theConnectedRepublic.org

A few months back I was talking about the role of collective intelligence in generating higher quality, faster decisions.  My discussion was focused on integrating social networking concepts and digital fabrics into engineering collaboration environments for large scale programs.  The response of one individual – who I’ll call John - was: “great ideas, but I don’t buy the whole social networking thing.  I mean if I listened to the mass social network I would be eating at McDonalds, the most popular restaurant. Yet I’m a food critic who enjoys expensive food and nice wines.  So I don’t see how the mass can help me.”

My response was “very valid, but what if you and I just met and I realized you had an interest in wines and restaurants. I excitingly talk about a new favorite restaurant with great French wines.  You try it, like it, and tell your friends.  You also let me know you enjoyed the recommendation, and I introduce you to a friend of mine with similar taste.  All in all we’ve just expanded our network of trusted experts/friends.  Would you gain any value out of this linkage of select groups who help expand, experiment, and refine our choices?”.

Social networking applied to public and private sector environments is not about the masses.  It is about tapping into the expertise, experiences, and insights of those who are directly trusted, are trusted by those you trust, and/or show a level of interest based on some event, an event worth exploring more with that individual’s or group’s insights.  The power of collective intelligence increases exponentially when you think in terms of trusted or selective social networking, not mass social networking.  John’s answer was “well I guess so…”.

This point is simple, but profound, for I believe that a new approach to collaborative decision-making approach is emerging.  An approach that blends elements of social networking with human networking and with emerging capabilities provisioned through digital fabrics. I have been developing this approach, which I call “digital swarming”, with colleagues inside and outside Cisco and a whitepaper on it is available for download on the resources page.

Digital Swarming is about a digitally connected human and machine world. A world where dynamically forming, scaling, reconfiguring and disbanding collaborative communities swarm for a cause, learning from each other, lowering cost and cycle times, and producing outcomes and effects that are greater than an individual or small group could produce on its own.

I think this approach has huge relevance for the public sector, given the complex interrelated problems it faces where they relate to the economy, sustainability, education or public safety. The opportunity to accelerate public/private/people partnerships to achieve results is the effect we all are seeking. The Digital Swarming framework is meant to contribute to this goal. I’ll do another post soon on some of the ideas and components of the framework, but I would be very interested in people’s reaction to the general concept as set out here and in the whitepaper itself.

My Cisco colleague Richard Allan introduced me to a paper from Yale entitled “Governmnet Data and the Invisible Hand”.  Worth a quick read.  The burden of its central message is that governments should stop setting up websites and start the less sexy, but ultimately much kore useful and revolutionary work of providing reusable data. 

Basically the authors suggest that in an age of relatively easy and cheap access to the tools of mash-ups and online forums, governments should spend much less time organising and presenting their data in ways they assume people want (and which mostly is done to reflect that goverment agencies themselves want and deem to be important) and much more time making the raw material - government data itself - easy to find, access and re-use.

This is the final paragraph of the paper:

“…we have proposed an approach to online government data that leverages both the American tradition of entrepreneurial self-reliance and the remarkable low-cost flexibility of contemporary digital technology.  The idea, though it can be implemented in a comfortably incremental fashion, is ultimately transformative.  It leads toward an ecosystem of grassroots, unplanned solutions to online civic needs.”

It can sound a bit arcane and technical, but the impact of the idea from this paper might make this the biggest single thing governments could do to usher in the era of so-called “government 2.0″. 

Copy attached (forget the reference to Princeton…got my US universities mixed up!)

I’m attaching a short piece from the MIT’s Technology Review entitled “How Obama Really Did It”.  The piece explores the Obama campaign’s phenomenal success with their web and online strategy, which apparently promoted Clinton advisor James Carville, of the famed “it’s the economy, stupid”, to paraphrase his own quip with the network now as his focus…

A few interesting hints from the article:

The Obama team put such technologies (Web 2, collaboration etc) at the centre of its campaign

The campaign did not micromanage but struck a balance beween top-down control and anarchy

They made giving money a social event…

You have to make the web tools central to the campaign and properly manage the networks of supporters they help organise

I get Obama’s tex messages (says David All, a Republican media consultant)…it is never pointless, it is always woth reading and it has an action for you to take.

