Give us the 140-character elevator pitch.

We are a tool, placed in online news and blogs, that promotes open dialogue between citizens and legislators in response to current issues.

What problem does Raise Your Voice solve for government?

By enabling average people to quickly and easily voice their opinions to their elected officials – from the news, when they’re most inspired – officials get a larger sampling and a better, unfiltered understanding of how their constituents feel.

What’s the story behind starting Raise Your Voice?

I conceived Raise Your Voice during the debates on health care reform. As an Emergency Physician, I grew increasingly frustrated watching the town hall meetings, well meaning attempts at open dialogue, were hijacked by special interests and degenerated into shouting matches. It became clear to me that there were too many layers – pundits, interest groups, and media, between people and their elected officials, so I designed Raise Your Voice to give the average citizen direct and easy access. I placed it in online news, because that’s where people are most inspired to act. We got some small funding and launched in November 2011.

What are its key features?

Our main attribute is that, in being placed in online news and blogs, we make ourselves available when people are the most inspired about current issues (who hasn’t yelled at the news?).

Other key features include:

• an address book that includes federal, state, local, and county officials (since all politics is local)
• a “widget configurator” that allows people to generate and download the javascript code to place our button on their sites
• the ability to share their communications throughout their social networks
• we are working on integrating an advocacy platform, so people writing about an issue can see other groups working in their area (i.e. I write about logging and the spotted owl then see links to the Sierra Club and Wilderness Society sites)
• we have a multitude of features we are working on to make interaction easier; all aimed at opening up government.

What are the costs, pricing plans?

We are free.

How can those interested connect with you?

• Dan Busse, 303.330.3461
• Website
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Blog

Source: civicsponsor.com

CivicSponsor wants to change the traditional way we fund our public spaces. Here, its three co-founders outline how their new venture aims to help citizens and public servants think outside the taxpayer box.

Give us the 140-character elevator pitch.

CivicSponsor opens channels in your local government so that you can directly, transparently crowdfund public projects in your community with tax-deductible dollars.

What problems does CivicSponsor solve?

As local governments face massive budget cuts, they leave constituents with only two choices: pay more taxes or get no more projects (likely get cuts). CivicSponsor offers a third option: make elective (not forced) contributions that are earmarked, transparent and audited and that only can be used for new, discrete physical projects. We only work on projects that have no other options: either the local government raises new money, or the projects simply can’t be built. CivicSponsor markets the projects, collects the funds, brings corporate sponsors to the table, and provides the tools to offer transparency and measurement of use of funds in clear terms: square feet of public space built, hours of education funded, etc. Our first project is live on our site at www.civicsponsor.org, where we are raising the necessary funds to build athletic facilities at four middle schools in East San Jose.

What are its key features?

We work with the governments directly. Folks can raise money on other platforms; there are plenty around. But none of the others are officially connected with local government. That makes all the difference when you need to offer a tax deduction (we’re for profit) and you need the funds to be earmarked for specific projects. You can’t simply hand funds to government and tell them how to spend it; general fund contributions won’t work that way. You need governments on board from the start, and we know how to close them. Also, we have a corporate sales function that brings big companies on board with these projects in visible, positive public/private partnerships. Companies are more and more realizing the power that investing in their community can have for recruiting, sales, marketing and other efforts. We sell these projects not as philanthropy, but as crucial community outreach that affects the bottom line in a number of ways. No other site does all of the above.

What’s the story behind starting CivicSponsor?

Our three co-founders had been thinking individually about how to save our home towns ever since the recession hit in 2008. Local governments control the public assets we interact with on a daily basis: the park next door, the school our children attend, the streets we bike on. And as grants and subsidies dry up at the federal and state level, the projects that get cut tend to be the local ones, the ones we see and touch and use every day. It didn’t seem appropriate to stand by and watch this happen, so we put together a plan to bring new, private sector dollars to public projects. We knew that to get more money from individuals and businesses, we needed to offer something more, and it turned out that folks we

Source: GovHub

When no one in Nick Gaines’ UC Berkeley freshman political science class could answer the question “Who is your state senator?,” he tuned in, dropped out and started GovHub with co-founder Adam Becker. Here, Becker shares more about their pursuit of the American dream and how they want to help citizens better engage with their elected officials.

Give us the 140-character elevator pitch.

GovHub provides a personalized platform for citizens to learn about and interact with their officials in each level of government.

What problems does GovHub solve?

For government officials:

• Lack of name recognition
• Antiquated, costly public opinion polls
• Inefficient methods for communicating with their constituents

For citizens:

• Hard to actually find who represents you in each level of government (to find out who my city councilperson is, I have to click through about ten pages on my city’s website, including a 2mb PDF file)
• Once you know who represents you, no good way to see what they’re doing in office
• Communication with representatives often feels futile and is hard to get a personalized response from

What are its key features?

• Enter your address and see the officials that represent you at each level of government.
• See their profiles, voting records, social media updates.
• Interact with them on our discussion board, which uses crowdsourced moderation to determine the issues that are most important to an official’s constituents. (We have Kriss Worthington from the Berkeley City Council doing our first Q+A on April 12th.)

