Obama Administration’s Deputy CTO Beth Noveck Takes Questions from Second Life
White House Deputy Chief Technology Officer, Beth Noveck, recently participated in a mixed reality event to promote her new book, Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger, and Citizens More Powerful. The event began with Noveck presenting on how technology and citizen participation can help the government become more effective at solving the complex social and economic problems we face today as described in the book. Noveck then attempted to highlight this by taking questions, not only from those in the audience in New York, but also from avatars in the virtual world of Second Life.
Noveck herself is no stranger to Second Life. NWN’s Wagner James Au calls her, “one of the first academics to use SL as an educational platform.” Her virtual avatar, Lawlita Fassbinder, was created in the early years of SL in 2004. He also notes that she is the very first to count the White House as her office address. There she has been working hard on open government and using social media tools to try and get citizens talking about public policy. She discussed some of the work she has been doing with New York Times journalist, Saul Hansell last month.
During the event, while answering a question from Second Life avatar Tara Yates about synchronous vs. asynchronous, Noveck said this of Second Life,
“To the Second Life community, there is an opportunity for people to be talking about and looking at the role that virtual worlds can play in helping to create jobs, do simulations and job trainings. It’s so desperately needed. And we’d love to hear from (them). It’s the kind of thing that.. can only take place if people work together in real time esstenially building job training facilites and simulations that can be used for job trainings and education and other social uses. So, I think it’s not a matter of just what’s available at the desk of folks who are in the EPA or in the White House, it really is what we can do with these social tools to solve the challenges that we’re all facing that are not simply a government issue.”
Noveck also called for a movement towards a “culture of engagement” stating that,
“The most important things is when we can demonstrate that it’s possible to people who have not been accustomed to collerbrating and taking advice and looking outside their institutional boundaries for help. When we start to do that, it creates a culture shift that I think all boats rise on.”
In closing, Noveck stated her believe is that technology is important for accountability and continued open policy by saying that,
“It’s one thing to have a stated policy like the Freedom of Information Act that says the default rule will be that all government information will be open and proactively made available. It’s another thing to have a data.gov platform and to have that data up there, and to have a dashboard which shows you how much data is up there, and who’s releasing it, and who’s putting it out. That picture is worth a powerful thousand plus words….. If the number of data sets on data.gov stays fixed and doesn’t go up over the next year, people will begin to notice that… The hope is once you create these things in practice, and make them visible and begin to create a culture that expects it… it’s going to be very hard to put back in the bottle. The technology is really the thing that’s helping us to do that, so it is hopefully the ability to do more of that and to change the way these institutions work towards being more colleraborative and more open will hopefully be, I’d like to think, the great technological challenge of the next ten years.”
As we noted in an earlier post, the Obama administration has been actively seeking out, researching, and testing virtual worlds for these types of opportunities.
The event received much positive feedback, with the audience feeling like the level of engagement was impressive. It will be interesting to see how the US government moves forward within virtual worlds.
