From OpenSource.com

What problems can we solve? How would it affect the way we learn? Work? Run our governments?

We want to shine a light on the places where the open source way is multiplying ideas and effort, even beyond technology. We believe that opensource.com will be a gathering place for many of the open source stories we’d like to share–through articles, audio, web presentations, video, or open discussion.

The term open source began as a way to describe software source code and the collaborative model for how it’s developed. Red Hat used this model for developing technology and built a business model around open source and its principles: Openness. Transparency. Collaboration. Diversity. Rapid prototyping.

The open source way is more than a development model; it defines the characteristics of a culture. Red Hat and other open source thought leaders want to show you where open source is headed next. Tell you how to get involved. Help you apply it to your life and the world around you.

The open source way is about possibility.

Open source presents a new way to solve old problems. To share ideas and effort.

The open source way opens doors.

Open source offers a new perspective. Open, not closed. Collaboration, not isolation.

The open source way multiplies.

Knowledge. Effort. Inspiration. Creativity. Innovation. The impact is exponential.

And it’s already happening:

CHANGING OUR SOCIETY…

The open source way thrives on broad collaboration and shared effort. Wikipedia is one of the world’s most extensive collections of information. Its rapid, exponential growth arose from a very different model and philosophy from the traditional encyclopedia. Anyone can contribute, and entries are subject to peer review.

CHANGING HOW WE WORK…

Two key characteristics of the open source way are transparency and accountability. With natural and organic foods market Whole Foods, they pass accountability to the employees that can most directly impact their individual areas throughout each store. Wages, staffing decisions, even choosing what items to stock–these activities are all done in the open.

CHANGING OUR GOVERNMENT…

US President Barack Obama came to office with the promise of change. His campaign encouraged participation, and his administration has pledged to create a new environment of openness and participation in government.

CHANGING HOW WE LEARN…

Education is all about an exchange of knowledge. MIT took the lead in sharing knowledge and chose to try and change the world in the process. They make the materials used in the teaching of almost all of its undergraduate and graduate subjects available on the web, free of charge, to any user in the world. With nearly 1,800 courses available, MIT OpenCourseWare is delivering on the promise of open sharing of knowledge.

visit site..

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
 

The Interview is online as part of Krishna’s hour long podcast at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/PodcampIreland

You can also download an MP3 version of the interview, which is excerpted from the podcast, the interview runs approximately 20 minutes.

In the interview we discuss the recent Kilkenny County Council planning wiki project.

Is running a one day seminar in Dublin on 24th October.

The Speakers are David Osimo, Dr Paul Hodgkin, Dr James Munro, Derek Chambers ,Kieran Lenihan and myself.

Further details and the agenda are listed below.

This seminar seeks to:
• Give participants a clearer understanding of the Web 2.0 concept and its dramatic effect on online activity.
• Examine how the associated technologies are influencing the way in which public services are being delivered.
• Look at the technical and organisational opportunities and challenges that Web 2.0 applications present for public sector organisations
• Draw attention to practical ways that the new technologies have been applied in an Irish public sector context.

Agenda

24 October 2008 at the Institute of Public Administration

Seminar Schedule
9.00
Registration

9.30
Welcome and Overview
Kieran Lenihan
Specialist in Service Delivery and Information Technology
Institute of Public Administration

10.00
Towards meaningful citizen participation in government: Role of Web 2.0
David Osimo
David worked until July 2008 in the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, where he coordinated research activities on e-government. He is author of the JRC report Web2.0 in Government: Why and How? (2008). Previously, he worked as advisor and project manager on innovation and information society policies in Milan, Brussels and Bologna. His current interests cover the impact of new technologies on future public services and more generally the role of government in the innovation system. He now works as an independent consultant.

10.50
Tea/Coffee

11.20
Implications of Web 2.0 for public service delivery
David Osimo

12.10
Case Study 1 -www.patientopinion.org.uk
Dr Paul Hodgkin, CEO Patient Opinion
A GP for 25 years in Sheffield, Paul is still practising. In the 90’s he co founded the Centre for Innovation in Primary Care in the UK and is a graduated of the Young Foundation for Social Entrepreneurs and is passionate about the developing role of social enterprises in solving the pressing problems of 21st century
Dr James Munro, Director of Informatics and Research James has a background in clinical medicine, public health and health research. Before joining Patient Opinion, he was director of health service research at Sheffield University school of Health and Related Research. For 20 years he was editor of Healthmatters, an independent magazine on healthcare and public health policy

13.00
Lunch

14.00
Working with Web 2.0 Technologies -The Challenges
Mark O Toole, IS Project Leader,
Kilkenny County Council
Mark is Editor of Rialtas.net (Government 2.0) and keenly interested in the potential for use of Web 2.0 technologies in providing government services. He has recently completed a Masters of Science at DCU focusing on Knowledge Management and Web 2.0 Technologies

15.00
Case Study 2 – Ireland www.bebo.com/yourmentalhealth
Derek Chambers
‘Your Mental Health’ Campaign Manager,
HSE National Office for Suicide Prevention
Derek (MA Sociology) has been working in the health sector for nearly ten years, primarily in the area of mental health. He is currently the Senior Research Officer and Deputy Head of the National Office for Suicide Prevention (NOSP) of the Health Service Executive. He was the project manager and main author of Reach Out, the national suicide prevention strategy (2005). More recently (2007) Derek managed the Your Mental Health national public awareness campaign which featured television, radio and outdoor advertising supported by a dedicated campaign website and a social networking platform on Bebo. His main interests include the development of public health approaches to suicide prevention.

15.45
Discussion/Questions
16.10
End

Download Brochure and application form (630 KB .pdf)

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.

(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/

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/

 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

We would also like to keep the new co-ordinates in a specific database table rather than in the general wiki article. There is a modification of Evan Miller’s extension here that seems to address this , I will implement and test this on our Intranet tomorrow.

I also demonstrated some ‘tag cloud‘ images to the plan’s authors showing the top 100 words used in a previous plan and they really liked the visualisation and hope to inlcude something similar for the new plan on the wiki , in addition to perhaps using it on the cover of the printed plan. As we get a little more advanced in this process I will put up some screenshots and additional information.

I have also been in contact with the New Zealand Policing staff responsible for their own public wiki and have received some useful guidelines from them around moderation and configuration etc. They used PM wiki for their project.