Government as a platform - hype or real?

The Gov 2.0 Expo last month provided a wealth of knowledge about how governments can actually be transformed to serve as platforms. What I found interesting about the Expo -- I was not present, just following from a distance - was this sense of a huge social experiment under way. An experiment that has global implications. A lot of the themes presented were very inspiring, like Think Tank from the Expert Labs. Palantir is an interesting "information infrastructure" technology demonstrating the power of open data (data.gov and similar national data infrastructures).

These infrastructures and the apps that they are driving ought to get us rethinking how our societies function. O'Reilly says the Web 2.0 is not the redesign of the web, but stripping down the web to its essential core, similarly so for Government 2.0. Read and comment Tim O'Reilly's book Government as a platform. My comments hovered around Society 2.0 -- not a redesign of society, but getting back to basics for a more engaging and participative society.

From Expo, I found Tim's conversation with Federal CTO Aneesh Chopra very interesting. It's not that the views or ideas are so very radical or innovative. It's the fact that they are executing to a vision. A vision built on the potential of mass collaboration, tranparency and participation. The core of this vision in driven by something called the Open Government Directive. Simple stuff, not rocket science -- what impresses me is the execution -- and potentially world changing. Ten years from now we will be wondering how we functioned as a society without transparency, collaboration and participation.

See this very rich review of Expo.

Nobel prize for Obama - Why I think it is a good thing.

Friday's announcement of the 2009 Nobel peace prize award to Obama has drawn much comment around the globe The comments are driving introspection and reflection at mulitple levels -- as witnessed by blogposts and Facebook conversations. The notion of peace is being examined and dissected and I suspect weekend conversations are going to be really interesting. In itself, this is a success for the Nobel committee!

Rambling through the blogosphere, I see my own reflections from different perspectives - starting from from the banal "what has he done to deserve this" to the business consultant in me "how do we measure success" and to the digital citizen in me "the role of new media technologies in generating debate and participation" .

What has he done: In the short time he has been in office, he has shut down the Guantanamo prison, as the first US president to chair a UN Summit he has secured a unanimous resolution on nuclear disarmament, he has supported dialogue with Iran and the discussion table, addressing the Muslim world from Cairo, challenging the situation in the Middle East -- just to name a few. These are good enough for me.

How do we measure success: After the immediate WTF and knee-jerk "the award is premature"-reaction, I was embarrassed. Embarassed, because as a planning and strategy consultant I expound the values of setting direction and thinking tactically in a strategic manner -- beyond just focussing on what is delivered. Delivery and execution are critical, but recently strategy thinking has been reduced to glossy-talk that is devoid of vision (like slow food, I hope we get "slow strategy" :-)). I now see the Nobel committee's award in that light; taking a bold step to interpret Nobel's intentions for the 21st century. They were rewarding Obama for the direction he set, for the vision he creates by small actions. One man alone cannot do but one can certainly envision. Ultimately they are rewarding a vision that is open and can be adopted by anyone. And that is the real value of the award for me -- "placing a responsibility" not only Obama, but on every head of state and every citizen of the world who shares that vision. A vision of a more equitable world, a world where conflict is resolved by dialogue and non-violence, a world where people are energized so that they can make a difference. If nothing else, the award has reenergized the world in a "Yes, we can" attitude. (Aside: I wish I had statistics on how many countries and communities have been energized by the Obama presidential campaign). So Yes, the Nobel committee have acted in a very strategic manner.

New media technologies in generating participation: After my first post to the BBC-website, when this award was announced. I have been reading blogs, newspaper sites, TV programs and Facebook comments. I was struck by how little attention I paid to mainstream networks. I googled using Google's Fastflip and got the gist of what they were saying and got a lot more background. But then, it was the blogs, tweets and Facebook conversations that caught my eye. Social media technologies are engaging people more than ever and Friday's award tells me that all that is needed is something really visionary to generate a debate and to involve and include. Society 2.0 is here and going global every day (Yeah, I know I said I would not use the 2.0 term, it now evokes new-thinking and I'm happy :-))

A note on the Nobel peace prize would not be complete if I did not mention my disappointment that the Nobel committee failed to a true innovator in peace -- Mahatma Gandhi. See this article for some context. Speaking of the Mahatma, Albert Einstein puts it best “Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth.”

A big problem with laws and other technical material produced for bureacratic use is that it is - for all practical purposes - limited to those who are well-versed in the jargon or those with an immense capacity to read through technical documentation. (This is not unlike similar practices where for eg only priests could read holy scripture). Opening up content, not only by putting it on the web, but also providing tools to review and comment it is a good idea.

