I’ll use the blog over the coming weeks to talk through the details of my ideas, but that conversation starts with the influence of my professional experiences. I’ve spent most of my career as an organizer. I work with families that have been impacted by type 1 diabetes to advocate for more federal funding for type 1 research.
What I’ve come to realize in the time that I’ve been organizing is that the advocacy program that I’ve helped to build is really a platform. It’s a platform for our advocates to share their stories of living with type 1 and to build relationships with one another in the process.
More than that, it’s the ideas generated through these conversations that usually determine our communications strategies as well as how we invest our program resources. I quickly learned that the wisdom our ‘advocate masses’ perfectly complemented the strengths of our professional staff. And this combination has created a program that can better serve the needs of all involved.
So, this is where my ideas for changing Virginia’s government start: investing in platforms that can encourage collaboration from the masses and harness the resultant wisdom. Just because times are tough doesn’t mean that we need to accept lousy services and the same, tired decision points of what taxes can be raised or what services need to be cut. We can make the decision to harness our ideas and use them to innovate our way to better outcomes.
Governments from across the country, in both states and municipalities, are already implementing this model and inventing new solutions to their problems with the same resource constraints we face here in VA. I believe that we can do the same. And that’s the idea that I want to share with you in the coming weeks.
In the meantime, I want my campaign to emulate the level of engagement that I’ve experienced professionally and that I hope to provide as a delegate. I want to provide the same opportunity for conversation and the exchange of ideas—and the chance for me to understand your story.
So, I’ll make it easy to start the conversation. Please take a minute to leave a comment below with your story and your ideas.
BTW, you can also find me on Twitter or Facebook or shoot me a note at mike@mikekforva.com. I’m happy to continue a conversation or address your concerns through any of these channels.
Thanks!
Why does government need to do any such investing? It didn’t need to in order to get JDRF going, that was all the work of private citizens with a common goal. If there is any benefit to creating such collaborations, wouldn’t private enterprise have already done it, like JDRF and others have done in the type 1 space?
Rick, I guess I’d answer your question with a question. Would we have had the large scale economic growth we experienced in the 50s, 60s and 70s had it not been for the government’s investments in things like highways, electrical grids, and education? Private enterprise surely would have seen the need for these things as well. Government can help to develop the markets of tomorrow by using collaboration technologies and providing taxpayers with access to public resources, like the data we collect. As an example, would the market for GPS technologies be what it is today if Reagan hadn’t worked to develop the technology and then release access to it? Thanks for taking the time to comment, Rick!
Mike, thanks for the reply. The answer is yes, we would have, particularly in the last 2 decades with the growth of the internet. Roads allow commerce to happen, but it’s still private enterprise which generates that commerce. Generally, electrical grids were only approved by government and built by private enterprise. Government has gotten in the way of private enterprise creating more available energy for consumption by preventing new power plants from being built. Education spending has skyrocketed, where we now spend at the federal level over $13,000 per student (and it’s still rising), and student’s academic performance has been declining. The more active government is, the more it gets in the way of Americans getting things done.
But roads and power and education isn’t really what you’re talking about. You are talking about taking tax dollars from private enterprise and private individuals to allow government to determine and develop markets. If there was value in those collaborations, wouldn’t private enterprise have already done it? As I pointed out above, JDRF didn’t need government to step in and develop a market for organization around diabetes. People just stepped up and self-organized to make it happen. We simply didn’t need government to do any of it.
How much data do you want government to know about you? How much of that data do you want shared? Do you want your finances shared with the public? Do you want your medical history shared? Your children’s? Do you want your the school your children attend shared? Where is the limit? Where does the Constitution allow the government to collect and share that information?
GPS technology was an idea generated by military personnel, but was actually developed by a private contractor, Raytheon. Because of the promise from government that they could commercialize that invention, it took off as a product. It was private enterprise which actually figured out how to create it, make it cost-effective, and then make a commercially viable product from it. Government had no role in that commercialization whatsoever.
Government trying to do things for private enterprise which private enterprise would already do if there was value in it is an intrusion which just doesn’t need to happen. JDRF is also a prime success example where government wasn’t needed to make great achievements.
Rick, there are lots of levels to get through there. We’ll likely have to agree to disagree on the constitutionality issues. That said, your point on privacy is very well taken and something that civic entrepreneurs and governments need to jealously guard. In some respects the data collected by the state is either stripped of personal information or personal info doesn’t apply: think school performance, health insurance information, zoning restrictions, public health inspections, and crime data. However, there are some instances where programmers have to jump through a lot of hoops to be successful, as is described in-depth in this article about how data can transform our transportation future. There are also examples like SeeClickFix.com (a private enterprise) that can take 311 data and build a community around it so as to prevent governments from even needing to address issues that the community can fix themselves. Self-organizing at its finest!
The larger point of the open government movement isn’t to determine markets. It doesn’t necessarily fit the mold of large/small government. The goal is to collaborate with the private sector and use the ideas and information that are generated not only to make government more efficient but to give private enterprise the opportunity to apply its creativity to tax-payer developed resources, like data, to develop new markets. There are several other examples of how this process has already worked successfully in states and municipalities across the country in the Partnership for Progress portion of the site.
To your other point about JDRF, I think if you asked the researchers where the state of type 1 research would be today without the NIH, you’d find a much different attitude about the need for government involvement.
Mike, the state of type 1 research is different than the success of JDRF as an organization. The state of type 1 research is what it is because of the efforts of private individuals, and the government didn’t need to get involved at all.
Privacy is a huge issue, and the more you have the scrub the data because of privacy the less useful it is.
So you advocate to have government help private business do something that private business is already doing? How does that make anything more efficient?