Author of machiavelli.net, proud father of three, interested in shaping network society. Welcome to my blog.Berlin Remix of the Moose
Larry Lessig gave an amazing presentation on David Post’s Jefferson’s Moose (2009) at the Heinrich-Böll Foundation in Berlin last week. Watch it! What do you think about the RW/RO argument? The Remix argument? Is change as radical as Lessig argues? What is your favorite moose? Other mooses you can think of?
What
One Rank to Rule them All: The Politics of Benchmarking
Almost a decade ago, the EU Commission started to measure the eGovernment progress of its member states (now 27) and select other countries. Whenever the new edition is published, the survey receives a lot of media attention. Headlines scream “Country X is a leader in eGovernment, it ranked 2nd behind country Y.” Whenever I attend EU conferences that are in some way connected to eGoverment, representatives of Member States like to point out their country’s position in the EU eGovernment ranking to underline how far they have come – it matters in politics. When politicians or high-level administrators from EU member states talk about eGovernment, they refer mostly to one particular result the EU eGovernment benchmark – online sophistication. So clearly, the benchmark has positively influenced eGovernment policies in EU Member States and beyond. Yet, what does it actually tell us?
The EU eGovernment benchmark measures 20 public services and the national portal, using four indicators : online sophistication (5-stages), online availability, user centricity and national portals. So in its essence the E-Government benchmark only tells us what is happening on the supply-side of eGovernment in 20 areas. eGovernment, of course, is much more complex than that. Other eGovernment benchmarks like the one conducted by the United Nations face similar difficulties. How do you measure a complex issue with a limited budget? How do include new trends such as Government 2.0 in a benchmark? How can you compare/allign benchmarks? They tend to differ in scope (EU=20 public service indicators; UN= mix of info society indicators), underlying cause-effect framework, or transparency of the methodology. Results differ widely and politicians tend to pick and choose on what they point at. Why not agree on one global cross-financed benchmark or at least a standardized set of indicators?
The EU and the United Nations are currently revising their respective eGovernment benchmark methodologies. This happens in smoke-filled backroom dealings between government representatives and select academics: There is no opportunity for the general public to participate, no platform for suggestions, no wiki to collaborate, no ranking/feedback mechanism, and the dataset is not available on a website in machine-readable format (think www.data.gov – read more about it in the Wired data.gov wiki). How can we change this? What indicators would you want to be included? How would you weigh them?
This text is an expansion on an entry published on the Harvard Kennedy School Complexity and Social Networks Blog.
Crowd-Sourcing NY 311
(reporting from the Washington CIO Exchange)
311 is the shortcut for the multi-channel citizen relationship management system of New York City. The CIO of NYC just stated at the Washington Governmental CIO Exchange that they are thinking about building a system, where they can integrate the knowledge of citizens into the response process of “311.” The idea is to offer an interface that allows citizens to participate in aggregating local knowledge into actionable information. Think Wiki or the citizen-driven approach of the peer produced London call centers.
PS: He is also thinking about open source solutions on the desktop.
Ines Mergel: Web 2.0 Enthusiasts Worth Following on Twitter
by Ines Mergel
I am a Twitter enthusiast and as one of those people who do spend a lot of time online, I noticed that Twitter is one of the information channels, that help me get access to information, that is otherwise not on my radar screen or I would not get access to.
Twitter – for me personally as a Government 2.0 researcher – therefore has the potential to bridge structural holes in the communication and information structure that I have built over the years. In addition, I noticed that it is expanding my attention network of a) topics I should pay attention to, and b) people and their public conversation streams that are interesting to know. In a new information paradigm of the US government to move from a need to know to a need to share strategy, I thought I would share a few interesting people whose information and conversation who might be interesting to listen in to.
Without trying to convince anyone of the power of public conversations happening on Twitter, I put together a list of people and organizations that might have helpful information for anyone interested in Web 2.0 in government:
@timoreilly: Tim O’Reilly is the found and CEO of O’Reilly Media, traditionally known for publishing IT-related books, isnow a supporter of Government 2.0 and hosts conferences on the topic. Definitely worth following -> I learned a LOT!