Therefore, Sharedbook is a very welcome technology that encourages people to collaboratively comment and annotate content. This form of collaborative action is useful in growing communities and creating a more engaging electorate (or an enterprise workforce for that matter). As a champion of more direct and participatory democracy, this move has a lot of potential of driving transparency.

I mention Sharedbook, because this is being used by some in the current health care debate in the US. See Congressman John Culberson's effort to get his constituents to engage themselves in the debate. There are similar technologies for co-creation of content (collaboratively creating content) -- and hopefully we will see the electorate actually collaborating on creating content that can become law. NB! I am not advocating that untrained people replace laywers or other experts, but that people are encouraged to participate in shaping policy and help lawyers and the experts.

Us Now is definitely a film to watch for those of us interested in the way grassroots movements are exploiting collaborative technologies. Director Ivo Gomley has manged to capture many aspects and examples in the documentary. Also thanks to Sermo for making this happen.

After nearly 4 years of blogging on the topic of the Digital Society -- often times meandering out on to my technology-jaunts -- I have for the first time got a sense of this phenomenon -- Society 2.0 or "deep democracy" -- taking root. I could hardly contain my excitement watching the different examples. Was also busy tweeting to capture my thoughts for later blogging (some tweets in Norwegian).

The debate that followed the screening was not really a debate -- the speakers were more or less in agreement on most issues. Which is just fine. We got some "confirmation to proceed"; what is needed now is to sustain the level of discussion and find ways to uncover the real issues in making Society 2.0 happen. The general election in Sept this year is very tempting to try out some ideas to get the issue up on the table. Anyone out there with ideas?

In earlier posts, I talked about the need to get law-makers and businesses to get together. Watching the film today, I am convinced we must hurry if we are to give ourselves time to evolve our societies and influence the global world order over the next 10-20 years. I would like to see a multi-discplinary think-tank (TT) formed; comprising political scientists, social scientists, computer scientists and business organisations to name a few players. This TT should take no more than 6-9 months to propose a long-term approach (say 4-5 years) to revise some laws and policies for eg in areas like education, healthcare, civil law, welfare and employment. Make changes that are more favourable to this "deep democracy" we want to happen. This will not be a revolution, but a very fast evolution.

In earlier posts I talked about Norway as a test-bed for creating services for the digital world. I'm not quite sure right now. It appears that maybe Norway does not have "enough pain" to want to stretch itself to experiment with participative decision-making. I guess the old adage "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" holds true. However, I'm not giving up the thought completely. Two areas I'd love to see more work is in Education adn Health care.

Watch this space...

I just read Nicholas Carr's note on the Web-Wikipedia-Google connection. It got me thinking about the way society in general perceives content from the Web as the sole truth (I too quote from Wikipedia, mainly definitions). The line of thinking in Carr's article got me digging into my mailbox for an email I wrote to friends on the EPIC video made by Matt Thomson and Robin Sloan.

Well, Googlezon is not here .... at least not as yet. However, since publishing the EPIC video, we have seen the rise of Facebook and the Huffington Post, YouTube is now a Google company and Amazon and Google are priming their products and services for cloud computing. The technology building blocks are taking shape (see my comments on Chrome and Web 2.0) and media ownership is changing rapidly. EPIC could be a reality pretty soon.

I'm hopeful that, as a society, we will push back the homogenisation and group-think that technology brings -- but it will not come easily. Developing our sense of critical thinking will be crucial. Besides, will our politicans and lawmakers resist the temptation to quote irresponsibly? We must evolve the governance structures of the hierarchical, atom-world to also address the networked, bit-world.

Sure, its not going to come easily and its definitely not going to be done overnight. Patience and diligence needed.

PS! Unless Britannica can be as easy to use as Wikipedia, I'm afraid Wikipedia will still be the preferred source of quotes. I tried quoting from Britannica for this article and it was far from easy.

Looks like Chrome may be taking the role of the operating system. What with all those nifty net-based applications building up on Google's home page. Google Docs is all set to take on MS Office, the features keeping increasing and the usability is improving (still a long way to go).

Once Chrome can deeply integrate with Google Apps --- not unlike the way MS Office (and other products) deeply integrated with MS Windows --- then we will be seeing the first steps towards creating a universal computer. One that just knows how to run a browser -- and drive a network card. That's all thats needed; the rest is on the cloud -- applications and data! 

Low power consumption will make it a preferred device not unlike the mobile phone. Talking of which, with the power that mobile phones are packing, phones will become computers (they already are) running a browser and using the mobile network. 

Google (and others) still have a lot of work to do to create the rich user experience in a world of all-net based applications. Which is why Microsoft is pushing Silverlight so hard and Adobe with Flash. Google still has the Android-card up its sleeve, with iPhone stealing a lot of the mobile-innovation thunder, I guess they will wait a bit.