The piece claims we’ll never see political campaigning the same again.  That might be true but the more interesting question for me is how Obama and his team, if they lay claim to the White House in November, translate the campaigning impact of the network approach into the same kind of shift in the way we do politics and policy.

Footnote - I watched the Obama acceptance speech from the Democratic Convention on YouTube last night.  The speech lasts about 45 minutes and had been watched by almost 300,000 people (that’s in less than 2 days).  And remember you don’t register a YouTube ‘hit’ as I understand it unless you watch the full clip…

In response to a request from Open Forum, a public policy discussion forum in Australia, I posted a short piece on the changing nature of work and the way in which Cisco enables a more flexible and distributed workstyle…

The full post is at http://www.openforum.com.au/content/working-smarter

This is the start of it…

The nature of work is changing and consequently we’re witnessing a proliferation of workstyles that reflect new demands for flexibility, balance and autonomy. Organisations in all sectors confront the need to respond urgently to a bunch of demands that include the ability to work in less predictable patterns of time and location and to work in new and more complex patterns of collaboration and co-presence. 

Some days you need to work on your own, some days you need to work with a team of people who are all in the same physical space and the next day you need to work with team members who are all on different continents. On top of that, people are juggling professional ambition with personal commitments to family and community. Maintaining personal good health and looking after the health of the planet are dimensions of life that can’t be conveniently forgotten or pushed to one side in the face of work demands and routines that are physically, emotionally and environmentally unsustainable.

So what are organisations going to do? 

My experience, fuelled by eight years’ experience working with global networking and communications leader Cisco Systems, is that new rhythms of work are evolving, responding to these complex and sometimes contradictory demands, enabled and sometimes accelerated by new communication tools and information management capabilities. What is emerging is a simple challenge - making it easy and reliable for workers to stay connected to their work, to their colleagues and to their customers anytime, anywhere. Putting in place the platform and the tools, not to mention the culture and practices to make that outcome a reality, is much harder.

Recently I had an interesting meeting with a large innovation UK local authority who felt that they (and other public services) needed to embrace radical reform or face the prospect of having to run ever faster in order to keep still. Their worries reflected the budget crunch that most UK public sector bodies are having to deal with. But their main fear was that as incomes rise, the demand for public services rises too only without a corresponding increase in citizen’s willingness to pay the taxes necessary to fund them. This point is most obvious in the area of healthcare and personal services (especially for the elderly) but it also applies in education and probably to a certain extent in most service areas. As our houses become more luxurious, we probably also expect our streets to be better maintained and cleaner, and as we jet off on foreign holidays we are probably less tolerant of any transport delays or high costs that we encounter on our way to them. So what should public sector organisations do?

The authority I was talking to were keen to embrace innovative direct provision models - couldn’t some of this demand be met directly by the private sector? I think the answer must be “yes”, but it is obviously not a magic solution. One of the key questions is who pays and if the answer is the public sector, then this innovation is still about meeting demand more efficiently and effectively rather than deflecting it. For example, in the personal support area giving people individual budgets rather than providing a public sector service can give people more choice, increase the range of potential suppliers (from one!) and lead to more finely-tuned provision. So citizens may get a much better service and potentially that service may cost less. However, what we are talking about here is clearly meeting demand for public sector services in a new way rather than reducing it.

What this authority really wanted, however, was “cost-less public service provision”, by which I assume they meant the market satisfying citizen demand that would otherwise have to be met by the public sector. I do think there are some opportunities here, but it is not an easy area. To some extent public bodies can use the fact that we are now in a more connected world to encourage specialised micro-markets that previously would not have been possible and whose absence does put pressure on the public sector. For example, as far as I am aware, the travel industry has not yet developed products for carers in need of a break from their caring duties. This (small) customer segment undoubtedly has specific needs (e.g. a holiday package that includes provision for the cared-for person being left at home or accompanying the carer) and if a market developed to meet those needs, some carers would no doubt take up the offerings and this would have benefits for the public sector (no need for the public sector to provide respite care, longer continuation of the non-state-funded caring solution etc). So there is a role for the public sector to play in encourage new (micro) markets to develop and thrive.