@mcaffee: Andrew McAffee, a former professor at Harvard Business School, has coined the term Enterprise 2.0. Andy addresses corporate but also general Web 2.0 problems and is asking questions using the hashtag #andyasks -> add the tag to the new search function, so that you can revisit the information purring in every few days.
If you like tweets from space live from the repair team of the Hubble telescope, space astronaut Mike Massimino is tweeting his observations directly from the space shuttle: @Astro_Mike. NASA itself was one of the first twitter users within the US federal government: @NASA:
As the swine flu (H1N1) developed and the threat level has increased to a pandemic disease, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in the US has adopted a comprehensive Web 2.0 approach to reach potential groups that are at risk at the virtual locations they might be frequenting the most. I posted a blog entry on this on my blog with an overview of tools used. On Twitter: @CDCemergency.
There are tons of government agencies present on Twitter and BearingPoint has put together a huge list that can be found here.
I have selected a few government agencies I am following and find helpful:
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Department of State: Official Blog of the U.S. Department of State @dipnote: http://twitter.com/dipnote
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White House @whitehouse: http://twitter.com/whitehouse
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US Army @USArmy: http://twitter.com/USArmy
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Tweet Congress: Aggregator of tweets from Members of Congress @tweetcongress
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USA.gov – the one-stop shopping portal of the US Government: @usagov
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Transportation Security Administration (TSA):Â @tsablogteam
In addition, the tweets of government-related IT publications and organizations might be helpful to learn about ongoing initiatives and news:
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One Laptop Per Child: http://twitter.com/OLPC
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Govdigest [http://twitter.com/govdigest] and DotGov [http://twitter.com/dotgov] are compiling up to date information and are retweeting information from other accounts, spreading the word to their followers and multiplying the attention base.
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UN Secretary general @secgen [http://twitter.com/secgen] is using Twitter to as an online calendar, listing whom he is meeting with each day.
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GovWiki: http://twitter.com/govwiki
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Government Technology Magazine: http://twitter.com/govtechnews
As I am located in the US, this post and my list of favorite Web 2.0 people is very much US-centric. Please leave your suggestions for additional Twitter accounts in the comments!
Following me on Twitter: @inesmergel [http://twitter.com/inesmergel]
Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt: The Politics of Identity Management
I am at the Austrian/German/Mexican/US CIO Exchange in Washington DC. Today we are at the CSC world headquarter in Falls Church. We are discussing identity management. CSC set it up with the song “beyond a shadow of the doubt†and 9/11. Identity management as a security challenge. Is this how you would frame it?
Identity management is a core function of any collectivity, therefore, we think about it in different terms in different disciplines (political theory, public policy, business, psychology, etc.). And as we are moving to network society, we need to ask fundamental questions about it.
On the most abstract level, identity management is a set of technologies and process that manage the life-cycle of users, authenticate them and authorize access to resources. It is a relative concept, meaning that identity management should be in proportion to the needs, so ask questions like: What resources are your protecting? What policies govern the resources? How do you translate policy into user attributes? How do you assure compliance? Is the solution standards-based? Is it inter-operable? The CSC approach is to (a) create a vision, strategy, and roadmap, (b) develop identity manager, access manager, and federation manager (an approach that enables the users of one organization to easily and securely access the data and applications of another).
This very important aspect of collective life is at the moment driven by the solutions that vendors can provide (vendor-driven theorizing). We as the netizens/digital natives of this world need to learn to participate in this discourse and start playing the politics of identity management. What are your major concerns concerning identity management in network society?
Unlocking Read-Write Culture
in the last two days in NYC I had amazing conversations on how our world is transforming with three of my former students. They come at the issue from different perspectives, Sofia is in the BCG Strategy institute thinking about the future of strategy, Adriana is working for a big Fortune 500 company trying to introduce sustainability into core business strategy, and Sam is in private equity in Hongkong.
The debates we had in Starbucks (in itself a high-res global MUD – you can even smell the coffee) and on the rooftop terrace of Bookmarks (on 41st and Madison) felt like we were continuing a conversation from last night, because (a) globally our experiences/perspectives are converging and (b) as friends they follow this blog.
Now, imagine we move this type of collective thinking online: We would be able to unlock the potential of Shaping-Network-Society. So (a) comment, (b) if you have an idea, write a guest-blog, and (c) as a simple way to jump-start the conversation: What are your favorite three blogs?
