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After going to the Rogers Centre en famille to watch the Jays defeat the Red Sox 5-3 yesterday, I’ll take a break from the serious business of narrative to write about the way American national pastime is now presented in Canada. While aging undoubtedly reduces tolerance for loud noise and bright lights, I think the Rogers Centre’s use of both is radically diminishing enjoyment of the game. The Centre – a concrete echo chamber, especially when the roof is closed – pulsates with incessant generic rock music, interrupted only for the few seconds between the ball leaving the pitcher’s hand and the play concluding.

The Jays – and I don’t know if this is common practice in Major League Baseball – have little signature tunes, also rockish, played when each batter comes to the plate. In addition to all the valuable electronic billboard information (the count, individual stats, playbacks) there is lots of extraneous stuff, such as exhortations to make noise or names of fans celebrating birthdays.

All this son et lumiere defeats what I remember from the days of the Triple A Maple Leafs or even Blue Jays prior to Skydome, as it was first called, as one of the enjoyable aspects of the game, the chance to chat quietly between plays about strategy or share baseball lore. This is particularly important when bringing young children – mine are nine and six – and trying to explain as much inside baseball as they can absorb.

If the Jays insist on signature tunes for their players, why not be more creative? One day they could do jazz signature tunes or another they could do Beatles or a third they could do classics, even hooked on classics style (which I am playing on Youtube as I write). There are some great possibilities here such as “Norwegian wood” or perhaps “Yesterday” for a designated hitter, “a little help from my friends” when a pitcher comes up to bat (under National League Rules), or ethnically motivated choices such as Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony or Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. Ode to Joy? Take Five? Take the A-Train? Caravan? Blue Rondo a la Turk? The possibilities are endless.

In any event, despite the excesses of son et lumiere, a good time was had by all, and our six year old son stayed interested to the last out in the top of the ninth, and told me that now he wanted to see the Yankees. We will.

After three weeks, here is my initial assessment of the Obama administration online.
Where they’ve made progress:

• The President keeping his BlackBerry
• Moving the weekly address to YouTube
• Introducing a more modern look and feel and more transparent whitehouse.gov
• Continuing to use mybarackobama.com and barackobama.com (now retitled Organizing for America and linked to the Democratic Party) to contact his followers

Next steps we’re awaiting:

• The White House Office of Public Liaison establishing some sort of Web 2.0 capacity for dialogue on whitehouse.gov, comparable to what exists on mybarackobama.com and what existed on change.gov
• Launching the website for the economic recovery program, recovery.gov

Big question for the future:

• Will the Obama constituency, using the tools on Organizing for America, be able to move the center in American politics? To do so, it will have to start changing the votes of moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats. The vote on the recovery package – no Republican support in the House and only three (Snowe, Collins, Specter) in the Senate – suggests this hasn’t happened yet.

Some questions about the public management implications:

• Now that Obama has cleared the way, will other senior administration officials go online?
• Will the departments copy the new look and feel of whitehouse.gov and begin using Web 2.0 approaches with their constituents? (One of the difficulties the sprawling US administration has had is adopting a common look and feel for its websites. The Government of Canada has been more successful here.)
• Are a host of new media positions being created in the departments as well as the White House to bring in IT-savvy members of the Net Generation to manage the Obama Administration’s new Internet and, increasingly, Web 2.0 infrastructure?

Barack Obama’s new Whitehouse.gov website was up and running at 12:01 pm on Tuesday, and it represents quite a change from George Bush’s stodgy and outdated version. Instead of the traditional three-column layout, the top of the home page is dominated by the big message – change has come to America – and big pictures of the inauguration. Underneath are six columns of links, including standards such the White House, the Administration, and the Government. But the full policy agenda is there, as well as the briefing room and blog, and a contact link. Contact will be handled by a new Office of Public Liaison, which is tasked with stimulating dialogue between the Administration and the public. When you visit any page on the site, a right side bar pops up with links to the blog and the Office of Public Liaison (as well as history such as a slideshow with portraits of all Obama’s predecessors.) We’re also told that the President’s weekly address will be available on video, continuing the practice established in the transition period.

The unanswered question is how dialogue will be handled. The transition period website, change.gov, freely hosted thousands of comments organized around such topics as the citizen’s briefing book (125,000 users submitting 44,000 ideas), open for questions (104,000 users submitting 76,000 questions), and join the discussion (4200 comments). The Citizen’s Briefing book has now wrapped up and comments have been disabled on join the discussion. It appears that some parts of the change.gov, such as some topics under the blog, are still open for comment.

As best I can guess, the Obama Administration would like to transfer the dialogue from change.gov to whitehouse.gov, and handle it through the Office of Public Liaison. That hasn’t happened yet, and the commenters and participants are anxious that it does. Obama has raised great expectations about transparency and openness in government, and we are all waiting to see what he will deliver. The old cynic, Sir Humphrey Appleby, said that you can have either openness or you can have government. But that was before the Internet. Stay tuned.

Last month we witnessed a clear demonstration of the power of web 2.0 organizing. On November 16, 2008, the Ontario Government introduced a number of restrictions on young drivers, one of which would have prohibited drivers in the first year of their licence from transporting more than one unrelated teenaged passenger. Within a few days a Facebook opposition group – Young Drivers against New Ontario Laws- was formed and it quickly grew to 150,000 members. On December 8, a mere three weeks later, the government rescinded this proposal.

