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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website was up and running at 12:01 pm on Tuesday, and it represents quite a change from George Bush’s stodgy and outdated version.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.

At last week’s meeting of my public management course, I asked a group of students to do an analysis of the Conservative Party website (www.conservative.ca) and another group to analyze the Liberal Party site (www.liberal.ca). Two excellent student presentations reached the same conclusion: the Conservatives’ site is election-ready, and the Liberals’ isn’t.

The Conservative site is easy to use, with everything reachable in three clicks. It has lots of information about Stephen Harper and his family, about the Government’s policies and accomplishments, and about the Conservative Party’s history back to Sir John A. Wherever you go on, the right sidebar has action options: donate, join, help, and “my campaign.” The latter, which requires a membership, includes activities like sending a letter to a newspaper or calling talk radio, and recruiting friends. Interestingly, the home page reaches out to the Net Generation, exhorting them to “freak out your friends. Join the Conservatives” and offering a program of paid summer internships in Ottawa.

The Liberal site hasn’t quite come together yet. Today - January 15 - it still carries Michael Ignatieff’s New Year’s message. It links to Michael Ignatieff’s site (www.michaelignatieff.ca) - which contains a well-written blog and lots of information about Michael - but his site is not yet integrated into the Liberal Party site. Ignatieff’s persona still stands apart from the Liberal site, unlike Stephen Harper, whose identity is clearly as PM and Conservative Party leader. The Liberal site has no statement of party policy but lots of critiques of the Conservatives - some delivered by former leader Stephane Dion. The Liberals’ action agenda is much more limited, with nothing like “My Campaign” nor a Net Generation page.

I suggest three reasons why the Liberals are so far behind. First, they haven’t nearly as much money to spend on web development as the Conservatives. Second, the party is still in a state of transition (disarray?), which is reflected in the website. Perhaps Michael Ignatieff hasn’t had the time to think about how to integrate his very effective personal website with the party site. Third, the party may not want to tip its hand on policy, preferring the standard critical Opposition approach.

In my view, the Liberals will have more leverage over the Conservatives’ forthcoming budget if they can make a credible claim that they are ready to fight an election over the budget. One aspect of credible election readiness is the website. To become election ready will require some time from the party’s senior strategists and party leader Michael Ignatieff, some money, and some involvement on the part of the Young Liberals to match the Conservatives’ Net Generation initiative. Michael Ignatieff has already shown some evidence of being an astute leader, for example in his making the point that the Conservatives’ negative advertising contradicts their desire for a consensus on the budget, and the Conservatives seem to have gotten that message. The question now is whether his organizational skills extend to cyberspace.

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 ‘government online’ … Don’t have ‘web sites’: create communities for new models of service delivery.” I’m not sure if this means governments should drop their websites and go with Facebook, but whatever it exactly means, I’m skeptical. Governments and political campaigns build their own websites to have some control over their own messages and the nature of interactions with their citizens. Again, Obama is instructive. He built his own campaign website, transition website, and, on January 20, www.whitehouse.gov will undoubtedly reflect his approach. It will have much more interaction and scope for user-provided content than any major political site we’ve seen before, but President Obama will still control the central message.

To conclude, one of Tapscott’s key messages is “the kids are all right,” namely that they haven’t been digitally-dumbed-down or otherwise corrupted. I’m with him there, but the digital dawning of the age of Aquarius he heralds seems to me a bit utopian.

This will be my last post of the year. A happy and healthy holiday season and New Year to all!

The coalition did bring change, not necessarily the change that was expected, but an important change nonetheless, stability in the leadership of the Liberal Party. And now that Michael Ignatieff is in place, it’s essential to return to the policy issues that brought the coalition into being, namely the nature of the economic stimulus package and appropriate funding for political parties.

The neo-Keynesian position on economic stimulus - espoused by this year’s Nobel laureate in economics Paul Krugman, 2001 Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, and senior Obama adviser Lawrence Summers - is that monetary stimulus and tax cuts won’t be sufficient to bring the global economy out of this recession. Monetary stimulus isn’t being passed along by the financial intermediaries, which are using the infusions of government money to shore up their own balance sheets. Tax cuts would go mainly into savings, as happened last spring in the US. That leaves fiscal policy to do the job of taking up slack and priming the pump for a private sector recovery.

I suggest three criteria for choosing spending projects: speed, efficiency, and effectiveness. In general, there is a tradeoff between speed and efficiency (spending no more than necessary for a project), but now excess capacity should hold down input costs. Smart procurement policy can create incentives for starting quickly and timely completion. The most important criterion is effectiveness, by which I mean defining great things that we, as a society, can do together.

The problem with entrusting the responsibility for fiscal stimulus to the Harper Government is that it’s just not in their DNA. The Conservatives don’t respect the public sector and have no vision of societal projects; they just want to give money back to taxpayers. Barack Obama’s speech about his stimulus package, delivered on YouTube last Saturday, exemplifies a leader defining a vision and outlining the projects that flow from it. (Notice that one of the projects, connecting all schools and libraries to the Internet is something the Chretien Government did over a decade ago.) By outlining a visionary and vigorous fiscal policy, the Liberals would define themselves as a clear alternative government, ready to contest an election early in the new year. Here are a few areas I’d suggest:

• Energy efficiency and alternative energy
• Enhancing public transit, in particular by implementing road pricing in larger cities
• Improving the delivery of government services
• Education, particularly reskilling, and research
• and that Conservative bête noire Canadian culture.

The Conservative move to terminate public subsidies for political parties, while intended to cripple the Opposition, was justified by citing opinion polls. Likely the question was posed in terms of wasteful government spending. A deliberative polling approach, taking as its objective strengthening Canadian democracy, would produce a different, more supportive result. In discussions about appropriate funding for political parties, participants should be don the philosopher John Rawls’s “veil of ignorance,” namely they should exclude from their minds their current circumstances or those of the party they support so as to come up with a principled solution that is in the overall best interest of society.

So let’s change the channel from leadership to policy.