Government 2.0 Taskforce draft report – a centralised response to decentralised action

The Government 2.0 Taskforce draft report released earlier this week more than delivers against their terms of reference. They have exceeded expectations. I’m really pleased! There has been international interest in the draft report. From the U.K. Glyn Moody said that the report is  an inspiring document. Those who have been participating in the deliberations are pleased. Stephen Collins put it this way “The release earlier this week of the draft report of the Government 2.0 Taskforce has the potential to be a watershed moment in the management and delivery of government and its services to the people of Australia”.  Nat Boehm is  really impressed, really excited.

So there is much to get enthusiastic about. But as others have indicated, the hard yards lie ahead. Stephen Collins tempered his expectations by raising concerns- quite rightly in my view – about the ongoing momentum once the final report is handed in on 31 December 2009. I agree with Stephen – it would be a shame to lose the momentum achieved so far. Craig Thomler has been open about the challenges ahead in implementing Gov2.0. Indeed, the Taskforce report is right up front in stating that “the greatest barrier to Government 2.0 is cultural” (page ix).

It’s fair to say that the rapid rise of social media and social networking over the last few years has left many people in organisations with business models, management systems and ways of working that are not only difficult to adapt to the networked society of 2009 – they are just too slow to keep up with the ongoing state of flux and change. Just to be clear, that applies to many in the private sector as well as in government.

But these developments that are so challenging for industrial-age institutions and practices are not are fad, they are not ephemeral. It’s what people want.  Indeed, the changes going on are all about the people. Self-expression, connecting with others and sharing are basic social needs. They are not going to go away. The underpinning technologies of broadband infrastructure, protocols and standards have generated innovative applications and services that internet users around the world have embraced like a duck takes to water.

Process wise, there has been a strong congruence in the work of the Taskforce with the philosophy and the practice of openness, transparency and participation. There has been many opportunities for citizens to contribute to the work of the Taskforce. I have been particularly impressed with the high quality of interaction on the  Taskforce blog. Sure, I’ve said some things could have been done better bur really I’m not fussed about that. There is time still to influence the final report by commenting on the draft. The way the Taskforce has worked has been so different to the way that the machinery of government usually works. That is a signal message in itself.

All well and good. But that brings me to my one remaining area of concern. The Taskforce proposes that a lead agency take responsibility for Government 2.0 policy and provide leadership, guidance and support to agencies and public servants. The agency would consult with relevant agencies through a Government 2.0 Steering Group. In other words, form a committee. Now that is classic public service stuff and would almost ensure that the momentum collapses.

However, developments in the networked society will not wait for guidance from a government committee. I’m enough of a realist to know that a lead agency and steering group are likely actions assuming the Government runs with the recommendations. But those actions need not defer ongoing agency progress in adapting to networked ways of working.  Like the revised APSC guidance on the use of social media, which I see as being permissive and encouraging, I say there is scope for the Taskforce to recommend that agencies start taken action now, or go further than they have so far, in leading the transformation to Government 2.0. Such permissive action is entirely consistent with Web 2.0. People do not need permission to express themselves and to be innovative on the Web. So to with government agencies. Sure, it means taking responsibility for actions that are taken. But then, internet users expect other users to take responsibility for their actions online. So let’s get some more action happening here. Sure, agencies can be guided by centralised processes. But in the end, it will be people in the agencies and their networks online – decentralised networks and ways of working – that will be the change agents over time.

Will the ABC be all spikes and no hub, or will virtual hubs rule?

Last month I blogged about innovation in media, including the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) move to develop widgets for users to aggregate ABC content on their social network sites. As I’ve said before, this is a smart move by the ABC. In taking this initiative, the ABC appears to have recognised the reality that social networks are the new hub for news and entertainment.

So it is interesting to contrast this strategy with the ABC’s primary vision to become Australia’s “virtual town square” – a hub for user-generated content. In May 2009, Mark Scott, Managing Director of the ABC, described the virtual town square as “a place where Australians can come to speak and be heard, to listen and learn from one another”. By November 2009, planning had advanced to the point where the ABC is to employ digital media trainers around the country to teach Australians how to upload their own content to the ABC’s website.

