Anil Dash had a simple message for those gathered at a Washington DC bakery to hear him give a brief talk Wednesday night: forget all your stereotypes about Washington's aversion to innovation.

The Director of Expert Labs, a nonprofit that advises the government on social media and crowdsourcing, spoke glowingly of the technology's potential to not only help government reach citizens more efficiently, but obtain feedback from them more effectively.  Whole agencies, he said, are in the process of changing as Washington increasingly takes a shine to adaptability inherent in start-up culture.

A Dash to Open Government

That Dash – a man with serious information-superhighway-credibility – would heap such praise upon Washington's attitude towards technology has shown the leaps and bounds the Federal Government  has made since the Web 1.0 days, when Al Gore thought he could get away with claiming to have invented the Internet.  

One of the first bloggers, Dash said that he envisions new information systems to revolutionize the way we think about government just as blogging pioneers begun to change the way we think about the media ten years ago.  “A small group of like-minded people can change the world,” he said.  

The White House's Open Government initiative is a good start, but lasting change, he believes, will occur on a grassroots level, at events like hackathons hosted in living rooms and coffee shops in DC and other places where people are enthusiastic about their politics.  

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Existing social networks and tech firms can offer a platform for change, he added, but this participatory spirit must be seized by programmers in order to make government more accessible for the non digerati. (Would it be truly be Open Government if a handful of contractors were in charge of making data available to the public?) It may be difficult to attract some of the top talent – it's  hard to say no to a Google salary and ping pong tables. But already there are programmers poised to take whatever data governments publish and turn them into useful apps in their spare time. Applications can be submitted to the government for official use on www.apps.gov. 
 
And while Dash may have said that "the Googles and the Facebooks of the world don't care about improved policy," --- his point being that their bottom line is of their utmost concern --- Google, at least, is getting in on the action. The California-based software giant is looking to submit their own apps to the government, who in turn will compensate the company.

Size Matters

Whoever and whatever is helping drive the movement, it is a sign of progress that it is growing. The more feedback the government gets on policy issues – not unlike the way users rate YouTube videos – the truer the government can be to the will of the people.  

Moreover, expanding the circle of who a decision maker -- in this case, the government -- asks for input can give added insight to problems. 

For example, Dash once crowdsourced the question “What cell phone should I buy?” to his Twitter followers. While most told him to get an iPhone or a Google Phone (“because my friends are nerds”), one sent him data on the radiation output of various cell phone models.  It wasn't what he asked, yet the information helped him arrive at a decision that he may have not made without it.

Encouraging participation, after all, will make social media more effective which, in turn, can revolutionize Washington. “The most potential and the most exciting uses for social media,” Dash claimed, “will change how we interact with the government.”

The event was part of the Sweets and Tweets series hosted by Debbie Weil.