The difficulty, however, is that purely market-driven solutions will not meet a lot of the current demand for public sector services unless our current provision models change in ways that will not be popular with voters (or therefore with politicians). Direct market solutions are only likely to thrive as we move away from free public provision to provision where at least some charge is made. Furthermore, moves in this direction probably mean different levels of provision, i.e. basic service (which would be free or for a nominal charge), premium service, premium plus etc. Against this background, there would be plenty of scope for the market to compete with the public sector (or for the higher levels of service to be provided directly by the market without a subsidy). At this point the problem of increased income leading to higher demand for public services would be eliminated but only because citizens had been educated to expect to pay for those services rather than received them free (or subsidized) from the state.

The other area that is also worth exploring in this context is how citizens can do more for themselves on a self-help basis. So rather than trying to move services from the public sector to the private sector you also explore what the community sector might do, leveraging the fact that connectivity makes it easier to bring people together. I think this is another important element in the puzzle of trying to reduce demands on the public sector. Unfortunately, I don’t think any of this means that the public sector will ever be able to get off the efficiency treadmill (which is probably a good thing). Nonetheless it is vital that they explore innovative ideas about how the market and community sectors can help reduce the speed at which the treadmill is turning.

I love the wealth of tools Web 2.0 has to offer and in an interesting sign of the times this week I joined two different Web 2.0 public sector collaborative groups. One arose from a European Union workshop on an e-government vision for 2020. Here the group went for Ning, which I had not used before and was glad to try. The other group was set up by the UK Department of Innovation Universities and Skills. They went for Basecamp from 37signals, again a new platform for me, but it seems pretty cool.

If this trend continues (which I expect it will), we are likely to see an explosion of these sort of groups (interestingly using commercial sites outside the firewall rather than internal tools), but it is going to be hard to sustain lots and lots of such groups, since no matter how interested you are in how transparency can transform the public sector, you are unlikely to trek round 10 different groups launching, contributing and learning from ten different conversations on this issue. I think that this is one argument for making as many of these groups as possible very open, so people can cross-post and link etc rather than making multiple entries or contributing randomly.

It is also pretty clear that we all face a learning cycle on this - particularly those who are setting up these groups and sites. The temptation is to think “I can create a really cool place everyone can come to” and to forget that increasingly people will have a bewildering large number of cool places they can go to! We are certainly going to need tools that make it easy to aggregate all these conversations in a convenient way. Obviously RSS is a big part of that, but the Ning group I mentioned above does not have an RSS feed because Ning do not offer this for private groups, while the Basecamp group does offer an RSS feed but because this is authenticated (to preserve the privacy of the group) it does not work with my Google Reader and so I had to set up NewsGator (which I do not like as much). So still some way to go, but at least the public sector seems to be embracing Web 2.0.

Another muse from Kevin Kelly…

http://www.wired.com/special_multimedia/2008/st_infoporn_1607

“Never mind Web 3.0: The next stage in technological evolution is a single worldwide computer. Collectively, we are already assembling this megacomputer from our billions of Net-connected PCs, cell phones, PDAs, and the like. As an increasing number and variety of devices are lashed to one another via the Internet and other communication systems, they form the components of what we might call the One Machine.

Its circuit board encompasses the million copper wires and radio connections linking all the chips contained in the gadgets in your pocket, office, and car. Instead of being powered by a mere billion tiny transistors, as your typical personal desktop is, it runs on a billion PC chips, each with its own billion transistors. Its memory is the collective hard disks and flash drives of the world. Its RAM is the sum of all memory chips online. Every second, a Library of Congress worth of data flows through it. The program it runs — its initial OS — is the World Wide Web.”

Have a read - don’t know whether to be amazed or laugh..

