But the actual deal between the two is less about cash then it is about technology exchange and access to their respective dealerships. Fiat, for example, is keen to bring its line of compact cars to the US, and is willing to trade access to its successful small-car platforms and fuel-efficient technologies to do so. Seems like a high price to pay for real estate, non?

Which brings us to the magic of US car dealerships:

• GM has more than 6,400 dealers in the US.
• Ford has over 4,300 in the US.
• Chrysler (with Jeep and Dodge) have over 3,300.
• And finally, Toyota/Lexus has (just) 1,400 US dealers.
• This works out to nearly 700,000 direct employees across the US dealer network.
• And with annual sales of 14-15 million new car sales per year, this works out to about 750 units sold per dealer.

For the most part, these dealerships operate as single-brand sales outlets (proprietary models one might say). Subsequently, the framework for sales across the US leaves the industry with a heavy, and somewhat immoveable burden of dealers that contributes to their inability to restructure.

But does it have to be this way?

There may or may not be precedent for something else.

Example 1 is Ontario’s Brewers Retail – the Beer Store. “Established in 1927, The Beer Store is the primary distribution and sales channel for beer in Ontario. It sells beer to the public under the authority of the Liquor Control Act and is owned by Labatt Brewing Company Ltd., Molson Canada and Sleeman Breweries Ltd.” I.e. It acts as a platform for distribution of various brands. Brewers that wish to sell through The Beer Store can pay a per store listing fee or a single fee for the entire system depending on the number of stores they wish to sell in.

Example 2 is the Credit Card – which for argument’s sake we’ll limit to Visa and Mastercard. Prior to their respective IPOs, both functioned as cooperatives, owned equally by their networks of 21,000 and 25,000 financial institutions respectively, wherein each institution would purchase a license for use of the network.

Both of these examples saw individual organizations choose the efficiencies and lower transaction costs of a distributed and shared network over a proprietary model. And while my colleague Denis makes a good point that in the auto industry the sticker price of a purchase is the equivalent of 1000 or so cases a beer, and thus makes keeping the customer as close as possible more important, I can’t help but think that a shared platform for sales would be more efficient and might just hep build a competitive and user-centred industry.

I’ll admit I’m not an expert on the industry so I’d love to know what everyone else thinks. I’ll also admit that I submitted a similar idea for the financial services industry about 8 years ago when I worked at large Canadian bank and got told thanks but no thanks! So maybe it’s already being done? Maybe it’s not possible?

Let me know.

But such immediate questions aside, growing youth unemployment, or underemployment, may have far deeper societal repercussions.

The recent events in Greece where mobs of angry youths rioted in the streets is perhaps a telling example. Triggered by the shooting of a 15-year-old boy, an estimated 8,000 Greek youths joined what soon became an all-out attack against their role in the Greek state. As Nikos Mouzelis, emeritus professor of sociology at London School of Economics, noted: “The death of this young boy was a catalyst that brought out all the problems of society and of youth that have been piling up all these years and left to one side with no solutions. Every day, the youth of this country experiences further marginalisation.”

Or as others noted: “The death of the young boy may just be an excuse for the overqualified, so-called ‘700-euro-generation’, to rage at society. They have a hopeless future, since their degrees do not correspond to the needs of the market…. What a pity it is to see the energy of youngsters lost just because society doesn’t take care of their culture and education, doesn’t encourage them to explore their dreams and at the same time introduce and prepare them for real life.”

So could this mix of economic, political and social marginalisation yield the same violent results in other parts of the world?

The most oft-referred to storyline focuses on the possibility of unrest in China if that country’s economic growth rate dips below 7-9%. China has already seen nearly 7 million jobs disappear thanks to the global economic slowdown. And while the current unemployment rate for new graduates is just over 12% – a further 6.1 million university graduates will enter the job market next year according to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Some imagine that should growth flatline at sub-7%, the country will fail to create enough new economic opportunities to keep its pool of job-seekers happy, and subsequently could lead to mass civil unrest that would far eclipse the push for democracy in 1989.

But even closer to home, one has to wonder whether the events in Greece are a sign of things to come. Youth unemployment across Europe is far from a one-nation issue – France, Italy and Spain all share similar statistics (+20% unemployment for 15-24 year olds) – and other countries, notably those three, have much more prevalent social issues related to the integration of new immigrants and social opportunities for both new and old. Moreover, youth in these four countries (Greece, France, Italy and Spain) also happen to have much higher levels of education attainment then their older peers (+20:25%)  If ever there were tinderboxes ready to burst…

So how, in a time of economic upheaval where upwards of 7 million jobs have been lost in China, 3 million jobs in North America and perhaps a million in Europe, can governments stem the tide of immediate discontent related to a lack of economic opportunities? The most common response has been deficit spending, in particular on infrastructure, in the hopes of creating enough jobs to weather the storm. But the current economic crisis isn’t the root of the problem. In Europe for example, 20% + youth unemployment has its roots in deep structural, societal and policy-related issues. A few extra dollars on bridge building won’t change that.

