tech elites or their behavior per se. But I wonder if a larger community – average citizens – has been ignored to some degree.

Ellen Miller related to me that the Sunlight Foundation did a poll which showed 80% of citizens were in favor of more government transparency. Interesting, but that could mean many different things. I'm interested in knowing if there's a poll, or even some man-on-the-street type video, asking citizens if they want more government data, and if so, what – specifically and individually – they would do with it. I suspect that few people want more data.

The data might benefit them indirectly, through websites and tools that others develop, no doubt about it. But what citizens – the real community the government serves – really want is information. They want news. They want analysis. They want content. Not XML, a tool catalog, or geodata. To me, this begs the question of whether the government should have an Information.gov site full of compelling, immediately useful, simple content for average citizens. What do you think?

It's great that the government can check some boxes on a form and say, yes, we have a new "open" website, and yes, we have made more data public and available (counting the number of data sets per agency has become a bit of an amateur sport). But if the citizens don't care, who is it helping? Forget the lobbyists people love to complain about – While they're enjoying their eggs benedict, have tech elites stealthily become the newest powerful special interest group in Washington, DC?

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Christina Gagnier wrote a post about the Gov 2.0 Camp held in LA this past weekend, focusing on one speaker, Bill Grundfest, the creator of Mad About You. The essence of the post is that Government 2.0 innovators are not using the right language to discuss the topic with their "intended audience, citizens." He criticizes the amount of jargon used as well.

I have two major critiques of this criticism by Citizen Grundfest.

One, the current audience for Government 2.0 conversations is currently not the American people; it is the tech and government elite. For better or worse, that's mainly who's interested in contributing blogs, attending events, and so forth, and so that is what the conversation reflects. This might change in the future, but currently these are the people who care most about data.gov, who the next CTO will be, and so forth. Citizens are the intended recipients of Government 2.0, but not usually participants in how it should come about, what the policies governing it should be, which technologies should be utilized, and so forth.

One might ask, how many "average citizens" attended Gov 2.0 Camp LA? I suspect that most attendees by far were the self-selected ones who know and use the jargon. That's the point. Events like that are created for the people who know the jargon to discuss things with each other, not the public, even if the public is the ultimate beneficiary of the discussion.

Two, if there is one niche in society that is well known for its piles of incomprehensible jargon, it is government. There is so much jargon in government that one cannot possibly criticize government for having it; That would be like criticising people for having skin. The notion that somehow people working on Government 2.0 use too much jargon, yet the rest of government is immune from this criticism is ridiculous. Jargon isn't great, but it is a fact of life in government. What is one to do except bang one's head up against the proverbial wall?

Further, every specialized field – especially emerging fields involving science and technology – has its own jargon. Surely, Grundfest wouldn't deny this is true of Hollywood itself, where jargon rules the land, with no attempt whatsoever to make it comprehensible to the average Mad About You viewer. And why should they? Back to point one – the viewer is related to the topic but not the intended audience for the discussion.

Does the public currently need to understand what Government 2.0 is? Do they need to understand the jargon, or must the specialized language of this burgeoning field go away to satiate the many common citizens who want to know more? I say, no. Few citizens are interested in attending barcamps, few download data from data.gov, and few read what the CTO is up to in Washington, DC. Rather, citizens want goods and services and information from their government. I suspect they don't care much how that comes about.

So, I think that the Government 2.0 enthusiasts – the goverati – are doing just what they should be doing: trying to wrap their heads around a rapidly changing, very complicated field of study. If a little jargon gets in the way, so what? No one ever said they wouldn't see a movie on a date because they didn't understand what a Key Grip does.

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The initial deadline for Federal agencies to meet the Open Government Directive (OGD) has come and gone, and many of them have checked the necessary boxes to prove that they are more "open" and transparent. They have new websites with new features and some new data that new people can use if they choose. And there's more new things to come in 2010.

But, as I noted in a quote within this Federal Computer Week article on the OGD,

“What concerns me about the Open Government Directive is the notion of ‘check-box government’ it seems to encourage. Very little emphasis seems to be on the actual engaging, or even on the strategy for doing so. The focus is on the technology. Where's the focus on the humans?”

Knowing that these new websites, user interfaces, and datasets are what the public wants and needs, and that the new forms of public engagement are actually, truly effective is far more important than merely peacocking them on the Web. Where is, in fact, the focus on the human side of the equation? I haven't studied every single open website in depth, but generally the emphasis is on new technology or new data, and not new engagement.

FCW also quoted me as saying,

“Engagement is hard, very hard, and it doesn't happen completely from behind a computer terminal in a cubicle on Independence Avenue,” he said. “It happens through genuine, human interactions with people, and through caring about the communities your agency is supposed to be supporting.”