Well, actually I was a civil servant, but this is the title of a set of principles for online participation the UK Transformational Government minister Tom Watson has just published. Writing some clear simple principles that will give civil servants the confidence to participate on the web in the right way is a really positive move. To the outsider it may seem a straightforward task, but it is easy to imagine the internal obstacles this project must have run into (from the lawyers of course, but not just from them!), and it is great to see that they have managed to be short (only five principles), simple and positive. But of course they raise many issues.

One issue relates to the fifth principle, which runs “remember that you are an ambassador for your organization. Wherever possible, disclose your position as a representative of your department or agency”. This seems fair enough, but it suggests you can make a clear distinction between the work-you and the private-you, and yet one of the features of Web 2.0 (and blogging!) is that it undermines this sort of distinction. Isn’t Web 2.0 about getting away from a world where any message from an organization has to be a marketing message, dependant on (and reflecting) the top-down line to take? Isn’t Web 2.0 about being more authentic and hearing what real individuals really think and feel? To be a bit unfair, would you believe an HM Revenue and Customs civil servant who cheerfully blogged that things were never better with his organization and that morale was sky high? Or what about a Whitehall official who wants to contribute to discussions about transformational government but as an expression of her own personal experience and views rather than as an ambassador for whichever department she happens to work for? Surely that should be permissible (or even encouraged) as long as it is conducted in a reasonable way (no betrayal of confidential discussions or comments clearly likely to bring her employer into disrepute)? I do not think there are any easy answers here, but I do think that we will gradually need to move towards a world where we can be more mature about handling these issues and give public (and private!) sector employees more leeway to express their real views and their personal views.

I suppose what these points bring out is that the principles are really designed to allow civil servants to participate online NOT so much as bloggers but as official contributers to discussion fora. So the principles seem to be mainly about enabling civil servants to enter a tax forum and flag up to people that a new piece of departmental guidance has been published or that the discussion is based on a misunderstanding of tax principles in that particular area or departmental processes etc. This is a worthy aim and I certainly agree that the government needs to explore every avenue both for getting its message out there and for understanding what sort of response that message is getting. However, I am not sure whether this is really going to take the form of legions of civil servants hacking through the jungle of the blogosphere for discussions where they can throw some light in a judicious, ambassadorial way. In fact, the whole thing conjures up very old fashioned images for me – one can almost sense the civil servant adjusting his bowler hat as he formally announces that he is a civil servant and cannot comment on all the issues being raised but would humbly like to point out one or two facts about departmental policy and process. Won’t all the forum participants respond – you are not a civil servant, you are a human being! And then they will start asking him what he thinks of his departmental policy and process - at which point he will probably have to beat a discreet retreat. Anyway, I do not want to be negative and I think these principles are a great step towards government engagement with the Web. I do hope, however, that in ten years (or five?) they will look rather quaint.

A year ago the UK government created a new ministry called the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills. Its dynamic and progressive Permanent Secretary (Ian Watmore, previously the UK’s first Government CIO) wants the department to be innovation by name, innovation by nature and he is trying to drive this forward in terms of the slogan “Ministerially-led, customer-driven”. That set me thinking …

In the private sector being customer-driven or customer-centric is easy to understand – the aim is to make money and therefore doing everything you can to delight your customer makes obvious sense. In the public sector it is not quite so straight-forward, since objectives are more multifaceted and there are lots of different types of “customer” (many of whom might more naturally be called stakeholders). The simplest cases are where the public sector is genuinely delivering a service (usually to a broad cross section of the population), for example, supplying a passport or enabling people to pay their income tax. Here being customer-driven seems relatively unproblematic; the main difference with the private sector is that a judgement has to be made about the level of resources that should be devoted to delivering a basic level of service, whereas in the private sector this is determined via the pricing mechanism. So while as customers of the passport office we might want all passports to be renewable within 24 hours, we might as taxpayers accept that the basic renewal service should take 21 days with a premium service being available at extra cost.

