theConnectedRepublic.org

Thanks for friend and NSW Government colleague  Ken Dray for pointing out this great piece from the US about the state of the official federal government blogopshere - http://www.fcw.com/print/22_13/management/152465-1.html?topic=management.

It’s worth a read…some great insights from those inside government who are pioneering the use of blogs not just as yet another channel to reinforce the dismal one-way conversation that so often passes for ‘communications’ and ‘collaboration’ in government, but as a potent and incredibly useful two-way interactive platform that informs, educates, debates and occasionally, it seems, entertains.

“Government bloggers are now writing about every conceivable subject, including the Middle East peace process, federal agency management techniques and rock singers with drug problems. The era of government blogging has dawned.”  One of the internal users from Health commented that she viewed blogs as the mode of communication for the future. Communicating through them will one day become as routine and frequent as an agency issuing a press release, she said. “Eventually, we’ll get there.”

Another reported a recent trip to Iraq, where he saw 20-year-old soldiers operating a dozen chat sessions at once while they were monitoring their functional areas.

“It’s the use of this type of Web 2.0 technology by the net generation - the 18- to 30-year olds - that has motivated me to start a blog…this age group is the reality of who our new recruits are, and this is the technology they are comfortable with. It makes sense to use it.”

Another noted that millions and millions of people, including poeple in government, get a lot of information from blogs. “There’s no going back.”

Indeed - might be something worth putting into the mix as we think through what the public sector of the 21st century is going to have to look like if we are to attract the requisite workforce to do an increasingly complex job in public management. 

It’s great to be able to announce that we are now ready to test the wiki facility on this site and see if we as a community can manage to collaborate on some thoughtleadership. Not surprisingly, we thought we would start with the topic of Government 2.0 and with a bit of help from Martin and Russell I have put together a series of seven principles as a starting point for the discussion. We are using Mediawiki - which is the same tool used for wikipedia and which takes a little bit of getting used to. I am afraid that to contribute you will have to register again on the wiki, but I suggest you use the same username and password as you have for the Forums which should keep things relatively simple.

To be frank I am not entirely sure how a wiki-based discussion is going to work on this sort of topic and it was quite difficult to work out the best way to set up the discussion that would maximise the freedom for people to contribute, while enabling newcomers to the discussion to understand the starting point and have a reasonable overview of what is happening. I have protected the frontpage with the original set of principles, so the starting point remains unchanged; but then there are pages to discuss each principle, point out the advantages and disadvantages of moving in the direction the principle points to and (most importantly) to add examples of that principle in practice. I am quite happy for the discussion to spiral off in all sorts of directions, so for example if someone wants to write about the pros and cons of blogging by ministers/senior politicians, they might flag up this issue in relation to the principle of openness and transparency and then create a linked new page to start a detailed discussion on this particular sub-topic. I will try to moderate the discussion, not to change the content but to keep the shape of the discussion as clear as possible so it is as easy as possible to contribute to it and enjoy it. However, please do get involved and contribute to the wiki discussion - otherwise we will never work out the right way of doing this kind of thing!

In terms of the seven principles themselves, I tried to capture what I see as the main features of Government 2.0 - for me its a shift to a less hierarchical public sector; a collaborative, joined-up public sector; a broader sector that brings together all organisations working with a public purpose; a world where citizens are empowered; where public bodies are feedback-driven; where they are radically more open and transparent; and where the government’s role is much more facilitative than controlling or delivering. I hope the discussion will explore which of these principles are the most important and (a slightly different question!) which of them are we really going to see translated into reality in the next five to ten years; what are the main barriers to the type of shift each principle seeks to capture; and what are the best examples of initiatives that already embody these principles and what lessons do those initiatives provide.