What strikes me about the virtual town square idea is that conceptually it is not  a new. Local radio chat shows are a long-standing example of user-generated content in media. The town square idea also rests on media institutions continuing to provide the hub or the space for people to use.  I just wonder how congruent the strategy is with social media has it continues to grow in importance in the everyday lives of Australians.

For when it comes to creating and uploading content, people are already doing this for themselves. The emerging social media hub is a personalised place, one that is open to friends, family, coworkers and other associates in the work place and in the community. The social media hub has user-generated photos and videos, status updates and wall posts for expressing views about whatever is of interest.  It’s a place to join groups of interest and for political activism. It’s a place where users aggregate  news feeds, music and videos from third parties, updates from their other social media sites, and feeds from people they connect with. It’s a place that links data from all over the web. In Australia, that could well mean some content from the ABC. It may well mean that data is collated and shared within user-created and run virtual communities. Users doing it for themselves.

Where might social network site aggregation and sharing go? Steve Rubel has suggested that user preferences for personalised social network sites may mean that the next great media company will not have a website, they will be “all spokes and no hub”. I’d say that is a good call.  With the widget initiative, the ABC is positioning to play in the user-defined media hub space. The corporation is doing that as well as playing host to virtual town squares on its own website. It will be interesting to see how these two plays pan out over the next couple of years.

Future of Social Media…and Media

The online media platforms of broadcasters and newspaper publishers have been integrating social media into their channels for some time now. Integration takes on many forms including offering space for comments, providing web widgets to share articles on the likes of Facebook, Twitter or del.icio.us. Recognising that people carry with them devices that can capture and distribute media in real-time, broadcasters and newspapers encourage people to send them information about events. Professional journalists have blogs and Twitter accounts. Indeed the inter-dependency between media and social media has evolved to the point that some say it is impossible to separate the two.

Media Futurist,Gerd Leonhard, describes the outlook for social networks and social media as an online operating system for individuals, for business and for government – for society generally. Whether you are communicating with people, looking for information or looking for other people or points of interest nearby, whether you are on the mobile web doing some purchasing or banking online, or some citizen journalism, whether your location enables information or advertisements about things of relevance to you to be pushed to your mobile device…you get the picture.

Portable identity tools such as Open ID, Facebook’s Facebook Connect and Google’s Friend Connect allow users to share and aggregate news and information from one web site to another. These developments are regarded as forerunners to technologies that enable portable identities creating (according to a Forrester analysis on the social web) shared social experiences – where socially connected people take their digital identities with them and interact with their social networks over the Web. Those shared experiences are more likely to be contextual situations where their reality is augmented and/or mixed through digital online technologies.

For people entering this space – possibly up to a third of the population over the next five years – content will not be king, nor will their voice calls be mainstays for the telecommunications industry. Content will remain important, but its placement will be contextualised and personalised. It will be relevant to and timely for individuals and their social networks. As Gerd Leonhard says, content will be embodied, packaged and curated in ways that offer value to people. That’s the rationale behind Google’s Social Search – this posting by Mahendra Pasule explains why. I like the terms used by Mahendra too, particularly social relevancy. I feel we will see that term becoming a mantra for social media value-adding strategies.

For more information on value generators see media Futurist Gerd Leonhard’s Future of Social Media presentation delivered at PICNIC ‘09 in Amsterdam back in September 2009. I found the 30 minute video to be time well spent.

The direction that social media/media is heading in is not cross-platform. The operating framework is as a social platform, a shared digital media space. The ‘community hub’ will not be a physical location as such, it will be a socially networked space, where content and services are socially relevant in terms of who and what people are connected to, and their context at the time.

Clay Shirky on the future of newspapers and accountability journalism

Professor Clay Shirky spoke recently at Harvard on internet issues facing newspapers. Click here to view the video or read the transcript. It is very interesting and fascinating stuff, covering newspapers’ shrinking ability to produce accountability journalism. The focus is on the U.S. and the public good role that commercial media – in this case advertising supported newspapers – have played in accountability journalism.

