Challenge.gov Screenshot

The US General Services Administration (GSA) in association with ChallengePost has just launched Challenge.gov a new website platform that uses crowdsourcing to  promote innovation.

The Perfect Citizen

The role of the citizen in creating a new Ireland is an important one. What foundations, skills and moral attributes should the perfect citizen have?…

…Perhaps its time to look at what was once viewed as the old-fashioned notion of citizenship. What is the perfect citizen? What foundations, skills and moral attributes should they have to ensure that we create a more sustainable form of success. What should we do to create such citizens and what can we learn from others?

Commentators are all agreed on one thing – the overarching role of education. There is also a broad consensus on the idea that to build these solid foundations, we need to start as early as possible in the education system.

Read entire article

I just came across this useful collection of articles on Social Media on Business week – ‘An executive guide to social media’

link…

The videos are embedded in the government’s party website www.fiannafail.ie  and are embedded YouTube videos, which of course means that they  can be seen and commented upon on YouTube. The website has recently been redesigned , apparently by some consultants that worked on the Obama website, and indeed it does look very derivative of Obama’s campaign website.

This morning several commentators in the media have been critical of the move , arguing that the Taoiseach is saying nothing new in these videos and is merely using YouTube as an additional mechanism for the delivery of the party line.

And this may be true.

However what will be interesting, will be to see the comments left by the public on the videos, and  the interactions between members of the public using YouTube video comments.

And it is this point that most of the media commentators are missing – Fianna Fail may be using YouTube as an additional channel, but unlike traditional TV and radio outlets, YouTube is a two way channel and members of the public are empowered to respond to Cowen using the comment facility, this is a key difference..

Here Cowen discusses the Irish economy

It would have been very progressive for Fianna Fail and the Government to include video comments on their own website or even more so to include a forum where people could discuss and debate issues, thereby Fianna Fail could harness and be aware of the  collective views of the public allowing the government to interact with a large group of people on a meaningful level.  This interaction would also naturally be very transparent and would therefore also increase trust in the government.

Anyway.. hopefully they will leave comments open on YouTube and we will see some debate start to develop around the government’s plans.

UPDATE – FALSE ALARM

I just tried to post a supportive comment on the Fianna Fail you tube video, praising them for allowing feedback when I discovered comments are disabled for these videos.. so apologies to the other media commentators this morning, this is not at all progressive and is just more of the same…. there will always be lamers and flamers and abusive posts, but the government HAS to open itself up to this two way  communication or it will lose all trust and credibility..

From the website:

The Ideas Campaign is about asking people for ideas to stimulate economic activity. It is challenging people in Ireland to be innovative and creative and to play their part in planning this country’s economic recovery.
We’re looking for ideas to:

•    Preserve and grow employment
•    Stimulate activity across key areas of the economy
•    Make it easier to do business in Ireland

Our campaign motto is simple – no whinging. The Ideas Campaign wants people to be positive, to think about the solutions and not the problems. We want people to draw from their own experiences to identify how Ireland can emerge from this recession and, particularly, compete on the world stage and earn export revenues.

I submitted a single idea to the website late yesterday afternoon with a simple suggestion.

Let others see and comment on the ideas being submitted to the website.

I am not sure if Aileen or her team were planning on revealing some of the ideas on the site anyway or whether my suggestion led to the publication yesterday evening of summaries of some selected submissions.

Some commentators are hailing the ideas campaign website as  ‘embracing social media’  which patently it is not.

In fact the very functionality of the site highlights an apparent misunderstanding of what social media is, and it misses a fantastic opportunity to provide a really worthwhile forum for interested parties to both submit ideas and suggestions for Ireland’s economic recovery, and also through this  forum, to see those same ideas challenged and debated and refined into better ideas…

…or else to see some ideas rejected , for reasons that other fellow participants  with different information or experiences may highlight.

The website explains that the best ideas as selected by an unnamed Advisory Group will be forwarded to government;

We have set up a small Advisory Group and invited a number of leading figures to participate. They bring a wealth of experience from the worlds of business, academia, economics and the public sector. The members of this group will be announced soon.This group will advise on the ideas we receive and how best to structure and present them in an action plan for government.

