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Anthony D. Williams
Anthony Williams, Vice President and Executive Editor at New Paradigm, is co-author with Don Tapscott of WIKINOMICS: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. An avid researcher and writer, Anthony has pursued his interests in the wide-ranging impacts of new technologies on social and economic life for over a decade. His work has been featured in publications such as Business 2.0 and Optimize Magazine, and has been widely circulated in proprietary syndicated research programs. Anthony was previously Research Director with Digital 4Sight and has consulted to Fortune 500 firms and international institutions, including the World Bank. He holds a Masters in Research from the London School of Economics and is a Ph.D. candidate there in the Department of Government.
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May 12th, 2008, 09:54am
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Last week I gave a keynote at Case Western Reserve University, as part of the President’s Symposium on Collaborative Technology and the Future of Education. I’ve posted my slides on slideshare.com and I’m working with the event organizers to make the video of my talk available here on wikinomics.com.
The event was organized by Lev Gonick, Case Western’s CIO and a trailblazer in educational innovation. Check out Lev’s blog for an amazing compendium of breakthrough projects. Among other things, Lev and his team are introducing the use of QR codes across the campus — to the best of my knowledge they are the first North American college or university to do so. According to Lev, “The codes are found everywhere from transit stops, where students can scan them to see when the next bus would arrive, to applications on Facebook and MySpace, to the student newspaper where QVC recently began rolling out its own marketing campaign with Mobile Discovery.”
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March 29th, 2008, 09:59am
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 Earlier in the week I posted Chris Rasmussen’s wonderful depiction of the merits of wiki collaboration. I noted then how a participant at a recent talk I gave at Nokia had pointed out that the happy faces on the left of Chris’s diagram probably ought to be frowning. Chris then alerted me to an updated version of the diagram that reflects the personal and organizational pain that email so often inflicts (click on the thumbnail!)
True to form, the post generated an interesting debate about whether the emailers on the left side of Chris’s diagram should be frowning, or whether they are, in reality, quite content with the status quo:
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March 28th, 2008, 07:20am
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Google Earth has become a platform for revealing atrocities in Dafur, tracking the spread of the avian flu, and analyzing the effect of climate change on sea levels, among dozens of other great applications. Recently the State of Alabama’s Homeland Security department opted to use Google Earth as a platform for emergency management.
The site threads together thousands of pieces of information from across the state - including maps, photos, traffic cameras, current weather and other databases. From fire and police departments responding to emergencies to emergency management agencies assessing damage from natural disasters, Virtual Alabama provides city, county and state officials with near instantaneous access to information ranging from building layouts to fire hydrant locations. Here’s how Alabama describes the possible benefits:
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March 27th, 2008, 03:39pm
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Some time ago I was asked by the U.S. General Services Administration to write an article describing how I envision the role of public sector CIOs. The article has now been published (Role of the Public Sector CIO) along side articles by Karen Evans, John Suffolk, Bill Vajda, Teri Takai, P.K. Agarwal, Jerry Mechling, Ken Cochrane and other influential leaders in government. I highlighted four priorities: infusing web 2.0 principles into government service delivery strategies, wikifying the public sector workplace, providing an infrastructure of large-scale digital engagement, and tackling the thorny issues of security and privacy. If you don’t care to read the entire article, I’ve posted the punchline below:
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March 26th, 2008, 05:42pm
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They say a picture is worth a thousand words and I think this one sums up the power of wiki collaboration better than any 1,000 word essay ever could. The model is courtesy of Chris Rasmussen at US National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. I presented this slide during a talk I gave at Nokia today and someone pointed out that the happy faces on the left probably ought to be frowning — he had a good point.
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March 16th, 2008, 11:35pm
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Last week I gave a speech to a group of leaders from some of the world’s largest non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) including World Vision, Oxfam, CARE, The Nature Conservancy, Red Cross, and others. The group was assembled to assess the possibility of putting together an industry standard for project design, monitoring and evaluation (DM&E) that could increase the transparency and effectiveness of the sector. My role was to provoke debate about what the future of the non-profit sector might look like in five to ten years time given the forces of wikinomics.
View the Slideshare link here.
