hello seddie
it’s an honor to be with you this
evening
Satana Nelda taluk versus wah it might
strike you as odd that at a TED event
here in France one of the speakers is
from the United States I was going to
give my talk on false a but I’m sure
that your English is better plus I know
how much you love it when we come here
and speak to you in English a few months
ago I lost my job in a mass layoff my
colleagues and I worked in the White
House for Barack Obama on the team using
social media and the internet to connect
with people in America and around the
world today I want to share some of the
lessons we learned but how governments
can use social media and the Internet to
have real substantive conversations of
the people that they serve to use
technology to help rebuild trust and
improve the dynamism of our democracy
wait a second you might be asking
yourself what about the most recent
election in the United States or France
or England or Holland makes this guy
think that democracy and the internet
mix well together this is a fair
question in recent experience the
Internet has done more to amplify our
prejudices and make our system
vulnerable to manipulation then it has
to bring us together as EV Williams one
of the founders of Twitter and medium
and blogger noted recently the internet
is broken so the answer can’t be that we
should simply place our trust in social
media and expect that with time things
will get better
platforms have a lot of work to do to
dial down the intensity and the anger
and the
partisanship and the trolling and until
that happens there’s no reason for us to
expect that snapchat will give us a
better president than Twitter did but
any answer to this question must begin
by admitting that for all their
drawbacks online platforms are the most
powerful tools for mass communications
and mass organizing that human beings
have ever built and we’re still in the
early years so we have to give serious
consideration all of us together to how
we can harness technology to create more
productive opportunities for feedback
and pursuit and participation in our
civic life our team at the White House
was called the office of digital
strategy the work of that office evolved
along with the consumer web in 2009
there was a MySpace page and by 2016 we
were posting to Instagram stores and
along the way there were many videos and
tweets and gifts and every other unit of
social media that you can imagine
Digital Strategy was brand new and
everything that we did in the office we
were doing for the first time sort of
like a startup but like other startups
we had a mission statement except ours
was given to us by President Barack
Obama connects people with purpose use
the internet and social media to help
people across America feel like they
were reflected in their government see
themselves reflected in their government
to feel that they were being heard and
to know that they were included in the
process few things that we did in the
office of digital strategy live up to
this mission better than we the people
an online petitions platform and this is
where I want to focus my attention today
the First Amendment to the US
Constitution enshrines the right to
petition alongside the rights of speech
assembly and religion it has roots in
the Magna Carta and yet when I say the
word petition most people think a
clipboard and a pen and it’s being
passed around for your signature let’s
take a broader view I want you to think
of it as the right of
people to take part in their government
the thing is the First Amendment doesn’t
say a lot about how you’re supposed to
exercise this right who do you give a
petition to how do they respond built in
2011 We the People was an effort to
answer some of these questions it wasn’t
perfect and with time it got better by
the time that we left the White House
any petition that received 100,000
signatures in 30 days got a response
within two months and as it turns out
many people like to exercise this right
to petition by asking us to do things we
didn’t always want to talk about like
pardon Edward Snowden or prohibit
mandatory prohibit laws for mandatory
vaccines or support Kurdish independence
there is not a single time when I was at
the White House that I remember a
petition saying you guys are awesome
keep it up but after all that’s the
point petitions are a way for people to
interrupt when they don’t feel like
they’re being heard many times our
answer was no sometimes yes and
sometimes well that’s an interesting
idea but we’re not going to deport
Justin Beiber
but here’s a point that I really want to
hammer home serious petitions received
serious consideration even when the
answer was no we wanted people’s
experience to be validated by the
process and you can see this reflected
when petitions reach the highest levels
of the White House engaged in sit and
they they cause serious debates across
the US government and across experts
across throughout the country you know a
petition was what held helped to hold
Barack Obama to his word on net
neutrality it was a petition that helped
to lead to a law on cellphone unlocking
and it affected many many other White
House initiatives over the years so what
are the lessons that we should take away
from this experience about civic
technology I want to propose three the
