Category: All Posts

December 15, 2010

Recognition and Social Fear — The Competing Forces of Citizen Participation

What makes for a good day? When you get home at night do you feel like you have had a good day when it is filled with non-stop listening to others and you have had little to say? Or do you have a good day when you can say – “You know what, I had something to say that someone listened to, and I think it made a difference”?[1]

The desire to be recognized is one of the most powerful human motivations that all of us share. And it is at the core of many government 2.0 applications – often, cooperative platforms that enable complete visibility and back and forth between citizens and at times agency employees and officials.

Wikis, crowd sourcing, forums, and blogs are all examples of specific cooperative applications. These tool technologies are often touted as enabling inclusion of citizens, agency partners, and employees in a way not before possible. Many of these social tools are in fact designed to build social friendships or relationships in closed groups, or have a strong social element.

Social fear, too, affects citizen inclusion.

Of course the flip side of openness is the social fear that it creates.[2] It too is a powerful emotion.

Do you remember the first time that you walked to a podium in a public meeting to share your point of view? Did you have a lump in your throat and a pit in your stomach? For many in America and throughout the World, this is the case. We don’t naturally gravitate to public recognition. We fear looking stupid and being ridiculed. And so it is online.

Why would citizens with constructive ideas share them in an online food fight, where in today’s hyper-partisan world cooperative tools are used as mega-phones for deeply held beliefs, often at the expense and ridicule of those trying to be constructive? In that sense a good case could be made that they inhibit inclusion rather than expand it – standing alone.

December 14, 2010

Collaboration is not Just a Cooperative Venture

I was lucky enough to give a couple of presentations recently, one at an intergovernmental social networking workshop and the other was a brief talk at a PS collaborative management day, both were outstanding events and real learning experiences for me. Listening to the other great presenters, re-enforced my fundamental beliefs that collaboration is not just a cooperative venture, but a deeper intellectual interaction based on respect and trust. It is the connection of people into communities, their conversations and relationships that will enable us to make the rich layers of knowledge that are needed to address tomorrows complexities today.

The Power of Sharing

View more presentations from Ralph Mercer.

Key Points

Leadership is not threatened by collaboration, people are. The vertical alignment of the org charts will still exist, the chain of authority, responsibility and accountability haven’t changed, but what has changed is the access to new innovative solutions and possibilities that come with connecting the horizontal lines of collaboration.
It may well be impossible to implement collaboration and social learning within government if we can’t get past the restrictive policies and realize that collaboration is not a risk but an enabler.
Simply put, change must start now if we want it to be part of the cultural fabric of the future. ( stop talking about it, and do it, trust your people)
Just as we create physical workspace to generate creativity we need to design the collaboration spaces that stimulate the mind not close it down with poor design. We need to move from the document and records management architecture that is a “file and forget” system, to one that we can surface the information we need and connect it to the right people, in the right place at the right time.
Managers exercise the authority they are given, if they are not empowered to say yes, they will say no rather than ask up the chain. The new managers role will shift from being the gatekeepers of the corporate knowledge to enablers of the practices and behaviors that build corporate knowledge from the bottom up.

And finally if I can leave you with one thought on integrating any social technology into our work it is this; stop building policy that keeps telling us what we can’t do and start building policy that tells what we should do. Just imagine the power of policy that encourages us, defining our interactions with each other in positive voice, now wouldn’t that be refreshing.

Ralph Mercer

December 12, 2010

White House Forum on IT Management Reform : Video Presentation

Last week, the US Office of Management and Budget hosted a Forum on Information Technology Management Reform at the White House. In the below video, following an introduction by Jeff Science, Vivek Kundra presents the 25 point action plan for the US governments IT strategy going forward. Already, they have been able to reduce budget by $3 Billion dollars and improve delivery of projects by 50%.

The numbers in this presentation absolutely boggle the mind and the amount of waste identified and now in process of being recovered is nothing less than incredible.

December 12, 2010

Feds will expand use of social media

By Andrew Mayeda, Postmedia News: “The federal government is developing plans to give public servants more freedom to use social media such as Facebook and Twitter so departments can engage more directly with the public and recruit young talent who expect a “Web 2.0” workplace.

Senior information-management officials also propose creating a central “open-data” portal that would make raw government information available to web surfers, provided the data isn’t personal, secret or confidential, according to internal documents obtained by Postmedia News.” Link to full article at Canada.com

December 12, 2010

Australia is the second largest government user of Yammer – over 110 active networks

There’s recently been some controversy in Australian government over the use of Yammer, a private and secure enterprise social network, which I discussed in my post, The ongoing struggles to balance IT security and staff empowerment.

I asked Simon Spencer, Yammer’s newly appointed Asia-Pacific General Manager, how many government agencies in Australia were using Yammer.

I was expecting him to answer maybe 30-40 agencies.

He told me that, counting state and federal government, there were at least 110 Australian agencies now using Yammer – with a total of around 13,000 users.

I was surprised, I hadn’t expected that much adoption.

However I was even more surprised when he gave me the global figures on take-up.

Simon said that Australia represents 29% of all government networks using Yammer. The US represents 33% and the UK about 26%. The rest of the world accounts for the other 12%.