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March 7th, 2008, 09:39am
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I caught the BBC’s article on email overload this morning. The article points out that two million e-mails are sent every minute in the UK. That is almost three billion each day.
But what is the real cost of this information overload, they ask? Apparently one UK-based firm estimated that dealing with pointless e-mails cost it £39m a year.
Everyone knows it’s a problem. Everyone hates trying to filter through hundreds of emails a day. So what to do?
Lots of organizations are now considering email-free days, as the article points out (and we talked about here). We’ve tried to encourage our clients to adopt social media tools as an alternative to email, but the culture of email is so deeply ingrained that it will take most organizations years to convince their employees to adopt wikis in a bid to thwart occupational spam. So perhaps more draconian measures are warranted.
There was a fairly radical suggestion posed at our Government 2.0 conference in Washington on Wednesday. New Paradigm colleague Nick Bontis suggested a one-cent tax on every email sent. For a variety of reasons, I’m sure its totally unworkable. The financial and political costs of collecting the tax, for example, could very well exceed the revenue it generates. Or would it? The UK government would stand to gain about £3 million in tax revenue every day, which it could redirect to good causes like closing the digital divide and increasing literacy rates.
Anyways, I’d like to hear your proposals for getting out of email jail.
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March 7th, 2008, 07:33am
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Recent data from the presidential primaries in the US suggests that youth participation has risen sharply. In some states the proportion of young people who turned out to vote has tripled and even quadrupled in comparison the primaries in 2000. All told, more than 3 million youth participated in the Super Tuesday primaries and 61% of young people polled said “they will definitely be voting” in the Presidential elections this year.
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February 15th, 2008, 05:20pm
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New Paradigm collaborator and avid Intellipedian Chris Rasmussen has a good article in FedTech magazine imploring governments to adopt a 2.0 strategy. He lays out some pretty simple Wikinomics ground rules for those that are just getting started:
First, you need the “big three”: a wiki, a blog and a social-bookmarking service. You might want to augment these with an instant messaging service and about a gigabyte of free storage space for every user to post content — such as Adobe Portable Document Format files, audio and video — that link to wiki pages and blogs and from socially bookmarked URLs.
Second, you need a plan to start exposing your databases and business functions through Web services to your enterprise — and even the world — to draw upon the widest range of talent possible. Your agency or office can no longer innovate with internal assets alone.
It will help to keep this quote from Henry Ford in the back of your mind while moving forward with all of this: “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they would’ve said a faster horse.” Take it to the next level.
Rasmussen raises another good point: government agencies should reinvent their service portals as hubs for user-generated content and citizen engagement. That’s something I have a lot more to say about, but I will save it for some other time when it’s not late on a Friday afternoon.Incidentally, I also have an article in FedTech on government and the Net Generation. You can read that here.
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February 15th, 2008, 04:17pm
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Wikinomics was published with 11 chapters, but only the first ten chapters had been written. Chapter 11 – the Wikinomics Playbook – was a blank slate with an open invitation for the world to help us write a suiting conclusion on wikinomics.com.
Over the course of 2007 something remarkable happened. A community of readers and experts formed and took on a life of its own. Thanks to a great deal of diligent “wiki gardening,” the community crafted a compelling and insightful guide to embedding wikinomics concepts and principles in 21st century organizations and business enterprises. Personally, I think it’s an amazing accomplishment given that the Playbook covers so many topics ranging from wiki adoption strategies to leadership in a “wiki organization” to mass collaboration in politics.
Hundreds of individuals generously volunteered their valuable time and ideas to the Playbook and we are grateful to everyone who took this journey with us. However, twenty six contributors deserve special mention for the hard work and creativity they put into writing this chapter. They are: Ron Long, Michael Laine, Max Ugaz, Kartik Ariyur, Al Safrata, Franciel Azpurua-Linares, Mark Temple-Raston, Gabriel Draven, Michael Pilling, Bob Iliff, Kartik Ariyur, Kate Raynes-Goldie, Joost Bekel, Jeff DeChambeau, Steven Streight, Alex Todd, Critt Jarvis, Neal Locke, Ryan Riley, Todd Dunn, Martin Cleaver, Bert Murray, Franciel Azpurua-Linares, Brendan Long, and Peter Haine.