So given somewhat limited job-creation capability, how might a new push for participation and engagement by youths in policy-making and strategy help mitigate their marginalisation? We’ve yet to see whether Obama’s warm hug re: hope and engagement will continue into his presidency but should it, it might just offer young people around the world a template upon which to hold their governments to account.

The documentary hosts a series of the world’s leading experts on communication, management and governance – notables includes Clay Shirky, Saul Albert, Ed Miliband, and our very own Don Tapscott (watch below) – in a broad discussion on what the explosion of online networks and grassroots community action means for governments from the local to trans-national levels.

And here’s one of my favourites – Tom Steinberg, director of mySociety.org, on the limits of representative democracy:

You can view all the videos here.

They recently hosted nGenera Chairman Don Tapscott and Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang (both of whom I’ve had the pleasure of working with) for a conversation about the Future of the Public Sector. You can view all the videos from this event, and many others, here. Unfortunately I haven’t figured out how to embed these particular presentations so you’ll actually have to go to Sitra’s site to view.

Nonetheless, here’s the lowdown: Don argues that the Net Generation and the Web 2.0 are ushering in a series of fundamental changes to the way governments operate; how they provide services and create policy; how they structure the workplace; and how they increasingly look to citizens to play a role in all of those areas.

Dr. Chang on the other hand takes a more cautious approach noting that the most visible and seemingly revolutionary ideas aren’t always the real change agents. He introduces an interesting question of whether the Internet was in fact the most revolutionary technology of the 20th century, or whether it was in fact the dishwasher for its role in changing tradiotional gender-specific roles and facilitating female entry into the workforce.

Chicken vs. egg vs. omelette. You choose.

He ends his presentation with three simple challenges to City Hall:

“1. Open our data. transit. library catalogues. community centre schedules. maps. 311. expose it all so the people of Toronto can use it to make a better city. do it now.
2. Crowdsource info gathering that helps the city. somebody would have FixMyStreet.to up and running in a week if the Mayor promised to listen. encourage it.
3. Ask for help creating a city that thinks like the web. copy Washington, DC’s contest strategy. launch it at BarCamp.”

The Mayor committed publicly to making many of these happen, which is great, but action will also need to come from the public… So who’s setting up Toronto’s version of FixMyStreet?

This type of radical transparency is bound to make a lot of people uncomfortable but it’s exactly the type of visibility that employees at Semco, a Brazilian industrial manufacturing company, have into the operations of the company.

Employees set their own wages, productivity targets, schedules and even choose their managers. Moreover, for important strategic decisions Semco each of the company’s 3000 employees votes – whether’s it’s about a merger, an acquisition, or plant relocations. For other less strategic discussions employees have two open seats on the Borad of Directors that anybody can occupy on a first-come first serve basis. And finally in order to stimulate new ideas, the company holds a monthly “idea meeting” to put creative employees in touch with those with budgetary control – an internal VC club.

Key to enabling this culture of openness has been SEMCO CEO Ricardo Semler’s firm commitment to doing things differently (he fired 60% of the company’s top management when he took over).

This video clip highlights some of the company’s unique HR practices:

Given the company’s success in the two-decades of its anarchic-management practice (its revenues have grown from $4 million to over $250million), is this type of transparency and workplace democracy indicative of an HR strategy the rest of us have missed the boat on?

Why does it work at SEMCO?
Why wouldn’t it work at your organization?
What type of industry/market is best suited to such structures?
Is this type of radical self-organization the future of the workplace?

I, for example, work on Government 2.0, a term that is now applied half-hazardly to any government activity associated with social media, wikis, or participative tools – no matter whether the result is closer to the 2.0 than the 1.0 on the scale.

If you were to ask us for a definition we’d answer that “Government 2.0 is a new breed of public sector organization that opens its doors to the world; co-innovates with everyone, especially citizens; shares resources that were previously closely guarded; harnesses the power of mass collaboration; and behaves not as an isolated department or jurisdiction, but as something new – a truly integrated organization.” Government 2.0 isn’t just about Obama, or just about engagement but rather it about how agencies provide services, create policy and structure the workplace using new technologies, tools and most important, a new culture of participation, openness and trust.

So when Mark Drapeau (Associate Research Fellow directing the Social Software for Security project at the Center for Technology and National Security Policy of the National Defense University in Washington, DC) blogged about “Renaming Government 2.0” we were evidently interested. Anthony and I have discussed a possible name change over the past several months but have yet to find anything better.

