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Posts Tagged ‘collaboration’

Yet Another Open Government Brainstorm Update

Posted in government, Web 2.0, tagged , , , on 4 June 2009 |

Things very multiball for me lately, so here’s just one further thought about the Open Government Brainstorm.

The brainstorm phase of the US consultation on open government closed on June 3. However, the folks managing the process decided to leave the site open to further contributions. But the site has now been overwhelmed with irrelevant and off-topic contributions — conspiracy theories about Obama’s birth certificate, pleas to legalize marijuana, and so on. Yet during the official brainstorming period, site contributors remained more or less focussed on the task at hand — ideas on how to make government more transparent, collaborative and participatory.

My take-away? When a consultation is over, it’s over. The site should have been closed to further contributions on June 3.

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US Open Government Consultations — Update

Posted in government, Web 2.0, tagged , , , , on 26 May 2009 |

Update on the online consultations on open gov happening in the US, mentioned in my last post.

With a little more than one day to go, 590 ideas have been submitted, nearly 1000 comments have been posted, and over 20,000 votes have been cast.

To see the full list, ranked by vote, click through  to the Open Government Brainstorm – by IdeaScale.

The choice of using a third party site to host the consult is interesting — shows  a willingness to use what’s out there, rather than re-inventing the wheel.

And based on the branding of the consultation site, the management of the consult appears to be by an arm’s length think tank (the National Academy of Public Administration). To my mind this enhances the validity of the process — shows that the White House is letting the professionals manage the consultation process. (Or to be less charitable, doing it this way at least puts some distance between the administration and the consultation process. Which can mitigate the usual concerns about “government meddling” in this as it unfolds.)

In terms of the actual brainstorm, many of the ideas that have been proposed are vague and sweeping. That’s to be expected, so it will be interesting to watch how this unfolds in the second step in the consult, when “the most compelling ideas from the brainstorming will be fleshed out on a weblog in a discussion phase.” Presumably the most compelling ideas are those that got voted up to the top.

Another interesting angle on this consult is that it’s open worldwide (as long you as you can participate in English), even though it is specifically about ways to improve the US government. What’s more, the consult was initially set up to allow anonymous contributions, although that was quickly changed:

Please note: On Saturday morning, we made a small change to this site. Posting, commenting and voting on ideas now requires users to log in. This change was made in response to concerns that settings that allowed anonymous posting may also have allowed users to vote more than once on the same idea. Our moderation policy can be accessed here.

(I see this change as a recognition of the limitations of current technologies to prevent voting up/down from being gamed, rather than an admission that allowing anonymous contributions is  an invalid approach.)

I find the worldwide/anonymous angle interesting as a more conventional decision would have been to limit input to American citizens, since the consult is about their how their government works. However, opening up the consultation to a worldwide audience shows a recognition that the best ideas about how to improve government transparency, participation and collaboration could come from anywhere–so why limit your options?

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US Open Government Initiative: Watch This Space

Posted in government, tagged , , , , on 21 May 2009 | 1 Comment »

On taking office back in January, one of the first actions of the Obama administration was to issue an “open government directive,” aimed at pushing the US government toward becoming transparent, participatory and collaborative.

The directive called for a set of recommendations for achieving “open gov” to be issued within 120 days. The deadline for this was today.

There doesn’t seem to be a set of recommendations that I can find. Instead, the public is being invited to co-create a set of recommendations. Go to http://www.whitehouse.gov/open to see.

Today we are kicking off an unprecedented process for public engagement in policymaking on the White House website. In a sea change from conventional practice, we are not asking for comments on an already-finished set of draft recommendations, but are seeking fresh ideas from you early in the process of creating recommendations. We will carefully consider your comments, suggestions, and proposals.

Here’s how the public engagement process will work. It will take place in 3 phases: Brainstorming, Discussion, and Drafting.

Beginning today, we will have a brainstorming session for suggesting ideas for the open government recommendations. You can vote on suggested ideas or add your own.