So, while you can now download and enjoy version 1.0 of the Wikinomics Playbook, the opportunity to continue the dialogue is by no means over. We’d still like to hear your stories about how Wikinomics is changing your organization or sector. May this be the one of many wiki-books to come!
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January 28th, 2008, 05:47pm
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President Bush recently called for the US administration to dramatically curtail earmarks (essentially pet spending projects that members of Congress insert into the federal budget), saying he will veto any appropriations bills that don’t cut the number of earmarks in half when they come to him during the remainder of his days in the White House.
The Washington Posts reports that the budget officials at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) knew at the time that the White House would need an earmark tally if they were to measure progress toward the president’s goal. But rather than proceed in the usual fashion, the OMB launched a wiki and invited employees from across the government to pitch in.
With the wiki, federal agencies compiled a database of 13,496 earmarks in 10 weeks. In the old days, it would have taken six months to get the information to the OMB.
The budget wiki is not as freewheeling as Wikipedia, the sometimes-controversial online encyclopedia. It is the government, after all. For security, federal officials have to ask permission to join; it is not open to the public or Congress. . .
It has 5,500 members and is growing by hundreds each month. A number of federal agencies are creating their own pages on the wiki, taking advantage of its automated tools and services that can perform multiple budget scenarios and analyze data.
I admire the OMB’s efforts — the project demonstrates how wiki-based collaboration can boost the efficiency and effectiveness of government. I can also appreciate the reasons why the OMB decided to restrict access to federal employees. At the same time, the decision to restrict access raises some bigger questions about the role of the citizenry in governing and whether the administration’s vision for Government 2.0 is as bold and ambitious as it might be.
Citizens can already view earmark data on Many Eyes thanks to the Sunlight Foundation and some clever visualization technology provided by IBM Alphaworks. So why not ask the public which half of the 13,496 earmarks they would like to see vanish from the federal budget? People are out there discussing this stuff anyways — shouldn’t the government open up the conversation?
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January 21st, 2008, 01:11pm
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I received an email this morning that gets the prize for reader comment of the week. In Wikinomics, we referenced Isaac Newton’s “shoulders of Giants” quote to illustrate the idea that all knowledge and scientific discovery is cumulative . . . one great discovery builds on the foundation of previous discoveries, and so on.
Well, Wikinomics reader Frank Smith notes that there is more to Isaac Newton’s “shoulders of Giants” quote than meets the eye. Here is an excerpt from Frank’s note:
I’m listening to the audio book at the moment and I love it, just one thing… In the book you mentioned how Isaac Newton back in his day, wrote a letter saying “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants” as an example of scientific collaboration.
Well I really like the book, but the truth about the letter was that it was a bit of a backhanded compliment to his scientific rival.
You see a young Isac Newton clashed with an elderly Robert Hook. Robert Hook in his younger years was a massive scientific force, working in partnership with Wren to rebuild London after the Great Fire [he suggested the grid system of city planning for London, which was later used for New York], being one of the principle founders of the Royal Society [which is EASILY, the world’s most revolutionary group of scientists and explorers, with Newton, Darwin, Cook, Hook, Davey, Peeps and many others members]. . .and being widely believed to be the originator of Boyles law.
Anyway, when he got older he and Newton clashed over their views of the properties of light, Newton wrote the famous quote at the end of a letter where he proved his theory once and for all and did so, to make fun of Hook’s short height as compared to Newton’s rather impressive height.
I don’t mean to be picky, but I think it’s a great story and well worth knowing.
Yours,
Frank Smith
Well, it turns out that Frank is probably right. Apparently several historians have suggested that Newton’s remark was a thinly veiled insult. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say on the subject:
This has been interpreted as a sarcastic remark directed against Hooke. This is somewhat speculative: Hooke and Newton had exchanged many letters in tones of mutual regard, and Hooke was not of particularly short stature, although he was of slight build and had been afflicted from his youth with a severe stoop. However, at some point, when Robert Hooke criticized some of Newton’s ideas regarding optics, Newton was so offended that he withdrew from public debate. The two men remained enemies until Hooke’s death. Research suggests that Hooke’s stoop was a combination of Scoliosis and Pott’s disease, literally making Hooke a Hunchback. This insult may have related to their apparent positions in society: Hooke was the experiment curator for the Royal Society and Newton was Sir Isaac, the chairman of the Royal Society.
