When Educom Review met one day late in the summer with Jonathan (Jock)
P. Gill, we rendezvoused in the White House Briefing Room and then
walked over to his office in the nearby Old Executive Office Building,
where Gill serves as director of electronic publishing at the White
House Office of Media Affairs. The interview was punctuated with
interruptions by Gill's colleagues, who continually updated him on a
minor systems crisis (solved by the time we left).
When asked how he got his assignment at the White House, he said, "Well,
let's see, I was up in Boston, advising a private investor and getting
more and more interested in the Clinton candidacy. When I came down to
the convention with some friends, I mentioned to Jeff Eller that I had
some time and would be glad to volunteer. He looked at me a second,
chomped on his cigar, and said, "Why don't you answer the e-mail?" He
was flat-out busy, and dealing with the mail was becoming a serious
problem. So I found a little place in the press room at the hotel and
got to work. It was just a table--actually, just the back side of a
table, because the front side was being used to create the first-ever
Clinton-Gore bus tour--and I started handling the e-mail. And the job
just kept growing."
When Gill and his colleagues arrived at the White House, they found a
typical 1970s or '80s mainframe-based, terminal-based, and character-
based information system. And they've been working diligently ever since
to change all that.
"What we're trying to do now is put much more control and choice into
the hands of users. Before we got here, there was a working, internal e-
mail system, so we used that as a starting point. But the federal
government is still today largely disconnected. We are working very hard
to correct that, and I hope that by the end of this administration, you
will see much more integration of electronic communications capabilities
throughout the federal government.
"This administration believes strongly in the electronic distribution of
in- formation--not only in the White House but throughout all the
agencies. We are strong believers in our accountability to the public
and in communicating directly with the public, and the president and the
vice president are both extremely supportive of what we are doing."
What they are doing is distributing a whole range of documents--
including press releases, bills, speeches, and so on--electronically.
People can access the documents through USENET/NETNEWS, CompuServe,
America Online, The Well, MCI, Fidonet, Peacenet, and Econet, as well as
through e-mail distribution. And, of course, the mail works both ways:
citizens also can in turn send e-mail to the White House (though at the
current stage of the system's development, senders receive only a
general acknowledgment rather than a tailored electronic reply).
"We still get quite a lot more paper mail than electronic mail. We
receive on the average 40,000-60,000 units of paper mail every single
day, contrasted with about 70,000 electronic messages over an entire
three-month period. That's not surprising, because there are far more
Americans with pencils and paper than there are with computers, and only
about 7 percent of the people with computers are on a network. All told,
about 86 percent of Americans aren't in play yet, in terms of electronic
communications. But that will change."
Is it a problem that e-mail messages don't get custom responses?
"The people in the e-mail community understand that we are in the
experimental stage on this; they understand that, at the present time,
when you send a message to the White House, you get only a simple
automated acknowledgment. Down the road we'll be able to do more, but
we're not there yet.
"It will take a while. When we showed up here in January, there was no
e-mail department, no staff, no room, no equipment, no hardware, no
budget. We're slowly building that. There are many things we have to put
into place: we have to develop the building infrastructure; we have to
build technology; we have to build software. The presidential
correspondence entails a lot of legal obligations and a lot of technical
requirements, and we have to understand all those and conform to all
those.
"For one thing, there are these tremendous security problems when you
deal with electronic mail, and you just don't simply give people here
general access to the outside world. Because of the security situation,
we have to take care not to accidentally provide unauthorized access
into the White House computer system. So, among other things, the Secret
Service people have to be satisfied. There are lots of i's to dot and
t's to cross. This is not just some casual operation running a bulletin
board in the basement."
It's also not a Fortune 100 operation.
"Right now, I think we really have just one staff person and a lot of
wonderful volunteers trying to pull this off in the spirit of the
Internet, doing as much as volunteers can and giving the highest
possible value with the greatest possible efficiency.
"I think the next president to come in will find that there's an
electronic presidential mail infrastructure in place to build on, and
that will be quite a change from the past. Still, I'd have to point out
that one of the questions Americans haven't answered yet--because I
don't think it's really been posed to them--is whether the White House
should be a shining example of the best of American technology
management."
And the answer is?
"I just pose the question," Gill says with a smile. "The electronic
publishing project is focused on the White House but is having an impact
throughout the government, and the House and the Senate are both very
interested in this."