A City that thinks like the web
Mark Surman, the executive director of the Mozilla foundation gave a talk in Toronto last November titled “a city that thinks like the web.” His argument was that opennes and participation made the web better and can make cities better (just imagine how you can improve city services, if you have a million beta-testers). David Eaves points us to a motion that will be discussed at the Vancouver City Council on May 19th, about making Vancouver an open city:
[…]THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED THAT the City of Vancouver endorses the principles of:
- Open and Accessible Data – the City of Vancouver will freely share with citizens, businesses and other jurisdictions the greatest amount of data possible while respecting privacy and security concerns;
- Open Standards – the City of Vancouver will move as quickly as possible to adopt prevailing open standards for data, documents, maps, and other formats of media;
- Open Source Software – the City of Vancouver, when replacing existing software or considering new applications, will place open source software on an equal footing with commercial systems during procurement cycles; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED THAT in pursuit of open data the City of Vancouver will:
- Identify immediate opportunities to distribute more of its data;
- Index, publish and syndicate its data to the internet using prevailing open standards, interfaces and formats;
- Develop appropriate agreements to share its data with the Integrated Cadastral Information Society (ICIS) and encourage the ICIS to in turn share its data with the public at large
- Develop a plan to digitize and freely distribute suitable archival data to the public;
- Ensure that data supplied to the City by third parties (developers, contractors, consultants) are unlicensed, in a prevailing open standard format, and not copyrighted except if otherwise prevented by legal considerations;
- License any software applications developed by the City of Vancouver such that they may be used by other municipalities, businesses, and the public without restriction.
BE IT FINALLY RESOLVED THAT the City Manager be tasked with developing an action plan for implementation of the above.
It is interesting to see how in 2009, organizations of all types are asking radical questions about process and governance. What will our world look like in 2010? [thanks to Ines Mergel for twittering about the motion. Do RSS her blog]
Fabrics of Trust
Massive/enhanced collaboration is such a new phenomena that we still do not know what it can really do for us. Are Wikipedia and Couchsurfing a small organizations because they have very few staff? Or big, because many people collaborate? Is the authenticity of peer production a value in itself? Can we mine local knowledge, by creating p2p call centers? How can we build trust/reputation online? What else can we do? Watch Banyak‘s US Now and participate in the discussion!
Us Now from Banyak Films on Vimeo.
A Geeky Way to Spend Friday-Night
Tonight at 8 pm New York time, Stephen Wolfram will launch WolframAlpha life on television/webcast. You can be there from the comfort of your home and do not have to be there in person like the people waiting in line for 24 hours to be the first in the Best Buy 5th Ave for the Green Day Autograph session tonight (we were driving by there on Thursday night and they had put up their tents). Of course, the webcast is a marketing gimmick, but it also shows how radical transparency is being mainstreamed as a strategic management tool. And watching a few old English men turning on the light in a data center with more than 3.800 CPUs sounds like fantastic friday night fun, doesn’t it? – To prepare you can watch the trailer.
What $ 2 Trillion Can Do For You
As we are watching the global stimulus packages being implemented, it makes sense to step back and reflect on comparable interventions. Germany has invested around 4% of its GDP every year since 1990 into the reconstruction of former East Germany. This amounts to around $ 2 trillion a number comparable to the $ 5 trillion that countries worldwide pledged in their stimulus packages. Peter Gumbel develops the analogy in Time Magazine,
In the past year, as the world economy has plunged into recession, governments have pledged to spend as much as $5 trillion of taxpayers’ money to ward off a prolonged slump. For the most part, these massive programs are based on little more than theory: nobody advocating them has experienced a downturn as dramatic as this one. But Dagmar Szabados has seen such spending before — she knows what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a gigantic fiscal infusion. Szabados, a chemist by training, is the mayor of Halle, a mid-sized town in the middle of what used to be the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the formerly communist eastern part of Germany. Since the Berlin Wall fell, the old GDR has been showered with money. Overall, some $2 trillion has been pumped in — the equivalent of about 4% of Germany’s economic output every year.
What do you think of it? Was it a success? I live in Erfurt, a stunningly beautiful medieval city in the East that clearly profited from the process, but what does that mean? What answer would satisfy such a question?
