Mike’s earlier guest post was all about the Debate 2.0 citizen committee’s many ideas for how to change the format and structure of debates to make them more like conversations.

Diane co-led the Debate 2.0 effort with Mike, and her post describes the softer and subtler motivations of candidates and the media and what ultimately kept our event from happening.

People frequently use weak passwords–passwords that are short and all lowercase letters with no caps, numbers, or symbols–either because they don’t know how to create strong passwords or because they try to make their passwords easier to remember (or both). Even so, people still frequently forget passwords!

While it’s easy to find techniques for creating good passwords that are easy to remember, you have to follow the methods and construct the passwords yourself. Password Savvy not only shows you how to make strong passwords that you can remember, it makes them for you automatically.

The classic xkcd comic strip on password strength parodies attempts to make strong passwords by tweaking uncommon words (like “troubador”) with random capital letters, letter-number substitutions (like ’4′ for ‘A’), and symbols (like ‘#’). It’s spot on that lone uncommon words with random changes are hard to remember. The comic suggests the approach of creating much stronger and passwords that you can remember by simply appending four random common words (like “correct,” “horse,” “battery,” and “staple”). That can be a lot of typing for a password that you type regularly though.

Password Savvy takes a different approach to creating strong passwords that you can remember. It is an homage to old CompuServe-style passwords that were two random words separated by a random symbol. By combining two random words, these passwords created phrases that were easy to remember. Moreover, using two words increased the length of passwords–a primary driver of password strength (entropy). Separating the two words with a symbol also made these passwords stronger, because using a symbol increased the size of the “alphabet” that a password cracker had to consider–the other driver of password strength. At the same time, it didn’t add complexity for the person, as the symbol always separated the two words.

Password Savvy builds on this strategy, by also capitalizing some letters and substituting numbers for some letters that look similar. However, by using patterns for these “decorations,” you can still remember these passwords, even though they’re strong. They’re also considerably shorter than four random words!

Let us know what you think on the discussions at the bottom of the Password Savvy home page. Thanks!

As a judge at the first Startup Weekend GOV event 6 weeks ago in Seattle, and now PDF:Applied, I wanted to write about the kind of innovation I’d love to see come out of PDF:Applied and all of the other civic-minded apps contests and hackathons.

Broad Distribution

Poor distribution is a chronic problem for civic apps. To have impact, we need new ways to get the right apps into the hands of the right citizens, at the right time. For example, the awesome transparency efforts of the Sunlight Foundation will only achieve their true potential when that open data is put in the hands of citizens right at the moment when they can use it to make an informed decision — whether it’s voting or making a purchase.

In the 1960s when the U.S. wanted to provide distribution to civic broadcast media, we passed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, which leveraged 250 FCC broadcast licenses that had been set aside for educational purposes. This led to the establishment of brands like PBS and NPR that provided editorial voice. Now that’s a lot of distribution!

What’s our 21^st century solution for distribution of civic software? Steven VanRoekel, the Federal CIO, knows that it’s not about adding new .gov domains. At Walk Score we invested millions of dollars and years of effort to build a network of more than 15,000 real estate web sites that distribute services that “help apartment renters and homebuyers find neighborhoods where they can drive less and live more” 6 million times a day. But what about the rest of the civic software ecosystem?

I’m hoping that the all-star cast at PDF:Applied will have more innovative ideas here.

App Roaming

It’s not as sexy for politicians as a new iPhone app, but for techies, it doesn’t get any more foundational. Simply put, civic apps don’t roam across political jurisdictions. It’s like cell phones before McCaw Cellular/Cellular One first brought nation-wide roaming to the U.S. in 1990.

The reasons are many — missing standards for schemas, semantics, data dictionaries, naming conventions (think data balkinization); lack of universal directories for programmatic data access, authentication, metering; incomplete, disparate, non-scalable licensing agreements; export and post models rather than interface-level access to transactional data and methods. And plenty more. Data hosting services like Socrata, even with API access, are promising but only scratch the surface.

