Platforms beat applications.  OK -    So what is a platform?  The nomenclature of platforms and applications arise from technology but I will use a low tech retail metaphor.   An application in this analogy is The Foot Locker (let’s just say) while the platform is the Mall.   The mall is a platform in that it provides many of the conditions necessary for The Foot Locker to exist;  physical infrastructure, foot traffic (no pun originally intended) etc.   This allows The Foot Locker to focus its attention on what it does best – market and sell shoes.  They don’t need to allocate finances towards owning the building and all the hazards that entails.    If Foot Locker is unsuccessful, there are other small business owners that might be eager to make use of the space in the mall.   The mall is a platform that allows myriad small/large businesses to flourish.

The best exemplar of the platform recently is the iPhone.   The iPhone allows developers to build applications that reside on the iPhone (the mall if you will).  These applications can take full advantage of the iPhone’s physical infrastructure (sensors like the accelerometer for games, microphone, GPS chipset etc.) and reach (37 million iPhones to date).  This is a compelling proposition.   There have been 35,000 applications developed – and 1 billion application downloads.   iPhone is now opening up its hardware to allow people to develop physical devices… (I imagine my iPhone as a netbook in the near future).

Platforms can be a powerful concept for re-imagining your business and is part of what I talk about when I say, Open beats Closed.   There is more talent outside your walls than within — find a way to tap into that creative potential.  Platforms are also a way of reimagining  our government….

This is the heart of Ed Felten’s recent post, Government Data and the Invisible Hand, on how to make government more transparent.  The genius stroke is right here at the beginning,

If the next Presidential administration really wants to embrace the potential of Internet-enabled government transparency, it should follow a counter-intuitive but ultimately compelling strategy: reduce the federal role in presenting important government information to citizens. Today, government bodies consider their own websites to be a higher priority than technical infrastructures that open up their data for others to use. We argue that this understanding is a mistake. It would be preferable for government to understand providing reusable data, rather than providing websites, as the core of its online publishing responsibility.

Beautiful… Felten is telling Government to build a platform that leverages citizen engagement.   It is an interesting notion to think about how new technological advancements (namely, the Internet) will reconfigure our very notion of democracy.    My Society and Frontseat (see my interview with founder Mike Mathieu here) already take available data for citizens to remix.  Imagine how powerful this can be if government saw itself as a platform rather than owning the whole mall.

Stimuluswatch.org allows citizens to see local government requests for stimulus-spending projects, add details, vote projects up or down and generally discuss the merit of each.  It is a great example of how the Internet lowers the cost of developing software and allows citizens to collaborate in government.   Anyone from an Enterprise can learn a lot from Stimuluswatch about
1.    How complex software does not need to cost millions (your intranet, your website etc.)
2.    How quickly projects can now get off the ground (weeks not months)
3.    How people outside your company can contribute their talent to get things done (Open beats Closed)

For those of you less inclined to read, here is a screencast that covers most of these details

A bit of history.  Stimuluswatch began with this blog request from Jerry Brito,

Who can help me take the database on the Conference of Mayors site and turn each project into a wiki-page or other mechanism where local citizens can comment on whether the project is actually needed or whether it’s a boondoggle? How can we create an app that will let citizens separate the wheat from the pork and then sort for Congress and the new administration the project in descending order or relevancy?

I got in touch with two of the developers who responded to Brito’s blog request, Peter Snyder and Kevin Dwyer, to get details on their collaboration.  The final site included all of the functionality (and more) that Brito had asked for was launched after only two weeks of work conducted over seven weeks including the holidays (for more technical detail on how they achieved this, see my Radar post here).

None of these people knew each other previously.  They were brought together by blog post into a common effort.  They used open source tools in rapid development.   They plugged in off the shelf social technologies  (Disqus as a tool to enable forums and commenting on projects, Tumblr as a blog and publishing platform for updates from Jerry and Mediawiki as a tool to allow citizens to collaborate together on building a common definition around each project – much like wikipedia allows users to collaborate on defining the meaning of a concept).  They achieved this in a matter of weeks.

Results so far?  One week after launch Stimuluswatch had 20,000 unique visitors.   These visitors were actively voting, discussing and even cleaning up mistakes in the mayor’s original data. Total cost of the effort?  $40 per month for hosting.

I am not sure that Stimuluswatch is the right set of tools for citizen engagement in public works.   That remains to be seen.  It does demonstrate the power of the Internet to radically reduce the time it takes to create powerful software and lower the barriers to group collaboration. If you are a business being faced with a million dollar software price tag from a big consulting firm you should think long and hard about whether or not your money is being wisely spent.

