Re: Hello and Welcome to the Civic Technology Community Group

Mike,



Thanks for joining and for sharing those hyperlinks. To your questions, for some backstory, the W3C very recently closed the Open Government Community Group and the Electronic Governance Community Group due to inactivity. As these former groups are now closed, they don’t show up on that list of open groups.

When I learned that those groups which I had participated in were going to be closed, it occurred to me that a new endeavor should start. As this new group progresses, we can have elections and can draft a charter document. A formal charter document should provide further technical clarity to some of the important questions that you have asked. For now, I can refer to combinations of artificial intelligence, open government, and civic technology as relevant topics for our group discussions. Beyond sharing interesting finds from the Web to warm up the group, I look forward to participating in group discussions.

In these regards, I’m looking at the Mississippi website (https://www.ms.gov<https://www.ms.gov/>) and its chatbot MISSI while considering technologies like ChatGPT and Bard. Conversational user interfaces and user experiences, e.g., conversational search, can amplify the benefits of bulk open government data, including financial, accounting, and budgetary such data.

Today, we can but imagine what it would be like for people to be able to interact with dialogue systems and chatbots to more efficiently explore bulk open government data through written and spoken multimodal dialogue. As a result of much hard work, including some here, I believe that this vision can be realized.

Some questions come to mind. Should each neighborhood, city, county, state, and federal government provide a chatbot resource on its website? Instead, or in addition, should there be one per nation, providing people with access to larger, unified datasets (e.g., usa.gov)? Instead, or in addition to awaiting public-sector chatbots, should one or more major search engines offer, as a community service, multimodal chatbots for accessing and interacting with these public-sector data? What are your thoughts on these topics?

I am also eager to learn more about other ideas and opportunities that you or any other group members might also have in mind for this group. Thank you.





Best regards,

Adam

P.S.:

Can ChatGPT work with your enterprise data? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tW2EA4aZ_YQ


ChatGPT Plugins https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt-plugins


________________________________
From: Mike Gifford <mike.gifford@civicactions.com>
Sent: Sunday, April 23, 2023 9:26 PM
To: Adam Sobieski <adamsobieski@hotmail.com>
Cc: public-civics@w3.org <public-civics@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Hello and Welcome to the Civic Technology Community Group

Thanks for setting up this community group Adam.

There are a lot of concepts brought up here that really range in scope.

It is important to define early in the life of a new group why it exists, but also what it is not. I haven't heard of this particular mix of topics proposed before, but I'm also not sure how they are going to be threaded together.

On what it is not, there are a bunch of existing community groups:
  https://www.w3.org/community/groups/


How is the CivicTech Community Group different than:
  https://www.w3.org/community/humancentricai/

  https://www.w3.org/community/aikr/
  https://www.w3.org/community/webagents/

  https://www.w3.org/community/cogai/

  https://www.w3.org/community/ml-schema/

  https://www.w3.org/community/webmachinelearning/


This came up as a problem when I joined:
  https://www.w3.org/community/sustyweb/


and then started to realize that there was likely overlap with:
  https://www.w3.org/community/sustainability/


On that note, it is worth remembering the huge environmental footprint that AI and big data has on the environment. Training new language models consumes a lot of energy and processing power.

 I didn't see anything on the W3C on Open Government, but did see:
  https://www.w3.org/community/smartcity-nordic/


Although, with open government and AI, it would be important to keep in mind the work of the OGP:
  https://www.opengovpartnership.org/documents/algorithmic-accountability-public-sector/


The W3C is also an interesting organization. I am learning more and more about how it works. For years I've avoided the sausage factory, but I can't do it any longer. Anyways, this fits within the limits of the W3C's Community Group structure:
  https://www.w3.org/groups/


There are some fascinating options that can might result in combining a tool like https://Pol.is with ML. Although, I don't know where I see it coming.

Aside from posting links and sharing ideas, what would we like to see happen?

I think there is a tonne of potential here for both good and bad. I do think that we have to consider the risks both of the process:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoVJKj8lcNQ


But also who these tools are excluding:
  https://wecount.inclusivedesign.ca/


New technology usually benefits those with the greatest ability to exploit it. What role does government have to ensure that everyone benefits from this new power? Also the awareness and maturity in the use of AI/ML by government and society at large is minimal. How do we raise the level of discourse so that citizens of the world can have an impact to weigh in on how this new super-power is implemented?

Anyways, looking forward to learning and exchanging from folks here.

Mike

On Sun, Apr 23, 2023 at 6:14 AM Adam Sobieski <adamsobieski@hotmail.com<mailto:adamsobieski@hotmail.com>> wrote:

Civic Technology Community Group,



Hello. New members, please also see the previous welcome email, below.

I am very excited about artificial intelligence, open government, and civic technology and I look forward to our future discussions and collaborations on these topics as we contribute to advancing the state of the art.

As recent developments in AI may be somewhat novel to some members, e.g., GPT-4 and Bard, we can be as both teachers and students to one another by sharing Web resources. Please do feel free to share any relevant Web resources – be they introductory, intermediate, or advanced – that you might find with the group (public-civics@w3.org<mailto:public-civics@w3.org>).



Best regards,

Adam Sobieski

P.S.: I found the following Web resource, a one-minute video, to be interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-waFp6rLc0 .

________________________________
From: Adam Sobieski
Sent: Sunday, April 16, 2023 12:49 PM
To: public-civics@w3.org<mailto:public-civics@w3.org> <public-civics@w3.org<mailto:public-civics@w3.org>>
Subject: Hello and Welcome to the Civic Technology Community Group


Civic Technology Community Group,



Hello and welcome to the Civic Technology Community Group! This new group will be a forum for advancing the state of the art and for discussing technical topics which include, but are not limited to:


  1.  how existing and new standards can benefit civic technology, open government, and artificial intelligence,
  2.  technical requirements from the domains of civic technology, open government, and artificial intelligence,

  3.  advanced software interoperability scenarios involving Web browsers,
  4.
ways that AI systems and chatbots in webpages, in Web browsers (browser sidebar chatbots), in other desktop and Web-based applications, and in operating systems can interoperate with one another,

  5.  clipboarding and dragging-and-dropping of chatbot-provided content,
  6.  sharing chatbot-provided content on social media,

  7.  ways that artificial intelligence technologies can continue to enhance public-sector websites and services,
  8.  multimodal dialogue systems or chatbots which can answer questions which involve processing data from one or more governments, city, county, state, and federal governments,
  9.
multimodal dialogue systems or chatbots which can create responses comprised of language, mathematics, charts, diagrams, figures, graphs, and infographics,

  10. architectures supporting both static and dynamic backing data and content,
  11. any other topics relevant to civic technology, open government, and artificial intelligence.



Our public mailing list's email address is public-civics@w3.org<mailto:public-civics@w3.org> . Please feel free to introduce yourselves in new e-mail threads and/or to draw upon any of these topics and open new e-mail threads with your thoughts on the topics. Thank you.



Best regards,
Adam Sobieski
http://www.phoster.com


P.S.: I've updated the group's About content here: https://www.w3.org/community/civics/2023/04/11/about/ . Please feel free to share any ideas with which to expand upon or otherwise enhance this content.



--

Mike Gifford, Senior Strategist, CivicActions
Drupal Core Accessibility Maintainer
https://civicactions.com<https://civicactions.com/>    |  https://accessibility.civicactions.com

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