I read the transcript to learn about the role that social media is playing in this…and was not disappointed. Social media disrupts the traditional role that media has played in deciding what information is bundled with the ads. Newspaper web sites by and large have mirrored the print copy of newspapers, assuming that readers would go to the web site just as they picked up a newspaper to read. With social media, that assumption no longer holds. Instead of going to the web site, people go directly to the storey, because someone in their network Twittered about it or put it on Facebook or sent a link in an email. So the audience is being assembled not by the newspaper, but by other members of the audience. Now, that’s true for me too. I spend less time on media web sites and on RSS feeds and more time on Twitter & Facebook because of the quality of information I’m getting through my social network.

There is little doubt that social media is a disruptive force in media and in advertising. Companies born digital are taking on more social dynamics into their business model. Take Google for instance, having just released an experiment with search going social.

Professor Shirky’s presentation goes into the public good generated by the social distribution of news online. The public good comes from republication and reuse on a scale that was not feasible from just hard copy print alone.

People can share or forward commercially produced articles online very easily right now, but for how long is unclear.  If newspapers put news and information behind a pay wall, that would block republication and reuse. But then, as Shirky says, the internet enables non-commercial models for news and information production and distribution, including socially produced material. So whatever newspapers do, they will need to rebalance with these alternatives. But the uncertainty is whether the alternative models will be effective substitutes for accountability journalism. Shirky thinks a transitional problem is looming due to the rapid decline of the newspaper industry (particularly in the U.S.); and the uncertainty about the nature and length of time of the intervening period until the (or whether the) social media ecosystem has evolved to fill the gap, particularly in respect of local journalism.

Trapped girls call for help on Facebook

Interesting news item from yesterday – two girls from Adelaide who were trapped in a drain called for help by updating their status on Facebook using a mobile phone. Some say this one comes in the category “you could not make this up”‘. Others – like Don Tapscott – would probable say this comes under “digital natives think differently”.

Now, as I understand, the two girls (aged 10 & 12) opted to seek out help from their social network instead of going straight to the authorities (eg. phoning ‘000′) because they wanted to avoid getting into trouble with their parents. Still, there are some important messages here, this one from Laurel Papworth:

“Incredibly important today is understanding how social networking protects our children. There is stuff they can’t tell a parent or a teacher or the police but they can’t bottle up any more. So they tell their friends, they tell people they play online games with, they write anonymously on websites full of emo-angst and they tell forum moderators and game GMs, who understand and ‘get them’. Expect to see lots more “we should’ve seen it coming” from adults waking up to teens pushing out warnings on online communities. It keeps them safe in the absence of an understanding adult”.

From my perspective – and drawing on Don Tapscott’s knowledge of these things – the girls had trust in their social network, more trust than in dealing with authority figures. Seems to me like another indicator of the central role that social network services play in the lives of digital natives.

Looking at this from anther perspective, Facebook, MySpace and Bebo all have age restrictions that limit access to those aged 13 or 14 and above. Such policies no doubt reflect the concerns that many have about social network site risks. Thing is, the reality is different. According to a UK study reported in August 2008, age restrictions do not stop many children from participating. A spokesperson for the UK research outfit said that “Children are at the vanguard of the social networking phenomenon, using sites such as Facebook and Bebo in the same way other generations used the telephone”.  True for Australia too. The ACMA’s Click and connect: Young Australians’ use of online social media 02:Quantitative research report found that:

• the internet is a regular part of everyday lives of children and young people aged eight to 17 years
• both frequency and length of use increase with age
• young people of high school age (12 to 17) years used the internet on average 6.3 days per week for an average of 2.9 hours per day
• the use of social networking services increases dramatically between the ages of eight to 17.

Plenty of room for thought here, not only about what digital natives do now that is so different, but what implications lie ahead for institutions and social interaction.

Future of Influence and more on Government 2.0

You may recall that I’ve posted a number of times on rise of ‘new influencers’ in social media. So the seminar on The Future of Influence held last Tuesday was not to be missed. Held in San Francisco and Sydney simultaneously (linked via Skype Video) there was a lively bunch of speakers, panellists and audience interaction. I’m putting up my notes from the summit in this posting along with some info about social media and influence that came my way subsequently. I’ve also drawn on the Twitter hashtag #foi09 used for the seminar as another reference in putting this posting together.

The event used to called The Future of Media, with the name change reflecting where marketing and content business interest now lies…or perhaps should lie. Interestingly, the name change resulted in a down-shift in participation in Sydney and an uplift in San Francisco, an outcome that Ross Dawson put down to “things needing to be successful overseas before they are accepted in Australia”.   Interesting indeed. That sentiment is consistent with what Duncan Riley (editor of Inquistor) has said about Australia being about five years behind the USA in the use of social media.