So can the crowds do a better job and find a title that does this transformation justice?

So far the top submissions include Quantam Gov, WeGov, YouGov, etc… nothing that I find any better or more descriptive than the 2.0. Can you think of anything better?

If anything this comment takes it…. “How about…democracy?! Isn’t this what democracy has always supposed to have been – participation from everyone?”

Or maybe even better: “This may be the one opportunity to NOT get caught up in tech marketing jargon. Why not just Government. Did we rename it when we went from the pony express to the modern day postal system?”

That’s not, however, to say that it’s a new concept. Information asymmetry in commerce is a centuries old problem. Solving it through reputation is equally ancient. We may associate eBay with our modern definition of online reputation but the concept is perhaps earliest associated by archival records of trading between Maghribi merchants in the 11the century. Research on these early economic transactions show that the key to curtailing “opportunistic behaviour and promoting trust between agents” in an environment of high information asymmetry was a system of reputations that was developed and shared between the agents within a trading coalition or network.

Like on eBay,
success for the seller rested upon the fear of exclusion from the trading network – thus promoting honest behaviour and fair trading amongst Maghribi merchants.

Fast forward to today and we’re all aware of the use of rankings and feedbacks to vet the quality of a buyer or seller on eBay, or rank the quality of submissions from participants in communities like Wikipedia, Sermo or World of Warcraft.

But can we take this concept of applying cheap and available reputation information to offset quality and reliability problems in Government?

This concept of information asymmetry can perhaps be applied to the relationship between governing and governed. A citizen votes and pays their taxes but their ability to see into the machine, and provide feedback, is quite limited. And if services fall short of expectations there is likely no tangible recourse for this citizen. So how do “lemons” get judged in such an environment, in particular in environments with little to no competition?

Ultimately, one can vote to change governments due to dissatisfaction, but this occurs at a much more macro level than the day-to-day transactions that account for the highest share of governed/governing touchpoints. Moreover, as a highly placed Federal government colleague told us on the topic of innovation: “Our incentives for change are very different – we aren’t going to go out of business anytime soon.”

Indeed, the bottom line is unlikely to motivate better customer service in these front-line government relationships. But what will? And might some type of transparent reputational index around service delivery satisfaction be part of the answer? Could a system like TheyWorkForYou be adapted for externally facing service delivery with reputation and ranking added to the system? Or could incentives be attached to the feedback and rankings developed at sites such as Patient Opinion to incent change? Where else might this be applied.

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

There’s no doubt that the short-term job market prospects for anyone looking for a career change have been disrupted by the last six months of economic upheaval. We’ve gone from touting the war for talent to focusing on the impacts of delayed retirement and decimated pension funds on the workplace.

As a recent McKinsey report notes, “Eighty-five percent of the boomers we surveyed said that it was at least somewhat likely that they would continue to work beyond the traditional retirement age. Nearly 40 percent said that it was extremely likely, and of those, two-thirds emphasized financial reasons.”

Their decisions to either stay in, or re-enter, the workforce may push less-experienced grads and Net Geners further down the HR queue and mark a temporary end to the concept of the much-sought-after Net Gener. Economic growth from 2000 forward had kept job markets buoyant and left new grads feeling as if they were in the drivers seat. A deep recession however may smash that perceived leverage. As one commentator noted, “So it’s the Yers, mostly in their 20s, doted on and over-protected by parents, and aggressively courted by employers, who, will be most psychologically affected by this softening of opportunities. Like boomers, they thought they were special.”

But like Boomers, they’ll eventually get their turn. In the long-term, demographic trends will remain unchanged and lead to an ongoing competition for talent and skills across North America, East Asia and Europe. (Moreover, of those surveyed by McKinsey who had retired early, over half had done so for health reasons making a return to the workforce in the short-term unlikely.)

If anything now might be the time to be looking for a new job – forward thinking, strategic employers will see a glut of good young talent on the market as an opportunity to stock up for the long-term… not a bad place for a Net Gener to find a home.

This concept of statistic-driven outcomes has its equivalent in healthcare: evidence-based medicine. Yet despite its theoretical value, it’s still rarely used and tough to access. As Billy Beane, Newt Gingrich and John Kerry note in a recent New York Time op-ed, “a doctor today can get more data on the starting third baseman on his fantasy baseball team than on the effectiveness of life-and-death medical procedures.”

All this despite the fact that the US spends more than twice per capita on healthcare than any other country in the world, ranks amongst the worst industrialized countries on health quality, and sees nearly 100,000 Americans killed every year by preventable medical erros. You’d think a moneyball/evidence-based medicine approach to healthcare would gain more traction.