It will also be interesting to see which principles generate the most interest and enthusiasm and eventually of course we may come back and decide that we have split up the terrain slightly wrongly and that rather than the seven principles listed, we need four or five principles with some of the current ones merged or cast in a different way. Who knows? This is an adventure and lets see where we end up! Reactions and comments are very welcome to this post, but I hope you will feel sufficiently interested in this project to go to the wiki, spend (literally) 30 seconds creating a wiki account and then start editing pages and adding content. As I said initially, MediaWiki does take a tiny bit of getting used to, but a side benefit is that you will also be training yourself up to contribute to Wikipedia (and the many other sites that use MediaWiki).

Last week I had an interesting conversation with Ivo Gormley from ThinkPublic, an interesting group of young designers and others committed to making public services better for everyone. Ivo (an antropologist) by background told me about an interesting film he hopes to complete shortly on Government 2.0 and which I hope we will at some point feature on this site. He also talked about some of the work ThinkPublic have been doing in the health service to develop bottom-up approaches to business process re-engineering. So rather than some consultants working out the perfect process and imposing this on recalcitrant reality (and even more recalcitrant staff); staff and users are invited to record their experiences about which bits of the process work well and feel good and this is then used as the basis for staff and users to work together in small teams to devise improvements to the process.

This sounded fascinating to me and it would be great to understand the process better and get some sense of what comes out of it. And that’s the rub. We were actually meeting to discuss Ivo’s idea of creating a vehicle for short, monthly videos that would highlight public sector innovation and invite others to comment, rate and emulate. It’s not clear where the best place for doing this is - should it be inside government, since it is about improving the public sector and showcasing interesting new ideas? If so, should it be across all sectors or does it make more sense to have different vehicles for different parts of the public sector, since more targeted sites will presumably be more compelling for the parts they are targeted on? Or is it better coming from outside government to give more freedom and avoid the risk of the exercise turning into an empty marketing exercise? And of course there are plenty of other questions. Should this be internal to the public sector or accessible to everyone? Would the point mainly be to flag up interesting initiative around the UK or would the discussions of those examples be almost as important as the examples themselves?

Obviously there is no one answer to any of these questions and Ivo’s idea could be developed in all sorts of directions, but what struck me is that I am not aware of many examples of this kind of thing going on here or elsewhere. Surely there must be some good internal tools that bring public sector workers together round examples of public sector innovation and encourage them to comment on and rate them? Surely there must be some administrations that are looking at this kind of thing both for the value it creates but also for the PR/”brand” benefit? I am sure there must be some, and of course the purely internal tools will not be visible to outsiders, but I would be very interested to hear from people with any examples they may have. In the meantime good luck to Ivo as he takes his idea forward and hopefully one day I will be able to update you on where he got to!

Australian business and technology analyst and writer Ross Dawson (Trends in the Living Networks - http://rossdawsonblog.com/) has some interesting reflections on the growing significance of social networking as the dominant platform for commuication and value.

Here’s his brief comments - http://rossdawsonblog.com/weblog/archives/2007/09/microsoft_faceb.html.  A couple of quick excerpts:

“Value is increasingly seen as shifting to social networks. When News Corp bought MySpace 2 ½ years ago for $580 million, I pointed out that what it was buying was the positioning at the interstices of people’s relationships. Media - as in the flow of information - is increasingly between people rather than in a hub and spoke arrangement, which makes social networking platforms central to value creation.”

“Social networks are rapidly becoming central to people’s interaction with the online world.” Really - not sure everyone would agree with that yet, but perhaps we are launched on a trajectory whose outcome will justify that claim eventually?

“This is all about the platform of the future. The computing platforms of the past have been dominated by Windows. More recently the level of the dominant and meaningful platform is the web-based application. It is quite likely that the level of the platform that can extract the most value in the future is at or close to the level of the social network.”

Thing that struck me is the link between these insights and the lask post I blogged about former Australian Labor Party  leader Mark Latham who suggested real reform in politics was always going to be difficult because it had to be grounded in people and relationships, not institutions.

Maybe there’s a link between Mark’s political insight and Ross Dawson’s focus on social networks.  If that’s right, then the idea of “government by Facebook” isn’t so silly, perhaps, except that it would mean something much more profound than putting a few announcements on a static and highly controlled facebook page.