Again, whilst I admit the participation and guidance of experts and professionals is a good thing, I think that perhaps ‘the crowd’ should also have a voice in the selection of and refinement of some of these ideas. There are some excellent examples of large amounts of useful and intelligent debate on many subjects taking place on websites such as Boards.ie and Askaboutmoney.com, both of which use ‘forum’ type software to enable this ‘many to many’ debate.

I also feel that the use by the Ideas Campaign of social media such as Facebook is a little ill-conceived, as it is necessary to become ‘ a friend’ of the entity  ‘Ideas Campaign’ before you can contribute anything or communicate with anyone via Facebook,  becoming a friend on Facebook means opening up all of your privacy settings and private information (normally shared with your friends) to someone (or some group of people) that you do not know.

Instead it would be more appropriate to create a Facebook ‘Page’   where anyone can join by becoming ‘a fan’ and thus post and comment to the group or else to create a Facebook Group where again, Facebook members can join the group and comment on group forums.

Here is an interesting post by Tim Davies  on the choice between using Facebook Pages and Facebook Groups for Social Participation.

Twitter is also being used by the campaign semingly as a vehicle for releasing 140 character ‘press releases’ about the website, instead of offering an additional channel for debate and contributions.

Linked In is being utilised by IdeasCampaign as an ‘individual’ LinkedIn user, where again I feel it would be more useful to create a Linked In ‘group’    that individuals could join and use to connect and communicate directly instead of having to communicate through the ‘Ideas Campaign’ user.

I do not intend to be overly critical about these things, (and indeed I would be happy to assist with the campaign if my assistance was wanted) I merely hope that as there are 19 days remaining until the ideas campaign officially closes, and that as the campaign, through Aileen’s hard work and effort now has such a high profile, that Aileen and her team might decide to open up the debate a little and allow some greater transparency and participation, two things that have been missing in the public sphere in Ireland for quite some time..

Web 2.0 and Human Resource Management: ‘Groundswell’ or hype?, which aims to inform on the latest thinking as well as outline good practice strategy development for the so-called V(irtual) Generation, suggests that the potential benefits of this technology are being overlooked because of fears about employee misbehaviour and a reluctance to lose control over its use. By failing to take advantage, however, it warns that HR will lose out on the possibility of playing an important role in guiding Web 2.0’s adoption to improve business performance.

More details on how Web 2.0 can help drive organisational performance will be discussed in an interactive session at the CIPD’s annual HRD conference on Wednesday 22nd of  April at ExCel, London

www.cipd.co.uk

Here is an excerpt from the foreword by Robert Ainger, Corporate Director, Orange Business

One of the key findings within this research is the tension that distinctions between purely personal and professional life are becoming increasingly blurred and that this is particularly the case with younger employees. The report identifies the rise of the ‘network citizen’ who relies more on their network for career opportunities than on their employers. This new dimension adds an extra level of complexity for businesses trying to recruit and
retain the best employees while also managing their reputation and intellectual capital.In fact, this report identifies both the ups and the downs of
networking. It challenges the concept that networking will only engender creativity, innovation and freedom while reducing costs by highlighting a potential ‘dark-side’. Networks blur the boundaries between formal hierarchies and informal structures in a company, and between our personal and professional lives.
Networks can create a tension between employees and employers where traditional ideas of loyalty or ownership of ideas and contacts become difficult. Networking can be exclusive and the rise in online networking may exacerbate it. ‘It’s not what you know but who you know’ may be an age-old adage: should business success today be based on contacts made through networking or purely on merit? In the current economic climate, it might be easy to ignore networking as something to concentrate on when there’s more time for lighter, less business-critical activities. The report points out that the value of networking within an economic downturn is perhaps more important than ever and I believe it could, in fact, mean the difference between a business collapsing or capitalising on the tricky conditions.

http://www.demos.co.uk/publications/networkcitizens

All of the presentations were very interesting and will all be online shortly. I will update you on their availability and provide a full report on the event in a subsequent post as soon as the remaining presentations go online.

