It’s now 8AM(-ish), Monday morning and Transparency Camp is officially over. I have more tabs open in Firefox, links bookmarked, and chicken-scratch notes to parse than I know what to do with — which is awesome.
I certainly learned volumes (measured with every metric, including liquid (coff..eee…)) about the debate over the existence, packaging, and reach of open data in governance. Importantly, I also gained insight into some of the players. Stepping back from transparency itself, it’s interesting to note the demographics of an event like T-Camp: yes, there was a large white male majority (where large = group size, not individual girth), but there was also some surprising crowd variety, mostly thanks to international attendees. Reps came from Kosovo, Denmark, England, Chile, and it was incredible to hear about their projects, both ongoing and desired. But, even with this great international outreach and government presence and reps from the non-profit/design/develop geek crowd, did T-Camp add up to being a diverse event?
Well…When the gender balance within the attending technorati came up in a session on local government transparency and city APIs, a heckler noted that “we could always use more women.” I want to avoid defending his claim by resorting to identity politics, but he’s right. We can always use more women in tech. Heck, we could always use more of everyone. The barriers of access to technology don’t just stop at the level of access to physical interface (see, library computers) or critical thinking (see, blog-reading population…well, maybe). We need to be thinking about the barriers of access that green-light some people into learning, building, and manipulating technology and stop others. I understand that the gov/tech community is concerned with liberating and analyzing data now in terms of The Big Picture: a more accountable, informed society. My concern is that while we design in the cloud layer, we operate (literally and figuratively) in the Clouds. That is, above and away from future Gov 2.0 users — that is, our fellow citizens.
It’s an idealistic claim that we need to keep Jane Lowtech — Potential Future Gov User — in the loop because her inclusion and participation are not that simple. How can we get Jane to care about her future digital rights when she doesn’t even have her own Internet connection? Or, if she only logs online to look up job postings because she’s unemployed? No one is yelling about Jane’s Right to Compute on the news. Jane hasn’t taken a bite out of Job’s apple. (She can’t afford to.) But Jane’s a registered voter, or even a potential registered voter, and doesn’t that mean that one day, even if she doesn’t care that app is spelled with two p’s instead of one, we’re going to have to care about her?
If we want to get Jane involved in the world of participatory tech and informed consumption that lays before us, we have to get her to care. “We” is a bit of a misnomer at this point. Perhaps it isn’t the job of the tech community as it stands to reach out to Jane or teach her or her kids enough HTML to at least be vaguely interested in The Conversation. Maybe. Maybe this is the role of some yet to be formulated group, a tech Peace Corps for the U.S. We already have e-cycling and organizations like Computers for a Cause that transfer “old machines” (“one man’s trash…”) to people and communities that need them. What we need is more education: So you’ve got a computer/an Internet connection/whatever. What now? Or, more importantly:
What next?
Although I fell victim to it myself in the above ramble, the Net Hivemind needs to stop generalizing the nonusers and potential users and actualize their participation. Who are we designing all this information for? Who are the users we’re talking about? What’s Jane Lowtech’s real name and what does she actually need to see from her local government’s website?
If we want to one day include our iconic, collective Mom, then we have to get a better understanding of our current and desired user-audiences AND empower that audience with the critical skills necessary to utilize all the cool shit we’re developing “for them.” Maybe there’s an organization out there already doing this, maybe not. If you know of one, link me to it. Meanwhile, I’m going to start thinking about whether the Census should include more questions on tech consumption and what exactly a US Digital Corps would look like.