The politicians, particularly the tech-savvy (at least in his own mind) Premier Dalton McGuinty, saw this episode as a wake-up call posing the question of what their government should do about web 2.0. In this case, seeing 150,000 members and 15,000 wall posts, the government simply backed down. In other situations it might not want to. If so, how would it read, analyze, and respond to 15,000 wall posts? How would it establish a dialogue with a 150,000 person group?

I was recently sharing a draft of a paper on The Digital State Revisited to a number of Net Geners, and I got a variety of views about Web 2.0 in government. First, they think it is ludicrous for some governments to block public servants’ access to web 2.0 sites such as Facebook because they are considered a potential distraction at work when politicians have establishing Facebook pages. Second, there is a concern that having a high profile online, especially one that is controversial, is seen by the public service culture (if not the federal public service Values and Ethics Code) as inconsistent with traditional values of anonymity and non-partisanship – potential career suicide.

But despite these negative signals, there is a growing realization – now Dalton McGuinty gets it – that, because the social networking sites are where the citizens are, they cannot be ignored. For example, the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade – which is among the most liberal in terms of staff Internet use policy – has developed its own YouTube Channel and Facebook groups. While internally oriented, a number of departments have developed wikis for staff dialogue, the most notable of which is the Natural Resources Canada wiki, which is used by approximately 2000 of its 5000 person staff. There is also an interdepartmental wiki titled GCPedia.

And some individual public servants are posting their thoughts about Web 2.0 on the Internet for all to see. Mike Kujawski, a Net Generation “marketing specialist and social media expert,” has compiled a list of federal, provincial, and US government web 2.0 initiatives, posted at http://government20bestpractices.pbwiki.com/FrontPage. Nicholas Charney and Mike Mangulabnan have launched a personal blog at www.cpsrenewal.ca.

The Harper and McGuinty governments present an interesting contrast in that the former has exerted tight central control over its message, while the latter has often encouraged open public dialogue as an important component of policy development. But both governments will be grappling with Web 2.0 over the next year. And the Net Generation members of the public service will be moving forward, proposing innovations, and pushing the envelope – as they should be.

The other day I received an email from Don Tapscott, promising me a free copy of his latest book Grown Up Digital, to send to a friend or relative for Christmas, if – here’s the catch – I wrote a review of it to post on either Amazon or Indigo. I just checked and there are just two reviews posted on Indigo and one on Amazon, so I understand why he is making this offer. Still, the implicit message is that a good review is expected. So I’ll forego the offer and post an entirely uncompensated review here.

One of the key themes in Tapscott’s work is that the “Net Generation” – people born between 1977 and 1997 – have grown up with readily available information technology; not only have they greater facility with technology than previous generations, but the technology has shaped their consciousness. Tapscott cites eight norms that he claims characterize this group: freedom, customization, a critical stance to institutions (scrutinizing), a desire for corporate integrity and transparency, a desire to mix work and entertainment, collaboration, speed, and innovation. His main message to all and sundry institutions is that, if you are to succeed in your relationship with the Net Generation, you must respect its norms. All this sounds plausible, but is the Net Generation really that different from all others?

Methodologically, the book was based on online surveys of 7700 Net-Geners (aged 13 to 29), along with control groups of 800 Gen Xers (ages 30 to 41), and 800 baby boomers (ages 42 to 61). Obviously, using the control groups was essential, though the surveys should also have been conducted offline, given that smaller proportions of both Gen Xers and boomers than Net Geners are online. As he was writing for popular consumption, it wasn’t a surprise that Tapscott’s main form of evidence was anecdote. He published only a little of his data. And, he claimed (on p. 34) that the eight norms differentiate Net Geners from their parents. As an academic, I’d like to have seen a book that was stronger on data than anecdote. If Tapscott feels that this would have hurt his sales, then he could have found some other way to make the data available, perhaps as a CD packaged with the book, or online.

Chapter 9, which deals with the Net Gen and democracy, interested me most. He argued that Net Geners are looking for personal involvement in democracy that goes beyond the traditional “you vote, we rule.” Barack Obama, the candidate who most acutely realized this and then translated into his online campaign, was clearly the beneficiary of massive support from Net Geners, as Tapscott approvingly observed. The chapter advocates expanding the Net Gen model of interactivity and collaboration in the political realm.

The chapter ends with a set of recommendations based on the eight norms (p.268). Two strike me as particularly dubious.

“If you’re a politician, stop using attack ads” because “Net Geners are sick of vacuous politics … want to know what politicians stand for … [and] want to revitalize the Founding Fathers’ marketplace of ideas.” But two pages before that, Tapscott told us how Net Geners are using YouTube to skewer politicians they dislike or mistrust. Politics, for any generation, is about both advocacy and critique. Net Geners are as willing to criticize as any other generation. My reading is that they are more partial to satirical putdowns than straight-out big lie attacks, and the Obama campaign was better at playing to this sensibility than was the McCain campaign.

The second recommendation was to “forget about putting