Michael Porter would call this a fragmented industry, and fragmentation hurts. Not only is it a major pain for end-users, but developers lose the economies of scale that make the commercial internet so powerful. Instead of one app that can take the world by storm, you get a series of one-off IT projects with no chance of going viral, let alone providing financial incentive to make a living doing this stuff. It’s why you see the same apps, time and again, when different cities host app contests.

Code for America is doing some great organizing work with The Brigade, a sort of hand-crafted, barn-raising approach to standing up their local apps in new cities. And My Society in the UK has a similar volunteer-driven approach to porting their apps. But what are the new civic innovations that can take this artisanal approach and industrialize it to gain scale economies across cities, counties, transit areas, states, and countries?

Meaningful Problems

Software is empowering. It’s magic. Even after 20 years of the internet. An unemployed developer can spend a month and build something with the potential to change the world. But developers need context. They need exposure to meaningful problems. Walk Score’s CTO, Matt Lerner, was inspired by ideas from a local sustainability think tank. Then he used his own creativity and teamed up with Jesse Kocher to build a seminal piece of civic software in just two weeks.

A developer without context who is pissed off politically will rely on the only context they know – as an ordinary citizen. In a tech-infused fit of rage, they’ll write one of two iPhone apps: the “who was my representative again?” app, or the “where do I go to vote again?” app. They’ve been written dozens of times, and I’m sorry to say, the true problem here is distribution, not tech. And they’re not the biggest civic opportunities either.

We need to organize the civic hackers, sure. But we also need to organize the domain experts who can shed light on how the world really works. The Presidential Innovation Fellows program, launched last week, sets a new high bar in this direction. Rather than a call for ideas, it lays out 5 specific digital government innovation challenges that the White House wants solved and makes an open call for applicants to rise to the challenge. True, they’re not the 5 largest problems facing government. But they’ve been carefully selected both for their impact on government priorities, their potential for completion within 6 months, and their ability to help show the way forward for digital innovation in government.

It’s time to end the hollow calls to “create innovative apps” using our “high value data sets” and to usher in a new era of curated problem statements. Save the Ideascale pages for sharing and voting ideas for technical solutions, not for crowdsourcing problem statements.

What’s the innovative new platform for locating the domain experts, and then collecting and curating the problem statements they produce?

The Future

There’s no doubt it’s fun to open up a new data source. Whether it’s the handy new work of the Voter Information Project, the mind-bending scale of data.gov‘s 300,000 data sets, or the rigorous independent aggregation efforts of GTFS-Data-Exchange for public transit feeds, opening data brings a strong sense of accomplishment. But the future of civic software rests not purely in the data. Challenges like distribution, roaming, and the knowledge and technical infrastructure to enable scalable, high-impact systems have become more central.

Developments like NYCFacets by Ontodia, the winner of the NYC BigApps 3.0 competition, give a hopeful glimpse of the future. Their service builds on the NYC open data catalog to provide searchable crowdsourced and algorithmic metadata services. This makes undigestable data catalogs like those in many major metro areas, suddenly much more useful for developers. Expanding their federated search model to include multiple governmental jurisdictions is an obvous and welcome next step. By itself, this isn’t a sexy end-user app. But like Socrata, it’s a piece of the infrastructure that should enable many more high-impact apps in the future.

My hope for PDF:Applied and other apps contests and hackathons like it, is to start moving beyond the feel-good apps (that die in short order), and the useful community building (that offers promise, but not significant impact), and into a new era of high-impact civic software infrastructure that enables national distribution of scalable, roaming solutions to important problems.

Walk Score  makes it easy for apartment renters and homebuyers to find neighborhoods where they can drive less and live more. In the last 4 months the dev team has nearly doubled and they are truly kicking butt and taking names. 6 million scores/day served via the API, 15,000 real estate sites using Walk Score services, adding a major new apartment search function, ranking transit systems across the country, and launching Bike Score.

And there’s lots more to come from this truly special team – particularly as they add more world-class talent in business development, marketing, mobile and web development (job listings.)

Meanwhile, at Front Seat, we’re actively exploring new opportunities for tech to connect people to the places they live, the resources they consume, and the communities they participate in.