Another source, aerospaceweb.org, claims that the original quote is not Newton’s at all, but comes from an 11th century monk named John of Salisbury. In any case, they concur that Newton’s comment was likely vindictive.
Clearly, the basic idea of these thoughts is that modern researchers owe much to the knowledge that earlier scientists have discovered. While many believe that was the sentiment being expressed by Newton in his letter to Hooke, some researchers have suggested that he was actually using the phrase “on the shoulders of giants” as a veiled insult of Robert Hooke, who was a rather short man. Newton had a reputation as somewhat of a petty and vindictive man whose ego clashed with those of his rivals in the scientific and mathematical communities. One of these rivals was Robert Hooke, who had been involved in a long-running fued with Newton over which one had discovered the inverse square law. Although Newton’s letter to Hooke appeared courteous on the surface, some historians have concluded that he cleverly employed the phrase “on the shoulders of giants” to ridicule Hooke’s lack of physical stature and imply that he lacked intellectual stature as well.
So, draw your own conclusions. I, for one, still think that the basic principle of cumulative knowledge creation remains just as relevant as ever, even if Newton’s use of it was somewhat petty. If any one else would like to set the historical record straight, please weigh-in with your comments!
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January 16th, 2008, 01:33pm
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It’s the first I’ve heard of a dissertation being written on mass collaboration, although I suspect there are many more out there. I have yet to read it in full, although I did note that our friend Howard Rheingold is one of the examiners. The author, Mark Elliot, points out that while Don and I were the first to write about mass collaboration, our book wouldn’t make it through a PhD examination process due to it’s lack of analytical rigor (see below)! Fair enough, but that’s why we love it when others, especially academics, build on our work.
Wikinomics: How mass collaboration changes everything (Tapscott & Williams 2006) is the first published work to directly address mass collaboration, an often cited example of Web 2.0 and the guiding topic of this thesis. While generally geared towards providing ‘examples of how people and organizations are harnessing these principles to drive innovation in their workplaces, communities, and industries’ (2006:20), Tapscott and Williams aim to identify new trends and methods of peer production labelling the majority of them as mass collaborative. Tapscott and Williams claim that mass collaboration is associated with ‘deep changes in the structure and modus operandi of the corporation and our economy, based on new competitive principles such as openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally’ (2006:4). They also suggest that the ‘new promise of collaboration is that with peer production we will harness human skill, ingenuity, and intelligence more efficiently and effectively than anything we have witnessed previously’ (2006:18).
However, Tapscott and Williams fail to provide an adequate definition or criteria for discerning collaboration from other collective activities such as cooperation and coordination. This has the effect of lowering the term to that of a buzzword and stripping it of analytical value. In fact, in most cases where authors use the term ‘collaboration’, it could be exchanged with ‘cooperation’ to little semantic, effect leaving the discerning reader to wonder why collaboration was used at all. This is not to suggest that there is no difference between the terms, on the contrary, it is precisely the distinctions which forms a key conceptual foundation for this thesis. Rather, in the distinguishing of collaboration from cooperation and coordination, it becomes possible to discern important differences in a range of the collective activities discussed by Tapscott and Williams and others.
Overall, Tapscott and Williams’ analysis is typical of inquiries into novel Internet developments in that it deals with the activity in a manner and tone geared towards commercial application. While this is a valid aspect to investigate and one which certainly enhances our understanding of the phenomenon, it generally does not engage the subject deeply enough to provide rigorous conceptual frameworks into the underlying nature, architecture and dynamics of the activity. However, their work does provide valuable examples and anecdotal insights useful in the support and theorising of such frameworks.
Thanks Mark for letting me know about this and congratulations on your graduation! Here’s a general call to other PhD students working on similar themes to let me know about your research.