When you hear Gary Vaynerchuk speaking about openness and engagement in the video above (possibly the single best video I've ever seen on social engagement with stakeholders in your organization), you don't hear about putting more options on a website, nor about this or that technology very often. You hear an awful lot about people – talking to people, listening to people, providing content that people want, and generally caring about people. And a lot of it is very one-on-one, not email blasts and blog posts. It's human and authentic.

In a talk long ago, I heard Gary use an acronym that I still use to this day, one that should be at play in all the discussion about the OGD. The acronym is RAT. RAT means Real, Authentic, and Transparent. RATs win. RATs use technology, but aren't focused on it. They're focused on people.

How the new open government websites and tools are used to interact with individual people, to engage citizens around topics (not agencies, topics), and act as platforms to build communities around those topics remains to be seen. But there's one thing anyone involved in communities already knows – these things take time and are not subject to artificial deadlines.

Joseph Jaffe recently wrote a truly excellent post about the Toyota recall, and their engagement with customers and other people online. He's fairly critical of their efforts. And what I couldn't help thinking about as I read it was the OGD. In Toyota's case, they seem to be doing all the right things (i.e., checking off all the boxes): apology in the newspaper, some of their website devoted to the crisis, 15k Twitter followers, an official Fan Page on Facebook, and more. But they're not engaging, because there's more to engaging than having a presence. It's about being alive within that presence. (Read the post for details on how Jaffe thinks they can "flip the funnel" on their communications crisis.)

Deadlines are good for checking off boxes in some kind of scientific manner. Engaging people is an art, a true street-smart craft that few are good at. Can one mandate such an art?

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Through my online and offline activities, a lot of people have begun to hear about me. Some of them find my blogs useful, maybe they think my tweets are funny, perhaps they were in the audience at an event I spoke at. I really appreciate hearing positive, and even negative, feedback from this audience. One interesting development is that now with me traveling more, with an audience spread all over the place, a lot of people say things like, “When are you going to visit Miami/Nashville/Minneapolis/Portland/Boston/etc.?”

Well, be careful what you wish for, because it might just come true. Something I’ve noticed is when I do actually visit one of these places (that I might only visit once every two years or something) is that some people hustle to meet me, and some people don’t. I try REALLY hard to reach out to people on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, email, and phone to tell them when I’ll be in town, where I’ll be, and when I’m available and what I’m thinking. It’s a hustle. I try to pack tons of engagements and activations into a trip (people who have seen me dashing around Manhattan know this well).

Back to the hustle; it goes both ways. It’s illegit to feign wanting to meet me very badly, and then not hustle to make it happen when I’m in your city for two or three days. It gives me a bad impression of you, if I haven’t met you previously. Everyone is busy, no doubt – but if you’re the kind of person to take 15 minutes and meet me in the hotel lobby for a cup of coffee, you’re making that BIG impression on me. And if you have this thing on Thursday and that other thing on Friday and you’re busy on Saturday…yeah, that doesn’t impress me. You can’t say you badly want to meet me when I’m in town and then not make it happen.

I try to meet everyone who wants to meet me, within reason. But it goes both ways. Want to make a GREAT impression in real life? Hustle. You can only do so much from behind a keyboard.

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There was an article in the New York Times on Friday about a “social” search engine that taps into the social graph to get answers to questions, as opposed to simply pointing you to a website based on keywords. This might be a big part of the future.

The social search engine in question is called Aardvark, and it’s really interesting. You have to sign up, like on Facebook or LinkedIn, with a real name, DOB, and so forth – very brief, not too onerous. You can also use Facebook Connect to interface the search engine with your Facebook interests, contacts, groups, etc. You can also interface with an IM program you use (I used my Gchat account for this). Finally, you can click on either “Answer” or “Ask” to do either of those two behaviors.

First, I clicked on Answer. A few questions were there that I didn’t know how to answer, but one person (25 y/o from PA) asked about where she might get historical items checked out. I recommended the Smithsonian as a resource (oversimplifying a bit here for the sake of space). Next, I asked a question about learning to cook as a couple in DC. Within 5 min I had an IM and two emails with answers from different people. Very specific answers (XXX in YYY place has wonderful evening classes for couples), location-specific, reasonable, even with good grammar. The answers were actually very helpful to me. The normal route would have taken me to the website of a local magazine, where I would have then searched for stories about cooking, where I would have then… you get the point.

Currently we have search engines like Google and Bing which break your query down into keywords and give you “relevant” websites. Sometimes that works well (”Pamela Anderson Baywatch pics”), and sometimes it doesn’t (”Where’s a good place to take my vegetarian date on a Sunday night in Chicago?”). So-called “organic” search engines like Twitter and Digg allow the most popular items to bubble to the top, and to some degree that’s interfaced with location and contacts to give you more specifics.

With Aardvark, you seem to get the best of all of this for specific questions. I’m excited to see where this leads.

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