Blogging the Virtual Government

Not long from now, we will make laws, set policies, write regulations and create programs by first "playing" the likely consequences in synthetic worlds, says Anne Laurent, longtime observer of federal management and creator, just this year, of a new blog, "The Agile Mind."

Laurent has written and edited for Government Executive for 12 years and did the same for Federal Times for 10 years before that. Now, she is blazing a new trail both in journalism and government, exploring how new human-computer interfaces, gaming, virtual worlds and other innovations will reshape the way agencies function and the way we explain what they do and how they do it.

Laurent has written recently for Tech Insider about NASA and other agencies venturing into synthetic worlds such as Second Life. She has written for Government Executive about the Defense Department's increasing use of gaming software for training, and about the Army's move into private virtual worlds.

On "The Agile Mind," she's weaving all these trends and others into a vision of a virtual government in which, she writes:

We will interact with all kinds of data--program results, claims processed, rates of environmental change, response times, performance, cost, schedule, etc.--physically via wall-sized multi-touch screens and computer tables, not keyboards and monitors.

Displaying and manipulating on one large screen both live and historical information about the past and current conditions and the effects of agency actions will allow us to see trends and possibilities and make predictions in ways we simply cannot today, when information resides in silos and behind the walls of very different organizations and is static and lifeless. Most of what we do digitally will involve touching and moving images or actually stepping into situations via our digital doubles--avatars--in uncannily accurate models of the real world.

For a sneak peak at the future, she points out, we need only turn to CNN, which began using a multi-touch computer wall as a news broadcasting tool on Jan. 2. Or visit NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Second Life. Or test the online game, "America's Army," the hugely popular recruiting tool. Or join the Federal Consortium for Virtual Worlds.

Laurent suggests that gaming and synthetic worlds and visualization and ubiquitous computing will become commonplace in government because the next generation of politicians and employees will expect and demand it. "These people will not, cannot, manage information on paper, or in spreadsheets or online dashboards," she writes. "They will not endure the kludgy, slow, inefficient process of learning new software and keeping that knowledge up to date merely to be able to manipulate data. . . . They will demand to see and touch and manipulate what is known about problems and to 'play' possible solutions so they can view the likely outcomes before choosing how to proceed."

It’s a beguiling vision filled with promise and peril. Laurent is an able and engaging chronicler of it.