September 24, 2011
Musings of a GCPEDIAC: What makes a great sysop?
It’s been a great year for GCPEDIA so far. I only wish I had more time to engage with it personally. As you can see from the lapse between this post and my previous writings about my favourite wiki (or indeed, any blogging at all), I’ve been busy.
But the wiki has chugged along just fine without me. More users every month and increasingly more complex documents are making the Recent Changes log fly by faster than ever… so much so that I felt compelled to add a bit of code to the wiki to highlight the sysop names in the activity log, just to make sure that there were enough staff online to help the users. (For the record: no problems there.).
One of my very favourite collaborators, Jesse Good, returned to the fold back in January after finishing school, and promptly turned the wiki on its side with his simultaneous injections of content, culture, and fun. Meanwhile, another of my long-time favourite users, Catharine Au, was finally goaded into accepting a position as a sysop after humbly refusing it before, much to my disappointment.
September 21, 2011
“Social Production” as a Market Strategy
“Social production” is defined as the result of “the coordinated creative energy of large numbers of people (usually with the aid of the Internet) into large, meaningful projects, mostly without traditional hierarchical organization.” (Wikipedia.org)
Given that definition, can social production build stronger market economies? Will we create compelling financial incentives and rewards with more social cooperation?
“Social production” was cognitively described by Yochai Benkler in the Wealth of Networks. We often think of market and social production as mutually exclusive. We mentally pit financial outcomes against egalitarian “free” outcomes. A good example is the open source versus traditional software licensing debates currently playing out in the Gov 2.0 movement in Washington D.C.
September 6, 2011
Improving Engagement by Understanding People
I’ve been studying and/or working in government and technology (“gov20) since 2007. My original interest in the field was around improving the efficiency and effectiveness of governance. The idea was that if we had better data and information about our work, engaged with the people our policies were designed to impact, and used the best technologies to manage the process, that we could create better government. I still carry this fundamental believe, and over the last few years have had the privilege of working on a variety of different technology and engagement projects with nonprofits and government institutions as well as studying how the best practices in the field from an academic perspective.
Much of the work to date has focused on pushing the use of technology to further engagement, improve the delivery of services and information, and help organizations meet their goals and missions.
In my experience, it is important to think about several layers when designing gov/tech/engagement projects:
July 30, 2011
Social Media in the Middle East and North Africa: Why Now? What’s Next?
Last month I went back to the Kennedy School to speak at the Plenary panel of the HKS reunion weekend. The panel was called “Revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa: Why Now? What’s Next?” The panel was moderated by Xenia Dormandy, Senior Fellow at Chatham House (MPP 2000), and featured Tarek Masoud, Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation and Razzaq al-Saiedi, Senior Researcher, Physicians for Human Rights (MPA 2009))
I was invited to provide some perspective on the role that social media has / is playing. I was happy that the panel was so diverse; the focus was not on social media, but rather on the socio-economic and political factors at play, which was quite refreshing to someone embedded in online media.
The panel video is now available in case you want to watch it.
May 31, 2011
Accessing Australia: The Challenges of Digitisation
Senator Lundy gave a speech at the “HASS on the Hill” conference as part of a session on Accessing Australia: the challenges of digitisation. HASS on the Hill is an event coordinated by the Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (CHASS) for the humanities, arts and social sciences sector to communicate with government and policy makers.
Senator Lundy spoke at the event on behalf of Minister for the Arts, Simon Crean, and the speech below was a collaborative effort between our offices.
Speech Notes
It was not so long ago, in December 2008, that the newest national cultural institution – the National Portrait Gallery – opened its doors.
From the very start it was a resounding success, with visitor numbers far exceeding initial projections.
The eagerness with which Australians embraced this cultural institution says a great deal about the importance we place on our cultural collections and our access to them.
The new National Portrait Gallery sits within Canberra’s cultural precinct. As much as I would like to encourage as many visitors to Canberra as possible, realistically, not everyone is going to have that opportunity.
That opportunity lies elsewhere. That opportunity lies in the digitisation of our national treasures.
May 18, 2011
We First is a community of brands and consumers using social technology to create shared prosperity and positive change
What is We First?
We First is a new way of looking at the world authored by Simon Mainwaring. It’s a personal and professional response to a sea of fears that surround us everyday.
May 6, 2011
“Open government” – Public discussion of bills of the Government of Russian Federation
The trend of public online panel discussions is continuing its development. The relevantPresident’s decree has been released in February. Now media reports that on 1st of June the discussion system of legislative initiatives is going to be launched on the government.ru website – the program name is “Open Government”. Every citizen can be involved in legislative system via electronic voting.
