The White House is hosting a “Hackathon” near the end of the month.
You should probably dismiss the visions of hoodies huddled around a table near refrigerators stocked with Mountain Dew that are already dancing in your head. The White House has no plans to invite hordes of WoW/BSG/computer nerds over to the Casa Blanca to create the perfect denial of service attack. Instead what they’re doing is giving programmers and developers the opportunity to help the White House create a better “We the People” petition site.
Yes it comes back to the site that has brought us such responses from the administration as why the U.S. won’t be constructing a Death Star and why the White House won't be seeking the president’s impeachment.
The plan over at the White House is to roll out “Petitions 2.0” in March. Their digital team is working on making the site more searchable as well as allowing other organizations and developers to make applications that can interact with it.
The tech team’s first step on the road to 2.0 is releasing an API, or application programming interface, that will allow users to get a better handle on the information the White House is harvesting with the petitions. So if you want to know how many people from Texas are signing a particular petition, the new version of the site will allow that data to be accessed.
According to Macon Phillips, the White House Director of Digital Strategy, this is the first time the White House has launched an API, so they’re hoping developers that attend the hackathon can help them find the bugs in their program, come up with cool application ideas, and “tap into the innovation and creativity that will help We the People get better.”
So how does the programming public get involved? Sorry, you've already missed your chance. On Tuesday, the White House posted a blog entry explaining the February 22nd event and invited people to apply to participate. The application process closed at 5 p.m. ET on Wednesday and in that time over 120 people applied. The White House is still making a decision about how many people to invite, but the chosen should be notified by Friday. Anyone selected to participate will have to pay their own way to the daylong event.
Now I need to come clean about two things:
- I was a bit cynical about the process of making the petition site even more accessible. While making it easier to search is a great idea, creating apps that allow it to interface with other websites and drive more traffic sounds like just another way to gather even more of the public's contact information.
- I didn't really know what a hackathon was.
So I called up a programming acquaintance that I know from the math and science high school I attended. Jon Allen works at a company called Grockit as a Senior Data Scientist and he described a hackathon as, “literally a bunch of people sitting in a room and talking.” They’re also coding and sharing ideas, so it turns out my mental images of hoodies and Mountain Dew weren't too far off.
Also Allen had a much less cynical view of the White House invitation. He saw it as the administration providing ways for different types of people to be “engaged with the government.” He said, “I can’t drop my job and go to Americorp... I can't really do Teach for America. There are certain constraints. But spending a few days building something would be something that's exactly right up my alley." He continued that if he didn't already have a prior commitment that day, he would have applied.
Like me, Allen realized that there is a “large P.R. component” to the hackathon and that he wasn't quite sure “how interacting with petition data is going to necessarily help the community.” However, he likes the concept of the White House asking for the public’s help. “I was less excited about this particular idea and more excited about, ok, they’re willing to do this. They’re willing to engage the community and have hackathons. Perhaps there's something that will come out of this,” Allen said.
Phillips at the White House also tried to move the conversation past the public relations aspect. “The notion that we just want to collect e-mail addresses misses the larger point, which is we want to communicate with people about the things they care about,” he said.
As for the possibility that this was a front for something more sinister like a secret DARPA program*, Phillips joked in true political fashion, “You think I'd actually tell you if it was?”
*This scenario was never really a possibility. This is a joke. Chill.
**Ironically, it appears that the actual White House Hackathon, which was partially inspired by Open Data Day, will not be open press.
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WOW.... i guess the fearmongers got everyone believing that sites can be hacked easy and need multi-million dollar contract. What a load of @!$%#!!! for about $1000 you can run a secure unhackable server - i said UNHACKABLE. But leave it to the government contractors to take the country for a billion dollar ride on the fraud train!
Kind of like the thousand-dollar hammers of the Reagan-era DoD. The Military-Industrial Complex: Screwing America Since WW2.
There is no "secure" sites. Nothing can't be hacked. If you believe otherwise, you don't pay attention.
This thread is off-topic. This is not about hacking or secure sites.
The word "hacker" is used as a badge of honor among many of the young, hip computer programmers - it implies that they are free thinkers, not bound by old fashioned ideas, etc. These folks are not people who try to break into computer systems.
So a "hackathon" is like a marathon session of generating new cool ideas and writing code. Calling something a "hackathon" is an attempt to attract the young and hip (and bright) computer scientists and programmers.
