Affiliations: [a] Digital Arts Research Center, University of
California, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA, USA | College of Staten Island, City University of New York,
NY, USA | Universidad Autónoma del Estado de
México, Mexico | Information Science Institute, University of Southern
California, California, USA
Abstract: The Obama Administration has outlined a set of principles and
practices to support Open Government in which citizens can collaborate with the
government to solve problems. The Administration is using technology,
especially web-based technology, to support Open Government in practice. Many
of the government's websites include video. We examine the website built to
support the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology (PCAST).
We critique it and argue that a number of important design decisions made for
the current site should be changed to better support Open Government. Key to
our argument is what has come to be known as Open Video, an application of the
ideals of Open Source Software to video. Our critique is followed by a
discussion of a prototype system we have built to demonstrate an alternative to
the current PCAST site. Our prototype is called Peer-to-PCAST to call attention
to the similarities between our proposals and Peer-to-Patent, the first Open
Government system built for a different context, the US Patent and Trademark
Office [34].
Keywords: Expert seeking, video, Open Source Software, wiki, social web, Web 2.0, online deliberation