first one is when technology doesn’t
work don’t assume user error some of our
most popular petitions asks us to do
things that were a little silly like
build a Death Star or replace the
national anthem with a theme song from
My Little Pony Friendship is Magic
friendship is magic some people some
observers in the media in particular
like to use these examples to suggest
that the petitions platform reflected
some of the fundamental drawbacks of
democracy namely the potential for user
error petitions were just a high-tech
way to troll the White House at best it
was a Avenue for slacktivism but if
there was a flaw in the platform it was
a flaw in the product design in 2015
when we began a site redesign we went
into it with the assumption that success
meant more users more petitions and more
signatures these are after all the
traditional markers of success for
consumer technology fortunately we had
the wisdom to ask for input from the
public and one product designer gave us
a very simple but intuitive
piece of feedback he said you guys are
the government you don’t serve you don’t
sell ads you serve people the question
should be how do we attract more daily
active users the question is how do we
generate better petitions ones that lead
to action and conversation a petition
that receives a million signatures on an
issue that’s all over the news carries
symbolic value but it doesn’t tell us
very much that we don’t already know the
most powerful petitions are the ones
that shed light on an issue that has
been overlooked or that
disproportionately affects disadvantaged
communities a Pew report a Pew
foundation report on We the People found
that 48% of the petitions on the site
were tagged by users as pertaining to
civil rights or human rights if a
hundred thousand people think that their
civil rights are at risk
that’s something the government should
absolutely look into here’s an example
of a petition that I have in mind it
asked the President of the United States
to intervene on something called the
Medicare local coverage determination
for lower limb prosthesis not exactly a
topic for the evening news but for
people in the lower limb community it
could have significant ramifications
thanks to the efforts of people in that
community groups and individuals this
petition route garnered 110,000
signatures
it was catapulted to the attention of
the White House and ultimately it helped
to lead to a decision to stall a putting
the rule into effect and this had
significant implications for people in
the limb loss community lesson two we
have to build an accountability the
biggest mistake with we the people 1.0
is we didn’t give ourselves a deadline
and as a result some of the hardest
petitions piled up not because we didn’t
care but because usually there was a
debate internally about how we should
respond and eventually we made that we
made a change and we made a promise to
respond within 60 days to any petition
that crossed the threshold this was a
critical decision at one point in 2013
the average weight
for a response was 271 days by 2016 and
it dropped to just 34 to get a sense for
how this impacts petitions in real life
I want to point to the example of the
save crypto petition asking President
Obama to take a firm stance in favor of
strong cryptology strong cryptography
without backdoors this is an issue that
was very hotly debated within the
technology and national security
communities and yet people across some
of the most important people across the
United States government were convened
for meetings to get a response in time
to meet the deadline this is a sort of
petition that previously might have
easily been delayed because it was so
hard to address and while the text of
the responses may not have always
correspond to the intensity of the
discussion behind closed doors the fact
is the debate was very heated and the
response was given and this is a good
example of how petitions can lead to
very valuable conversations and
individuals through their petition can
help set the agenda at the highest
levels of the federal government on such
a critical issue as national security on
such a critical issue for national
security and Technology lesson three
make it a conversation in six years the
White House issued 268 responses many
times as I noted before the answer was
no or not yet but that shouldn’t be
where the conversation ends when
somebody signs a petition asking the
White House to require police
departments across the entire country to
our body cameras one of the things that
they’re telling you is that they care
deeply about civil rights criminal
justice and police violence so we didn’t
want to spam people but we did look for
opportunities to extend the conversation
even when we didn’t tell people what
they wanted to hear we wanted their
experience to feel validated by the
process and to wit the average response
the average open rate on a response from
us was 30 to 40 percent on those emails
which anyone with any experience email
marketing will tell you is very high and
this reflected
high levels of engagement across the
entire platform it wasn’t unusual in a
given week for We the People to have
many times the number of visitors as
whitehouse.gov and in six years there
were four hundred and eighty thousand
