Wayne Moses Burke is a Gov. 2.0 acolyte and newly minted author of an account of his attempts to launch a Twitter-based tool for bettering communications between congressmen and constituents. He's also executive director of the Open Forum Foundation where he works toward that same goal.

Burke's account, "GovLuv" (named after the Twitter tool) can be found in "The Big Book of Social Media: Case Studies, Stories, Perspectives," edited by Robert Fine.

It can also be found on FierceGovernmentIT, where we're excerpting Burke's entire account online.

We recently caught up with Burke to hear more about Gov. 2.0, Open Government and how the federal government and Congress might make better use of social media.  

FGIT: How would you characterize the state of Gov 2.0 today?

Burke: First of all, I want to make a qualification between Gov 2.0 and Open Government.

Gov 2.0 is really about use of technology within government, whereas Open Government is a broader term that includes Gov 2.0 and focuses on participation, collaboration and transparency.

I make this distinction because the state of Gov 2.0, within the broader context of Open Government--which I think is the context we really need to be discussing--is at a stage where it's no longer just about the technology. It's no longer about just Gov 2.0, you could say. There's sort of a maturity that has occurred, where the discussion has turned from how do you use Twitter, how do you Facebook, how do you use these specific tools, to more "We kind of understand the tools, but where are we going with this?"

There's been a discussion that we're maybe 30 percent of the way into-- the very early portions of it started maybe six months ago. The discussion is: "Why are we doing all of this?" That's really neat to be in the middle of, and to be experiencing this maturation of the entire movement.

What we're seeing now is more of a connection between how these technologies are used and bringing that down to the level of how does that improve the mission and make you more effective and efficient.

FGIT: Any examples of that?

Burke: Here's a simple example. A year and a half ago, or even a year ago, a lot of what was going on the Hill, in terms of social media, was driven either by strong individuals within individual offices--maybe there was a communications director or even director of new media. So it was individual offices that were doing innovative things and playing with all the new technology and doing some really interesting stuff. The other thing that was going on was social media experts were coming in and giving speeches to offices to help them understand and to broaden their understanding of the tools.

Today, a lot of what is going on is actually internal--there is an understanding of what is effective for offices, what are effective ways to use social media--but a lot of that training is going on within the parties. For example, the House Democratic Caucus is training Democratic members on the House side on how to use social media. And they're doing their internal events. Same with the House Republican Conference, and the same with the two appropriate caucus and conference on the Senate side, as well.

At first, it was just individuals out there trying things, but they've gone to the next step where they've internalized how to apply these things and now they're trying to distribute the information.

FGIT: Are they using social media to both communicate internally and externally?

Burke: I haven't seen any examples where social media is used for improved internal collaboration on the Hill and I think they're fairly rare on the agency side also. It's more that there are collaborative events to talk about social media, but in terms of actually using these Web 2.0 or Gov 2.0 tools to improve collaboration either between offices on the Hill or between agencies, I haven't really seen any good examples of that. I'm not going to pretend that my knowledge is definitive, but most of the use is external facing.

I would say the big struggle now, in that regard, is understanding the power of these tools for collaboration. With a multi-directional conversation, you can have a lot of things going on at once and bubble-up the good ideas--I know it's a bit of a catch phrase, but nonetheless you can find the good ideas and because everyone is involved in the discussion, you can sort those out.

FGIT: Is that truly happening--that outside people, with no real insider knowledge can really come up with ideas that are doable? Outsiders are truly able to come up with ideas and what's more, people are actually using those ideas?

Burke: If it's occurring, it's very rare. That's the ideal, that's what the tool can enable, but so much of the culture is still only about broadcast. It's "How do we use Twitter to get our message out there?" When, of course, the real value of Twitter is to ask questions and have a conversation--illicit interest, grow understanding of your perspective.

For a Representative's office that really wants to engage with their constituents, Twitter and Facebook and YouTube enable that in a way that wasn't possible before. But so many offices are still stuck in this mindset of "Oh, here's another channel that we can directly reach the people we want to reach." So much of it is broadcast.

One office, in their application for interns, requested that applicants submit a YouTube video to show their understanding and comfort with the medium. It's interesting, because instead of a static application that the office had to go through, they just watch YouTube videos.

That same congressman, [Tim Ryan (D-Ohio)] would carry a Flip camera around with him and he'd go up to his legislative assistants and ask "What are you working on today?" And he'd film a three minute video about what they were working on and put it up on YouTube. The comments that come back from that YouTube video are directly relevant to what they're working on at that time, as well as reaching out and engaging in a more meaningful way with the constituents.

FGIT: It's still broadcast, though...

Burke: Yes. But, when they put that video out, that's not the end of the conversation, that's the beginning of the conversation. Through the YouTube comments or through reply videos, you can begin to have a back and forth.

FGIT: At this point, do we come to the problem that social media users are a self-selecting group that may not necessarily be representative of the full extent of constituent thinking?