Back in 2005 we (then New Paradigm) authored a series of reports on the future of healthcare and how evidence-based medicine was a necessary next step based on research and early trials that showed tremendous benefits in terms of cost savings, cost avoidance and ultimately patient outcomes. One of the companies we profiled as part of this research was InfoPoems, now known as Essential Evidence Plus, and their business focused on providing peer-reviewed EBM summaries at the point of care. At the time we noted, “In a consumer centric system consumers and physicians make decisions based on informed consideration of meaningful evidence. POEMs—patient oriented evidence that matters—offer proven research summaries relevant to physicians and their patients… Which in an age of 18 minute patient-physician interactions could mean the difference between life and death.”

But fast forward three years and we’re still saying the same thing, and as the authors of the op-ed note, we’ve made precious little progress outside of a few small-scale implementations.

What’s holding back progress in the US?

A likely cause is the uncoordinated nature of a multi-payer system, and the lack of a joint federal government / private sector push for EBM. Collaboration in health care is part of a needed solution to both reduce cost and improve outcomes in all jurisdictions, as is the release of health care data to the public related to outcomes, thus allowing concerned citizens, employers and government providers and payers to work together to help find solutions.

Whether or not such an approach allows health care to emulate small market baseball teams that manage to win is still to be determined but given the current state of affairs, not moving towards stats and EBM is a step that a new administration can’t afford to take.

But if you’re Canadian and concerned that either the current Conservative government will get a majority hold of Parliament, or conversely concerned that it will fail to do so, then there are several appropriate story lines to follow up North. The first is a growing Facebook group called ‘Anti-Harper Vote Swap Canada,’ which now boasts over 12,000 members.

The group works as follows:

“In a completely legal fashion, it allows voters in different ridings to swap votes to best ensure the Conservatives don’t win. Almost anyone who is opposed the Conservatives can take part. If your preferred party has no chance in your riding (or if they are absolutely certain of winning) you can use your vote elsewhere to help candidates from the same party beat the Tories, while at the same time voting strategically to stop the Tories in your own riding.”

Now who knows how many of those 12,000 members will actually follow through on their swap pledge (and how strong the honour system this site is built upon is) but nonetheless the concept is intriguing and potentially disruptive for the assumed favourites. A few months ago University of Ottawa professor Michael Geist wrote that 27 MP’s across Canada (9% of all MPs) had won their ridings by less than 1000 votes.  The potential impact of vote swap is thus rather significant.

The second example is www.voteforenvironment.ca . Like the former example, it takes aim at the Conservative government, this time for their environmental record. Their strategy is similar to Vote Swap as it highlights closely contested swing ridings and recommends to would-be voters which of the opposition parties in those ridings would be best positioned to win the riding in the Oct. 14 election. For example, the site highlights one riding in East Toronto and notes that a “This is a Liberal/Conservative race. The NDP can’t win. We recommend voting for Liberal candidate Michael Ignatieff.”

Evidently this raises some rather important questions about the strength of our democracy and the different values of a vote across the country but it also points to the increasing strength of weak ties and their ability to coalesce around issues of importance to effect change from outside of the formal system.

As Kevin Grandia, the creator of voteforenvironment.ca, notes: “It really doesn’t matter what the politicians say anymore. It really doesn’t matter what the mainstream media is saying about these issues because we have a massive online conversation about climate change, about environment and about strategic voting going on across the country.”

But do they make sense in more developed markets? That’s still very unclear.

RBC (Royal Bank of Canada for non-Canadians) recently rolled out a trial for their own mobile banking solution. RBC Mobex is billed as an “innovative payment solution designed for use with your existing mobile phone to make life more convenient for you. Just imagine, you already use your mobile phone to access friends, family, work and play: now you can use it to access your money too. Use it when you don’t have cash in your wallet, there isn’t an ATM nearby or cheques and/or debit / credit cards are not accepted forms of payment.”

The value of such systems comes with scale. I may want to pay someone using this system but if the receiver isn’t signed up then I can’t. And getting this scale isn’t necessarily easy. Projections for the growth of the mobile banking section range from the objective to the fantastic:

• Gartner has forecast that there will be 33 million mobile payment users worldwide in 2008, with the Asia Pacific taking the lead. Gartner expects this number to triple to 103.9 million users in 2011.
• IMS Research sees the combination of contactless mobile payments, mobile banking and over-the-air payments pushing the number of mobile banking users to 884 million in 2012.
• And finally, Juniper Research predicts said in April that 816 million consumers will use mobile devices for banking services by 2011.

So somewhere between 100 million and 1 billion people will be using these platforms by 2011… helpful.

Perhaps more interesting is the geography of usage, this from Gartner’s research on the topic: “Asia Pacific has the most mobile payment users with a projected 28 million users in 2008, accounting for 85 per cent of the worldwide total. Western Europe is expected to have 499,000 users in 2008, and North America is projected to have one million users.”

