Page:E-government 2.0 - Improving Innovation, Collaboration, and Access.pdf/19

 As you can see, just as the dot-com crash forced private industry to think about more efficient and effective ways to use digital technology, the attacks on the United States forced our intelligence community to explore innovate ways to share intelligence among agencies.

This brings us back to what might be called the lesson of Wikipedia, that an open flat forum allowing many stakeholders to participate can facilitate information sharing in an extremely costefficient manner and it can take advantage of a wider range of knowledgeable people than traditional information sharing processes do.

Good democratic governments strive to be responsive to citizen’s needs. In order to do so, it is important that governments use technology wisely to communicate with the public and also to allow the public to communicate with the government.

It is my belief that the government of the United States should be using wiki technology for both internal and public facing projects. As with any large enterprise, internal communications problems are the cause of many inefficiencies and failures. Just as top corporations are finding wiki usage exploding because the tool brings about new efficiencies, government agencies should be exploring these tools, as well.

The U.S. Government has always been premised on responsiveness to citizens, and I think we all believe good government comes from broad, open public dialogue. I therefore also recommend that U.S. agencies consider the use of wikis for public facing projects to gather information from citizens and to seek new ways of effectively collaborating with the public to generate solutions to the problem that citizens face.

Thank you for inviting me to testify about the potential for the Wikipedia model to improve our government’s ability to share and gather information for increased security, for increased governmental responsiveness in our open society, and for the preservation of democratic values. Thank you.

Chairman. Thanks, Mr. Wales. That was great, and necessity mothered a great invention.

I love the story of the founding of Wikipedia. And if I may say so, and I appreciate your saying that in some ways, it is classically American. And this is a part of American history, part of the American experience that goes right back to the beginning. It always struck me as instructive, that among the founding generation of Americans were some remarkable inventors, beginning with Franklin and Jefferson. And obviously this continued, in many ways, throughout our history with the extension of the American frontier and all of the advances that have occurred since.

But you have really done that, along with your colleagues, in this age. And so I thank you for it.

And I thank you for the suggestions that you have made about how this collaborative technology can help us, in government, do our job better. I want to come back to that in a few minutes. But let me start with this question that we were focused on in the reauthorization, which is the problem of access through search engines.

Mr. Needham, you testified that in whole or part, there are 2,000 Federal Government websites that are not included in search en-