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The Connected Republic

A community space, developed by Cisco's Internet Business Solutions Group

Opening Up the ConversationSeptember 24

Recently I’ve been doing a bit of thinking about consultation and how governments could innovate in this area. Obviously using the web means that potentially many more people can be involved, including many people who would never have thought of responding to a government consultation in the past. And of course you can be much more imaginative about the form of the consultation. You can let people respond to or rate the comments of others; you can let people comment on any paragraph of your document rather than just on a few set questions; you can even use widgets to allow people to put your consultation questions on their own sites. So there are lots of interesting things you can do.

But how far does that really get you? More citizens get to comment on the proposals and it is easier for them to do so, but it’s still the government setting the agenda and there is no guarantee the citizen input really has any impact. So what would radical change look like? One way of putting it is to say that the government needs to enter into a permanent and real, two-way conversation with citizens, but what would that actually mean?Frankly, I am not quite sure. Imagine, for example, that rather than consulting, you set up a citizen agenda-setting site. The site could cover public issues in general or a specific area, but the aim would be to give citizens as much freedom as possible to set the agenda. So on an annual (or quarterly or monthly or continuous) cycle citizens would b

Benchmarking egovt in the Web 2.0 eraSeptember 9

Some of you will remember the discussion on benchmarking that David Osimo launched in the Forums a little while ago. David has now developed his ideas and put them forward in an excellent paper in the European Journal of ePractice. He argues that in the first phase of e-government the focus of benchmarking was on availability of online services and that in the second phase the focus should be on transparency. David sees transparency as a key emerging issue and I very much agree. Interestingly, he contrasts online services which required a lot of IT investment in order to deliver a flagship goal that drove relatively little change within government with transparency which he argues requires little IT investment to deliver a flagship goal that will drive major change in government.

David points to the undoubted impact of the current methodology for measuring egovernment progress developed by Cap Gemini Ernst & Young for the European Commission. He suggests a new measure needs to be just as easy to understand and to collect if it is to work. So what he argues for is a measure along the following lines:

- 20 basic sets of public data such as beneficiaries of public funding, laws, planning applications, air pollution data etc

- each data set assessed on a five point scale consisting of 0) not p

Harnessing the Power of Collective IntelligenceSeptember 5

A few months back I was talking about the role of collective intelligence in generating higher quality, faster decisions.  My discussion was focused on integrating social networking concepts and digital fabrics into engineering collaboration environments for large scale programs.  The response of one individual – who I’ll call John - was: “great ideas, but I don’t buy the whole social networking thing.  I mean if I listened to the mass social network I would be eating at McDonalds, the most popular restaurant. Yet I’m a food critic who enjoys expensive food and nice wines.  So I don’t see how the mass can help me.”

My response was “very valid, but what if you and I just met and I realized you had an interest in wines and restaurants. I excitingly talk about a new favorite restaurant with great French wines.  You try it, like it, and tell your friends.  You also let me know you enjoyed the recommendation, and I introduce you to a friend of mine with similar taste.  All in all we’ve just expanded our network of trusted experts/friends.  Would you gain any value out of this linkage of select groups who help expand, experiment, and refine our choices?”.

Social networking applied to public and private sector environments is not about the masses.  It is about tapping into the expertise, experiences, and insights of those who are directly trusted, are trusted by those you trust, and/or show a level of interest based on some event, an eve

Government Data and the Invisible HandAugust 31

My Cisco colleague Richard Allan introduced me to a paper from Yale entitled “Governmnet Data and the Invisible Hand”.  Worth a quick read.  The burden of its central message is that governments should stop setting up websites and start the less sexy, but ultimately much kore useful and revolutionary work of providing reusable data. 

Basically the authors suggest that in an age of relatively easy and cheap access to the tools of mash-ups and online forums, governments should spend much less time organising and presenting their data in ways they assume people want (and which mostly is done to reflect that goverment agencies themselves want and deem to be important) and much more time making the raw material - government data itself - easy to find, access and re-use.

This is the final paragraph of the paper:

“…we have proposed an approach to online government data that leverages both the American tradition of entrepreneurial self-reliance and the remarkable low-cost flexibility of contemporary digital technology.  The idea, though it can be implemented in a comfortably incremental fashion, is ultimately transformative.  It leads toward an ecosystem of grassroots, unplanned solutions to online civic needs.”

It can sound a bit arcane and technical, but the impact of the idea from this paper might make this the biggest single thing governments could do to usher in the era of so-called “government 2.0″. 

Copy attached (forge

It’s the network, stupidAugust 31

I’m attaching a short piece from the MIT’s Technology Review entitled “How Obama Really Did It”.  The piece explores the Obama campaign’s phenomenal success with their web and online strategy, which apparently promoted Clinton advisor James Carville, of the famed “it’s the economy, stupid”, to paraphrase his own quip with the network now as his focus…

A few interesting hints from the article:

The Obama team put such technologies (Web 2, collaboration etc) at the centre of its campaign

The campaign did not micromanage but struck a balance beween top-down control and anarchy

They made giving money a social event…

You have to make the web tools central to the campaign and properly manage the networks of supporters they help organise

I get Obama’s tex messages (says David All, a Republican media consultant)…it is never pointless, it is always woth reading and it has an action for you to take.

The piece claims we’ll never see political campaigning the same again.  That might be true but the more interesting question for me is how Obama and his team, if they lay claim to the White House in November, translate the campaigning impact of the network approach into the same kind of shift in the way we do politics and policy.

Footnote - I watched the Obama acceptance speech from the Democratic Convention on YouTube last night.  The speech lasts about 45 minutes and had been watched by almost 300,0