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January 14th, 2008, 12:11pm
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Written petitions have long been an important means by which citizens can bring their concerns to public officials. Petitioning was common in 18th and 19th century England and is thought to have played an important role in enabling working class movements to force significant social and political reforms, and eventually universal suffrage. The tradition was later enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, where the First Amendment guarantees the right of the people “to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Petitions typically have no legal effect, but the signatures of millions of people on a petition exerts a certain moral authority that is difficult for public officials to ignore, whether democratically elected or not. The freeing of Nelson Mandela was due, in large part, to the countless petitions presented to the United Nations that expressed worldwide contempt for the apartheid government.
The question now is what form will petitions take in the digital age? It seems logical enough that people are using the Internet to organize online petitions. But how will governments assess the authenticity of e-signatures? And might the relative ease of collecting signatures online have the unintended consequence of diminishing a petition’s moral authority? Collecting a million signatures by going door-to-door is an act of true political conviction, without question. Somehow collecting a million e-signatures seems less heroic. Or, is it?
 The UK government’s has been experimenting with an e-petitions system on the UK Prime Minister’s own website and found itself wrestling with some of these concerns (see my comments on a previous blog). Popular petitions have been launched to demand that the government scrap the inheritance tax, repeal the ban on fox hunting and abandon planned national ID cards. But the biggest by far was a petition against the government’s road pricing proposal in February 2007, which surprised everyone by attracting over 1.8 million e-signatures from a population of 60 million people (although no one has verified that there was only one e-signature per person). The site was official, but experimental at the time. The whole exercise generated quite a row, with shocked government ministers unable to backtrack on the site’s existence in the face of national news coverage of the phenomenon. The incident has demonstrated both the potential and pitfalls of online e-petitions.
In light of the controversy, the UK Parliament’s Procedure’s Committee is now holding a public consultation to gather the views of the public on whether people would use an e-petitioning system (I think that question has already been answered!) and what they would expect from it.
The forum will run until Friday 15 February 2008 and a report is to be released after Easter. I’m looking forward to it.
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January 14th, 2008, 09:36am
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One of the most intriguing books I’ve read of late is The Gift of Athena, by economic historian Joel Mokyr. Mokyr traces the rise of the industrial revolution and the important role of the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution in increasing access to knowledge in society at large. Here’s his thesis in a nutshell:
“The central phenomenon of the modern age is that as an aggregate we know more. New knowledge developed in the past three centuries has created a great deal of social conflict and suffering, just as it was the origin of undreamt-of-wealth and security. It revolutionized the structures of firms and households, it altered the way people look and feel, how long they live, how many children they have, and how they spend their time. Every aspect of our material existence has been altered by our new knowledge.”
Mokyr argues that the phenomenal rate of knowledge accumulation and economic growth since the scientific revolution can be traced to the evolution of social networks comprised of individuals affiliated with universities, publishers, corporations, professional sciences, and kindred institutions. These social networks underpin an immensely complicated communications structure that pulls the dispersed knowledge of humanity together in a largely self-organizing fashion — delivering sustained improvements in technology and prosperity, despite the absence of any conscious, hierarchical direction.
It is worth underlining what a remarkable achievement this is, particularly when placed in historical context. Only a handful of generations ago, most individuals had to be jacks-of-all-trades in order to cope with the large variety of problems essential to survival, not least of which including eating and providing shelter. Prior to the industrial revolution, specialization came at the expense of the variety necessary for survival for all but the most wealthy individuals.
As markets grew, people specialized at the expense of more “general” knowledge. But the loss of general knowledge was made up by an increase in trade.
Today, no one person in society needs to know everything in order to survive. On the contrary, we are collectively better off if everyone specializes in knowing only a few things very well. For so long as we have low cost mechanisms for integrating specialized knowledge with other complementary knowledge, we will collectively know a great deal more with a highly granular division of labor than we could in a world of generalists.
Now with the rise of wikinomics and further advances in artificial intelligence and social networking we are seeing the rise of something akin to a global brain. Not a global brain in a spiritual sense, or a global brain in the sense that all of humanity will share one central nervous system; but a global brain in the sense that we will soon be able to almost effortlessly recombine the total sum of human knowledge(with the aid of artificial intelligence, of course) . We have observed for some time that the costs of creating, sharing and aggregating information have declined dramatically as improvements in storage, communications and collaboration technologies enhance our ability to find, retrieve, sort, evaluate, and filter the wealth of human knowledge. These trends seem set to continue to follow an exponential curve, pushing our accumulation of scientific knowledge and technical capability at an ever increasing rate.