Anyway, here are some messages that came out of the seminar:

• another reminder of the importance of digital media literacy: find good info online (good as in credible, accurate and believable) by looking into what others say about the author or the posting, how many people have bookmarked the item, how many people liked the posting; and for building personal learning networks online
• the community is becoming more influenced by itself than by “leaders” or top-down, push media
• moving away from push media and replacing audience measurement with measuring influence, advertisers are particularly interested in the ability to inspire action.  Advertisers need to define what behaviour they want to influence and measure that, and be actively engaged in what the community is saying in social media
• Government interest in social media is in what can be done to move their policies and ideas. Politics is providing a learning ground for the effectiveness of social media influence that will in turn influence what business does in social media([and I would add in government agencies)
• effective engagement in social media is about understanding the target community context and the people in the community, and that requires skills and abilities in sociology and psychology
• broadcasters are becoming more reliant on receiving content from social media (eg. Twitter & YouTube) and re-distributing it relative to generating and distributing their own content
• charging for online content is likely to shift more attention to social media, public media and sponsored media
• developments in the semantic web and social media content aggregation will drive moe personalisation of media (that combine/integrate professional and social content)
• tools to search with on social media include: Google Alert, Google Trends, Google Blogs, Facebook Lexicon, Tweetfeel, TwitterCounter, theDailyInfluence, SocialMention, Wotnews and Technorati.
• techniques to gauge how influential people are include the size of their social graph, follower/friends counts and activity levels and blog post comments.

Being a social media summit there has been a lot put out about the event already. Examples are from Ross Dawson, Mick Liubinskas and Xavier Vespa.

In some developments over the course of today, TechCrunch posted about identifying the most influential and connected Twitter users. The article has some more data on the amazing speed in Twitter take-up over the last few months. The Web Ecology Project published a report  called Analysing Influence on Twitter where influence on Twitter is defined as “the potential of an action of a user to initiate a further action by another user”.  Actions include retweets, replies, mentions and attributions. On the basis of new methodology applied by The Web Ecology Project, mashable is more influential than CNN, but news outlets (regardless of follower count) influence large amounts of followers to republish their content to other users.

Finally, I met a number of interesting people at the summit, including Tim Martin. Tim is the director of 2 Sticks Digital Marketing, a Melbourne-based consultancy providing advise on online community building and engagement and other things. Have a look around Two Sticks web site to get a feel for digital marketing in practice.

Government 2.0

There was a publicsphere event held in Sydney today, see #nswsphere on Twitter. I viewed Premier Rees presentation over the live video stream hosted by the NSW Parliament. Premier Rees announced a new information sharing policy initiative as part of the NSW Government’s commitment to fostering an ‘Open Government’. One particularly interesting observation from the Premier was that one of the main challenges in achieving greater openness in government is to overcome the culture of secrecy and control in government agencies. Again, interesting indeed.

Twitter is not about text messaging, it is much more than that

A couple of recent developments prompted this posting. One was this New York Times piece on why teens are not attracted to Twitter. The other was to share with you another positive Telstra experience on Twitter that I had last week, and to share some other observations about Twitter.

I’ll start with my own experience, with a little background first. I have some history now, having signed up on Twitter as @conem just over a year ago now. In that time Twitter has grown about 10 fold from an early adopter crowd to almost being a mainstream social media service. As of this morning I am following 767 tweeple and 772 are following me.

Readers of this blog may recall I had a positive experience with @BigPondTeam some time ago. I was treated to a similar experience last week. I found an odd item on my latest Telstra bill, a charge of $2.28 for “Dial-up Internet Calls Telstra”. The thing is, we have broadband, not dial-up…I was left scratching my head. It just did not stack-up. While it was not much money, I decided not to let the matter lie. So I tweeted about it. About one hour later (6.37 pm) I had a response from @BigPondTeam agreeing with me that the charge looked odd and asking if they could help out. They surely did.