On the Senate side, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy was the first member of
Congress to offer constituents direct access to his speeches, press
releases, and Senate statements electronically, by having them posted on
several computer bulletin boards as well as two USENET news groups via
the Internet and by enabling readers of the releases to give immediate
feedback on the issues by commenting via computer.
On the House side, Rep. Charlie Rose, chairman of the Committee on House
Administration, and Reps. Jay Dickey, Sam Gejdenson, Newt Gingrich,
George Miller, Fortney Pete Stark, Bill Thomas, and Melvin Watt have
piloted the use of a Constituent Electronic Mail System, which enables
members of Congress to communicate with their constituents
electronically via a gateway to the Internet.
And then there is ACE (Americans Communicating Electronically), of which
Jock Gill was a founder and is one of the driving forces. "ACE is trying
to address the issue of those Americans who are without computers,
without modems. How do we give them access to electronic information?
Well, I discovered that there are over 3,000 USDA [U.S. Department of
Agriculture] county extension offices throughout the country, and it
occurred to me that they're part of the answer. If we don't have to buy
a lot of new infrastructure and we can provide a distribution system and
an information center that allows citizens to drop in and send and
receive electronic information and services from their government, then
we're on our way. So we went to the USDA and they were delighted to
participate. Of course, we still have a long way to go; ultimately, we
want to create an intelligent information infrastructure, with full
multimedia capabilities that offer lots of opportunities for
interaction.
"We now have something like thirty-seven agencies participating--that's
thirty-seven agencies willing to accept electronic mail from the public.
They are not all on board yet, and the technology is not all in place,
but they all understand this opportunity."
At the time of this interview, the Washington Post had just carried a
story suggesting that a major experiment in interactive television had
failed. Citizens in Cerritos, California, had been offered a full range
of interactive services, including movies on demand, starting about four
years ago, but now hardly anybody is still subscribing to it.
"I'm not surprised at all," Gill remarked. "Just look at the
applications for technology from the beginning, and look at the
predictions of the late '70s. They're appalling. They were so far off
the mark, they were absurd. Predictions in the early '80s were just as
ridiculous and fanciful. Look, as in most things, timing is everything.
If you are given an isolated piece of technology, it doesn't amount to
very much. If you have no reason to send e-mail to people, then e-mail
won't offer you anything, but if you can work professionally with
colleagues around the world, then e-mail will mean quite a lot to you.
So there's nothing magic about connecting electronically; it's only one
of the tools in the tool kit.
"I would also guess that the intellectual infrastructure wasn't in place
yet to support interactive communication. If your workplace doesn't
support it and value it, if there isn't a major leadership push across
the country for information in every school, the technology itself isn't
going to mean much. In other words, communication is much more context
driven than technology driven; technology may be just jim-dandy, thank
you very much, but if the content isn't there, people will reject it.
People aren't stupid; you can't fool them for very long. They know
perfectly well when the emperor's got no clothes on, and if you try to
sell people on a technology that doesn't solve their problems, you're
wasting everyone's time, including your own."
We asked Gill his views on the best uses of information technology in
education.
"The more that Americans understand that information is economic power
and the more that we understand that the ability to create new
information from existing information is going to be the source of
regenerative economic power, we're then going to be making some very
different sets of demands of our schools. Instead of asking our schools
to produce people with a set of punch-clock, sit-in-rows-and-answer-
when-spoken-to, show-up-on-time-and-leave-on-time, and dress-neatly-and-
follow-all-the-rules attitudes, we're going to be very concerned with
whether we're producing students who can create new information from the
old. It is just these young people who are going to be the ones who add
value and make our American culture viable, competitive, and dynamic.
"We're still asking industrial questions, using industrial measuring
devices, and setting industrial-type goals in our education system. So
we'll need to redefine the goals, redefine the majors, and redefine what
we're looking for, because we'll only find what we look for. It's just
like quantum mechanics: if you look for a particle, you find a particle;
if you look for a wave, you find a wave. So the educational systems have
to 'reinvent' themselves--to use a current term. Maybe students and
schools and faculties will have to work much more as a team, much more
collaboratively, cooperatively. There's a buzz word: 'collaboratorium.'
It's not a bad word.
"When do we start testing collaboratoria within schools, between
schools, between states, between nations?"
We wondered whether Gill thought of the White House as a kind of
collaboratorium.
"In many ways. To a large degree, working in the White House is whatever
you make of it. President Clinton has created a very flat structure,
very open, very approachable; ad hoc work groups are put together to get
things flowing and pulled together and resolved. It's a very, very
remarkable place to work."
That was our impression, too.