Gordon Brown (talking at TED)  on global society, and how technology enables a global community to fundamentally change the world..he discusses how in future foreign policy should not be dictated by political elites, but instead should be run through listening to the public opinions of people who are blogging and using other online technologies to communicate across the world..he discusses combining the power of a global ethic  with the power of our ability to communicate and organise globally, with the challenges we now face, most of which are global in their nature, Brown gives the example of  climate change which  can not be solved in one country, nor can the financial crisis or terrorism…

The great project of our generation according to Brown , is to build for the first time out of a global ethic and out of our global ability to communicate and organise together, a truly global society, built on that ethic, but with institutions which can serve that global society and thus  make for a different future.

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..

Al Gore addressed the San Francisco audience at the Web 2.0 Summit with an urgent appeal to assign a purpose to Web 2.0 tools. His address focussed on three themes:

* the democracy crisis: television has removed the democratic view of truth, and interactive Web TV – (Current tv) has the potential to restore it.
* the economic crisis: how to stimulate the economy by undertaking a 10 year project to transform the economy with a national infrastructure project aimed at eliminated America’s dependance on foreign oil by focusting on 100 % renewable and “0 carbon” power sources
* the climate crisis: how to as Gore said, “use Web 2.0 for organizing an imminent rescue of the earth’s climate balance which is now in great jeopardy”

Gore began by addressing Web 2 Summit Attendees, “The election of Barrack Obama would not have been possible without you, the empowerment of individuals to use knowledge as a source of power that has come with Internet.” Gore was referring to the proliferation of blogs and social commentary including the interactivity or user-generated content, social networking and new collaborative projects like Current.tv ‘s interactive projects with Digg.com and Twitter.com to “Hack the Debates” and provide interactive election night coverage on cable TV and the Web.

Web 2.0 has given us all kinds of power to do “gee-wiz” and “wiz-bang” stuff but according to Gore, Web 2.0 is largely operating without a clear purpose. His presentation was a call to the social media community to use Web 2.0 tools to restore democracy and take on global challenges.

 Read full post

See also one of my earlier posts on Dail and Seanad Eireann Webcasts-  Just add Twitter..

See also an earlier post on Mark’s PhD Disseration on  Stigmergic Collaboration

http://www.rialtas.net/blog/2008/02/21/stigmergic-collaboration/#more-63

See also

http://www.rialtas.net/blog/2008/07/31/kilkenny-county-council-planning-wiki-first-use-of-a-wiki-by-a-government-organisation-in-ireland-as-part-of-a-public-consultative-process/#more-106
 

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…

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.

Apologies for the hiatus, I have been completing my  MSC dissertation (on Web 2.0 and Knowledge Management) but I’m back on the air..

I see the UK Civil Service have published some ‘Principles for online Participation’

Here also is a common craft video explaining Social Media in plain english.. its very good… (thanks to Steve Dale for highlighting it..)

The Joint Committee on Broadcasting and Parliamentary Information has arranged Webcasting of Dáil Éireann and Seanad Éireann. Live and archive Webcasting may only be viewed in accordance with the Rules of Coverage.

The Webcast Windows Media Player service is available on the Internet, and on educational and research networks, provided in association with HEAnet. The IPTV Web MPEG2 service is available on the Internet, where service providers permit multicast IP, also provided in association with HEAnet. The IPTV Gov MPEG4 service is available to Government Departments, Offices and agencies on the Government Networks, provided in association with the Department of Finance. The RF cable service is available in Leinster House and nearby Government buildings, provided in association with the Office of Public Works.

Would it be an interesting enhancement if there was an opportunity for members of the public to submit questions or to participate Live in some of these sessions? Perhaps even the facilitation of a public ‘back channel’ using Twitter or similar as is becoming so prevalent at many conferences and seminars today (or perhaps require user registration and do it on a subsidiary website)? This would allow members of the public to engage with each other on the issues being discussed rather than interacting directly with the speakers, and perhaps the TDs and Senators could be given the backchannel transcript at the end of the session for their own reference? This could represent another step toward true e-democracy.

The Dáil and Seanad Webcasting service commenced on Tuesday 11 October 2005.

Link

‘EUtube’, the European Commission’s new channel on YouTube, was officially launched on 29 June 2007. By offering an additional way of communicating Europe to its citizens, EUtube indicates that some of the European Institutions are starting to keep pace with some of the newer developments on the web. EUtube is another example of the use of the ‘Web 2.0’ communication technologies at EU policy level.

YouTube is a popular video-sharing website where users can upload, view, share, and rate video clips. Both the average ratings and the number of viewings are made public. As such, YouTube is a typical ‘Web 2.0’ communication IT tool, allowing viewers not only to receive information but also to publicly comment it, react and confront points of view. About 50 % of YouTube users are under 20 years old.

Following the conclusion of a non-exclusive arrangement between the EU Commission and YouTube, the EUtube channel now offers approximately 50 video clips on a wide range of topics that explain EU workings on main issues from across the 27 Member States. Topics covered by EUtube stretch from the EU’s first post-war historical steps to current environment concerns or even the EU’s ‘Help!’ campaign against smoking.

As for the regular YouTube contents, EUtube users can post comments and rate the video clips. At present, there is content in English, French and German with plans to add more languages wherever possible.

In presenting the main reasons for setting-up the channel, Commission spokesman Mikolaj Dowgielewicz stated: “We have audiovisual material on our own website…but people don’t know it exists… It’s part of our strategy to use the tools that people use,” he added.

This is not the first of the EU’s moves towards ‘Web 2.0’ communication technologies. Already implemented is the practice of blogging, which was adopted by several EU Commissioners.

http://www.youtube.com/eutube 

For over a decade UK government has been busy moving online. This has made some progress, for example in driver and vehicle licensing, but is yet to take off in terms of usage in the way of some spectacular contemporary Internet examples like Facebook and iTunes.

Is this inevitable? Are there good reasons why government and public services do not engage people in the way music, shopping and social networking do? Or is government not yet going about this in the right way, and does the success of the contemporary Internet have important lessons for the design of public services and public engagement? How can we improve value for money, and achieve higher returns on investment, better services and improved operational efficiency? How can the government build public trust and protect privacy?

Over 10 hours of video presentations and panel discussions are available for viewing or download here:

http://webcast.oii.ox.ac.uk/?view=Webcast&ID=20080125_209

Speakers:

* Dr Ian Brown (Oxford Internet Institute)
* Professor David Cope (Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, POST)
* Professor Jim Norton (Institute of Directors)
* Martyn Thomas (Visiting Professor, Oxford University Computing Laboratory)
* Professor Ross Anderson (Cambridge University Computer Laboratory)
* Alun Michael, MP
* Jerry Fishenden (Microsoft)
* William Heath (Ideal Government)
* Tom Steinberg (mySociety)
* Simon Davies (LSE)
* The Earl of Erroll (House of Lords)

http://webcast.oii.ox.ac.uk/?view=Webcast&ID=20080125_209