petitions twenty nine million users and
more than forty million signatures but
like I said before it wasn’t about the
numbers where it counted creating
opportunities for people to engage
productively with their government to
provide feedback we were just beginning
to scratch the surface one of the
consequences of the current chaos in
American politics is that we’re a
deprived of the opportunity to have a
discussion about what happens next at
the White House about civic technology
the irony of this president is that for
someone who inspires so much
participation he is totally unresponsive
to it to give but one example a petition
asking him to release his taxes drew
over 1 million signatures and yet the
White House has made it abundantly clear
that no response is forthcoming and this
is a shame it runs counter door one of
the great traditions in American
politics the idea that we are in an
ongoing conversation with our leaders
this theme was picked up by some of our
most revered presidents from Thomas
Jefferson Abraham Lincoln Teddy
Roosevelt to Barack Obama even extends
to the French I’m gonna pander excuse me
but since we’re in France talking about
American democracy it’s my
responsibility to invoke idak ceased it
took view when he was just 25 and 1831
he voyage to America to see our
representative democracy up close and
one of the things that surprised him is
how easily he walked into the White
House again he was 25 ostensibly writing
a book about the American penal system
and he was granted an opportunity of 30
minutes to speak with President Andrew
Jackson meanwhile in France they were
contemplating a return to the monarchy
this anecdote is emblematic of the idea
that in America the president answers to
the people not just in the ballot box
but at town halls by mail and over the
phone
Americans delight in the thought that we
have the ear of our leaders this thought
is codified in the First Amendment in
the powers to assemble to petition and
to speak your mind as millions of
Americans have reaffirmed over the past
several months the right to go into the
streets to petition to call your
representatives to attend town halls
this is an essential part of a healthy
functioning democracy and yet it still
leaves something to be desired people go
into the streets when they’re angry and
if any of you have experience with
customer service you know that when
people are angry is not the best time to
solicit their constructive feedback
technology offers an interesting
solution in principle technology makes
it possible for this feedback to be
contributed more sustainably and
consistently it can also empower people
who are socially geographically or
culturally remote from power to provide
it and our task now is to figure out how
to build it why now because
representative Dalek representative
democracy is under stress the system
which was able to absorb massive shocks
in the 18th 19th and 20th centuries asks
us to repose trust in representatives
who are more knowledgeable and
experienced to solve big problems a task
at scale this doesn’t work if we lose
faith that this arrangement will reward
us with greater opportunity and Liberty
and yet as research research shows that
this is precisely what’s taking place
among young people not just in the
United States but in liberal democracies
across the world
likewise frustrated citizens in
industrial towns from Pennsylvania to
the Paducah day
feel left out and they’re signaling an
openness to something else
Jasha monk a political scientist at
Harvard believes that the warning signs
of democracy are flash and red there are
some efforts now to address this
including in the technology community
where there’s a tendency to imagine
radical solutions that would supplant
our current system to make our
representative democracy a little bit
more direct we should be very skeptical
brain power should be devoted to
strengthening our current system not
displacing it not just when it comes to
basic services and transparency but
communication and engagement I don’t
suggest that apps or petitions will be
the things that solve our democratic
issues but certainly we can learn from
our experiences to make our system
stronger the three lessons that I want
to reinforce our focus on product design
building accountability and make it a
conversation a United Nations report on
a participation a ranking of countries
across the world and how they fare in
these various various dimensions has the
United States and France tied for 12th
place none other than the United Kingdom
a country with a monarch is in first
by contrast oh and in the UK if you get
a hundred thousand signatures in their
petition system Parliament will debate
your proposal live by contrast France
has no petitions platform of its own but
you’ve just selected the youngest
president in the history of the Republic
someone with a very ambitious technology
platform what better time for you
citizens of France to ask for a bigger
seat at the table so to end my
presentation on a note of civic
participation
I want to encourage you to visit neuter
pep point x equals E and a zebu PBX
today via hi detective with senior and I
encourage you to add your name to
petition asking your new leadership to
build a platform for you Nancy
[Applause]
it’s an honor to be with you this