FDR was our radio president, JFK was our TV president and Barack Obama will be our Internet President.

Quietly at noon yesterday, as the world was fixated on the televised inauguration of Barack Obama, some obscure IT managers flipped a switch (metaphorically) and transferred Change.gov to Whitehouse.gov…  While the inauguration spectacle was awe inspiring and the speech lived up to its promise, Whitehouse.gov is the herald of bigger changes.

Team Obama has shown a native fluency with the web – high engagement (personal video emails from David Plough), bottom-up organizing (empowering a thousand micro-campaigns to flourish via their social network), great use of data as a competitive advantage (they release voter lists to be called upon, scrubbed and returned to them by their members) and harnessing collective intelligence (during the get out the vote campaign they were feeding real time results of calls back into the system making it smarter with each succeeding call).

Thirteen million citizens joined MyBarackObama.com.  They gave money and time.  They occasionally rose up in protest of their man’s policies (see FISA).  MyBarackObama.com fulfilled the deeper, more democratic promise of social networking;  that people can organize around meaningful issues and coordinate action with near-zero barriers to entry. Change.gov was launched immediately upon Obama’s winning the presidency and we saw the same result – massive engagement and some surprises (the biggest topic members want answered is how Obama will deal with the issue of prosecuting torture).   And now  Change.gov has become Whitehouse.gov.

I applaud this use of technology to engage citizens in better government.   I also carry a healthy bit of skepticism (every citizen should).  To quote Barack Obama, “Power Does Not Concede” – It did not before the Obama  and it will not after the Obama administration comes to power.   But the responsibility for how this gets shaped over the coming years is ours.   An Internet president presides (if anyone can) over a loose network of citizens capable of mobilizing and flexing their power (money, petitions) in near real-time. But, like any network – the power is with the massive swarm of citizens staying informed and participating in the social technologies that now take democracy from an annual ritual to a daily activity.

This is a cross-post from Radar

While in NYC I interviewed Jashca Franklin-Hodge, CTO and Cofounder of Blue State Digital.  This is a three part series that explores how technology affects our political process.

Blue State Digital was born out of Jascha’s experience helping Howard Dean’s seminal run for the White House in ’04. and is the technology and strategic services company powering Barack Obama (and many other Democratic leaders and social justice causes like Save Darfur and We Can Solve It).

Here is part three of the series…

Here are the key observations I took away from the discussion:

Online U.S. political communities will morph from a campaign fundraising role to a governing role. Regardless of whether Obama or McCain wins in November, every 2012 political campaign, even the laggards, will be as sophisticated as Obama is today- and any campaign with that much momentum won’t be able to stop community participation at the White House door or the Capitol steps (“thanks for all the money and support, I‘ll see you in four years”). Online communities will follow politicians into their governing roles. This summer when MyBarackObama experienced the FISA revolt within his own community this became clear. This has far more transformative potential than the fundraising juggernaut we are seeing now. Powerful communities may come to dominate the agenda of incumbent politicians providing feedback, direction and policy input.  There is a whole book to be written on this topic alone.  It also factors in for businesses currently running one-issue communities – Are you prepared to follow your community as it moves deeper into your organization?

Microcampaigns and Swarm Politics: Rather than one centrally governed behemoth, MyBO is enabling a thousand small campaigns to flourish. MyBO puts the tools into the hands of anyone that wants to get active; from having your own blog, downloading voter lists to make calls with “Neighbor to Neighbor” or having your own fundraising dashboard to mark your progress. This kind of swarm politics has generated enormous amounts of energy (and money) from ordinary citizens. Jascha sums it up best “We are helping them run thousands and thousands of little local campaigns that roll up to a central set of issues or candidate or goal” That is unbelievably powerful.

Technology (infrastructure and know-how) will become a necessary core competence in all U.S. political campaigns. Jascha points out that campaigns traditionally mirror movie productions, with all of the resources, technology and logistics brought together for a short burst of activity and then disappearing once the final scene is shot; this results in an enormous loss of knowledge and skills that need to be relearned once the next campaign begins. Campaigns that maintain or are able to tap into a continuity of software, infrastructure and human capital will have serious advantage. Blue State Digital was conceived to fill that gap on the Democratic side of the aisle…

Open Data and transparent government. Part Three of the video series digs into the value of open data in government to allow citizens to hack and remix at will. When lobbyist data, earmark data etc. is available in standard formats it will be a great leap forward for more transparency in government. Great stuff.