…and some really neat things planned for the future.

What are the costs, pricing plans?

GovHub will always be free for its users. In the future we plan to charge government officials (and candidates) for the different services that can connect them to their constituents.

How can those interested connect with you?

• Website
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Email: contact@mygovhub.org

The right to vote is being chiseled away by voter ID laws that require voters to show government-issued photo ID in order to vote.

In December, the Department of Justice blocked South Carolina’s voter ID law on the grounds it would make it harder for minorities to vote in violation of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Mississippi and Texas voting ID laws also must be pre-cleared but Texas is not waiting. The Lone Star State filed a federal lawsuit in an effort to speed up a decision.

Strict photo ID requirements will be in place in at least five states – Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Tennessee and Wisconsin — In November. With Election Day less than nine months away, voters without an official photo ID cannot wait for the challenges to play out at the Justice Department and in the courts.

In Wisconsin, for instance, voters must navigate “The 4 Proofs.”

I am a founding member of the Election Protection Coalition. Still, looking at the infographic makes my head hurt. More worrisome, it discourages voters from completing the application process. So I presented the problem of TMI (read: disenfranchisement by design) at Random Hacks of Kindness and the Hackathon for Social Good. Citizen programmers developed solutions to quickly provide voters with information on how to get a voter ID.

During Social Week Washington, DC, I gave a demo of the Cost of Freedom web-based app developed by Kin Lane, API Evangelist for CityGrid.

Users in Wisconsin can forget about “The 4 Proofs.” Instead, in four clicks or less, they will be able to access information about the state’s voter ID requirements, how to obtain a certified copy of their birth certificate (the document that’s typically produced to establish one’s identity), and the location, hours and directions to the Office of Vital Records using public transit.

I also gave a live demo of the Cost of Freedom text-based app developed by Jack Aboutboul, Twilio’s API Evangelist. Twilio is making an in-contribution of text message services to promote voter education.

To commemorate the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., we plan to launch the Cost of Freedom App on April 4, 2012.

I will post regular updates about the Cost of Freedom Project and other initiatives that are using civic innovation to protect the right to vote. The conversation about voter ID also gives us an opportunity to raise awareness about disruptive technologies in the public sector beyond election administration.

For more information, please visit us at Facebook.com/CostofFreedom. You can sign up to receive notice when the Cost of Freedom App is launched.

In 2007, Robert Vogel and Mike Alvarez Cohen started Peak Democracy to “build public trust in government through online public comment forums that are civil yet meet government freedom-of-speech and transparency laws.” Peak Democracy’s Open Town Hall now serves more than 25 government agencies and elected officials.

Vogel and Alvarez share their philosophy and experience building Open Town Hall and helping citizens become engaged by meeting them where they are.

What problem does Open Town Hall solve for government?

Open Town Hall enables governments to provide constituents with online public comment forums that have the order and decorum of government meetings — thereby making the online forums civil, constructive, and legal.

More specifically, the problems that Open Town Hall solves for government include:

• Diversifying community feedback beyond those few that have the time or inclination to attend public hearings;
• Providing an alternative to online community blogs that are frequently filled with vitriolic attacks, dominated by a few extremists, and consequently uninviting for most constituents; and/or,
• Satisfying explicit or latent demand by constituents for their government to offer online public forums (that are civil and informative).

How do Open Town Hall online public comment forums work?

Integrating Open Town Hall into a government’s website can take less than an hour of a webmaster’s time. Peak Democracy provides an HTML snippet to the webmaster, and then the webmaster simply embeds the HTML into a page of the government’s website. The forum’s look (i.e. color, logos, etc) can be easily customized by the webmaster. All of the forum’s IT requirements are provided by Peak Democracy’s servers — including bandwidth, storage and backup, etc.

Government staff access the forums via a password-protected dashboard and backend suite of tools. Staff prepare topics, review the content, and then make the forums available to the public. The forums are then announced to subscribers and the community via email, Facebook and Twitter — as well as announcements at meetings, and other communication channels.

People visit the online public comment forums, learn more about the topics, read and support other perspectives, as well as post their own public comments.

In addition to handling all IT requirements, Peak Democracy’s software and staff monitor comments to maintain civility, authenticate participants to prevent fraud, and provide end-user support.

Government leaders can read the responses and synthesize voluminous feedback using Open Town Hall’s analysis tools. The forums can be archived for public records retention, and printed for distribution at community meetings.

What’s the pricing model, current customers, and how are they leveraging Peak Democracy?

Peak Democracy’s cloud-computing architecture, smart software and economies of scale enable the company to cost-effectively price it Open Town Hall service — as described on this web page. Pricing is based on client population, and starts at $2,400 per year of unlimited use, or $700 per forum — for communities with populations below 25,000.

Open Town Hall is used by over 25 towns, cities and counties. They have launched almost 600 topics, and have had about 50,000 people attend those online forums. All the forums include user surveys with results that are accessible to government staff. Over 96% of user survey respondents indicate that they like Open Town Hall.

