Rialtas.net - Government 2.0

The UK Government (Ministry of Justice) has recently released a new initiative

http://www.buildingdemocracy.co.uk/

Building Democracy is a government initiative to support new and different means for people to address public issues.

It is funded by the Ministry of Justice through the Democratic Engagement Innovation Fund.

They want more people to participate in UK democracy, and want the public to come up with ways to make this happen.

If members of the public can think of a way to help people to address public issues and influence government, they’d like to hear it. They have £150,000 available to develop about ten proposals.

Applications are due by 26 September 2008, to date the site as recieved over 60 ideas.

I came across this excellent short talk by Clay Shirky author of  “Here comes everybody“, speaking at the Web 2.0 Expo (22-25 April 2008) about what he terms  ‘the cognitive surplus’ that television (in his opinion mostly sit-coms) has been masking for the past 60 years.

Here is an excerpt:

“I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing—there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders—a lot of

things we like—didn’t happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.

It wasn’t until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened—rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before—free time. And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.”"

Shirky explains that he and Martin Wattenberg at IBM have calculated That

• Currently all of Wikipedia represents the accumulation of around one hundred million hours of human thought.

• That television watching represents around 200 billion hours of human attention in the US alone, every year. (or 2000 Wikipedia projects a year)

• That 100 million hours are spent every weekend in the US just watching ads.

This is a big surplus.

He asks, Where do Wikipedia contributors find the time? and identifies that Wikipedia a tiny project within an overall ‘architecture of participation’

Shirky argues how the interesting thing about a surplus like this is that you don’t know what to do with it at first. Hence the gin and sitcoms.

Shirky reckons we are still in the ‘all special cases’ phase, where outputs cannot reliably be predicted because there is so much complexity. Instead we are trying lots and lots of things to see what works and hoping that whoever fails, ‘fails informatively’ in order that the path slowly becomes a little clearer. He gives the example of a professor in Brazil (Vasco Furtado) who created a Wiki map for crime in Brazil -where users can put push pins in Google maps and add information to characterise the crime, and over time a map starts to emerge. This map represents tacit information, society knows this without really knowing it in the sense of ‘don’t go there that, street corner is dangerous’ but there is no source where you can take advantage of this information, no point to go to to find it out.

“And the cops, if they have that information, they’re certainly not sharing. In fact, one of the things Furtado says in starting the Wiki crime map was, “This information may or may not exist some place in society, but it’s actually easier for me to try to rebuild it from scratch than to try and get it from the authorities who might have it now….Maybe this will succeed or maybe it will fail. The normal case of social software is still failure; most of these experiments don’t pan out. But the ones that do are quite incredible, and I hope that this one succeeds, obviously. But even if it doesn’t, it’s illustrated the point already, which is that someone working alone, with really cheap tools, has a reasonable hope of carving out enough of the cognitive surplus, enough of the desire to participate, enough of the collective goodwill of the citizens, to create a resource you couldn’t have imagined existing even five years ago.”

Shirky explains that the internet connected global population watches about 1 trillion hours of TV every year (about 5 times the size of USA annual consumption) and that if people watched 99% as much TV as they used to, that the cognitive surplus (1%) would represent about 10,000 Wikipedia scale projects a year worth of participation

By extension I suppose it can be argued that in the past the intelligentsia/intellectuals within a society were individuals that enjoyed for various reasons the availability of some cognitive surplus and were able to use this surplus to write their articles essays and treatise in attempts to influence the opinions of the ‘masses’ and the governments or other rulers of the day.

Today many have the potential to enjoy this kind of cognitive surplus and wouldn’t it be amazing if instead of applying it entirely to watching TV ,that  instead individuals began to use some of this surplus cognitive capacity to engage with governments, public organisations and other citizens to collaborate in the design of   better ways to govern and be governed and to help in the design of a better society where everyone can participate in the creation of a better future.

Just read a very interesting article by Tim O’Reilly on ‘Open Source and Cloud Computing’

O’Reilly highlights the dangers of proprietary  ‘lock in’ to cloud computing service providers such as Amazon’s S3 and EC2, Google’s AppEngine and Salesforce’s force.com.

O’Reilly asks

Why did the WWW end up with hundreds of millions of independent information providers while centralized sites like AOL and MSN faltered?…

…All of the platform as a service plays, from Amazon’s S3 and EC2 and Google’s AppEngine to Salesforce’s force.com — not to mention Facebook’s social networking platform — have a lot more in common with AOL than they do with internet services as we’ve known them over the past decade and a half. Will we have to spend a decade backtracking from centralized approaches? The interoperable internet should be the platform, not any one vendor’s private preserve…

…How can we preserve freedom to innovate when the competitive advantage of online players comes from massive databases created via user contribution, which literally get better the more people use them, raising seemingly insuperable barriers to new competition? …

…But just “paying attention” to cloud computing isn’t the point. The point is to rediscover what makes open source tick, but in the new context. It’s important to recognize that open source has several key dimensions that contribute to its success:

1. Licenses that permit and encourage redistribution, modification, and even forking;
2. An architecture that enables programs to be used as components where-ever possible, and extended rather than replaced to provide new functionality;
3. Low barriers for new users to try the software;
4. Low barriers for developers to build new applications and share them with the world….

