Levy Rivers's List: organizational

• We commissioned Ed Mayo and Tom Steinberg to write the Power of Information report because we knew that information, presented in the right way, was a potent driver for improving public services and government.
• Today I am going to offer two arguments that I think compliment the Prime Minister’s recent announcement on public service reform
• Firstly, that freeing up data will allow us to unlock the talent British entrepreneurs. And secondly, engaging people - using the simple tools that bring them together - will allow the talents of all our people to be applied to the provision of public services.
• The difference of course is that today we contend with what Richard Saul Wurman describes as a ‘tsunami of data’
• My job is to make sure that government can benefit from this new thinking too. When we were first elected in 1997 people had a recipient relationship with data, they got what they were given when they were given it. It was static.
• In scale, the spread of social media is comparable to the spread of telephones in the 1930’s to the 1950’s. Yet it’s happened in two years not 20.
• As Clay Shirky would say, we’ve reached a point where technology is simple and boring enough to be socially useful and interesting.
• Over 7 million electronic signatures have been sent, electronically, to the Downing Street petition website. 1 in 10 citizens have emailed the Prime Minister about an issue. The next stage is to enable e-petitioners to connect with each other around particular issues and to link up with policy debates both on and off Government webspace.
• Only last week, the Prime Minister became the first head of Government in Europe to launch his own channel on Twitter, which I can tell you from experience, is extremely useful to his ministers at least
• Richard is here tonight and I hope that after the formal proceedings you might like to share some of your own ideas with him. Richard is also joined by a number of other taskforce members. They’re all people with remarkable track records in this field. We’re lucky. The UK has some of the world’s leading talent.
• And today the PM announced an initiative that would allow you to find your community Bobbies using your postcode.
• The taskforce will bring its expertise to bare on existing initiatives to see if we can what we already do better
• I want the taskforce to ensure that the COI and Cabinet Office produce a set of guidelines that adheres to the letter of the law when it comes to the civil service code but also lives within the spirit of the age. I’ll be putting some very draft proposals to the taskforce to consider later this week.
• By bringing people onto the taskforce with the skills and experiences of people like Sally Russell we can move further and faster in this area.
• Two weeks ago the Prime Minister signalled that we were moving public services to the next stage of reform. He said that we were not only going to, further enhance choice but also empower both the users of services and all the professionals who deliver them - to drive up standards for all.
• Transformational government is about wrapping services around the citizen, not citizens around the services.
• Last month DirectGov had over 7 million visitors. Peter is seeing the aggregate desires of millions of UK public service using citizens. I had half an hour with him a fortnight ago and came away with a dozen ideas as to how we can improve our public services.
• I’m the Member of Parliament for West Bromwich East and I didn’t know about an important recycling initiative going on in my own patch. This information now means that a bag load of clothing for a small child and a habitat sofa are about given a second chance to give pleasure.
• And much of that information has the potential to be reused in data mashups. Some of it already is, like Hansard on theyworkforyou, or Google Maps using Ordnance Survey data.
• The Power of Information Report recognised that, and made recommendations to the Treasury. The Treasury, with the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, published an independent economic study in the Budget and announced its intention to look at these issues during this spending review cycle.

• It was this early open source approach that arguably fostered 500 years of Islamic scholarship in important fields like medicine, astronomy, lexicography, literature and science.

   

  In contrast, European data was stored in monasteries and did not foster easy knowledge transfer. As Gibbon wrote in the ‘Decline and fall of the Roman empire’ the ‘age of Arabian learning continued about five hundred years’ and was coeval with the darkest and most slothful period of European annals?

• I believe in the power of mass collaboration.

   

  I believe that as James Surowiecki says the many are smarter than the few.

   

  I believe that the old hierarchies in which government policy is made are going to change for ever.

   

  I said that I don’t believe the post-bureaucratic age argument. It’s just old thinking, laissez faire ideas with a new badge.

   

  The future of government is to provide tools for empowerment, not to sit back and hope that laissez-faire adhocracy will suffice.

• The irony that laying claim to the ownership of a policy on open source was lost to the poor researcher who had spent a day dissecting the speech. He’d been able to do so easily because it was freely available on my blog, a simple tool used for communicating information quickly and at nearly zero cost without the requirement to charge for access.

   

  The point is, who cares? It doesn’t matter who has the ideas. It’s what you do with them and how you improve on them that counts.

21 more annotations...

• During the interactive portion of the sessions, 60% of the attendees said they used social networking sites. In addition, 68% of the attendees said their organizations did not ban access to such sites, while 25% did not.

• For businesses the overriding philosophy has been capture, contain, control and leverage the masses.
• The social web flies in the face of this wisdom with users wanting and learning to leverage “free” for self expression,
• The irony of this is that old “beliefs systems” are based on a philosophy of scarcity rather than abundance.
• Blinded by old beliefs those that continue to try and contain and control will loose to those that leverage free for greater value for a larger market of people willing and wanting to participate in the new “philosophy”.

