Results tagged “YouTube” from FastGov: Where Government is Going

State portals have never looked, or acted, like this.  The state of Utah launched a new Utah.gov on Monday afternoon.

After at least eleven months of development, with some elements in the works for as long as two years, Utah.gov has turned hard core on Flash.  The portal developers had long wanted to exploit Flash functionality, an industry standard program for creating interactive features for websites, but didn't want to leave anybody out.  They were surprised, pleasantly so, to learn from statewide surveys that fully 97 percent of their audience used Flash.

Utah.gov backstops the landing page with proxy detection that makes the version of the portal served invisible to users -- Flash for those with the player installed, a simpler version for those who do not, and a mobile version for those coming to the portal on a smart phone. 

Flash graphics grab your attention on first visit, coupled with a carousel of icons (with a distinctive Mac-like look and feel) that add a dynamic feel to navigation.  User feedback and usability studies had told them that real users thought conventional portal wisdom was wrong. 

Search is central to navigation, and is now central to the front page of the portal.  It is what the users said they wanted.  A prominent news section, which lists recent agency press releases, has always been a big deal for agencies but less so for users.  It is still there on the landing page, now organized thematically with horizontal tabs, but has been bumped lower by the prominent search function and a local information window.

"Local meetings and resources" as the section is labeled does a couple of important and useful things. 

First, it uses noninvasive Geo-IP technology to identify the area of Utah from which the user is coming so it can serve up a calendar of events, information and services that would matter to a person from that community.  (Visitors from outside the state default to Salt Lake City although that outsider view was still serving up surprises during final testing last week.)  Mapping the IP address of the visitor to location-relevant information and services finally delivers on the promise that people should not have to take a civics lesson to learn how to get the services they need. 

Second, Geo-IP mapping also screens out the clutter.  Even in a reasonably well ordered state such as Utah, there are still more than 50,000 government forms, 1,163 online services and terabytes of public information with which to deal.  What you don't have to see matters.

The carousel of icons take users to any number of dedicated portals on everything from tourism and traffic to data and sustainability.  The multimedia portal brings together the posts from 27 formerly discreet state blogs, tweets from over a hundred state Twitter feeds and even serves up state-posted YouTube videos in an environment free of Google's persistent cookies. 

The carousel of goodies also includes a link to an initial pair of iPhone apps built by Utah.gov - the first for search (there's that user priority again) and another to look up the status of any licensed professional in the state. 

This newest Utah.gov is the product of, in no small measure, heavy lifting by its portal partners at the NIC subsidiary Utah Interactive.  In an interview days before the re-launch, Operations Manager Sara Watts said that so much was new in terms of form and function of the portal that it took six times the resources of an average development effort.

What was the hardest part in getting to consensus on the new portal? "The icons.  [The fights over them] have been going on for two years," she chuckled, "but that's why we made them easy to swap out."

If defending a landmark $3.6 trillion federal budget proposal and a $787 billion economic stimulus package was not enough, the Obama administration has been dogged by persistent complaints about persistent cookies used by YouTube in embedded videos on administration web sites. 

Persistent Dogging over Persistent Cookies

The big dollar spending initiatives have dominated the news cycles but blogger, self styled cyber activist and academician Chris Soghoian remained on the embedded video watch as the Obama team has successively launched its transition site (change.gov) after the election, the new whitehouse.gov site after the inauguration and the stimulus tracking site (recovery.gov) after the passing of the economic recovery act.

The Original Complaints

As detailed in this blog's post last December, Soghoian's initial call for team Obama to "ditch YouTube" was based on three concerns:

1. The use of persistent cookies by YouTube that would violate a long standing prohibition of the use of long-term cookies on federal websites;
2. Favoratism through the exclusive use of what Soghoian repeatedly reminds us is the Google-owned YouTube; and,
3. Lack of transparency about privacy and user choice.

Soghoian's critique of the transition site softened only slightly with the launch of POTUS 44's White House.  He noted with alarm that White House lawyers had written in an exemption for embedded YouTube videos from the White House privacy policy.  And he gives a grudging nod to a subsequent technical fix that he admits will protect most (but perhaps not all) visitors.

Soghoian implies a correlation between his critiques and the technical fix, which he suggests may be modeled after the the Electronic Frontier Foundation's MyTube privacy tool. 

Making YouTube Safe for Federal Websites

If all of these changes took place incrementally on whitehouse.gov, the more fully formed package of fixes debuted with recovery.gov.

1. Visitors guarded from YouTube Persistent Cookies until they Click









The image of a embedded YouTube (left) and the actual embedded video (below).










 







As Soghoian describes it "YouTube is now only able to use cookies to track users who click on the "play" button on an embedded YouTube video -- the majority of people who scroll through a page without clicking play will not be tracked."