…This is far from a complete list, but it gives food for thought. As outlined above, I don’t believe we’ve figured out what kinds of licenses will allow forking of Web 2.0 and cloud applications, especially because the lock-in provided by many of these applications is given by their data rather than their code. However, there are hopeful signs like Yahoo! Boss that companies are at beginning to understand that in the era of the cloud, open source without open data is only half the application….

Read the full article here.

I see that top social bookmarking site Del.icio.us has recently launched a redesign of its website and services.

They have organized the site into three main sections: Bookmarks, People and Tags. When you are logged in, these menus give you quick access to your Bookmarks, Network and Tags pages. The My Tags page is a new way to see all your tags in an expanded tag cloud.

Del.icio.us was aquired by Yahoo in 2005 and since then very little had changed with the site or its services . The new site is available at the easier to type URL delicious.com

Kilkenny County Council has just released a new Wiki on which it invites collaboration with members of the public on the development of Local Area Plans for townlands in Kilkenny.

(I am an IS project manager for Kilkenny County Council and this wiki is one of my current projects.)

We believe that this project represents the first use of a Wiki by a government organisation in Ireland as part of a public consultative process.

The aim of this wiki is to enable interested and engaged members of the public to participate online in a collaborative discussion around the development of future Local Area Plans (LAPs). Any interested parties can register themselves on the wiki and can then make changes or additions to articles within the LAPs. Comments can also be made on any of the content of the wiki. When a change, addition or comment is made on the wiki it enters a queue for moderation by a member of Kilkenny County Council Staff. Contributions will be moderated for defacement or for improper use; all contributions made in good faith will be approved and will become visible on the wiki for all visitors to read. During office hours all contributions will be reviewed as soon as possible following their addition. All contributions made outside of office hours will be reviewed as soon as possible on the next working day.

It is intended to leave all valid contributions online and following the close of the consultative period to leave this wiki online (but locked) as a document of record.

We believe that this wiki will help to enable enhanced transparency within the consultative process and will also permit a wider group of interested parties to participate in the process.

A comment on or contribution to an article on the wiki does not constitute a submission to the local area plan, rather the wiki is intended as a mechanism to enhance collaboration and debate with the public and any interested parties and also as a mechanism to enhance transparency.

All contributions to this wiki will however, be considered by the Planning Department in the formulation of the plans.

The Draft Plans of Callan and Castlecomer are being used to pilot the use of a wiki as part of a consultative process. If successful it is intended to use the system with all future local area plans.

You can visit the wiki here: http://wiki.kilkennycoco.ie/

A few months ago Google announced that they were testing a new product called Knol. Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects. Yesterday, they made Knol available to everyone.

The web contains vast amounts of information, but not everything worth knowing is on the web. An enormous amount of information resides in people’s heads: millions of people know useful things and billions more could benefit from that knowledge. Knol will encourage these people to contribute their knowledge online and make it accessible to everyone.

The key principle behind Knol is authorship. Every knol will have an author (or group of authors) who put their name behind their content. It’s their knol, their voice, their opinion. Google expects that there will be multiple knols on the same subject, and believe that this is a good thing..

With Knol, we are introducing a new method for authors to work together that we call “moderated collaboration.” With this feature, any reader can make suggested edits to a knol which the author may then choose to accept, reject, or modify before these contributions become visible to the public. This allows authors to accept suggestions from everyone in the world while remaining in control of their content. After all, their name is associated with it!

Knols include strong community tools which allow for many modes of interaction between readers and authors. People can submit comments, rate, or write a review of a knol. At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads from our AdSense program. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with a revenue share from the proceeds of those ad placements.”

http://knol.google.com/

Interesting article on the Memphis based site commercialappeal.com
Apparently the director of police is using public funds to attempt sue and identify an anonymous blogger believed to be a Memphis police officer (or several officers)

Memphis Police Director Larry Godwin and the city of Memphis have filed a lawsuit to learn who operates a blog harshly critical of Godwin and his department.

The lawsuit asks AOL to produce all information related to the identity of an e-mail address linked to MPD Enforcer 2.0, a blog popular with police officers that has been extremely critical of police leadership at 201 Poplar.

“In what could be a landmark case of privacy and the 1st Amendment,” the anonymous bloggers write on the site, “Godwin has illegally used his position and the City of Memphis as a ram to ruin the Constitution of the United States.

Read the full article here.

The UK Government is inviting feedback from the public to help generate ideas and useful applications for public data. They hope this approach will help to improve the way public information is communicated.The Power of Information Taskforce is running a competition on the UK Government’s behalf, and they have a £20,000 prize fund to develop the best ideas to the next level.

