I love great movies (even when they are American Sports references, sorry to ll of our global readers). I love great speeches. I love motivation. And I do so, because of many of the things inside this speech. And the Government 2.0 movement is at this place, right now.
The founders of the movement toiled through years of being the minority, of gaining little attnetion. Of margianialization. And then, the 2008 American Presidential Election.
All of a sudden our points were made eloquent by one of our country’s best orators. He laid down the open government directive gauntlet as a first step. He appointed a rebel to CIO. He embodied the revolutary mantra and ethic, surely this movement had arrived.
But an economic crisis interceded. A healthcare challenge. A midterm election disaster. And questions abound. About him. About us. About the movement. We are down, a bit. But we are far from out.
As Pacino says in the clip, the inches are all around us. We just need to take them. We need to shoulder on through the current controversy. We need to ignore the charletans and those who might simply try to profit off of the momentum. Igonre these market timers of the movement. We need to have the guts to take what is our destiny, not just despite the odds against us, but becuase that opposition is there.
No gain made in life that is worth the effort happens without trial. Without unbelievable effort. And the best occur when we leave every last drop of sweat, every ounce of energy, every last bit of our passion out there on the playing field, and collapse, victorious.
As many of you who follow my blog know, I believe in both the Rebel and the Revolutionary. This post is way on the Rebel side of the argument, but I am actively involved with the Revolutionary spirit. I fight to invest, to deploy, to cajole, to plan and to create long term vehicles to help carry your message. And I believe that our movemnt must embrace the cypherpunk ethic “Gov20’ers write code”.
We need even more of that. In light of the criticism, deploy a solution. Write an app. Form a community. Join a meetup. Organize a Social Media group inside your government. Deploy Citizen based systems that treat citizens like customers. Drive performance metrics.
But most important, adopt a new point of view. You see, while revolutions depend on great speeches that move masses of people to take some form of collective action…real revolution only happens inside individual people. and, it is all that we, in fact, can control. And the greatest point of all, it is completely within our own control. Nobody can stop us from taking on a new point of view. Your boss cant force you not to have it. Your husband can’t stop you from thinking about it. Lack of time in a day cant stop it. Bad community leadership, a questioning press corps, FOIA requests, opposing political parties…none of them can touch it. And even better, you can recommit to it each and every day, it costs nothing and you need no permission.
Lets start today. And grab those inches.
Great rallying cry, Matt. Thanks!
I would like for once to hear/read a clear explanation defining Gov 2.0. What exactly is it? It often appears to be little more than a stalking horse for liberals to bypass the electoral system and claim some sort of mandate from the people based on social media interactions that are unsupported at the ballot box. I read about all this support for various intitatives with claims of how many people “friended” a facebook page, “retweeted” a tweet, “liked” a post etc; but the nubmers rarely add up to more than a fraction of the voters in any given jurisdiction.
So is Gov 2.0 about empowering ALL of the people, including those who are not “progressive” or allowing a relatively small group of liberal activitsts to bypass the elected represenatives the people have actually chosen?
Thanks Adriel.
And great post Peter. I push folks on that all the time. For this movement to be a success it must strip itself of partisanship. It is about setting the stage to let individual governments successfully fulfil their potential. Period. Individual policies will vary from city to city, state to state and country to country. If it is seen as an effort by one side of the political spectrum to simply push an agenda, then it will fail.
That is why the focus on Government as a Platform is an integral part of my definition of Gov 2.0. We need to provide a platform upon which citizens themselve4s, the private sector and NGO/IGO’s can focus on from an innovation standpoint. If Governments simply take on the role, whenever possible, to provide a solid and reliable open data paltform then conservative governments can leverage to fulfill their needs in the same way that liberal administrations will be able to do the same. The power then truly will reside inside the hands of the people.