A few years ago, the Australian Labor Party was led by a young man called Mark Latham.  His accession to the Labor leadership was somewhat unexpected but fuelled by a reputation for original policy thinking and an eclectic curiosity (one of his political opponents was once unkind enough to label his approach “policy by Google”). 

Mark’s leadership crashed badly in the 2004 election following which he abruptly left politics altogether.  An iconoclastic writer and diarist, he’s back in the mainstream Australian press with renewed vigour and, in my view, great insight.  This is from his most recent piece in the Australian Financial Review (1 May) in which he opines the emptiness of the social democrat ideas cupboard.  These few extracts from his article will give you a sense of his thesis.  It’s confronting stuff.  I predict Mark will start to assume a kind of Cassandra-like status as a voice whose compelling insights will be undermined by people who will dismiss him for his previous political clumsiness.

    The problem with the public sector, he writes, is its limited capacity for reform.  “It only has two tools available to it: legal coercion and financial entitlement.  Yet these are poorly suited to dealing with the social crisis of our times: the breakdown of relations between people.”

He goes on to note that governments work on a top-down basis in an orderly, predictable and legally-sanctioned way.  Civil society, by contrast, couldn’t be more different, “with its diffuse and disorderly approach to relationships.  The square peg of the state does not fit into the round hole of community life.”

His example is from the recent Australia 2020 Summit, where the idea was floated that students could pay off some of their higher education fees debts by volunteering in community organisations.  For Mark, this is nothing less than transforming service into toil, swapping generosity and sacrifice for the ethic of a mercenary (sure I’ll volunteer, so long as you pay me). 

He might be right. Before he became Labor leader, Mark was building a reputation as a powerful advocate of some new thinking about public policy and public management.  His instinct to reach for civil society might be seen by some as a little romantic, perhaps even romantic.  It seems he’s returning to his theme as he emerges from his self-imposed exile followng his political failure.  Some might say it was a shame that he seemed to lose sight of his real agenda when he had the chance to do something about it. 

I’ve put in some links for the recent Australia 2020 exercise, which saw 1000 people selected to join the new Australian Prime Minister and some of his senior Ministers for a 2-day ideas and strategies session in Parliament House in Canberra last weekend.  

In many ways, the whole process can be seen as a powerful experiment in open innovation, a real attempt to throw open the traditionally impenetrable process of policy and decision making to a much wider influence.  The event was streamed on the web - at the web site, you will be able to review some of the session for the next few weeks I think - http://www.australia2020.gov.au/.  It was also broadcast on ABC television (our public TV channel).

The event, which was the culmination of a process of smaller events in schools and communities around the country leading up to the Summit itself, has been the subject of much comment in the mainstream press and of course in the blogosphere.  Depending on your point of view, it was either a very clever political exercise in spin and issues management, ending up with a series of ideas pretty much along the lines of current government policy anyway, or a genuine attempt to create a richer and more interactive policy conversation.

My view is that the event manifests a little of both - clever politics without a doubt, but with some good ideas from an interesting diverse group of people responding to the dynamic of a collective deliberation process that provided some discipline and structure to move towards a few concrete proposals.

Much will depend, of course, on what happens next.  All of the material from the Summit is going to be posted on the web  The website already contains the thousands of submissions people sent through before the Summit in the 10 topics that formed the themes for the discussion.  The full write up of all the ideas and proposals that came out of the 2 days will also be on the site in a few weeks, I understand.  There is already an interim report (attached) which was actually presented to the PM before the end of the Summit itself!

PM Rudd has committed to responding to all the Summit’s ideas, including those he and the government will not take forward.  

In may ways, despite the use of some new tools (eg web streaming - but it was only limited) the process was a reasonably “World 1.0″ approach to a fairly traditional planning process.  But the potential of building on this first attempt and gradually introducing many more collaborative and interactive tools into the process is considerable.  Have a look at one blog post (I’ve put the extract at the end of this email) to illustrate how far some people feel the process still has to go to really harness the potential of the new tools of collaboration…

But as an example of a fairly ambitious and, for the most part, reasonably successful exercise in Government 2.0, and with real political leadership (the whole thing was led by the PM himself), it’s a very worthy story.  