I’ll admit that “a global brain” still seems like a fanciful concept, but it may not be as far off as we think. Mokyr’s book is historical and doesn’t spend enough time exploring how the knowledge revolution that he so admirably describes will play out in the future. Nevertheless, it’s a worthwhile read for anyone who wants to better appreciate the role of social networks in scientific progress, and in turn, how scientific progress fueled modern economic growth.
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January 10th, 2008, 03:11pm
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It seems the timing of my earlier post was somewhat fortuitous as NESTA (the UK-based National Endowment for Science, Technology and Arts) has launched a £1 million contest to find the brightest ideas to fight climate change. The Big Green Challenge, as they call it, is intended to stimulate the search for “Eureka moments” for reducing carbon emissions. The top ten finalists will receive £20,000 to help put their idea into practice. The lion’s share of the £1 million prize will be awarded to the most successful initiative in 2009. According to NESTA, the winner will have to achieve a measurable reduction in carbon emissions, involve the whole group or community and prove their idea can be expanded or copied in different settings.The goal is to reduce CO2 emissions in a community - which can be local, regional or more widely dispersed - by 60%.
NESTA is accepting application until February 29, 2008. Good luck!
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January 10th, 2008, 12:11pm
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Don and I have been ruminating over the potential to develop the equivalent of the human genome project for climate change and would like your input on the issue.
An optimist could argue that we’re in the early days of something unprecedented—thanks to the web 2.0 the entire world is beginning to collaborate around a single idea for the first time ever: changing the weather. Climate change is quickly becoming a nonpartisan issue and all citizens obviously have a stake in the outcome. So for the first time we have one global, multi-media, affordable, many-to-many communications system, and one issue on which there is growing consensus. Around the world there are hundreds, probably thousands of collaborations occurring where everyone from scientists to school children are mobilizing to do something about carbon emissions.
On January 31st in the United States, for example, millions of American students at over 1,300 academic institutions will take part in “Focus the Nation,” a one-day academic and civic-engagement discussion focused on climate change, its consequences and potential solutions. Organizers hope the event will create a groundswell of activism and help spur government policy-makers into action. The event will feature an interactive forum where citizens, students and political representatives can discuss issues, challenges and solutions. Participants will then vote on their top five priorities for action and the results will be forwarded to local and state representatives. Few other issues have garnered the attention of more than a million participants, and few, if any, have gone as far as Focus the Nation in convincing colleges, universities and secondary schools to lend an entire day of instruction to just one topic.
Before we get too excited, however, we should consider the pessimist’s case. One could argue, for example, that while there was there is only one human genome there are many, many solutions to climate change. It seems unlikely that someone, or some organization, will ever be in a position to coral the entire world around developing one “magic bullet” solution to climate change in the same way that organizations such as the National Institute of Health and Wellcome Trust helped to coordinate efforts to synthesize the genome.
Moreover, the worldwide effort to decode the human genome promised significant advances in health care and huge commercial windfalls for companies that learned how to exploit it. Apart from extremists, few people argued that the human genome project was a bad idea and there was little organized resistance. The efforts to stop climate change seem unlikely to produce similar windfalls, although there will undoubtedly be money to made in green energy, construction materials, and consumer products. Worse, halting the warming of the planet will require action — and in some cases, uncomfortable and perhaps unwelcome lifestyle changes — by billions of dispersed individuals and some very powerful economic interests that will resist change.
If we fail to stop climate change there could be devastating consequences. But for most people those consequences seem distant and it’s certainly true that the worst of it will be inherited by future generations. Given the short-termism that dominates our political systems, our economy, our capital markets, and day-to-day decision-making as individuals, I am not convinced that humankind will be sufficiently motivated by a sense of inter-generational justice to make the deep and difficult adjustments that are required to avert global ecological disruption.