evening
Satana Nelda taluk versus wah it might
strike you as odd that at a TED event
here in France one of the speakers is
from the United States I was going to
give my talk on false a but I’m sure
that your English is better plus I know
how much you love it when we come here
and speak to you in English a few months
ago I lost my job in a mass layoff my
colleagues and I worked in the White
House for Barack Obama on the team using
social media and the internet to connect
with people in America and around the
world today I want to share some of the
lessons we learned but how governments
can use social media and the Internet to
have real substantive conversations of
the people that they serve to use
technology to help rebuild trust and
improve the dynamism of our democracy
wait a second you might be asking
yourself what about the most recent
election in the United States or France
or England or Holland makes this guy
think that democracy and the internet
mix well together this is a fair
question in recent experience the
Internet has done more to amplify our
prejudices and make our system
vulnerable to manipulation then it has
to bring us together as EV Williams one
of the founders of Twitter and medium
and blogger noted recently the internet
is broken so the answer can’t be that we
should simply place our trust in social
media and expect that with time things
will get better
platforms have a lot of work to do to
dial down the intensity and the anger
and the
partisanship and the trolling and until
that happens there’s no reason for us to
expect that snapchat will give us a
better president than Twitter did but
any answer to this question must begin
by admitting that for all their
drawbacks online platforms are the most
powerful tools for mass communications
and mass organizing that human beings
have ever built and we’re still in the
early years so we have to give serious
consideration all of us together to how
we can harness technology to create more
productive opportunities for feedback
and pursuit and participation in our
civic life our team at the White House
was called the office of digital
strategy the work of that office evolved
along with the consumer web in 2009
there was a MySpace page and by 2016 we
were posting to Instagram stores and
along the way there were many videos and
tweets and gifts and every other unit of
social media that you can imagine
Digital Strategy was brand new and
everything that we did in the office we
were doing for the first time sort of
like a startup but like other startups
we had a mission statement except ours
was given to us by President Barack
Obama connects people with purpose use
the internet and social media to help
people across America feel like they
were reflected in their government see
themselves reflected in their government
to feel that they were being heard and
to know that they were included in the
process few things that we did in the
office of digital strategy live up to
this mission better than we the people
an online petitions platform and this is
where I want to focus my attention today
the First Amendment to the US
Constitution enshrines the right to
petition alongside the rights of speech
assembly and religion it has roots in
the Magna Carta and yet when I say the
word petition most people think a
clipboard and a pen and it’s being
passed around for your signature let’s
take a broader view I want you to think
of it as the right of
people to take part in their government
the thing is the First Amendment doesn’t
say a lot about how you’re supposed to
exercise this right who do you give a
petition to how do they respond built in
2011 We the People was an effort to
answer some of these questions it wasn’t
perfect and with time it got better by
the time that we left the White House
any petition that received 100,000
signatures in 30 days got a response
within two months and as it turns out
many people like to exercise this right
to petition by asking us to do things we
didn’t always want to talk about like
pardon Edward Snowden or prohibit
mandatory prohibit laws for mandatory
vaccines or support Kurdish independence
there is not a single time when I was at
the White House that I remember a
petition saying you guys are awesome
keep it up but after all that’s the
point petitions are a way for people to
interrupt when they don’t feel like
they’re being heard many times our
answer was no sometimes yes and
sometimes well that’s an interesting
idea but we’re not going to deport
Justin Beiber
but here’s a point that I really want to
hammer home serious petitions received
serious consideration even when the
answer was no we wanted people’s
experience to be validated by the
process and you can see this reflected
when petitions reach the highest levels
of the White House engaged in sit and
they they cause serious debates across
the US government and across experts
across throughout the country you know a
petition was what held helped to hold
Barack Obama to his word on net
neutrality it was a petition that helped
to lead to a law on cellphone unlocking
and it affected many many other White
House initiatives over the years so what
are the lessons that we should take away
from this experience about civic
technology I want to propose three the
first one is when technology doesn’t