In the meantime here is the presentation I gave on
‘Working with Web 2.0 (Social Software in the Workplace)’

View fullscreen

Businesses should exploit their employees’ knowledge of web 2.0 in order to fully take advantage of the tech, according to analysts.

With more consumers than ever involved with social networking, user-generated content and cloud-based apps, businesses should be using their employees’ web 2.0 skills to make the workforce more productive, a report from the Butler Group has found.

Richard Edwards, information management practice director at Butler Group, told silicon.com: “[We] have this other life outside of work in which we’re interacting with [other people] and we’re sort of bringing those ideas into the workplace.”

He added: “[Businesses] need to recognise what’s actually happening – what are those changes – and examine the possibility of utilising some of this to bring about positive change within the business.”

But in order to get the best out of web 2.0-savvy staff, bosses will need to listen to their workers. “No one can argue that getting employees to contribute more of their wisdom and know-how for the good of the organisation is a positive thing,” he said.

The Butler Group report adds that businesses risk losing out if they fail to formalise the use of web 2.0 within the organisation.

Read article..

Government 2.0 Symposium in the IRM Government Center in Second Life

The Panelists were

• David Wennergren, Deputy DOD Chief Information Officer (Moderator)
• Bruce Klein, Director of Public Sector Group, Cisco
• Anthony Williams, VP New Paradigm and co-author of Wikinomics
• Mike Bradshaw, Director, Enterprise Federal, Google

The kenote speech was given by David Weinberger, Weinberger is a U.S. technologist, writer, and
Web 2.0 guru. He is the co-author of the “Cluetrain Manifesto”.

The Seminar took place in Washington DC, but through the wonders of technology I was able to attend the symposium at the IRMC Government Center in Second Life.. Second Life participants could view a video feed, chat and interact with each other and could also submit questions to the panelists.

The presentations started with a showing of Shift Happens (watch it if you haven’t already..)

Shift Happens

The presentations will all be available on the IRMC website shortly.Overall, some fascinating presentations, the event was attended by representatives of over 30 US universities, over 15 government agencies, and personnel from NASA and the Library  of Congress and many more.
David Weinberger’s speech was a little marred for Second Life attendees as his lapel mike was malfunctioning and it was a little difficult to hear everything he was saying but essentially he outlined how for big organisations, change is hard, but then in time, a big ‘shift happens’ and that this shift provides a ‘moment of opportunity’ where change is made easier for organisations if they can only surf the wave of enthusiasm and excitement that is  felt by the public during these shifts, and that government organisations internationally currently have this opportunity..

Anthony Williams (author of Wikinomics)  spoke about rethinking public services and urged government  organisations to open channels for feedback, engagement and collaboration , he gave the examples of ChicagoCrime.org   and Fix MyStreet

Williams also discussed the problems that exist around the ‘complex machinery of government’ arguing that there are too many levels in government, and too many agencies, and explained that this was no one’s fault having grown organically over the centuries, but that  now ‘knowledge must flow horizontally’ as an example of this new type of structure he outlined the Intellipedia project,
Another key issue for Williams was that of restoring trust in democracy, in his view democracy internationally has suffered in recent years, the ‘broadcast’ model of politics is dead, he said. It is time to invite participation and to rethink the division of labour, harnessing mass collaboration to engage people in the creation of a better society. ‘ It is important to remember’, he highlighted, ‘that Web 2.0 (and Government 2.0) is not about technology, it is about connecting PEOPLE’.

Next up was Bruce Klein of Cisco who also outlined his view that Web 2.0 is not about technology but rather it is about ‘culture’ and ‘process’ he also spoke of the urgent need to move towards  collaborative and teamwork based organisations. In his opinion the biggest issues are the leadership and the organisational culture. The leaders need to be willing to change and to adapt to these new structures.  He explained how in Cisco the  leaders who couldn’t ‘get this’ were invited to choose another role..
Last up was Mike Bradshaw, Google’s Director for Government Services, who also spoke extensively about Generation Y / The Net-Gen and the difficulties in attracting them to work in government agencies and the need to open up the enterprise to these new social tools..
The Presentations will be available here.. they are well worth watching,  very focused on a collaborative future, and delivered with a real sense of urgency…