@BigPondTeam managed to find out the calls were to subscription TV operator Foxtel number to order Box Office movies. Eight calls were made between 4 am and 5 pm over the same day. In my response to @BigPondTeam I said that it was weird on two counts – we have never ordered a Box Office movie from Foxtel, and there was no one awake or at home when the calls were made! Anyway, @BigPondTeam said that was all they could do. We would need to contact Foxtel to resolve the matter they said. Still, got to be impressed with @BigPondTeam!

I tried @Foxtel but while they had some followers they had not posted any Tweets. I thought, why be on Twitter and not tweet? So I rejected that move. Then I shuddered. The next step was to make a phone call and go through the hassle of computerised directions in the hope that I could find a human to talk to. Actually, as it turned out I managed to speak to a human at Foxtel without any drama and got the matter resolved quickly. The problem with the dial-up calls put down to a software problem. A refund will be made the man said. Still, I wonder how much dosh Telstra has made overall from software-glitch dial-up calls for Foxtel movies?

Now, back to the teenager thing. There are teenagers on Twitter. Some follow me. But there is a rule of thumb when it comes to teenager communication preferences – literally. As the NYT’s piece noted, “Kristen Nagy, an 18-year-old from Sparta, N.J., sends and receives 500 text messages a day. But she never uses Twitter”.  At 500 texts a day, who would have the time to do anything else? I’ve managed 1684 tweets in 14 months and I am one of the power users.

It is common to have text-like experiences on Twitter – conversations flicking back and forth. They are often good fun. The relationship side is important. Some personal, some professional, some that are weak ties. One-to-one communication is available through a direct messaging option. But the main benefit for me in using Twitter is tapping into and contributing to the rich information stream (mostly about communications and media trends). Oh, and getting my Telstra problems sorted out. I put up comments and links about seminars I’m attending or blog posts or news items online I have read or viewed, or photos or videos just taken or viewed and so on. The thing is, so do many others that I connect to on Twitter. I can track particular topics or events by hash tags that are used (eg. #gov2au for the Government 2.0 Taskforce). The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Question and Answer show uses #qanda for real-time Twitter interaction. Nothing beats Twitter for real-time information.

I use a third party application called TweetDeck to categorise my Twitter stream into everyone I follow, mentions of me, most interesting or core groups and favourite hashtags. I have TweetDeck on my PC and on my iPhone. I have columns for links to status updates of my friends on Facebook. My tweets show up in my Facebook and FriendFeed streams, as do others I’m connected with.

Bit.ly is a service that lets you shorten, share and track your links on Twitter.  I can track how many tweeps (people with a mutual following) have clicked in the links I put up.

There are third party applications that measure Twitter influence. As Ross Dawson has said, influence on Twitter is not just a matter of how many tweeple are following you. Influence is measured by the frequency that you tweet and retweet others postings, the replies and direct messages that you send, and your use of hash tags to help others track stuff.  Influence is about your reach – how many people is it possible for you to reach, say if you take all of the connections with others you are connected to into account. Check out your Twitter influence on Twinfluence.

Here is a link to a good article in the New York Times by David Pogue  about tools for Twitter that a colleague passed on to me.

In short, I can understand why teenagers prefer text messaging. They mainly just want to interact with their mates. Whereas Twitter is about being in the information stream…and for getting excellent customer service.

Monetising media and the future of journalism

Well, it seems to me that Rupert Murdoch hasn’t realised that content is no longer scarce. Content is created in many places and the marginal cost of distributing it is close to zero. According to Universal McCann’s Wave 4 report, social networks are becoming the dominant platform for content creation and content sharing. That said, I do think there is value in professionally produced content that people will be willing to pay for. Kevin Kelly has an excellent piece on eight value generators: immediacy, personalisation, interpretation, authenticity, embodiment, patronage and findability. There is plenty of incentive there to motivate people to part with some money – as long as its not complex or uncertain. There is some work to do on formulating the right mix of subscription and transaction charges.

And the question remains, how much are people willing to pay? Moreover, the same question may well apply to TV (see the Razorfish Digital Outlook Report 2009 chapter TV at a crossroads. After all, advertising revenue is moving from broadcasting to online as well, as well as the fragmentation problem from multiple channels, time shifting and so on.

I came across a video of a US panel session on newspapers & the future of media via Gerd Leonhard, a media futurist. Click on the Gerd link to view the first 10 minutes of the session, or view the full one hour session (or part thereof) on FORA.tv.