While there are certainly markets in Asia / Pacific whose usage and demand for such solutions stem from infrastructural deficiencies (for example, India and China), other markets such as Japan and South Korea are big users despite having dominant bricks-and-mortars financial services players. So what makes them want such services? This links back to Naumi’s recent post on why North American consumers seem to demand less than their East Asian bretheren. Perhaps we’re just technology luddites, satisfied with what serves our needs, and less willing to try new services that, while cool, may or may not add value to current activities.

And within that lies a much deeper cultural and sociological analysis of what makes different people tick – and the subseqent incentives for companies to innovate for them. Has the East Asian model of state-driven development embedded a greater sense of confidence or trust amongst people,  or perhaps even a  greater willingness to fail given the backing of the welfare state? And conversely has a more free-market oriented system which pushes competition and failure actually produced a populace that desires stability rather than constant change?

I’m full of questions rather than answers but nonetheless it would make for an interesting thesis on the link between the path of economic development and the subsequent impacts on culture and innovation.

That notwithstanding, the good folks at IBM (one of the founders of the consortium) sent us through a little update on the project that I thought was worth mentioning here:

“I wanted to give you a heads up that later today we will announce that Xerox, DuPont and Bosch have joined the Eco-Patent Commons, a first-of-its-kind business effort to help the environment by pledging environmentally-beneficial patents to the public domain. The newly-pledged patents include:

-A Xerox technology that significantly reduces the time and cost of removing hazardous waste from water and soil;

-A technology developed by DuPont that converts certain non-recyclable plastics into beneficial fertilizer;

-Automotive technologies from Bosch that help lower fuel consumption, reduce emissions, or convert waste heat from vehicles into useful energy;

-Technologies developed by founding member Sony that focus on the recycling of optical discs.

The new pledges more than double the number of environmentally-friendly patents available to the public. They are available on a dedicated Web site hosted by the WBCSD (http://www.wbcsd.org/web/epc). Many of the original patent holders have been contacted directly about their patents and we know of at least three patents that have already been used by others since the January launch of the Commons.”

Now regardless of my pessimism around the quality of these patents, the fact that they’re being made available is a significant depature from the usual monetization route and acts as a rather astute form of CSR. Moreover, for developing country research labs this offers a pretty amazing short-cut route to potentially valuable technologies and thus might mean that they gain the ability to produce rather than purchase these new tools. But perhaps where this model is most valuable is the potential that other industries might follow suit….. is anyone in health care and pharma listening?

Now aside from being a $5.3 billion, 27-kilometre underground tunnel, the Large Hadron Collider is also a partial product of an innovative and collaborative environment supported by the use of wikis. Not surprising given CERN was home to Tim Berners-Lee and the invention of the Web. The link between the origins of the Web and the wiki are strong, given that (according to Berners-Lee), “the idea behind the Web was not just that it should be a big browsing medium. The idea was that everybody would be putting their ideas in, as well as taking them out.”

Jump ahead two decades and today CERN employs approximately 3,500 people with a broader membership of partners increasing the total to 10,000 researchers and scientists across 500 institutes in 56 countries, a heck of a network.

About a year ago, Vincenzo Cammarata, a graduate student at the University of Lugano, emailed me a copy of his Masters thesis (Wikibility of Innovation Oriented Workplaces) which takes an in-depth look at CERN and its collaborative activities. He notes, “CERN can be defined as the hub of an enormous Social Network: for its large number of members, for the knowledge that is owned inside of each silo, and for the big need for collaboration and subsequently knowledge transfer.” He dives into an analysis of how wikis have supported the LHC project for knowledge management and knowledge transfer across its global network, as well as for software and network development. CERN users note that the use of wikis significantly increased the quantity of materials shared and, more important, the quality of final outputs. Not a small consideration given the investments being made, and the outputs desired. Evidently, there are also definite limits to the usefulness of the wiki, and users make note of its use to supplement rather than replace other forms of communication.

And so regardless of the outcome of tomorrow’s sub-atomic particle smashup, the lessons CERN offers regarding the impact of collaborative tools and collaboratve activity are pretty impressive. Their ability to bridge global and organizational divides to hasten the development of frameworks around which the LHC was built should in theory yield not only significant time and cost savings but more importantly should help shed light on where we came. No small feat.

You can read the CERN case study and Wibility of Innovation Oriented Environments thesis here, thanks Vincenzo!