We are probably reaching the stage where consumer-centered design of services is a very distinct possibility.

Web 2.0 is rolling on. I just came across these two pieces of software Flock (link) and Viewzi (link).

Flock is a social-web browser based on Mozilla, that gives a hint of the potential to develop specialist browsers. I'm not sure I'd want dedicated browsers, too much of a hassle. Rather, I'd like to change to a new "skin". A skin here is more than a layout theme or colours and fonts, it captures the user context. So, when I am browsing for people I activate a skin that offers a deeper browser experience. Similarly for shopping, listening to music etc.

Viewzi is a visual search tool. As one who prefers the visual/graphic over text, I find this user experience interesting. It actually interprets the results and content to present different views for the user to browse the content.

Now, I wonder what a Viewzi + Flock experience may actually look like?

Anyway, we still have a way to go before we can harness the power of Web 2.0. I am hoping for more contextualizing and visualizing. We need to focus on "a horizontal context" i.e. to exploit Web 2.0 in the context of work being performed for a given business activity. It makes things much more concrete.

So here it is. A network player like Cisco entering the home entertainment space -- by announcing that they will provide telepresence solutions for the home -- through AT&T and Walmart (!) see this article. I was hoping Tandberg would come up with a solution like this. But, Tandberg is focusing on the small/medium size business with the T1.

Anyway, the race for Telepresence is heating up; and as sales of LCD-displays increase it looks like we may be having these devices in the not-too-distant-future. As these devices reach the home and as the service economy grows; we can soon be using services that were previously restricted to face-to-face meetings. In a global world, this could be very interesting as I could receive services from the other side of the globe. Hmmm.... now what would my doctor think about that? And maybe the do-it-yourself store can finally offer services to help you fix the appliance you bought from them. Would IKEA try something like this?

My recent posts have talked about technology and solutions and less about the Digital Society. Partly due to myopia (its an occupational hazard of working with solution planning) but also deliberately, to show examples of what can form building blocks for the foundation of a digital society. However, today I am suddenly made aware of a live example that can serve as a use case for the Societal Digital Infrastructure (see my other blogposts with this tag).

The TVaksjon is an annual national fund raising event hosted by NRK - the Norwegian state television. An event that, for one day, brings people together to support an organisation that works towards a focused cause. The organisation and cause are carefully chosen to balance multiple perspectives. This year the funds go to UNICEF Norge and the topic is Together for children aimed at helping children face the challenges of HIV and AIDS. This event is a national dugnad has many interesting elements like the use of auctioning technology, use of crowdsourcing techniques to mobilize volunteers nationwide or the use of web technology that helps businesses to leverage their social involvement and profile their products.

For such an initiative to work at this depth of credibility and involvement requires a hidden foundation. A foundation built on a combination of societal practices, social behaviours, laws and governance and enforced and enabled by technology. It is a combination of these that form the foundation of a digital society -- Societal Digital Infrastructure.

It is very likely that similar campaigns exist in other countries or in different communities like this scheme DonorsChoose. Please drop me a note/comment if you have other examples.

In what I would characterise a landmark event for communications, Microsoft and Norwegian telco Telenor teamed to launch the VoIP platform in Oslo today (Norwegian). Demonstrating the merger of software-powered telephony with device/network powered telephony I sensed a major shift -- blurring the lines between traditional communication and collaboration --but also witnessing another example of the consumerisation of IT (i.e. introducing products from the consumer market, into the enterprise).

The two case-study presentations were also impressive; but then Microsoft are very good at recruiting early adopters to demonstrate production-grade implementations. The case studies were from Norway's largest company StatoilHydro (collaboration between land and sea/rig) and one of Northern Europe's most advanced hospitals St. Olav in Trondheim (the VoIP platform as the foundation for communication).

Again, Microsoft showed their willingness to develop hardware, even though it may only be to demonstrate the power of the software platform. The Roundtable device is a simple device with a USB-connected 360-degree camera with voice-detection allowing for automatically zooming to the speaker. The quality of the picture could have been better but anyway, it brings an audio/video dimension to VoIP in the enterprise. And in these climate-conscious days, it could help reduce travel.

Microsoft's VoIP platform (or Unified Communications as it is called) seems poised to be the "web operating system" for developing large scale mobile applications with deep integration of communication and presence. Judging by the partners present and those announced, it looks like a new wave of solutions from ISVs. The video-conferencing sector (like Tandberg) will get a boost from this launch even though I think it is difficult to say if the impact will be positve (i.e. people develop a sense for video conferencing and look for better solutions) or negative (i.e. put off buying expensive video-conferencing equipment).