The event was hosted by the Commonwealth Club of California. All four panellists – from a newspaper, community funded reporting start-up, media aggregation start-up and academia – agreed that the traditional newspaper business model is toast but that journalism will remain a force. I’ve noted a good level of interest about trends in the newspaper sector and the future of journalism more generally. The panellists have an excellent knowledge of the media and cover some interesting emerging and potential developments. Can I recommend the full program to those of you with such an interest.

The newspaper representative said that the old newspaper model of 80% revenue from advertising and 20% from circulation is certainly dead. But he seems to think that print will be around for a while yet. Other interesting comments made by panellists were that:

• people still want content - people feel more connected to the community through access to content - it is the packaging that is changing
• there are likely to be different models to suit different audiences
• professional journalists can collaborate with citizen journalists, adding value in the process
• other forms of professional content, citizen journalism and consumer interaction are likely to focus on personalising media aggregation and sharing.

The community funded content outfit is Spot Us, an online “market place where independent reporters, community members & news organisations can come together & collaborate”. Kachingle is the start-up exploring new ways to monetise content on the basis of personal selection/preference aggregation.

What teenagers know that corporations do not

Well, hasn’t it been fascinating just how widely distributed the views of 15 yo Morgan Stanley intern, Matthew Robson have been. Looking at what Matthew had to say, I am not at all surprised. The messages were clearly stated and I found them hard to disagree with. What’s more, the concise nature of the report is in line with what Matthew said about newspapers in that no teenager he knew regularly reads a newspaper [print] since most “cannot be bothered to read pages and pages of text”. I would add: no video, no audio, no interaction, no links, no free content = no teenage readers. It makes you wonder about the form and format of other research reports. Oh, and in another report on Matthew’s comment I learned that no teenager looks at telephone directories.

Clearly, with so much to attract their attention, many people (not just teenagers) really do value a good summary of something or have a really good search engine on hand rather than pages of text. I just wonder how influential Matthew’s comments have been relative to say other analyst and research institute reports.

As to the sceptical view of 20th Century media moguls, I do wonder whether they have much insight about the way things are going. To my mind, Howard Stringer (CEO of Sony) gives the game away by describing social media as a “club”. It’s not actually a club – particularly not in the walled-garden, proprietary systems view of the world. Social media is an ecosystem in  constant emergence. No one is in control and things change fast. That is not what the moguls and big corporate institutions are used to.

Fred Wilson (a venture capitalist with Union Square Ventures) had this to say about what teenagers are up to. While Fred sounded a note of caution in reading too much into what Matthew Robson had to say, based on his own kids behaviour, he went on to say that “My kids have moved from the set top box to iTunes to Netflix in less than a couple of years and are now watching much of their TV streamed over the Internet.” It is obviously a big challenge for media moguls and their international corporations to be agile and responsive to that  kind of change, especially when that don’t get the fundamentals of what is driving change.

Fred had a few things to say about profitability in internet ventures too. There are a few internet companies doing nicely thank you (including Facebook now it seems). Yeah, I know. You would expect him to have that view. But one of the things Fred Wilson gets is that the internet is transformative. He said that the internet …”is a huge game changer. The internet has been a commercial technology for about fifteen years now. And we are beginning to see the impact of it on everything around us. The industrial revolution and the Renaissance before it lasted a century or more. It takes a long time for such fundamental changes to work their way through the system and produce a new ‘normal’”. That is not a case for deferring strategies to adapt to change I should hasten to add! It is a case for building in agility and flexibility.

Largest increase in expressing capability in history

Clay Shirky’s latest presentation is inspirational.

How cellphones, Twitter, Facebook can make history

What is changing is that the people formally known as the audience (in broadcasting terms) or the user (in telecommunications terms) can connect to one-another to talk and ‘do media’. It’s these networks of inter-personal connections that is the driver of change.

The ‘Telecommunications Age’ was one of one-to-one communication. The ‘Broadcasting Age’ was one of ‘one-to-many’ content distribution. The ‘Networks of Inter-Personal Connections Age is ‘many-to-many’.

Those institutions that were in control are no longer. They can convene groups of networked people but cannot control them. Adapting to that change involves a mature realisation of that social phenomenon.