1. Don’t think about Web 2.0 or e-government as being just about technology. It is about saving time and making life easier and more efficient for citizens.
2. Make sure you are resourced to cope. No point setting up a blog that encourages comments if you can’t respond to each comment.
3. Carefully plan your strategy if using blogs. If it’s a council blog, make sure it’s part of a wider communications strategy and not the domain of one or two keen individuals.
4. Consider the reputational risks of publishing un-moderated citizen comments in online forums or blogs. Don’t assume comments represent universal opinion.
5. Identify the audience you are trying to reach and use the appropriate channel. Not everyone has an account on Facebook, Myspace or Bebo, and not everyone has broadband. Know who you are excluding and plan for this.
6. Ensure there is a staff policy for using social media sites during working hours.
7. Most Web 2.0 solutions are relatively cheap to deploy. If you are planning to spend more than £100k on an enterprise solution you’re doing something wrong – or you have particularly complex requirements.

You can read the full article here.

But perhaps more interesting is Schmidt’s remark about our love affair with “the Internet election,” and how it’s evolved since the mid-1990′s. He points to the 1996 election of George Allan (VA) to the US Senate, and its subsequent impact on the Bush (Sr) presidency, as one of the first outcomes affected by the Internet, and briefly delves into what is perhaps the most interesting aspect of online tools related to politics, its ability to upset the entrenched nature of traditional media.

His take, “all theory and fanfare” with no real substance.

I won’t deny that it’s pretty difficult to quantify Gov 2.0 given the nascent issues at hand but it’s important to note that as we start down this road towards a Government 2.0 transformation, the business case won’t initially be made with dollars and cents. Instead progress will be measured in the following manner (which is by no means exhaustive or exclusive): productivity and efficiency gains, new ideas and innovations, and finally recruiting and retention.

A) Productivity and Efficiency: If using a Wiki can, as Anthony’s previous posts noted, decrease the time employees spend emailing each other, do away with versioning issues and ultimately create a better and more collaborative output that enables better decisions then the case sells itself. In the end, it’s all about decision making – better and faster decision making. Not to mention that a system that enables a faster or more accurate response to an emergency such as that enabled by Virtual Alabama is likely to create significant savings, both in upfront deployment costs and the effectiveness of funds used.

B) New ideas and innovations: Ultimately, government serves citizens. The focus of any public sector transportation must thus attempt to provide better services, i.e. more effective, faster and easier to access, as well as creating policy and legislation that is more representative of the views, values and ideals of our constituents. That’s hard to measure in these early stages. But government transparency is central to the Gov 2.0 concept and projects like the UK’s ShowUsABetterWay highlight the potential such transparency has for improving processes and services. In just two weeks, the project garnered more than 250 new ideas on how to improve processes thanks to the publication of previously concealed data. Whether any get implemented is another issue but at a certain point we need to value an increase in the stock of those ideas, and there’s no doubt that opening up to the public and external experts is one surefire way to do so.

C) Recruiting and retention: Our research shows that the public sector is far from the top-choice of most university graduates. We surveyed over 10,000 youths in 12 countries and outside of Continental Europe, the public sector was dead last when respondants were asked to rank their employer of choice. A large part of the government 2.0 transformation is thus focused on reinventing the public sector workplace so that it does attract the best and brightest, and that when they arrive they have the tools, technologies and organizational cultures to make the impact they desire to. That ability to make an impact is key to Government 2.0. It’s about creating participative cultures that flatten organizational hierarchies and keep talent plugged in and motivated. Some of our partners are looking at replacing upwards of half of their entire workforces over the next 8-10 years. Unless they’re looking for investment bankers that won’t be easy to do. One of the key metrics for Gov 2.0 will be the ability to attract 1a candidates and more importantly the improvement, if any, of retention rates amongst those star employees.

Ultimately, companies and agencies that get it aren’t waiting for analyst reports noting how much they’ll save. Instead they see the value in the above three metrics as a means of creating more intuitive, proactive and predictive organizations.

Evidently there are challenges. Leadership and culture being key. None of these benefits will happen without the commitment of top agency/department decision-makers as this isn’t as much about technology as it is about people and culture. That will bring about the need for changes in incentives, compensation and performance management. Yes, all challenging to bring about. But if we truly believe that governments can do more with less then such changes need to be put into motion. It won’t be easy but the payoff portends a much more effective, innovative and ultimately competitive public service.

He likens this to a post i9/11 future, one where our online rights and privacy will face unprecendented scrutiny by government. You can watch part of his talk at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference in California where he made the comments below.

This message mirrors part of the thesis proposed by author and Harvard Law School Professor Jonathan Zittrain in his new book “The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It.” In it, Zittrain argues that we’re on the path to Internet lockdown thanks to a combination of proprietary devices and malicious intent. You can read my colleague Naumi’s review here.

There’s some great discussions and ranting taking place about this pretty much everywhere so I’ll pass on the summary of what’s being said and instead pose two questions: what constitutes an i-9/11 attack, and what would such an act allow that isn’t already being done today?

Thoughts?