Then on June 3rd, the most compelling ideas from the brainstorming will be fleshed out on a weblog in a discussion phase. On June 15th, we will invite you to use a wiki to draft recommendations in collaborative fashion.

These three phases will build upon one another and inform the crafting of recommendations on open government.

This will definitely be worth watching — and serve as a model for those curious about how governments can undertake online consultations.

Update: just hopped over to http://opengov.ideascale.com/ – this is where the actual brainstorming phase of this consultation is taking place – as of 3.25 pm EDT, there are already 18 proposed recommendations that have been voted on 206 times. Not bad for the first hour that this has been live.

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GCpedia Update

Posted in bureaucracy, collaboration, government, social media, Web 2.0, wikis, tagged , , , , , , on 7 February 2009 | 3 Comments »

GC pedia computer screen

Memorable tweet from @krusk:

krusk Secret confession: I don’t like Wikis. I like the *idea* of them, I just don’t like using them at all. 11:38 AM Jan 30th from web

I can identify with this sensation. And I gather I’m not alone. The GoC has recently seen the launch of a government-wide wiki — GCpedia (sorry if you are reading this from home, it’s hidden away behind the government firewall) — and I’ve heard from a few people that they’re having some growing pains – such as a lack of gnomes to keep things neat and tidy, and frustrations at the learning curve from a user base that’s unfamiliar with actually *using* the platform. I wondered about the choice of MediaWiki to power GCpedia, what with it’s lack of WYSIWYG editing capability, and I’ve heard folks complain about that angle also. (Great that MediaWiki is open source though.)

These issues I see as symptoms resulting from a deeper underlying cause: to fully integrate wikis into our work processes, we’ll have to change them. Wikis are about spontaneous group collaboration, and the bureaucratic culture of the GoC  is not.

While unstructured, informal collaboration might be ingrained at the team level (think: calling to your colleagues over the cubicle divider), getting collaboration between teams is much harder, and tends to require formal structure. The habits for this are well-ingrained — one person “holds the pen” on meeting agendas and minutes, everything (not just key decisions) needs approval by executives, and edits and changes are often still made on paper(!). Not  exactly conducive to wiki collaboration.

Still, it’s early days, and there are some key wiki champions in senior positions in government, which helps to push things forward. For example, there’s Jeff Braybrook, Deputy CTO at TBS (trust me it’s senior) and a driving force behind the development of GCpedia. Jeff spoke at the most recent Third Tuesday Ottawa event (which I missed due to a blazing, blinding headache. bummer).

Anyhow, I was able to pick up @thornley’s live tweets for the event, and here’s my faves. Looks like Jeff is aware of the challenges and has a good sense of which direction to head with GCpedia.

thornley Jeff Braybrook: Gov’t of Canada began GCPedia as a platform to explore web2 behind thefirewall & sort out the issues thru experience #TTO 6:38 PM Feb 2nd from TweetDeck

thornley Jeff Braybrook With the GCPedia Wiki. “Everybody can see what everybody is thinking.” You can watch the ideas of the group evolve #TTO 6:40 PM Feb 2nd from TweetDeck

thornley Jeff Braybrook says the adoption of social media by government of Canada will require the transformation of the gov’ts work processes #TTO 6:54 PM Feb 2nd from TweetDeck

thornley Jeff Braybrook The next step is for gov’t to figure out new processes to collaborate using social media #TTO 7:04 PM Feb 2nd from TweetDeck

thornley Jeff Braybrook : The technical barriers to using social software are low. We must help people know how to use it for different purposes #TTO 7:26 PM Feb 2nd from TweetDeck

thornley Jeff Braybrook In 5 years, GCPedia & social media in gov’t will be invisible – totally integrated in a natural way #TTO 7:47 PM Feb 2nd from TweetDeck

(photo credit: Web 2.0 – MediaWiki, by m.gifford on Flickr)

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Goverati vs Carpetbaggers

Posted in bureaucracy, government, Web 2.0, tagged , , , , , , , , on 5 February 2009 | 2 Comments »

What with Obama-dot-prez taking power, and the excitement around the transition from change.gov to whitehouse.gov, followed quickly by the appearance of this executive order mandating increased government transparency and citizen participation in the Obama administration, lots of talk about 2.0 stuff in and around govt south of the border.