The first bill under discussion will be “The bill on the basics of healthcare of Russian citizens”. The discussions are going to be coordinated by the Public Opinion Foundation. The biggest problem with national discussions is when they are not moderated the main thread will be buried under unnecessary noise.
All of the bills that could have social response are going to be submitted on online discussion.
Earlier, the Presidental Police Act was discussed at the similar special platform.
The “Open government program” could be useful in the elections season, so the opposition could not use unpopular initiatives for counter-agitation.
April 20, 2011
On fearless advice and loyal implementation
I traveled across British Columbia last month, visiting a series of three Employment Insurance (EI) processing plants, to deliver talks about engagement and career development. I met a lot of dedicated public servants, made new friends, and learned more about front-line service delivery than many Ottawa-based policy wonks do this early in their career.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the sessions and the conversations that emerged at the three different sites and here is where my mind has settled …
Regardless of what you were hired to do – be it providing traditional policy advice in the National Capital Region, or “crushing” EI claims for Canadians in a processing plant in Kamloops – your role as a public servant is to deliver “fearless advice and loyal implementation”. What I’ve found is that there is a divide, real or imagined, between those of us in Ottawa who were hired to deliver “fearless advice” and those of us in the regions who are expected to “loyally implement”. This isn’t ubiquitous, but was my general impression. It is an impression that was hammered home when someone asked me why Ottawa couldn’t just fix the culture in the regional office, as if some sort of Deputy decree could change their specific working conditions. What struck me most about the comment wasn’t the idea that culture could somehow be made by decree, but rather the underlying sense of helplessness, as if culture couldn’t be affected by those who are actually mired in it.
I think the problem is that we have collectively misinterpreted the significance and underestimated the opportunities we have to effect our work culture and sub-cultures, regardless of where we work or what we work on. We mistakenly think of fearless advice as something that only the people at the very top of the organization do; something that is reserved for private meetings between Deputies and their Ministers. In fact, I think that speaking truth to power (fearless advice and loyal implementation) more often means pushing against the small “p” office politics and the small “c” culture of the bureaucracy. In other words, fearless advice isn’t reserved for ministerial briefings, but rather happens in the hallways, over cubicle walls, and in the lunch rooms among peers.
Think of it in terms of the long tail:
Let me end by saying this: regardless of where you work, or what your role is, your responsibility is to articulate an argument, back it up with the facts, infuse it with passion, and deliver it with non-partisan conviction, wherever you see the opportunity to do so.
April 5, 2011
With Honesty and Open Government for All
Since falling head over stilettos with Twitter, it’s a known fact I strongly advocate open government and increasing government transparency (especially via social media).
But tweets, Facebook posts, and Youtube videos alone obviously aren’t enough. Government transparency begins with the most simple of principles: always tell the truth. Sometimes the truth isn’t always the prettiest thing in the room, but it takes someone with integrity and a strong moral compass to do the right thing.
Over the last two years, I’ve observed several politicians and candidates across this state and across this nation in regard to their stand on open government. Some are pretty disappointing… but with West Virginia’s 2011 special gubernatorial election, one candidate stands out from the pack with a strong record on increasing government transparency: Jeff Kessler.
March 31, 2011
Is it practical for government agencies to block web-based mail?
The Australian National Audit Office has just released a report ‘The Protection and Security of Electronic Information Held by Australian Government Agencies‘ based on a review of the approaches to information security by four agencies, the Office of Financial Management, ComSuper, Medicare Australia, and the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.
Amongst other recommendations was one which has been much discussed on Twitter this morning, “emails using public Web-based email services should be blocked on agency ICT systems, as these can provide an easily accessible point of entry for an external attack and subject the agency to the potential for intended or unintended information disclosure.”
This reflects the recommendation in the Defense Signal Directorate’s Information Security Manual, the ‘bible’ for Australian Government agencies when it comes to ICT security, which states on page 100 that:
Agencies should not allow personnel to send and receive emails using public web-based email services.
The concerns are very clear and relevant – web-based email systems can easily be used, inadvertently or deliberately, to distribute large quantities of citizen’s personal information, or an agency’s In Confidence or other classified information rapidly and to large numbers of people, making it impossible to contain the spread of the information.
Web-based email is also a potential source of attacks against an agency, through viruses, worms and trojans in email attachments (which may not be able to be scanned at the same level as Departmental email can be) and through web-links in emails to compromised websites.
I don’t dispute these real concerns. They are concerns for corporations as well.
However, I do ask – what is ‘web-based email’?