Collaboration 18 articles

Bw_medium Tiago Peixoto

A Touch of Classics on Collaboration

last updated 10 months ago, 1 Comment

A while ago I read Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens  by Josiah Ober, and since then I have been thinking about what it contributes to the ongoing debates about collaboration in the public sector, participatory democracy and even WEB 2.0. At the risk of being unfair to the monumentality of Ober’s work, I would try to summarize it as a work that, building on analytical tools from institutional design and organized collective action theories, dem...

posted in Collaboration

113_1356_medium Paul Johnston

How do you stop Collaboration from being the Cinderella?

last updated 10 months ago, 3 Comments

Gerald did a great post recently on Collaboration and we are all convinced of the huge potential for improving collaboration within all kinds of organisations whether they are public sector or private sector. The problem is that collaboration is everyone's problem and no one's problem. Ask anyone whether collaboration could be improved in their organisation and the chances are that they will agree that it could be, but its like a background ache rather than a burning pain and it is very easy ...

posted in Collaboration

113_1356_medium Paul Johnston

Who should run the U.S.?

last updated 10 months ago, 4 Comments

Here's another interesting one from the techno-democrats - I don't mean President Obama's team but rather those who like the idea of marrying technology and direct democracy. This time it is in the US and it looks like a good platform - http://whitehouse2.org/ I still think, however, that it is going in the wrong direction - the point is to transform our democracy, not to pretend it does not already exist! In my view the value of this kind of thing is that it increases pressure on g...

posted in US Obama Collaboration Consultation

5393105394713e50d61fc3_medium ChrisCook

Peer to Peer Finance

last updated 10 months ago, 1 Comment

The Carnegie Institute published this article re Peer to Peer Finance http://www.policyinnovations.org/ideas/innovations/data/000085 A more comprehensive piece is up on Michel Bauwens' P2P Foundation blog http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/an-open-capital-framework-as-a-solution-to-the-financial-meltdown/2009/02/27 and also here with diagram http://www.metamute.org/en/beyond_public_and_private   Beyond Public and Private “21st Century problems cannot be fixed by 20th Century s...

posted in Collaboration Microequity open corporate Finance 2.0 Gregory Vincent micro-equity equity finance Web 2.0

Headshot_medium njacknis

LittleSis -- The Sousveillance Website

last updated 10 months ago, 0 Comments

Relatively new and still evolving, LittleSis has already garnered some publicity in the last couple of months.  The website is http://littlesis.org/.  It describes itself as "an involuntary facebook of powerful Americans, collaboratively edited and maintained by people like you." The creators go on to explain: "It's easier than ever to spot the symptoms of corruption and cronyism in our political process.  Ordinary Americans have never felt more shut out from all levels of gov...

posted in public safety e-Democracy Web 2.0 Collaboration

113_1356_medium Paul Johnston

UK Weather - Snow Problem for Twitter

last updated about 1 year ago, 0 Comments

Great example of the power of crowd-sourcing. Last Sunday someone had the idea of using twitter to gather data on where it was snowing in the UK. So people who twitter were asked to send a message of the following kind: #uksnow tw12 5, i.e. the hashtag uksnow followed by the first three elements of their postcode followed by the amount of snow on a scale from 0-10. And then someone made a video of the result! Impressive and another good illustration of how things are going. For me info see h...

posted in twitter UK Collaboration

Gtcj_exec_portrait_cisco_medium gcharles

Collaboration Has Become the Building Block for Productivity and Growth in Government

last updated 10 months ago, 5 Comments

In today's knowledge economy, during an unprecedented time of economic crisis, current public sector practices, resources, and skills are challenged as never before. We have a multigenerational society that continues to diversify and be more distributed geographically. Increasingly, people who are strangers to one another are gathering in communities to produce value for each other. The volume of data, information, and ideas that we produce and consume is rising exponentially. Our carbon foot...

posted in Collaboration productivity

113_1356_medium Paul Johnston

One day everything will be mashed!

last updated 10 months ago, 0 Comments

I couldn't resist sharng this - it's a mashup of all the cisco offices where we have installed a telepresence suite to enable virtual face-to-face meetings: TPgooglemashup. I think it is interesting for two reasons: a) it shows the extent to which one company has invested in moving away from travel towards virtual meetings b) it just reinforces the fact that more or more we will expect everything to be available in this sort of mash-up.