A team of volunteers from more than a dozen Washington state civic groups, including Alec Ramsay and I from Front Seat, have been meeting for the last 18 months, developing ideas on how to bring the world of participatory democracy into political debates, with a focus on the 2012 Governor’s race.

The hope is to build a culture of civic engagement in political debates, where citizens are not just passive recipients of talking point messages, but are active participants. Where they listen and learn, but also ask questions – of candidates, the media, and fellow citizens.

We were very happy to learn that Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna accepted our invitation on March 26. Follow up discussions with former U.S. Congressman Jay Inslee’s campaign led to his acceptance of our invitation for an October 6 event at Intiman Theater at Seattle Center.

Walk Score’s stunning growth over the last year — it’s now showing 3 million Walk Scores per day on over 4,000 real estate partner web sites — has taught the team to elevate their sights, and we’re thrilled to have a leader of Josh’s caliber on board to help them achieve their vision.

Read Josh’s bio here.

Thanks,
Mike

Estonia Cleanup – citizen self-organized 1-day cleanup of an entire country

Localocracy beta site launch – engagement in local elections and issues

Federal Ideascale Dashboard- aggregates, compares levels of public idea generation at different federal agencies.

ChatRoulette – randomized video chat connection between people across the world. Mindchanging. Contemplating potential impact on civic engagement. [WARNING: not always work or kid safe - in the same way that many AOL chats 12 years ago weren't all work or kid safe.]

1. Nominations Open for Social Innovation Fellows @poptech
2. Green Homes Flunk Walk Score Test – USA Today and NRDC commentary
3. Free chapters from @oreillymedia‘s “Open Government” book here! http://bit.ly/97Ciev
4. Open Source Digital Voting Foundation – transparent + publicly owned voting system code

Fun Facts from a remarkable year:

• 10 million visitors spent 46 million minutes on Walk Score in the last year.
• Daily traffic is up 291% since last January.
• 1.3 million visits last month.
• 46% of visitors are in the process of deciding where to live.
• 11,000 petition signatures to increase America’s Walk Score.
• 1,6oo signed petitions asking local transit agencies to open their GTFS data feed to sites like Walk Score.
• 3,400 real estate web sites now use Walk Score Real Estate services, up 484% in 1 year.

2009 Product highlights:

• Launched the Walk Score API – now serving 3 million scores/day to our real estate partners
• Shipped our first Walk Score iPhone app with the help of some great volunteers.
• Added public transit locations on Walk Score – our #1 customer request
• Upgraded the Walk Score Tile (Walk Score in a widget) to include Google Street View and transit maps
• Received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation for transit and other improvements
• Compare Your Score – lets you see how you’re doing compared to others in your town
• Walk Score Home Value Study – Joe Cortwright, economist for CEOs for Cities quantifies the financial value of a high Walk Score

Thanks to all of our supporters for your help. We look forward to a more walkable 2010.

Rants

@RatedRHackstar wrote: Nj transit has to have to worse buses, timewise eva, them sits neva stick to schedule they come when they want

@merlynn wrote: the bus in front of me averaged a whopping 40 mph on the freeway. Way to go, Sound Transit.

@BlackMaria wrote: They’re checking fare on transit. Like half the people on the bus got fined and kicked off. Mean!!

@BookGeekGal wrote: Indianapolis: Why does your public transit website SUCK & repeatedly crash my internet? I’m trying to study feasibility of Indy trip. #sigh

@mermaidmask wrote: I f***ing hate public transit!

Tech Driving Accountability

@MicheleNW wrote: Lol bus went past me then stopped. I got on and he says “I know you would’ve emailed NJ transit…” I said “before you hit the corner!”

@coffee_makers wrote: TTC driver suspended following YouTube video of coffee break: A Toronto transit driver has been suspended pending … http://bit.ly/dChgsS

Agencies Opening Up for Feedback

@gctransit wrote: Welcome to the Gwinnett County Transit Facebook page. In our efforts to provide better service to our customers we… http://bit.ly/9KqOl0

@HillsboroughMPO wrote: How could improved mass transit in Tampa Bay affect you? Video contest going on now http://tinyurl.com/y9g4k7g