The growth of China’s online community has been acknowledged by many within the Chinese Communist Party, including the country’s most powerful leader, Hu Jintao. In mid-June he took part in an online web-chat at the People’s Daily website that marked the first time a senior party official publicly engaged with internet users. While commentators noted that “there was no real substance to the online conversation,” it has since been referred to as symbolic of the central governments acknowledgement of the internet as an important source of public information and public opinion.

This would seem to auger the path towards democratization that many have hoped the Internet would catalyze in China and elsewhere in the world. But whereas the growth of China’s online population may indeed force the government to listen into a new medium, whether it forces change is another question. Remember, it’s been nearly 20 years since the June 4th incident and change has been, as Mao predicted, “like crossing a river, feeling for the pebbles one at a time.”

And so as China has transformed itself into a capitalist autocracy, whether its evolution includes our liberal notion of democracy is up for debate. This week’s edition of the New Yorker carries a great article on China’s “new generation (of) neocon nationalists” and the role they’ll play in determining China’s future. Author Evan Osnos notes that the Internet is being used successfully as a meeting place for a generation of tech-savvy ‘angry youth’ who view the country’s sovereignty on internal and external affairs as trumping the promise of a liberal democracy. Chinese nationalism is, according to them, on the upswing thanks to the Internet and tools that allow them to network with, and transmit information to, like-minded Chinese who see democracy as but one more attempt by the outside world to influence China’s internal progress. One of those interviewed states “Chinese people have begun to think, one part is the good life, another part is democracy. If democracy can really give you the good life, that’s good. But, without democracy, if we can still have the good life why should we choose democracy.”

As I wrote back in January, the rise of the Net and its ability to engage citizens is equally applicable to globalist or nationalist schools of thought. While on one hand it has, and will continue, to break down the barriers of distance and standards that exist between nations and people, it holds an equal ability to reinforce those very walls by those who see what’s beyond them as threatening to the sovereignty and future of their nations. And given the unequal distribution of the proceeds of globalization (whether that be measured by the impact on a US auto-worker or an African farmer), and mankind’s predisposition to protect those closest to them, I can’t help but think that we’ll never quite reach Nicholas Negroponte’s prophecy that one day the Nation would “evaporate like a mothball…from solid to gas directly…wherein there will be no more room for nationalism than there is smallpox.”

Instead, I’m much more inclined to think that we’re headed back to the city state models of Ancient Greece and Northern Italy where the confluence of local interests and priorities with a knowledge economy that can accommodate rural locations could well yield a new form of local/national government and a much richer form of democracy and participation.

The release is meant to allow citizens, whether development experts or simply concerned city dwellers, a greater role in conversations and plans about the city’s future. Want to propose a new development? These 3D images should go a long way in allowing all parties a better, and simpler, platform upon which to build.

Over at the Google Earth blog, Barney Krucoff, the GIS Manager for OCTO, highlights why they released the data. I’ve cut the highlights of his remarks – visit the LatLong blog for the full version:

1. It is the right thing to do. Fundamentally, the District Government believes that data created with public funds should be available to the public.

2. Because every neighborhood can benefit from 3D. Economic development was a primary driver behind development of the dataset. The buildings provide the context in which to plan and debate proposed new developments.

3. We get better 3D performance from the cloud and we don’t pay for it. Frankly, the District did not have the technical capabilities for distributing nearly 100,000 3D building across the enterprise. With the data now hosted on Google Earth 4.3, we expect DC Government users to turn to Google Earth just like the public.

4. We want to communicate with our residents. It is important to us that citizens, particularly DC taxpayers, understand what we do.

This is great stuff. We’re looking closely at what Kundra and his colleagues in Mayor Adrian Fenty’s adminstration are up to in DC. Whether it’s the use of wiki’s to bring transparency and accountability into the procurement process or releasing upwards of 80% of the real-time statistical data they collect via RSS feeds to the public, the team at OCTO is redefining traditional notions of what is and isn’t shared with the public. And in doing so they’re acknowledging that the public may be a significant asset in helping build a stronger DC community. Now what remains to be seen is what the impact of this transparency will be and ultimately how will we measure the success of Government 2.0

It’s pretty humorous (and either slightly sad given what doesn’t happen despite the available tools or slightly scary to think that Steve Jobs may be planning a coup).

My favourites:

• There would be a three hour wait to get the latest $5 bill. It would also feature a web 2.0 gradient.
• Instead of a Social Security number, all newborns would receive a free MobileMe account.
• The cabinet would add the Department for Ergonomic Design, including a new position called theSecretary of Feng Shui. The office would debate the merits of using Arial versus Helvetica on street signs. Additionally, the Lincoln Bedroom would be upgraded with a mini rock waterfall and tiny Bonsai trees.
• Steve Jobs’ face would inexplicably appear next to Roosevelt’s on Mt. Rushmore.
• “In God We Trust” would be changed to “Getting Things Done”.

