Hear what Beth Noveck White House Office Science and Technology wants to know about how the government can create useful feedback loops with crowdsourcing. Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, a graduate student at Columbia University who studies the use of new technology in politics, offers his response. At PdF 2009 in New York we asked "If you could ask the PdF audience one question, what would you ask?" We would like to hear your answers to the insightful questions that were asked at our 2009 conference. Please post your comments below.
Interested in hearing more from Beth Noveck? Hear what she said to PdF 2009 in her keynote titled Innovation in Government, Obama-Style: Participation and Collaboration.

As striking as it was that one of the very first acts of Barack Obama's presidency was to call for making the federal government far more transparent, participatory, and collaborative , open government advocates have waited eagerly and, ironically, mostly in the dark for some news on just how this new paradigm would emerge. In some ways, that wait is over.

Beth Simone Noveck has written a seminal piece on "Wiki-Government" for Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, and I recommend you read the whole thing. Noveck is Professor of Law and director of the Institute for Information Law & Policy at New York Law School and the McClatchy Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University, who has been advising the U.S. Patent Office on its new open-source approach to involving the public in helping review patent applications, and that experience informs her vision. She lays out a powerful case for reinventing government with "civic software" (a term I once floated and still love) that "can shift power from professional sources of authoritative knowledge to new kinds of knowledge networks" and create a kind of "collaborative governance." I love it.