So, I reluctantly put myself in the pessimist’s camp for now. While I think there will be many significant collaborations to stop climate change, I don’t see the equivalent of the human genome project emerging in this space. That being said, I am eager to see someone prove otherwise. It’s true that no issue has captivated the attention of a broad internal audience as much as climate change has in recent years. And, as noted by Kofi Annan, former secretary general of the United Nations, “For far too long, climate change has been seen as a problem of the future, one that only a limited range of ministries and institutions should manage. This must change now. Climate change requires broader engagement.”
Will the “killer application” for mass collaboration turn out to be saving the planet? What do you think?
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December 30th, 2007, 11:02am
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Further to my earlier post, there is a nice article in FCW written by our friends at the National Academy of Public Administration. It lays out the benefits of collaboration in the public sector and references one of my favorite government 2.0 examples: the Transportation Security Administration’s Ideafactory - an idea marketplace for transportation security officers (the kind folks who marshal you through security at airports around the United States).
“At TSA, Hawley has launched an internal collaboration site, at least in part to provide a place where the 43,000 transportation security officers (TSOs) can share important information and techniques for improving the security of our country’s airports.
TSA’s Idea Factory is a secure intranet, restricted to registered users inside the agency. It has become an instant hit. Airport TSOs now share ideas for improving their workplace environment and strategies for making the traveling public more secure. Within a week of its launch, TSA employees had submitted more than 150 ideas, offered more than 650 comments and voted on ideas more than 800 times.”
Too bad it’s not open to the public — I’d love to know what kind of ideas they’re cooking up and I bet road-weary travelers like myself would have more than a few proposals for them to consider.
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December 30th, 2007, 10:39am
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It’s easy to berate government agencies for being slow to use popular web 2.0 platforms like YouTube and Second Life to deliver public services or engage citizens in dialogue — I certainly have. I have little doubt that governments must establish a genuine presence in these participatory online communities as they struggle to maintain relevancy and legitimacy in today’s world. But when you start to consider the legal and political risks that agencies take on when they use third party channels for engaging with the constituents, you can at least sympathize with their dilemma.
This report produced for the Queensland Government in Australia outlines many of the legal issues that agencies must consider as they migrate to a web 2.0 environment. I wouldn’t recommend it if you’re looking for riveting holiday reading, but it’s a must for public sector practitioners who want to ensure that their first foray’s into web 2.0 don’t end in political disaster. Here’s an excerpt:
“Increasingly, young voters feel that they cannot communicate with governments and with politicians. Young people often use online and digital environments—websites, bulletin boards,forums, social network platforms and virtual environments,instant messenger, SMS and Voice over IP—to converse with each other about things that are of importance to them. The topics of these conversations—education, the environment,policy, economics, human rights, sexual identity—are inherently politically relevant. Consequently, if governments are to have meaningful interaction with young people, it is important for them to engage in these communication platforms. . .
The current generation of internet platforms have the potential to provide significant benefits to organisations that wish to
interact with their audience—whether customers or constituents—in a more direct and immediate fashion than has
been possible with established communication channels. . .
Organisations wishing to make use of these Platforms must be aware of the legal risks which may arise from their use and
take steps to ensure that those risks are actively managed and minimised. In particular, any organisation using the Platforms
must develop and implement policies and procedures addressing issues such as:
• behaviour and conduct of Platform participants and
the organisation’s employees;
• the dissemination of illegal or inappropriate material;
• copyright infringement; and
• management of the organisation’s own intellectual property.
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October 21st, 2007, 08:59pm
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A list of official government blogs maintained by USA.gov showcases a grand total of 16 blogs. Granted there are many “unofficial” bloggers sharing their thoughts with the world without official sanction. But the official list demonstrates just how conservative the bureaucracy is when it comes to communications with the public.
Try this for perspective. Last count of the federal bureaucracy put the number of civil servants at roughly 1.87 million. If the government were to set a target to get even 5% of federal civil servants blogging it would be a mere 93,484 blogs short! Loosening the reigns over communications takes courage, but in my view a more significant and lively presence in the blogosphere would help agencies build more authentic and trustworthy relationships with citizens.
Have you come across any interesting government blogs recently? Let us know.
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