Burke: That's absolutely true. My perspective since I've gotten into this is that there is a digital divide issue and there is class segregation not just among social media users and non-users, but even amongst different networks. MySpace attracts a different crowd than Twitter does, than Facebook does. Even though there are those divides, we're in such a tumultuous discovery phase of social media and Internet usage--this is one of the difficult things of being in this phase: You can't solve all the problems. And while that is a big problem, I had to accept that there are really good people working on that problem, and I'm going to focus on how to make use of these technologies, which are going to continue to grow. At some point over the next 10 to 20 years, they are going to be effectively ubiquitous.

FGIT: Here's a perfect moment to bring up GovLuv.

Burke: In the chapter I tell this story in more detail, so I'll be a little brief, because of course, your readers can click over and read that.

We set out to build a global communications platform using social media that everyone would love. It was right at the time that Twitter was becoming incredibly popular here in D.C., and we decided that the first step should be to build our platform on top of Twitter, make Twitter more usable, both for congressional offices as well as for citizens.

Our goal going in was really to bring out the two-way conversations that were already happening. GovLuv is effectively a Twitter aggregation tool that is based around congressional offices. It's actually not just congressional offices, there are over 40,000 offices, federal and local all across the U.S., and we tried to match Twitter accounts to all those offices, which is a difficult project in and of itself.

But nonetheless, we have them all in there. It shows all the different Twitter accounts that are related to that elected official, so they have a campaign account which is different from their official account. They may have a staffer account. Some of them also have a personal account--and for those that only have one account, it was sometimes a challenge to figure out which type it was? At the local and state level, it's not as important to make that distinction, but on the Hill, Franking or Senate rules apply. If your Twitter account is mentioned on your website, then all the communication rules that apply to communications with constituents also apply to your Twitter account--there's a lot of complexity and it's very important for them to distinguish which of these it is.

People, generally speaking, when they visit the site, think it's so awesome--and then they don't really come back. Which we kind of struggled with, "why is this?" Everyone we talk to, everyone we show it to is so excited about it, "It's just a great idea, you have all this functionality I haven't seen anywhere else, blah, blah, blah."

Our conclusion was that citizens aren't--well actually, both sides aren't but we expected citizens to be more ready than representatives--neither side is really ready for meaningful two-way dialog. The fact that this begins to enable that, nobody really cares. It's cool, it's fun to look at once or twice, but it's not a tool that they actually go back to and use as their main form of communication to the elected officials.

I like to refer to this as we're in the cathartic phase of citizen engagement, where, "I don't want to talk to that person I elected, I just want to tell them what they're doing wrong. Now that I have a channel I can do that through, I'm happy to just yell at them whenever it comes to mind."

I, being an eternal optimist, hope that in maybe another two or three years, we'll work through the excitement of the "I can tell them what I think at any point" phase, to a phase where "I'm going to give them meaningful feedback and constructive criticism, with the knowledge that they're actually listening and are able to respond in a meaningful way."

That's what I'm working toward and GovLuv gelled that in my head.

FGIT: Let me ask my devil's advocate question.

Burke: (laughs) Okay.

FGIT: Every decade or so there seems to be a technology that says it's going to revolutionize communications between elected officials and constituents. For example, C-SPAN was supposed to have done the same thing. You say you're an optimist, but what justifies that?

Burke: I have two answers. I read a book called "Millennial Makeover" that I recommend to anyone who is interested in citizen engagement or politics or the millennial generation. An extremely brief overview: It talks about the cycle of the American political system, and how it's tied to four different generations. There's also a cycle in the generations that they reference, and there's all sorts of data. It's very convincing, suffice it to say.

They talk about how every 40 years there's a shift in how American politics works, and that shift is accompanied by a technological advancement. The current one is the Internet with the millennial generation. There's a lot of optimism that I gained from looking at those cycles and seeing how those changes have happened in the past, and how we're at the early stage of a significant change.

The other one, in terms of being eternally optimistic, is more about me. And, I think you're right, there's a technological advancement you can point to about every 10 years and if we go back just a couple, the fax machine was really exciting, and then the Internet and websites and everyone having immediate access to information. Why social media is different is because I think it emulates how we relate to one another in person, but it makes it possible for those relationships to be geographically much more dispersed. And it enables a broader diversity of weak ties, where you can share information with a greater number of people, and everyone in the network can basically publish to everyone else. That doesn't mean that everyone else is going to read it, but if you have a topic that you're specifically interested in, you can find the other people who are also interested in that topic.

You hear a lot that it's a sea change, it's fundamentally different, it's all these sorts of things. But I actually see it from a perspective of "it's fundamentally different from a broadcast model," and the broadcast model is what you and I grew up in. In living memory, it's all broadcast model. But if we go back 200 years to when that broadcast technology didn't actually exist, the way people interacted was more on this one-to-one level that I see social media emulating. I'm not going to pretend that social media is exactly like that, but it's more like that. It's more like the way humans evolved. That's what gives me optimism moving forward and I believe it's the technology that's going to bring us closer to the democracy that we all think we grew up in, as opposed to the one, let's face it, the one we're actually in.

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