December 12, 2010

Late Bloomers and The Evolution of “Social”

“…[W]e live in a society with peculiar expectations about the time course of success. We think that if a child isn’t blossoming as fast as the others in grade school, he or she will be hard pressed to eventually flourish.”

Scott Barry Kaufman, Ph.D Candidate, Yale, Psychology Today, November 2008

The Social Evolution is in full swing. We are finally moving beyond early stage social experiments, and on to achieving transformation through distributed learning and exchange that characterize complex social behaviors.

Scott Barry Kaufman’s article on the phenomena of “late bloomers” provides an opportunity to consider an interesting metaphor on social transformation. Like late boomers in human development, social transformation is prone to the emergence of “late bloomers” too.

December 11, 2010

Think IDEO, but for government

This entry may be last before the new year, and to be honest, has been a long time coming. You see, I’ve got this thought in my head and it seems to have taken up residence. I’m not sure how much you know about me, or how much you care to know, but I’ve spent the last four years in the public sector. I could bore you with all of the details but let’s just say that I’ve experienced both the best and the worst this sector has to offer.

My initial experience was so abhorrent that I’ve made it my mission to try to make it better for others; I look to my father for inspiration and to my children for lessons in collaboration. I like to think that I have helped inspire public servants to be courageous, to rethink old mental models, and to alert them to the art of the possible.

I’ve met many great people, inspiring thinkers and doers, and for that I am incredibly fortunate. Many think I am living the dream, that I am one of the few who have come as close as you possibly can to an entrepreneur in the public sector. There was a time when I agreed with them, but that time has passed.

We are ready for so much more

I was on the bus on my way to work yesterday and overheard three public servants speaking. One of them was talking about her son who was working as a student two days a week for a federal agency. He was doing so well that they wanted to bridge him in full time, only he didn’t want that. In fact, “It is the last thing he wants, he is looking for something where he can be entrepreneurial.”

It’s not surprising, despite the best efforts of some of our best and brightest, even the most well-intentioned attempt at public sector innovation is suffocated by the traditionally bureaucratic: committees, policies, and briefing notes. Perhaps it’s time for a complete redesign.

December 10, 2010

Should government policy be discussed in social media?

There’s a fantastic series of articles being published over at FutureGov Asia-Pacific at the moment, introducing some very interesting perspectives on social media and government.

One asks, Should policy be debated in social media?, providing perspectives from senior leaders in different jurisdictions across the region.

There is a fair amount of diversity in the viewpoints, however the overall consensus appears to be that it should.

Several of those asked to comment pointed out that it is happening anyway – regardless of what governments may wish.

It is my view that we’re past the point where government agencies and politicians have the luxury to choose where and how they form their policy. They can no longer fall back on government-controlled due process.

December 10, 2010

An Open Government Directive Scorecard, Year One

The Open Government Directive (OGD) was issued on December 8th, 2009, by the administration of President Obama. The document states:

“The three principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration form the cornerstone of an open government.”

It is around these three core attributes that the directive is focused.

On this first year anniversary I wanted to take a moment and share my thoughts on how well the US Government has done in terms of OGD and in regards to moving the needle regarding open government overall. This is clearly subjective on my part and it is my hope that the Whitehouse will take this opportunity to provide a more objective score.

The scorecard is built using the following breakdown:

Goal Setting: 30%
Clear Strategies and Measurements of Success: 20%
Leadership Education and Approaches: 20%
Personnel Communication, Training, Retention: 20%
Use of Technology: 10%

My individual and overall grades, with brief explanation, follow.

December 10, 2010

What’s the risk for government agencies of NOT engaging via social media?

If you do not embrace social media soon, the digital divide in your country will be dwarfed by the divide between your country and the rest of the world.
Chris Moore, the CIO of Edmonton Canada, as reported in FutureGov Magazine.

When people ask me to consider the risks of government agencies engaging with audiences via social media, I often respond by asking them if they’ve considered the risks of not engaging.

This often gets blank looks; many people don’t often consider the risks of not doing things, even though it is a normal part of life.

For example, who today doesn’t understand the risks of not wearing seat belts? However, only 15 years ago there were plenty of concerns still raised about the risk of wearing them.

Here’s a list of some of the risks highlighted by the US anti-seatbelt movement:

Wouldn’t you rather be thrown through the windshield of your car to safety than trapped in a rolling vehicle? And after you are thrown through the windshield, how can you jump out of the way of your rolling car if you’re all tangled in a seatbelt?
As much as one tenth of one percent of auto accidents involve sudden fire or plunging into water. If everyone in the United States takes part in an annual auto accident, that’s 23,000 people who run the risk of being trapped and fatally killed by a seatbelt each year!
Psychiatrists say that exposing young children to practices such as bondage from an early age can cause confusion during puberty.
A section on seatbelts in the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Web site’s FAQ says (when edited for clarity): “Wear … a seatbelt … and … you will … died.”
Even the statistics of the pro-seatbelt Automotive Coalition for Restraint of Freedom proves the case of their opposition. The Coalition says that seatbelts cut the risk of serious or fatal injury by 40% to 55%, but even if this number is believed, it means that seatbelts are potentially deadly in the remaining 60% to 45% of cases!
Seatbelting is related to the hideous ancient Chinese practice of foot binding.

I expect, over time, that many of the risks of using social media will become normalised and accepted or explained away as myths, whereas the risks of not using social media will become more acute.