posted in Collaboration cisco telepresence

113_1356_medium Paul Johnston

Web 2.0 and the Public Sector

last updated 10 months ago, 1 Comment

This is the version of the Government 2.0 paper that we used at the Public Services Summit in December. Its a slimmed down and improved version of the original draft. We plan to do a final version early in 2009. At the event the strongest push back was on transparency where there was a strong sense that the need for confidential advice put major limits on what could be achieved - I am not sure I buy that, but lets leave that to another day! Another interesting bit of feedback was the suggesti...

posted in nobel Collaboration empowerment Transparency Web 2.0 Government 2.0 IBSGdraft

113_1356_medium Paul Johnston

Us Now: On the Road to Self-Organised Government?

last updated 10 months ago, 4 Comments

Yesterday I saw Ivo Gormley’s film US Now at the RSA. It’s a beautifully made film about the power of self-organising groups and what that might mean for society and the public sector. As well as clips from interviews with Clay Shirky, Charles Leadbeater and many others, the film follows some interesting real-life stories – an internet-based group of football fans that bought a football club with all the investors voting on team selection etc; a social networking site whereb...

posted in Collaboration

Default_avatar_medium JD Stanley

Digital Swarming

last updated 8 months ago, 3 Comments

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 w...

posted in Collaboration IBSGWhitepaper pdf

113_1356_medium Paul Johnston

What does Shirky mean for the Public Sector?

last updated 10 months ago, 0 Comments

This is really a continuation of my earlier post on HCE by Clay Shirky, but this time I will try to focus on the public sector implications. For me, the starting point has got to be ridiculously easy group-formation and I can certainly see many ways that the public sector can tap in to this new opportunity. Firstly, I think there is a lot to be done in promoting the opportunities for group formation as a form of social capital. So I love http://www.groupsnearyou.com/ and think all local autho...

posted in shirky Collaboration

Jconnell_medium John Connell

Collaboration as 'Productive Disputatiousness'

last updated 10 months ago, 2 Comments

[This is a slightly amended version of a post also published on my own blog at http://www.johnconnell.co.uk/blog/?p=102] Given the ubiquity of its use, I cannot be the only person who wonders what people really mean when they write or speak about collaboration. I was reminded of the question during a recent talk from a colleague on the developing notion of Government 2.0, during which he indicated that consensus should be seen as a key aspiration of modern, collaborative, democratic modes of...

posted in Collaboration

113_1356_medium Paul Johnston

New site launched - Power to the People!

last updated 10 months ago, 6 Comments

We have now launched the new improved "Connected Republic". We loved the content created in the old site, but felt that the separate elements -- blog, forum, bookmarks, videos -- made it more complicated to contribute to the site. So we've unified everything together in postings. Blog posts and comments from the old site have been moved across. Please now use the Postings area for articles, link/video sharing and starting discussions. Everyone can do this. You can also tag any posting with a...

posted in TheConnectedRepublic Collaboration

Duff_mug_medium duff

Competitive Government vs. Democratic Government

last updated 10 months ago, 7 Comments

Arnold Kling recently wrote an interesting essay in which he says:  In this essay, I will suggest that competitive government might be better than democratic government at satisfying the desires of the governed.  In democratic government, people take jurisdictions as given, and they elect leaders.  In competitive government, people take leaders as given, and they select jurisdictions. As the internet becomes more widely used, folks with unpopular beliefs are fi...

posted in Collaboration

Martin_medium msweeks

It’s the network, stupid

last updated about 1 year ago, 0 Comments

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...

posted in Collaboration

113_1356_medium Paul Johnston

Embracing a multiplicity of Conversations

last updated 10 months ago, 0 Comments

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 c...

posted in Collaboration

Default_avatar_medium Michelle Selinger

Content through Collaboration

last updated 10 months ago, 2 Comments

I have just been reading a very timely article by John Seely Brown and Richard P Adler about ‘social learning’. My reading coincided with a recent discussion I had with a colleague, Lee Simpson, about the use of VLEs in higher education. We both see VLEs being used primarily as repositories for lecture notes; for posting PowerPoint slides, or for turning acetates into electronic documents – all no more than putting books online. Academics are still the guardians of content.  This is the wors...

posted in Collaboration Education