To indicate the kind of ideas that they are looking for they give the examples of Fix My Street Website (covered in an earlier Rialtas post),  and another example similar to the concept of ChicagoCrime.org

To show they are serious, the Government is making available gigabytes of new or previously invisible public information especially for people to use in this competition. 

 http://www.showusabetterway.co.uk

From Federaltimes.com article By Elise Castelli

 This Federal Times Article describes how the US EPA, in trying to better share information with the public, industry, the media and its own employees, took an ‘unusual’ tack: It set up a Web site and asked for ideas from those who rely on EPA’s data in their work and lives.

“A lot of issues we deal with are global in nature and require collaboration,” EPA’s chief information officer, Molly O’Neill, said in an interview. “We need to figure out how to use these [Web] tools to be more transparent and collaborative.”

 

With the public demanding more and faster access to government information, “we need to change that model a little bit and get back to rebooting the public square,” said DiGiammarino, who spoke at a Web 2.0 conference June 3. This is a challenge for leaders because “when you think of government, you don’t necessarily think of speed, agility, reach and efficiency,” which is what the Web 2.0 world demands, he said.

Using discussion boards and e-mails, EPA’s new social Web site, called National Dialogue on Access to Environmental Information, has pulled comments from across government and the country to help O’Neill as she fashions a new information-sharing policy.

Since O’Neill came on board last year, EPA has embarked on four such projects that integrate blogs, wikis, discussion boards and other social networking Web tools, which are collectively referred to as Web 2.0, into EPA’s business.

“The technology is not complicated, it’s just a different way of doing business. And getting people to do business in a different way is culture change and that’s a challenge,” O’Neill said.

Read Full article

Interesting article on RedOrbit by By Maryann Lawlor, discussing the adoption of Web 2.0 by businesses . Some excerpts below, read the full article here..

Common interests bring professionals together online, then lead them to corporate collaboration. Social networking and other Web 2.0 capabilities are creating new avenues for commerce by facilitating communication inside the corporate structure and extending collaboration beyond company walls. Key to making the most out of new technology, however, is determining corporate goals before throwing a new tool into the mix. When chosen and applied judiciously, nearly every Web 2.0 weapon-from del.icio.us to wikis- can play meaningful and profitable roles within any company…

 

…If, for example, an organization has a strict chain of command and only executives have certain information that they want to keep under tight control, the tool its leaders choose must have an authority- and approval-chain capability built in, she explains. “If that’s not the case, and you are trying to get the information out regardless of where it is in the ranks so you don’t need as much approval, you can start looking at social networking tools and really start to open it up a little bit more,” she adds.

The variety of tools now available to corporations for both knowledge sharing and collaboration is growing considerably because more of them are now easier to use. One example Walser cites is del.icio.us, a Web 2.0 capability that can be installed with a plug- in to a computer browser. It allows the user to bookmark and tag Web articles immediately with keywords that resonate specifically with the user or with the user’s coworkers and friends. As a result, rather than sending a link to an interesting article in e-mail, colleagues can access del.icio.us and can see the stories others have tagged. “It gets things out of e-mail-where people are so buried-and moves them to a tool where users can start to see the common interests of other people,” she explains. Common interests in one area-even if they are not work-related-open conversations that often lead to professional relationships, she adds.

SRA noticed this trend developing within its own corporate walls. Staff members already were using tools such as del.icio.us and social networking sites such as Facebook and Linkedln, which enable them to stay connected both within and beyond the organization. As a result, the company decided to adopt similar capabilities to improve knowledge sharing within the organization.

…Web 2.0 tools can also help break down geographic, temporal and physical barriers, facilitating collaboration. For example, SRA has a presence in Second Life, one of the most mature and well-known virtual worlds, and has found people who either specifically look for the company there or have stumbled upon it “in-world.” In addition, Walser relates that the Second Life island dedicated to accessibility for people with disabilities enables her to meet new colleagues with similar interests. “Now we have a whole new network of people that we didn’t know before. They are nowhere close to us in the United States, but it doesn’t matter. You start to transcend geography,” she points out…

…For all the benefits that Web 2.0 tools offer industry, the capabilities also pose challenges to traditional corporate structure. Walser notes that because people are accustomed to using the tools at home, the line between personal and professional usage blurs. While organizations should want to provide their employees with an open environment that promotes collaboration, they must recognize the responsibility to ensure that the technology is being used appropriately and professionalism is maintained…

 

…The Web 2.0 balancing act for corporations must extend even further than their employees maintaining a professional presence on the Web and ensuring mutual respect among its personnel. Although these tools are ideal for promoting collaboration in many ways, Walser warns that companies must make sure that they offer opportunities for real-life interaction among their employees. This helps nurture the e-collaboration that takes place online, she maintains.

 

Read the full article here