work don’t assume user error some of our
most popular petitions asks us to do
things that were a little silly like
build a Death Star or replace the
national anthem with a theme song from
My Little Pony Friendship is Magic
friendship is magic some people some
observers in the media in particular
like to use these examples to suggest
that the petitions platform reflected
some of the fundamental drawbacks of
democracy namely the potential for user
error petitions were just a high-tech
way to troll the White House at best it
was a Avenue for slacktivism but if
there was a flaw in the platform it was
a flaw in the product design in 2015
when we began a site redesign we went
into it with the assumption that success
meant more users more petitions and more
signatures these are after all the
traditional markers of success for
consumer technology fortunately we had
the wisdom to ask for input from the
public and one product designer gave us
a very simple but intuitive
piece of feedback he said you guys are
the government you don’t serve you don’t
sell ads you serve people the question
should be how do we attract more daily
active users the question is how do we
generate better petitions ones that lead
to action and conversation a petition
that receives a million signatures on an
issue that’s all over the news carries
symbolic value but it doesn’t tell us
very much that we don’t already know the
most powerful petitions are the ones
that shed light on an issue that has
been overlooked or that
disproportionately affects disadvantaged
communities a Pew report a Pew
foundation report on We the People found
that 48% of the petitions on the site
were tagged by users as pertaining to
civil rights or human rights if a
hundred thousand people think that their
civil rights are at risk
that’s something the government should
absolutely look into here’s an example
of a petition that I have in mind it
asked the President of the United States
to intervene on something called the
Medicare local coverage determination
for lower limb prosthesis not exactly a
topic for the evening news but for
people in the lower limb community it
could have significant ramifications
thanks to the efforts of people in that
community groups and individuals this
petition route garnered 110,000
signatures
it was catapulted to the attention of
the White House and ultimately it helped
to lead to a decision to stall a putting
the rule into effect and this had
significant implications for people in
the limb loss community lesson two we
have to build an accountability the
biggest mistake with we the people 1.0
is we didn’t give ourselves a deadline
and as a result some of the hardest
petitions piled up not because we didn’t
care but because usually there was a
debate internally about how we should
respond and eventually we made that we
made a change and we made a promise to
respond within 60 days to any petition
that crossed the threshold this was a
critical decision at one point in 2013
the average weight
for a response was 271 days by 2016 and
it dropped to just 34 to get a sense for
how this impacts petitions in real life
I want to point to the example of the
save crypto petition asking President
Obama to take a firm stance in favor of
strong cryptology strong cryptography
without backdoors this is an issue that
was very hotly debated within the
technology and national security
communities and yet people across some
of the most important people across the
United States government were convened
for meetings to get a response in time
to meet the deadline this is a sort of
petition that previously might have
easily been delayed because it was so
hard to address and while the text of
the responses may not have always
correspond to the intensity of the
discussion behind closed doors the fact
is the debate was very heated and the
response was given and this is a good
example of how petitions can lead to
very valuable conversations and
individuals through their petition can
help set the agenda at the highest
levels of the federal government on such
a critical issue as national security on
such a critical issue for national
security and Technology lesson three
make it a conversation in six years the
White House issued 268 responses many
times as I noted before the answer was
no or not yet but that shouldn’t be
where the conversation ends when
somebody signs a petition asking the
White House to require police
departments across the entire country to
our body cameras one of the things that
they’re telling you is that they care
deeply about civil rights criminal
justice and police violence so we didn’t
want to spam people but we did look for
opportunities to extend the conversation
even when we didn’t tell people what
they wanted to hear we wanted their
experience to feel validated by the
process and to wit the average response
the average open rate on a response from
us was 30 to 40 percent on those emails
which anyone with any experience email
marketing will tell you is very high and
this reflected
high levels of engagement across the
entire platform it wasn’t unusual in a
given week for We the People to have
many times the number of visitors as
whitehouse.gov and in six years there
were four hundred and eighty thousand
petitions twenty nine million users and
