Jun 30th, 2010
On Government Big and Small. And Weeding.
by Jennifer Pahlka
We are at a wonderful cultural moment, when the concept of big government is getting batted around, pulled apart and reconstructed in terribly useful ways. I recently tweeted this refreshing article from Dan Palotta, eloquently giving “big government” new meaning as a vehicle for tackling the big challenges of our day and meeting ambitious, visionary goals.
Code for America was itself inspired in part by my mentor Tim O’Reilly exhorting us all to attempt bigger, harder, more important problems; this theme in his work came first as a call to hackers to “work on stuff that matters” and more poetically to “being defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings” in his ETech keynote in 2008. More recently he took up that theme in a government context, reminding the audience at the Gov 2.0 Expo last month that the outcomes worth fighting for may not be achieved on Internet time. I found that talk well worth watching, so I’m including it below.
But I’m equally interested in the small of government, the daily care and feeding that makes a community work. I spent last week in Tishomingo, Oklahoma, population 3200, staying at the home of the mayor and his family. (They are family friends I’ve known my whole life, what we call “framily.”) This was my second trip since Lewis had become mayor in his retirement, and I was struck by how much time he spent on his cell phone, dealing with the day to day issues of a community, from signing loan documents for an upgrade to the waste water systems to dealing with a stray dog in the road. For a job that pays $27.50 every three months (yes, that’s not a typo!), it looks like a 24-hour gig.
Tishomingo’s landscape features an invasive weed called Johnson grass, so walks around the town with Lewis involve stopping and pulling out these tall, rough plants from the side of the road in Tishomingo’s beautiful, lush landscape. Weeding is something I’ve always found hugely satisfying, and a special treat to do when traveling, because it requires knowing what’s a desired species and what’s a nuisance in that area. You have to weed with locals.
It also turns out it’s more fun to pick up trash with locals. The city had recently put better trash cans with lids that don’t blow off down by the swimming hole, and as we left there we each practiced the “pick up three pieces of garbage before you leave” rule that my daughter learned at her school. When you’re the mayor, evening walks include a giant plastic bag that you fill up with bottles, cans and other garbage along your route, and sometimes the provenance of that garbage. Lewis pointed out the spot along the road where the small bottles of gin turned to bottles of mouthwash as we neared the home of one resident with a drinking problem and the need to hide it from his family. I got the feeling Lewis and his wife Floy had been picking up this man’s litter for a long time, and expected to continue to do so. It was part of the fabric of their community.
Government is a mechanism for making society work, for allowing groups of people to live together in some degree of harmony, and to achieve more collectively than they could individually. The needs of the group are the needs of the individual writ large, and societies, like each of us, have both grand ambitions and day-to-day needs. What the dialogue around “open cities,” gov 2.0, or whatever else you want to call it is telling us, is that if we want to stop fighting about big government versus small government, spending and intrusion, we need to start thinking about big government plus small government, our lofty ambitions and the thoughtful service of our every day needs, and most importantly, our part as citizens in both. At this point in the evolution of our society, neither big government nor small government is possible as an outsourced, packaged service that we simply buy and forget about. It just doesn’t work. The costs of vending machine government, both financial and otherwise, have gotten too high. We must all learn to pull weeds when we walk, and we must all reach for goals that at first seem as outlandish as putting a man on the moon, sequencing the human genome, or launching a satellite network that would one day make it possible to pinpoint your location within a few meters.
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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by craignewmark. craignewmark said: RT @pahlkadot: Blogged about redefining big govt and small government: http://bit.ly/ctr4oq [...]
Big gov. as the tree and small gov.’s as the limbs. The ones with fruit on the end we should focus on for best practices. What makes a city/town the success that it is. Low crime, high-employment, good schools, etc. A comparison of cities starting with a region then scaling the study nationwide and eventually internationally. A pilot city coalescing the chosen success factors and ultimate design. We are heading towards Utopia.
Vs. creating an arbitrary app devised by drones themselves. Instead, a scalable app which takes into consideration the input and crowd-sourcing but is not another foursquare. An app worthy enough for Big Gov. that trickles down to small gov. One that focuses on and enhances the actual social goals being ‘worked on’ now. Education, social services, local health-care centers, local-social-entrepreneurship, community involvement, community TV and video records of town-hall meetings, GPS enabled cell-phone for reporting local problems (lost dog, pothole, etc.)to your local public works department.
Erasing the digital-divide so that people in all U.S. communities can access this unified Gov App of all apps for their educational needs, social services needs, employment needs, etc. in a real and usable way. A single portal with many avenues. But focused on the key products in that vending machine. Not spread to thin.
This App could be made and offered for free to all with the same money that is being thrown around elsewhere today. If only we had the resources and team of engineers and developers at our fingertips now.
I’m all for various forms of collective action to tackle societal problems- its what gives life to whats called civil society. And its only a lack of imagination as to what forms of collective action can be formed to tackle such problems. But seeking to have government provide such services is just flirting with danger. When does government not try to become larger, protect itself as a vested interest, and crowd-out other forms of civil action? (not to mention investment capital). The problem with government is that it has legal authority to coerce- which it inevitably employs- and it ultimately morphs into tyranny (with small government units becoming the instruments of the larger). This is not brain science- its shown repeatedly throughout history. And last time I checked, human nature was a constant.
This is a great discussion of the theory and reality of government and a lovely reminder that small government has just as large, if not larger, role in people’s day-to-day lives. I would extend this concept further and connect it to egovernment: while working with the federal government to revamp federal systems may be exciting, applying many of the advances in applications and architecture to local government will have a substantial, immediate impact. I believe applying many of the simplified application principles from Web 2.0 to the vast array of local government applications would result in a much higher quality of service experience for citizens. The second order benefit would be that local government could use modern analytic architectures to make better, faster decisions. I hope bright young programmers become just as incented to work at the local level as they are at the federal level! Thank you again for this post!
[...] On Government Big and Small. And Weeding. » Code for America Fabulous: Government big and small. And weeding. Must-read. #gov20 #citizenship [...]
Only people either very young or very immature could envision this rediculousness as “good.” Government is never the solution to anything. This seems to have become an empirical truth based on the current status of not just America, but the entire world. Just look at the box we now find ourselves in. Thanks last 2 or 3 decades of Presidents, their Administrations and Congress/Senate; GREAT Job. How sad and misguided you must be . . . .
[...] it’s not just grand crises that call for our involvement; making the world a better place begins right where we [...]
I’m just back from a two-week no-internet holiday and this is my favorite re-entry item so far. My time online is well spent if I can spend it reading essays like this.
Most of my work focuses on the social impact of the internet on health & health care, so I tend to see everything through that lens. Join me for a minute: read the post again, but replace “government” with “health care.” Health care is also being broken down to its component parts and re-assembled. What can we learn from the locals in that context? What can we learn about health care from an individual family practitioner? From the clinic at the end of the branch (to pick up on Greg’s comment)? From the individual patient or their loved one who cares for them? And how can those lessons course back through the system to inform Big Health Care?
Pew Internet’s research points to the end of the vending machine information/services resource, whether it’s in the realm of government or health care (or journalism…etc). Thanks for giving me a new way to think about our findings!
[...] Replace “govt” with “health care” in this lovely post by @pahlkadot http://bit.ly/ctr4oq You Can’t Blow Up the World with a Tweet! – http://bit.ly/9K9mcs Is Globalization [...]
[...] a recent blog post, Jennifer Pahlka, Code for America’s founder and executive director, said that the concept [...]