2. Exclusive use of YouTube and the Appearance of Favoritism

Below the screen, users are given the option to download the video directly or access it from an alternate video sharing site (vimeo).

3.  Transparency about Privacy and User Choice

The initial screen (image, not the actual embed) includes a link to the YouTube privacy policy, which users can compare to the administration's privacy policy (linked below the video) before they click on anything.





What Have We Learned?

The administration has taken the same kind of pragmatic approach to the persistent cookie problem as it has with larger policy issues.  It brings with the risk of alienating the most zealous in its base but it also brings the promise of getting things done.

There are two other alternatives.  Soghoian clearly wants a crack down on Google for the privacy-invading cookie-collecting practices of its YouTube service (even with the privacy work arounds in place).  Drawing attention to concerns over the administration's use of these technologies is also the best shot at what Soghoian really wants -- a congressional investigation.

Within the civil service, federal web masters report that they have been in discussions with YouTube for about a year to establish a YouTube just for government to provide a comprehensive, once and for all policy-based solution to concerns over privacy and commercial encroachment.  The problem is, there is no once and for all on the Internet.  The other problem with a YouTube-of-Its-Own approach is that it would be isolated from the real YouTube, that space where 80.7 million people gather voluntarily to watch videos -- a place where the eye balls that public agencies want to reach gather naturally.

Remember the stodgy old presidential radio address?  They were all the rage when President President Franklin D. Roosevelt began his Fireside Chats in spring 1933.  A half century later, it was hard to find a radio station that carried them live but they did make a free and easy source of audio for weekend news editors, and so they limped on.

The Office of the President Elect put a novel twist on the 75 year old tradition by posting the addresses on video sharing sites, including YouTube, AOL, Yahoo, MSN. In five short weeks, these weekly addresses have become popularly known as Obama's YouTube Addresses. 

Viewership varies widely week-to-week but the numbers are not trivial:

• November 15, 2008 -- First weekly address -- 993,086 views
• November 22, 2008 -- Second weekly address -- 525,420 views
• November 29, 2008 -- Third weekly address -- 231,842 views
• December 6, 2008 -- Fourth weekly address -- 454,600 views
• December 13, 2008 -- Fifth weekly address -- 135,783 views
  

     (Numbers were current as of December 16, 2008)

In a country of some 300 million people, the video addresses are well short of a mass medium but they do attract a much more motivated audience than their radio predecessors. The theme of most of the media coverage was that it was a harbinger that the new president would govern the way he campaigned ... all Web 2.0'ish and sticky.

The sticking point for blogger Chris Soghoin was two-fold:

(a) Video Hosting is a "no host give away": the transition team had a mountain of cash ($12 million) but was getting a free ride from YouTube's parent and the company's watermark in the corner of the videos has underdetermined commercial value to Google;
(b) Embedded Videos may violate privacy rules for federal websites: According to Soghoin, just by visiting the Office of the President Elect's change.gov site, "visitors will be transmitting cookies to Google's servers."

Sohoin's solution is captured in the post's headline -- "Obama should ditch YouTube," presumably in favor of government-owned servers, here-to-for overlooked video sharing start-ups such as Veoh, Vuze, Revver, Blip.tv and his personal favorite, BitTorrent.

The no cost dimension of this video sharing deal reminds us again that public procurement rules are either silent on or, at least, unhelpful on the issue of governments buying things that are free.  While an occasional annoyance in the past, the procurement problem around free will not serve us well as government confronts business models that  would have been unimaginable at the beginning of the average contract administrator's career.

The privacy implications here are not trivial but there are ongoing conversations between Google and public agencies as more and more governments establish YouTube channels to aggregate and host their videos.  Both sides in the dialogue have an interest in positioning YouTube as more than a novelty or plaything, but a platform for doing important things.

Clearly, YouTube and most of the rest of Web 2.0 environment remains wide open for experimentation, pilots and even some production-level work, even with a couple of caution flags fluttering in the distance.

For its part, the federal government has been in negotiations with YouTube for eleven months to get special terms for federal agency use of the service because, as one federal director of web communications noted, "The standard terms contain several points that federal agencies cannot agree to...."

Even as governments, acting together or alone, work toward creating a private label video sharing environment that meets policy requirements, there should be some consideration to the one thing that they cannot re-create: the audience.  YouTube aggregates eyeballs.  People who like videos go there, and to AOL, Yahoo, MSN, Veoh, Vuze, Revver, Blip.tv and BitTorrent.  The great lesson is to go where the eyeballs are, engage people in a community of their choosing, and avoid a false start in a field of dreams of government's making.