However, in other areas the position is more complicated. Consider the area of support for the unemployed, to what extent should that be customer-driven? Here it seems to me that what should really drive a department’s actions are the underlying public policy objectives. So if the objective is to maximise over the long term the percentage of the working age population who are economically active, this should be the primary criterion against which your specific actions should be tested. However, this limits the extent to which policy is customer-driven. The fundamental question is not “Are we providing the kind of support our customers - the unemployed - want?”, but “Are we providing the kind of support that is effective over the long term in getting people into work?”. Of course, the two questions are linked and no doubt a major barrier to the public sector achieving its outcomes has been a weakness in listening to and understanding the various stakeholders it is trying to work with, but I do think the public sector risks getting confused if in its efforts to improve its interaction with stakeholders it forgets that fundamentally it needs to be objective-driven rather than customer-driven. Public policy should engage with the whole body of citizens; rather than focussing exclusively on a particular subset of the population that is seen as most directly affected.

I think the other aspect of DIUS’s slogan is equally interesting and I would argue that being more genuinely ministerially-led probably involves a clearer (and hopefully more transparent) contract between ministers as policy decision-makers and civil servants as policy implementers. At the moment we have a situation where ministers are theoretically responsible for everything that a department does, but where clearly a lot of the decisions are not really made by them – either because they literally do not know about them or because they had some knowledge of them but not to the extent that they can reasonably be held responsible for them. (“Surely minister you remember paragraph 10 of the 8th submission you read on the car home from the House? It contained an oblique reference to the fact that if you endorsed the recommended policy there would be some adverse impacts for groups X and Y?”). An alternative approach would to limit the number and type of decisions that were ministerial made, but precisely in order to ensure that the direction of policy was be more clearly and more firmly ministerially-led. So ministers would be responsible for setting clear policy objectives and making high-level resource allocation decisions and the most important strategic decisions on policy implementation. While civil servants would be responsible for working with “customers” (and other stakeholders) to deliver these objectives within the ministerially set resource constraints.

Interestingly, this might lead to two rather different sorts of consultations – consultations by ministers on the overall policy objectives and the best strategies for achieving them; and consultations by civil servants on the details of how best to achieve what ministers have said they want. The former would naturally be oriented towards the wider public, while the latter might to some extent be more targeted in customers/stakeholders. Moves in this direction would significantly change the dynamic between ministers and (part of) the civil service – civil servants would need to take more responsibility for some aspects of implementation, while ministers would have to recognise more realistic constraints in terms of their changing demands of those seeking to deliver their policy objectives. Ideally, of course, this new system would also involve a lot more transparency, so there was more awareness of what ministers had sought to do and the constraints they encountered. Would innovation along these kinds of lines work? Would ministers feel disempowered or would they feel more genuinely in control? Would civil servants feel empowered to stand up and deliver or would they see it as just a more complicated form of the status quo? I am not even absolutely sure what I think but I do think this is an area that is worth exploring and I would be interested to hear what others think.

Here is  link to a point of view recently published by the IBSG education team on which comment and critique are most welcome. cisco-point-of-view-on-one-to-one-computing.pdf 

It seems to me that computing policies are too often made without reference to a sound model for education trasnformation that will really prepare learners for life and work in an increasingly global society. There are many commentators who talk about the fact that learners are hyper-social animals who want their formal education to embrace their world of connectivity and social networking. They talk about the need for changes to the curriculum, the way it is taught, the way it is assessed, the spaces in which students learn. Seymour Papert started the debate in 1993 with his book The Children’s Machine and many others like Marc Prensky have taken up the baton. 15 years later little has really changed. Schools my be more liberal, more group work happens in places and the tasks students undertake are more interesting and varied, and there are pockets of excellence, but to all intents and purposes whole systems have changed little.  Maybe they can’t change?  Maybe the political will and public perceptions about what schooling is and should be are too strong? Charles Handy commented that “education is prone to a fifty-year time lag, as those who manage it have to prepare young people for experiences two generations removed from the world that they grew up in”.  Do we have to wait for two generations then before education catches up with the other transformational changes already happening in the world?