Key bit for me in the “Transparency and Open Government” memo:

I direct the Chief Technology Officer, in coordination with the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Administrator of General Services, to coordinate the development by appropriate executive departments and agencies, within 120 days, of recommendations for an Open Government Directive, to be issued by the Director of OMB, that instructs executive departments and agencies to take specific actions implementing the principles set forth in this memorandum. The independent agencies should comply with the Open Government Directive.

Hmmm, my spidey senses are tingling… Now I don’t know a lot about how the US government operates specifically, but when I read about coordinating the development of recommendations for  “specific actions” for implementation of the Presidential memo, I can envisage bags of money being spent on building stuff, whether or not it is needed or useful. But which agency heads can point to as evidence that they are  meeting these objectives. (And of course, there’s the endless stream of strategy docs, breifing notes and business cases that justify the spend.)

This kind of situation usually means opportunities galore for consultants ….

In the best case scenario, there is an opportunity here for the ascendance of a new digitally-enabled class of government worker, supported by able and connected outside experts, to push Obama’s government 2.0 agenda forward. These are collectively dubbed the “Goverati” by Government 2.0 insider Mark Drapeau. Sounds very nice — Will it play out?

Or will the day be carried by what Geoff Livingston recently labelled government 2.0 carpetbaggers? And as Aaron Brazell added, “If You’re a Government 2.0 Guru, You have no Business in Government 2.0:”

They [these gurus] have appeared on the scene in recent months, read the blogs and brushed up on their government-fu. They probably come from traditional, and sometimes social media communications backgrounds. They have been working with small companies in the web space or otherwise, and expect the principles which have governed their trade to transcend the halls of Commerce, Agriculture, State and Defense. Therefore, they believe, they are experts.

Yikes!

Don’t get me wrong, I love the principles of transparency, collaboration and participation. It’d be nice to see the “Goverati” ideal play out. But I’ve seen how business gets done in the bureaucracy, too.  Yup, those spidey senses are tingling, alright.

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Wikis vs Email for Version Control

Posted in collaboration, wikis, tagged , , , , , on 7 July 2008 | 2 Comments »

I was struggling to explain to a colleague a little while back about how wikis could be a fantastic way to streamline the process of creating and revising documents in our workplace. How I wish I had known then about this brilliant little infographic:

(Click to see at fullsize. Found via this blog – not sure what language it’s in… German? Dutch?)

What this captures perfectly for me is how wikis can enable version control for your content in a way that is impossible via the usual email-based methods. It’s amazing how simple it is – just by sending everyone to the document rather then sending the document around to everyone, you’ve solved the problem.

This is an issue that has been bedevilling my colleague for a long time – she’s an editor, and so needs to be reassured that she is working on the latest version of whatever it is she is editing. Because all too often, she finds out later that the version of that news release she just spent an hour cleaning up is out-of-date, and so she has to do it all over again.

Not to mention that working via wikis in an editorial setting would allow you to avoid having to deal with the cringe-inducing horror of “track changes.”

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Government as platform vs Government as Web Publisher

Posted in bureaucracy, collaboration, Web 2.0, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on 11 June 2008 | 2 Comments »

Getting at the data

(Image source: Unhindered by Talent on Flickr)

My trusty Google Alerts on all things Govt 2.0 have been feeding me a steady trickle of reaction and reportage on a draft paper from scholars at Princeton which was released last month. In the paper the authors argue that the US federal government should pretty much get out of the business of maintaining websites and simply release the data.

In order for public data to benefit from the same innovation and dynamism that characterize private parties’ use of the Internet, the federal government must reimagine its role as an information provider. Rather than struggling, as it currently does, to design sites that meet each end-user need, it should focus on creating a simple, reliable and publicly accessible infrastructure that “exposes” the underlying data. Private actors, either nonprofit or commercial, are better suited to deliver government information to citizens and can constantly create and reshape the tools individuals use to find and leverage public data. The best way to ensure that the government allows private parties to compete on equal terms in the provision of government data is to require that federal websites themselves use the same open systems for accessing the underlying data as they make available to the public at large.