2 more annotations...

• Business Schools are a very recent form of eduction. Divinity schools have been around for centries and yes - they were concerned with belief systems or dogma - Levy Rivers on 2008-04-08

• The argument is an apologia in the theological sense of giving reasons, with room for doubt, directed to nonbelievers.
• "Bourgeois virtues" is neither. Modern capitalism does not need to be offset to be good. Capitalism can, on the contrary, be virtuous. In a fallen world the bourgeois life is not perfect. But it's better than any available alternative. American capitalism needs to be inspirited, moralized, completed. Two and a half cheers for the midwestern bourgeoisie.
• I don't much care how "capitalism" is defined, so long as it is not defined a priori to mean vice incarnate.

1 more annotation...

• But every now and then, a couple of messages come in that really irk me. These messages tell me how wrong I am about something I reviewed, which is fine — but they come from people who have *never even tried the product.*

• To find out how a company can protect its site and its good name from being hijacked, I talked with Jeremiah Grossman of WhiteHat Security at last week's RSA security conference here in San Francisco.  Grossman has made a big name for himself over the last couple of years by getting the word out about common Javascript vulnerabilities in Web sites.

• It's here, at street level, where the city's next generation of community engagement and leadership is taking shape. "There is a new model," says Cecelia Thompson, executive director of the Guilford Green Foundation, which serves the lesbian, gay and transgender community, gesturing to a clutch of fellow 20- and 30-somethings. "This is the model sitting around the table."

  Just as the city's economy is undergoing transformation, so too is Greensboro's leadership and how things get done

• The new model emerging is one of consensus, in which many people — community activists, young professionals, the newly wealthy — work in collaboration.

  John Alexander, who until recently ran the internationally renowned Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, calls this style "responsibility without authority."

  While consensus-building is far more difficult than simply making a command decision, it ultimately makes for a more prosperous community

• What's the point of honourary mentions? You're only going to honourary mention people that you like, and they probably know you like them, and therefore it's pretty bloody pointless. Especially as the point of the thread is to talk about the people WHOSE REPUTATION PRECEEDS THEM.

• Crowdsourcing is a concept that encourages organizations to access ideas and expertise from an untapped knowledge base that often includes customers. The survey was conducted among MENG members in December of 2007 in order to gauge the opinions and experiences of its members regarding this topic. The majority of the members who responded to the survey were Chief Marketing Officers and VPs of Marketing.
• Of particular interest is the way that these marketing executives view the effectiveness of crowdsourcing relative to internal R&D staffs for new product and service development. Sixty-two percent of executives surveyed rated crowdsourcing and consumer collaboration as an effective or highly effective approach to new product and service development, while only 11 percent more rated an internal R&D staff this way. This is a stunning development in the way executives consider approaching R&D. Additionally, 63 percent rated employee ideas and contributions as effective or highly effective, while 60 percent did the same for sourcing ideas from functional experts accessible from business and knowledge networks. Rated lowest was the use of traditional consulting and professional services firms (54 percent).

• Even more interesting is that we live in a time where we find at least three generations in the workforce who all have different values and expectations for their jobs. Implementing Enterprise 2.0 in this environment will be challenging to put it mildly.

    

  While it’s impossible to discount the findings of the Forrester report, a couple of points need to be carefully considered before taking it as gospel. The first is that Forrester reports are generally funded by enterprise vendors like Microsoft and IBM, which can lead to encouraging organizations to look to these vendors first for product selection — examine all your possibilities before assuming that an “enterprise suite” is truly the best option for your needs

• As usual, IBM is absolutely right in its observations, but eons late to the dance in Internet 2.0 terms. At this point, IBM is telling us that the earth orbits the sun, and not the other way around.

    

  And IBM will never catch up. I've said this before. All IBM will ever do is bolt collaboration tools onto their preexisting application suites--a clunky approach for which absolutely no one will have patience.

    

  What surprises me about Swisher and Perez is that they seem to buy into the idea that enterprise users will wait for the grumpy IT departments. Swisher writes:

    

  Still security and scaling issues remain paramount and startups that have pioneered these apps in the consumer space might lose business to big copycats like IBM and Microsoft.

    

  Puleease! Big copycats like IBM and Microsoft have been pouring out the same old blather about security and scaling while line-of-business chiefs are turning to their young hires and saying, "hey, how much is of those open source wiki things going to run me, and how fast can we set it up?"

• 4. Choose your friends carefully

   

  Well, that’s just good advice, period. But Wollman stresses it in regard to LinkedIn. “Whereas rampant friending is the norm for Facebook and MySpace, LinkedIn users should use discretion in building a network of colleagues they know and trust.” (The word “friending” threatens to give me an aneurysm, but I won’t edit it out. Don’t want to do any enemy-ing.)