Clients are leveraging Open Town Hall to post forums that range from (1) topics agendized on council and commission meetings such as fiscal budgets, annual priorities, and land-use projects, to (2) topics of general interest to government leaders and staff such as transportation studies, sustainability projects, and safety issues.

What are lessons-learned and advice you have for government when it comes to conducting online public comment forums?

Having supported almost 600 online forums from communities across the US (and Canada), Peak Democracy staff has learned a great deal about the best practices for online commuity feedback. For example, online public comment forums should never be positioned as votes or polls — otherwise they can usurp the decision-making autonomy of government leaders.

Learn more about Open Town Hall at the Peak Democracy website.

The platform is available to government agencies starting at $5,000/month. You can download a product spec sheet or register for a demo.

CitizenSpigit features list:

• Core Idea Management Platform
• Pricing starting at 5K per month with unlimited users
• Available on the GSA
• Reputation Scores/ Virtual Currency
• Social Media Tools (i.e. Blogs, Wikis, Polls)
• Online Incentives Store
• Standard Reporting
• Idea Markets
• Community Management Services
• Customized site branding

City of Manor CIO Dustin Haisler discusses their use of the CitizenSpigit platform:

The General Services Administration recently announced it will create FedSpace, a ‘new social intranet for federal employees and contractors.’ The project will be managed by the agency’s Office of Citizen Services and the initial version is expected to launch late summer.

GSA describes it as follows:

FedSpace is a secure intranet and collaboration workspace for Federal employees and contractors. Designed to be “for Feds by Feds”, FedSpace will enable government employees to work collaboratively across agencies, through the use of Web 2.0 technologies like file sharing, wikis, a government–wide employee directory, shared workspaces, blogs, and more.

Gartner analyst Andrea DiMaio has interesting thoughts as to why it’s too late for FedSpace (with spirited and substantial comments). Whether you believe the federal government should create another social network or intranet is another discussion. I understand Andrea’s 30,000-foot assessment, but disagree, mostly because an officially-endorsed government network has huge potential to cut through the open Web clutter and protect the privacy of people who just want to get their jobs done.

FedSpace was inevitable and will survive the test of time, regardless of its success. Longer term (1-2 years), if effectively executed, it will have a huge impact on GovLoop, the largest unofficial social network for government employees. To his credit, GovLoop founder Steve Ressler shared his suggestions for FedSpace.

To learn more about FedSpace, there’s a great FAQ and overview page here.

This is a great opportunity for the federal government to do something creatively epic and have a major impact on the way government works. Below are some questions and recommendations.

Questions:

• What is the budget?
• What will it be developed in?
• Will it be hosted on a government cloud?
• How many people are on the development team?
• What contractor firms are working on the project?
• Who’s the project lead?
• How will success be measured?

Recommendations:

• Change the name. Government needs to stop mimicking dot-com social network branding and get creative. Use a naming contest as an opportunity build interest. While this may seem trivial, branding is a big deal.
• Read Steve Blank’s customer development classic The Four Steps to the Epiphany. Joshua Porter’s Designing for the Social Web is a great reference for non-technical team members and will help others get more excited about the potential.
• Leverage experts outside of the government tech bubble. Smart people are working internally on this project, but engage with in-the-trenches product and marketing development experts from popular commercial networks. Bring them in for brown-bag discussions or video-conference Q&As.
• Start an open blog to chronicle your progress and solicit input. You’ll get free advice and feedback from all sectors, increase project visibility and create a resource for state governments looking to do the same.
• Get serious about marketing it. Its usefulness will determine long-term success, but short-term, you’ll need to get very creative to get 2 million employees actively engaged.

NOTE: Site is very much in beta. Pricing and Web copy still needs updating.

What is PageFreezer?

Government websites are actually public records and need to be archived. PageFreezer is a Web service that archives websites, so they can comply to public records laws. However, in case of a legal claim, archiving is not enough. You need to provide proof of data integrity and authenticity. You need to prove that a page was archived on a specific date and that the archived page hasn’t been changed over time.

What problem does it solve?

Government websites, in accordance with the Public Records Law, are considered an official government publication. Information on these sites influences decisions of citizens and businesses. Governments can be held accountable for the information they publish on the Web. Tracking changes on Websites with PageFreezer offers governments trusted, non-refutable evidence in case of liability claims.

What’s the technology behind it?

It’s pretty complex and we’ve been working on it for more than 2 years. PageFreezer uses crawling technology, similar to that of Google, to take snapshots of your website. Archiving is an automated process. Only new pages and changes are archived, saving storage space.

Each page is time stamped with an ANSI X9.95-compliant Time Stamp Authority securely synchronized with the certified atomic clocks of a Stratum-1 Time Server. This trusted, non-refutable time that cannot be altered without detection provides legal proof when the page was actually archived.

For Drupal geeks:

Go.USA.gov is open source, and was developed in Drupal using the theme base Blueprint, Drupal Core, Shorten, Short URL, and TLD restriction modules.

User activity will be monitored to better understand citizen interests and needs. According to GSA, more than 700 public servants across all levels of government have registered to use the service, and more than 3,000 URLs that have been clicked over 450,000 times.