I am a Progressive, but this isn't about being American Citizen; this is about being a Terrorist ... If you are a member of Al Quaida you have lost your rights as an American Citizen. No one likes drones and we need to redefine "the war on terrorism" and obviously drone attacks cannot be permitted on US soil.
Think about it. Do we really want to make it easier for people to petition to secede from the union?
So what should be do. Rather than actual petitions, we construct "Nations" for discussion of elaborate petitions and encourage an endless cycle of re-writing and approvals. Where consensus seems likely, key posters are invited into private elite chat rooms to disperse any leadership. By then it will be time to convert to version 2.1.
Anyone else see the irony in Adam Selene arguing against secession?
Also, as a resident of a donor portion of the country, letting the deadbeat states set off on their own sounds pretty good...
JohnSE,
It's a generational divide - I don't think most know RAH except for some disappointing movies. Sigh. You're a hard man John, I thought committee-boarding them would be torture enough.
Free Luna!
Damn and I was hoping for raid night :(
Start a petition that requires John McCain take his act to the Gong Show.
Ok, here's functionally some of the features I'd like the API to handle:
The White House is definitely open to an app that would allow you to vote on petitions via your Facebook account, but there's no timeframe for when that kind of application would be launched. As for location identification, the best you'll probably get is being able to categorize petition votes by zip code and that is if the signer volunteers that information.
I concur with Alva at #6....why can't issues be catagorized and voted on by the American public, publically?
Or would that be just another avenue of corruption for select individuals?
It occurred to me that the Yes No petition structure is insufficient for advisory votes. For example, say a committee is considering 7 different flavors of tweaks to a portion of the health care act to lower the cost of pharmaceuticals. The way these sorts of things get decided in committee is via multi-round votes. So the advisory vote would have to go beyond what petitions do- asking yes no questions.
4) the api must be able to handle multiple choice votes, with the evaluation algorithm on the vote to be a transferable vote system such as the Hare–Clark system (invented 150 years ago) used by the vote for Australian Senate which has important behavioral tweaks- such as randomizing candidate order because items high in the list are biased due to lazy voters. <technotwit dive into details- hold your breath > There is some off in the weeds technical discussions that show that the evaluation can achieve greater correctness- but the mathematical rational of some of these will be elusive to the electorate. For example, it might seem like algorithms should meet the Condorcet criterion, however the science of decision theory (used in artificial intelligence technology) understands the weakness of this evaluation. For example, Arrow's impossibility theorem demonstrates that any method that satisfies Condorcet does not satisfy the independence of irrelevant alternatives measure. These may seem like hair splitting technical discussions for technologists, but really, they are relevant to a wider audience because the weaknesses can be exploited by those attempting to manipulate the system to their favor. Some of these are summarized in Wikipedia's article on Strategic Nomination. Anyway, if I were managing this, I would simply use the OZ proven system then upgrade it, taking the recommendation of a research group populated by the best decision theory minds I could find coupled with that of political operatives familiar with schemes for manipulating votes and vote process. This would yield a system with highest correctness, and lowest vulnerabilities to the most likely real world attacks on it. </end technotwit dive>
This sort of ranked choice system would also be used for advisory votes on committee appointment, House leader, Senate leader advisory votes.
I really like that the Obama administration has brought forth this petition idea, but I think that we ought to have a system by which the voters can enact their own legislation by voting, and do this at a federal level.
The idea is that voters would have the power to enact their own laws, overrule gov't decisions, or recall elected officials, just by voting. The key here is that just like Congress, the people could vote to do these things at any time, 24/7/365, and cast their votes online or by phone.
How to get such a thing done has puzzled me, and this was my best attempt at how you'd structure such a thing.
http://articleeight.blogspot.com/
Switzerland uses national referenda regularly. California has an initiative system which many blame for the state's serious fiscal problems due to the public being for spending but against taxing. One popular suggested fix is to require all proposals be revenue neutral- for example if the initiative cut taxes, it would have to specify which programs would be cut and by how much. If a project requiring spending, then what new taxes or revenues would pay for the new spending.
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I think we will move to direct electronic democracy. One way to get incrementally there is to implement non binding "advisory votes". However- without verification that voters are voting only once and are eligible, the identify of the voters would have to be verified. But this sort of thing could be phased in once people got used to the scheme, and its value.