This week I have been attending Cisco’s e-leaders forum in the glorious city of Liverpool. The event brings together about sixty decision-makers from local authorities across Europe for two days of discussions on how they are using technology to transform their activities. As ever, it is striking to see the diversity of participants (from large cities like Liverpool and Amsterdam to small towns like Dunkerque or rural areas like La Manche) and yet the similarity of interests and experiences.

One of the highlights of the first day was David McElhinney’s presentation on Liverpool’s transformation experience. (all the presentations are available on the resources page).
David’s focus was using customer contact to drive up performance and drive down cost and at the heart of his philosophy was the paradoxical assumption that customer contact was essentially a failure, something that should be systematically managed down in many areas to an ideal target of zero. On this approach generating a large amount of customer contact is a reflection of excessively complicated processes imperfectly implemented. So the solution is to simplify the processes and move towards one single way of doing any generic activity - so one way of receiving payments whatever those payments might be, one way of making payments, one way of collecting debt etc. It was also striking how ruthlessly Liverpool have been prepared to apply this approach. For example, they simplified salary payments by moving everyone onto a monthly salary (12 payments a year is fewer chances for error and customer contact than 52 payments a year) and making all payments directly into the bank accounts of their staff. Employees who were not prepared to give their bank details were not paid - so most people did share their details quite quickly, although one person apparently held out for one year during which she was working but not actually receiving her salary!

Another interesting point David made related to customer relationship management (CRM). He argued that the council does not really have an interesting in having a full picture of its relationship with individual citizens, since if a customer gets in contact to complain about their rubbish bin not having been emptied, they are unlikely at the same time to want to discuss the recent planning application they made or their application for a resident’s parking permit. So rather than having a comprehensive CRM tool, Liverpool cluster together activities and try to get a comprehensive picture of that particular area, so they have a CRM tool covering everyone who makes or should be making payments to them, a CRM tool that covers all those people to whom the council gives benefits of any kind (from payments to bus passes, disabled parking permits, free school meals etc). In relation to street scene issues they take a CRM-type approach, but the focus is assets on the streets (lamp-posts, bus shelters, drains etc), since the issue when someone gets in contact is having a clear picture of all the things on the street that the citizen might be wanting to raise an issue about. Again the value of this approach is that by clustering related issues together it helps Liverpool to simplify processes, reduce systems and enable front-line staff provide quick responses in those (hopefully ever-decreasing) situations where something goes wrong and the citizen rings up unhappy or confused.

At the other end of the spectrum from David’s philosophy of moving to zero customer contact and in a rather interesting contrast, we also explored the issue of citizen participation and empowerment. Here we heard from Carol Hayward of Bristol City council who are one of the leading councils in the UK in relation to e-democracy. Carol talking about the various initiatives the council has taken to drive up participation and to broaden it so that young people and other groups get much more involved in council decision-making. One tool they have been using for some time is an e-petition tool and there were a number of interesting aspects to the ways they were using that tool. Firstly, they have deliberately sought to encourage councilors to use the tool so that they see it as a way of testing public opinion rather than something that undermines the role. Secondly, they have been clear that the tool is about debating an issue and exploring attitudes, it is not a form of direct democracy. So the discussion forums that explore the issues raised by a petition are almost as important as the petition itself and it is not just a question of the number of signatures a petition manages to attract. They also webcast the council meetings, so ultimately when petition topics are discussed in council the public can see what weight councilors gave to their views and why the final decision was made. So two contrasting but not necessarily conflicting approaches and an interesting first day for the event. Of course, there was much I have not covered with interesting experiences from different countries on fibre to the home and wireless city projects, but maybe I will come back to some of that in my next post on this event.