I thought I’d take it one step further and theorize what would happen “if the United Nations were run by Google.”

• The Chinese and Russians would withdraw their vetoes against sanctions on Zimbabwe after Googling “Mugabe” ….
• The Millennium Development Goals would get crowdsourced.
• The Kyoto Protocol would be restructured with targets for member nations tied to the number of servers each country possesses.
• The Russians would attempt to buy Google with oil money.
• The Security Council would fail to come to agreement on “Don’t be evil” and would instead adopt “Google first, Act later.”

*Authors’ note: The Promethean Institute is a libertarian public policy think tank based in Orange County, California. I am neither libertarian nor Californian and by virtue of being Canadian, less good looking but definitely more in-touch with my socialist side.

Now I’m going to put aside my usual remarks about management, motivation and ultimately its value as a recruiting tool (if you trust and value your current employees, wouldn’t their close ties be prime targets for recruitment?), and instead point you towards some interesting survey results out of the UK. Courtesy of Telindus, a Belgian IT Services firm, and via Rialtas.net, an Irish e-government & e-democracy blog that I follow:

“The survey found that 39 per cent of 18 to 24 year-olds would consider leaving if they were not allowed to access applications like Facebook and YouTube. A further 21 per cent indicated that they would feel ‘annoyed’ by such a ban. The problem is less acute with 25 to 65 year-olds, of whom just 16 per cent would consider leaving and 13 per cent would be annoyed.”

 

 

 

So would you actually consider leaving your job if they banned access to social networking sites? And on the flip side, if you’re one of the organizations banning these tools for your employees, how do you justify doing so?

Amongst the discussions at our Government 2.0 meeting at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government was a debate over the merits of data sharing, and whether the collection of citizen data in the name of public safety and service delivery outweighed the risks of abuse and the potential for infringement of personal freedoms and privacy.

To kickstart the discussion, one of our colleagues shared this video from the American Civil Liberties Union that highlights a perhaps perverse or perhaps not-so-perverse future:

And while we’re probably a ways off from having our local pizza place advising on health care, the question remains as to how much of our personal data we’re willing to share in order to ensure public safety and perhaps enable better, i.e. more customized, service delivery.

And how does that equation change as the facilitator of that data use alternates between a private sector provider and a government agency? Do we trust government agencies more or less with our data? Why?

Perhaps the most interesting presentation was our tour through Virtual Alabama with Alabama’s Director of Homeland Security James Walker.

Built on a Google Earth platform, the site has Federal, State and municipal security and safety agencies sharing local data, images and technology. The result is a phenomenally-rich 3D environment that allows near instantaneous emergency reponse capabilities, which in an area known for its hurricanes and tornadoes is a must.

And while the prospects for emergency response are evident, where else could you apply data/image mashups to create citizen value? Tourism? Economic Development? What else?

As for the Princeton report, Government and the Invisible Hand, it provides added support to the belief that the data that resides within agency firewalls could lead to significant public value if made freely (and easily) available to the rest of us.
The report notes:

“If the next Presidential administration really wants to embrace the potential of Internet-enabled government transparency, it should follow a counter-intuitive but ultimately compelling strategy: reduce the federal role in presenting important government information to citizens. Today, government bodies consider their own websites to be a higher priority than technical infrastructures that open up their data for others to use. We argue that this understanding is a mistake. It would be preferable for government to understand providing reusable data, rather than providing websites, as the core of its online publishing responsibility.

Rather than struggling, as it currently does, to design sites that meet each end-user need, we argue that the executive branch should focus on creating a simple, reliable and publicly accessible infrastructure that exposes the underlying data. Private actors, either nonprofi
t or commercial, are better suited to deliver government information to citizens and can constantly create and reshape the tools individuals use to leverage public data.”

Rather than have statistics presented in static form on government portals, the future should see organizations allow their constituents to use free visualisation platforms to transform data into conversations about communities, economies and lifestyles. As Hans Rosling told me in a (not-so) recent conversation, ‘the role of the State is to provide the sidewalks between data sources,’ and thus thanks to visualisation and data animation tools, allow data to be consumed and digested by statisticians and laymen alike.

One of the few examples I’ve been able to find of a government agency actually going down this path is the Swivel-hosted Utah Data Group. Created by Utah CTO Dave Fletcher, the group doesn’t quite have the participants needed to make for a robust dialogue but nonetheless it provides a couple of examples of the conversations that can ensue from this confluence of technology and transparency.

Here’s hoping such efforts cease to be the exception, and perhaps more important, get incorporated into Government 2.0 portals and mashups.