On Being Human
Connected Republic member Simon Willis reflects on Summer School with the Young Foundation. Watch video
All postings and discussions
e-Democracy - Alive and Kicking!
Today I participated in e-Democracy 08, the annual e-democracy event in London. There was an interesting opening presentation by My Society’s Tom Steinberg who assessed progress over the last 12 months. Not surprisingly, his initial focus was the recent US elections and to my outsider’s eyes I thought his analysis got it just right. He highlighted President-elect Obama’s success in securing mass participation, but noted that much of his online campaign was about usin...
To Portal or Not to Portal?
This article from the Yale Law Journal argues that governments should concentrate less on creating all-encompassing integrated portals and more on making its information available more easily. It contrasts rather strikingly with a series of presentations I saw at a recent conference which were all about efforts by several governments to create exactly those kinds of portals. It reminded me of the story from the UK where the folks from MySociety set out to prove the new UK Governmet site...
Real-time Personal Politics
Congratulations to the new helmsman of the US! My good friend Mark sent me an example of what Web 2.0 politics means today: From: Barack Obama <info@barackobama.com>Date: Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 9:13 PMSubject: How this happenedTo: XXX Mark -- I'm about to head to Grant Park to talk to everyone gathered there, but I wanted to write to you first. We just made history. And I don't want you to forget how we did it. You made history every single day during this campaign -- every ...
UK local govt Web 2.0 experiments
Very useful site bringing together (on a wiki) all the things UK local authorities are doing in terms of using Web 2.0 to reach out to citizens: http://localgov.pbwiki.com/ .
Atheist Bus Campaign
The guys at Gallomanor have an interesting post about the Atheist Bus Campaign. Its not a sentiment I agree with, but it is a good illustration of ridiculously easy group formation. There is no way this sort of thing would have happened without Web 2.0!
Peak Moment: Oil and Gas -- The Next Meltdown?
This may be a little off topic for TCR, but my guess is that many visitors to this site have been a bit mesmerised by the global economic implosion currently in progress. While that crisis unfolds, it is easy to forget that other, potentially more serious, problems remain to be addressed. I assume you are all well aware of peak oil and are likely to have heard of Matt Simmons I think he is someone worth listening to although, as this video shows, what he has to sa...
It’s the network, stupid
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 Th...
Free at last? Maybe not...
The quote below is from an article by Seth Finkelstein that I read today in the Sydney Morning Herald. Every time my romantic inner self is predisposed to celebrate the proliferating and apparently unstoppable freedom of the Internet and the new power of the participative web, I read statements like this. The real world is unlikely to be be as untramelled as we might like to hope... "It's sometimes suggested that we are entering a new internet era with blogs and syndication feeds and massi...
Social networks the platform of the future
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 ...
Transforming Local Government
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. ...
2,761,832 - is this a totally different game?
More evidence from the front line of the world of online politics that tests our views about whether we are witnessing the birth of a genuine, disruptive transformation of the way we play the game of politics and government, or whether we are witnessing nothing of the sort.This is how PoliticsOnline reported the phenomenon of Barack Obama's 'Wright' speech which was posted on YouTube: "Barack Obama's 37 minute-long speech has skyrocketed to the 51st most viewed video of all time on YouTube. ...
PMA 44 - A Challenge and an Opportunity
My colleague Alan Balutis and a group of Washington experts have been doing some fascinating thinking about the next (44th) U.S. President's Management Agenda ("PMA 44"). There are a wealth of insights in their Public Manager Articles, but a couple of different aspects really struck home with me. The first was the HR issues. The U.S. - like many developed countries - faces a retirement tsunami that will hit the public sector particularly hard. As well as the potential loss of expertise, this ...
"A Cautionary Tale on Networks"
This was the title of a recent story in Canadian Government Executive magazine, a thoughtful publication generally focused on matters of importance to decision-making, non-elected, senior officials. I've been thinking about it for some time because it touches on so many things, wittingly or otherwise. The author is a well-respected individual, having spent time in government and as a public sector academic, has spent more than 30 years teaching Public Administration. When I read his articl...
An intractable challenge!
How's this for an understatement...."despite significant progress (in eGovernment), transforming the deeper structures of government is proving to be an intractable challenge." Really? What a surprise. The insight comes at the start of a great blog from Don Tapscott at Davos where, in a moment of impromptu madness by all accounts, he convened a quick seminar on the challenges of "government 2.0". His report suggests the discussion buzzed and sizzled with exciting discussion and considerabl...