Stephen Coleman gave a great interview to Australian youth site Vibewire as part of the eFestival of Ideas which is on this week, specifically on the eParticipation forum.

There are two parts to what turns out to be a great interview, in which Stephen reinforces his position as one of the most thoughtful, pragmatic and insightful analysts of the impact of the Internet and the ‘hyperconnected’ world on politics and democracy.

Have a listen…and while you’re there, leave a couple of comments on the forum…

 http://www.vibewire.net/efestival/videos/efestival-professor-stephen-coleman/ for part 1 of the interview

 http://www.vibewire.net/efestival/videos/efestival-professor-stephen-coleman-part-2/ for part 2 of the interview

The audio quality is a bit wobbly at the beginning, but stick with it…it’s great.

A week-long eFestival of Ideas is currently on hosted by Sydney-based youth organisation Vibewire.  I’m contributing to a forum on “eParticipation: Fad or Future”, which Cisco is sponsoring.

Come and have a look at the debate and join in.

http://www.vibewire.net/forum/view_topic?topic_id=86

One of the other guest contributors, Mark Pesce, had this to say in a recent blog.  It will give you a flavour for the debate we’re enjoying:

“The institution finds itself caught in a paradox: aggregation makes it powerful, but takes away its voice. When power was important, the institution prospered. Now that the cultural balance is shifting toward hyperempowered individuals engaging in conversation, the institution is under threat. It is being disempowered in a way that it can not adapt to without a fundamental restructuring of its organizational behavior. This is something that governments are only slowly coming to recognize, but educators (and, in particular, educational administrators) are already well aware that their students are more empowered than the educational institutions they attend. The desynchronization between the scope of institutional power and the chaos of unconstrained and unconstrainable conversational hyperempowerment presents a challenge that will transform the institution – or kill it.”

He’s right, I think - one of the dimensions of the current contest between government and the Web 2.0 world is a largely unspoken struggle between individuals and institutions.  If Pesce is on the right track, we can expect much more unhappiness and resistance from government in the face of the rise and rise of hyperempowerment.  Unless, of course, you think Pesce is talking through his bottom… 

From the ‘Designing for Civil Society” discussion comes some salutary insights and wise advice from Tom Steinberg, MySociety founder and generally all-round smart thinker (and do-er) in the government 2.0 space.

In a post to the UK and Ireland E-Democracy Exchange, Tom writes “mySociety has traditionally worked on the assumption that it’s basically impossible to ever get any part of any government to do anything of any real significance in the field of edemocracy, or in the wider field of greater access to data.
As a result we’ve always tried to pick projects that work as well as possible for the citizen without requiring government to do anything it didn’t do before (think FixMyStreet, or WriteToThem). Picking a project that requires a bit of government to move a single inch in order for your project to work at all is a sadly proven path to failure.

Unfortunately, our need to campaign today is a validation of this highly pessimistic approach. It is absurd that this campaign is even necessary, given that we tried so hard to do it the ‘nice way’ with meetings, gentle encouragement and nicely written word documents in Whitehall-speak explaining why it was useful and cheap and non-threatening. But where it counted the unelected officials who hold the relevent power here just weren’t persuadable for reasons that we’re having to FOI to find out.”

So, that’s a bit disappointing.  But as an antidote to such a pragmatic assessment, Tom offers some advice. Instead of looking at what e-democracy projects don’t achieve in terms of mass engagement, it is better to look at “pressure points, chinks in the armour where improvements might be possible, whether with the consent of government or not”.

He concludes:

“Anyway, if this seems like a counsel of despair, it isn’t supposed to be. I’m just saying that being realistic about the nature of actual progress in our field (tiny, incremental, currently peaking with things like TheyWorkForYou and Stemwijzer.nl ) makes for more interesting, useful discussions than comparing everything to the Holy Grail of True, Mass Scale Deliberative Democracy”

Small pieces, it seems, will ‘loosely join’ to achieve the larger ‘transformation’ only if we acept tht the real vaue we’re after will inevitably be subverted by premature and over-weening ambitions for scale and scope.