more than forty million signatures but
like I said before it wasn’t about the
numbers where it counted creating
opportunities for people to engage
productively with their government to
provide feedback we were just beginning
to scratch the surface one of the
consequences of the current chaos in
American politics is that we’re a
deprived of the opportunity to have a
discussion about what happens next at
the White House about civic technology
the irony of this president is that for
someone who inspires so much
participation he is totally unresponsive
to it to give but one example a petition
asking him to release his taxes drew
over 1 million signatures and yet the
White House has made it abundantly clear
that no response is forthcoming and this
is a shame it runs counter door one of
the great traditions in American
politics the idea that we are in an
ongoing conversation with our leaders
this theme was picked up by some of our
most revered presidents from Thomas
Jefferson Abraham Lincoln Teddy
Roosevelt to Barack Obama even extends
to the French I’m gonna pander excuse me
but since we’re in France talking about
American democracy it’s my
responsibility to invoke idak ceased it
took view when he was just 25 and 1831
he voyage to America to see our
representative democracy up close and
one of the things that surprised him is
how easily he walked into the White
House again he was 25 ostensibly writing
a book about the American penal system
and he was granted an opportunity of 30
minutes to speak with President Andrew
Jackson meanwhile in France they were
contemplating a return to the monarchy
this anecdote is emblematic of the idea
that in America the president answers to
the people not just in the ballot box
but at town halls by mail and over the
phone
Americans delight in the thought that we
have the ear of our leaders this thought
is codified in the First Amendment in
the powers to assemble to petition and
to speak your mind as millions of
Americans have reaffirmed over the past
several months the right to go into the
streets to petition to call your
representatives to attend town halls
this is an essential part of a healthy
functioning democracy and yet it still
leaves something to be desired people go
into the streets when they’re angry and
if any of you have experience with
customer service you know that when
people are angry is not the best time to
solicit their constructive feedback
technology offers an interesting
solution in principle technology makes
it possible for this feedback to be
contributed more sustainably and
consistently it can also empower people
who are socially geographically or
culturally remote from power to provide
it and our task now is to figure out how
to build it why now because
representative Dalek representative
democracy is under stress the system
which was able to absorb massive shocks
in the 18th 19th and 20th centuries asks
us to repose trust in representatives
who are more knowledgeable and
experienced to solve big problems a task
at scale this doesn’t work if we lose
faith that this arrangement will reward
us with greater opportunity and Liberty
and yet as research research shows that
this is precisely what’s taking place
among young people not just in the
United States but in liberal democracies
across the world
likewise frustrated citizens in
industrial towns from Pennsylvania to
the Paducah day
feel left out and they’re signaling an
openness to something else
Jasha monk a political scientist at
Harvard believes that the warning signs
of democracy are flash and red there are
some efforts now to address this
including in the technology community
where there’s a tendency to imagine
radical solutions that would supplant
our current system to make our
representative democracy a little bit
more direct we should be very skeptical
brain power should be devoted to
strengthening our current system not
displacing it not just when it comes to
basic services and transparency but
communication and engagement I don’t
suggest that apps or petitions will be
the things that solve our democratic
issues but certainly we can learn from
our experiences to make our system
stronger the three lessons that I want
to reinforce our focus on product design
building accountability and make it a
conversation a United Nations report on
a participation a ranking of countries
across the world and how they fare in
these various various dimensions has the
United States and France tied for 12th
place none other than the United Kingdom
a country with a monarch is in first
by contrast oh and in the UK if you get
a hundred thousand signatures in their
petition system Parliament will debate
your proposal live by contrast France
has no petitions platform of its own but
you’ve just selected the youngest
president in the history of the Republic
someone with a very ambitious technology
platform what better time for you
citizens of France to ask for a bigger
seat at the table so to end my
presentation on a note of civic
participation
I want to encourage you to visit neuter
pep point x equals E and a zebu PBX
today via hi detective with senior and I
encourage you to add your name to
petition asking your new leadership to
build a platform for you Nancy
[Applause]
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