Typical reaction from the Web 2.0 set is along the lines of:

That’s a compelling vision of the future of open government, and one that makes a lot of sense. The idea is something like CSS — which separates the display code of a web site from the content. A government data platform would separate the content from the task of displaying it, which the commercial and non-profit spaces are likely better suited for than the government itself.

OK, well sure, makes sense that someone who’s got buckets of data that was publicly paid for (like Stats Canada, to take a Canuck example) should be making it freely available for others to use, for mashups or something similar.

This is basically the same argument that Hans Rosling makes with his Gapminder project and in this mind-melting presentation at TED from a couple of years back (presenting macroeconomics data like a sportscaster — wow!). He’s been working specifically with UN data, but the idea is still basically the same.

But to suggest that Govt should get out of the Web business altogether is absurd.

First off, there’s the privacy issue – lots of Govt data is about individual citizens. I’m not sure how well people would take it if their information was being accessed by marketers or advertisers who were able to freely connect to the social insurance database or the passport database. Think of the Facebook vs privacy controversy – and then up the angst by orders of magnitude. So while making some govt data more freely available is a good thing, there’s lots of data that the bureaucracy holds that really no one else should be able to get at. (But this isn’t really a Web publishing issue is it – it’s more about NOT publishing at all.)

More importantly, there are other compelling reasons for the existence of Government Web sites than just to provide a shell for their databases – like, well, gee, how about informing citizens about what Govt is up to? Don’t you want to know how your taxes are being used? Don’t you want to know how the government of the day is responding to issues or dealing with crises?

As a citizen, I’d be pretty miffed if I could no longer go to directly to www.parl.gc.ca to see what’s going on in Parliament. Sure, most of the time it’s a bore, and the really big news gets reported by the media and blogosphere, but I still like the idea that I can go there and see for myself what is happening — without any filter. And plus the protocol stuff is pretty funny.

Or what about getting access to government services – I would rather go to www.canada.gc.ca directly to find out how to apply for government services than have to check with a third party. And if I wanted to check on the status of my tax refund? Again I’m not sure that I’d want to go to a third party to see whether my cheque is in the mail or not (here’s an example where privacy and Web publishing come together).

Basically, framing the issue as an either/or choice doesn’t make a lot of sense for me. There is lots of room for both opening up govt databases for third party use and also to maintain a solid govt web presence.

Other reporting on this can be found here, here, here and here.

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On Expertise and Linking

Posted in books, bureaucracy, tagged , , , on 9 April 2008 | 1 Comment »

Back to reading Cluetrain again. This tidbit – from Weinberger’s “The Hyperlinked Organization” essay – caught my eye:

An expert is someone who contains a lot of information, like a book contains information. In fact, experts are people who can write books. But, with today’s huge increase in the amount of information, you can be an expert only in something sliced so thin that often it’s trivial. Increasingly, a useful expert is not someone with (containing) all the answers but someone who knows where to find answers. The new experts have value not by centralizing information and control but by being great “pointers” to other people and to useful, current information.

i.e. in our current environment, useful experts are like useful links.

Further:

In short, your most valuable employee is likely to be the one who, in response to a question, doesn’t give a concrete answer in a booming voice but who says, “You should talk to Larry. And check Janis’s project plan. Oh, and there’s a mailing list on this topic that I ran into a couple of weeks ago…”

This struck a chord – I’d like to thinking that I’ve been working at being that kind of employee. An aggregator or a conduit who can help others get things done. This takes work though, as it forces me to connect with folks across the Department.

And that doesn’t come easily – there’s still a lot of walls between the various groups in our Department, what with it’s deeply ingrained culture of silos. I find that when trying to reach out and connect to folks beyond the borders of our Comms shop, I can often feel the mistrust in the air. I am willing to bet that this is not unique to my workplace either.

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