Network Literacy

Howard Rheingold has put up the first video in what will hopefully be a series of talks about networked literacy. Drawing on the insights of some eminent people (David Reed, Lawrence Lessig, Manuel Castells, Duncan Watts, Yochai Benkler as well as himself) Rheingold spoke of what I feel is a very important view: that understanding how networks work – in a social and economic sense as well as technically – can influence how much freedom, wealth & participation might be experienced in the 21st century. I agree with that.

From a technical perspective, understanding the end-to-end principle is important to know why & how the architecture of the internet was designed so that content can flow from one end point to another without centralised permission or control. Understanding the social drivers behind the formation of human networks and their ability to self-organise  – drivers that go back to ancient human history – is necessary to get a feel for why the internet is such a powerful participative tool. It’s why the web has been so transformative. It’s why we now life in a networked society. Understanding the difference between individual freedoms enabled by the internet vs. institutional control is at the heart of appreciating why the 20th century power elites find the web to be so disruptive, why they now battle for control, and why others strive to maintain internet freedoms. Some see the transformative web as a threat, others see it as an opportunity. Those that achieve network literacy are more likely to see, and to grasp, the opportunities and generate new forms of value.

Understanding any of these social, economic and technical spheres individually is a challenge. Understanding them all – especially in relation to one another – is overwhelmingly the greatest challenge. It’s a challenge that exceeds the capabilities of any one discipline, department, value-chain or service/product line. It’s a challenge that Howard Rheingold appears to have grasped, and I commend him for it.

However, there are others at work on this issue beyound those that Howard is currently drawing from. A couple of weeks prior to viewing Howard’s video, I was pleased to see that danah boyd and co at the Digital Youth Project have released Hanging Out, Messing Around, And Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media. They write about youth-driven peer-based learning. They say there is “an opportunity to define, in partnership with youth, the shape of online participation and expression and new networked, institutional structures of peer-based learning”.  In other words, the task is to adapt to the web – to new forms of interconnection and expression – by participating in the process. I now see that these insights are an example of network literacy in action; of seeing where the opportunities are to generate new value.

So I feel that networked literacy is a competency necessary to grasp the opportunities lying ahead. Networked literacy is a competency necessary to gain comparative advantage. But most importantly, networked literacy is necessary to know what to promote and what to safeguard against, in order to make the most of the transformative web.

Government 2.0: no change without culture shift

Australian Government 2.0 Taskforce member Martin Stewart-Weeks has put up a really good posting on the culture shift necessary to thrive in the Web 2.0 world. Martin’s posting revealed a deep knowledge of the societal issues involved in online engagement, issues that are far more challenging than designing or selecting Web 2.0 tools.

The challenges and opportunities outlined in Martin’s posting are challenges and opportunities for citizens and lobbyists as well as for public servants and policy makers. Here is a taste of what he had to say:

“As governments and the public sector start to do the same [get value from Web 2.0], they will encounter the same challenge as others have, which is that these new tools don’t just change structures and processes, they change behaviour as well. In order to thrive in this kind of world – connected, contingent, collaborative – you have to adopt a certain set of behaviours that are similarly open, interactive and engaged. The obvious conclusion is simple, but demanding – no change without culture shift.

This is the big challenge underlying the ability for governments to make the most of this new way of working and these new tools for democratic conversation. If they want to use them to improve the design of public services, to empower citizens to use information to create new services themselves or to harness more powerful combinations of knowledge and expertise for better policy, then they have to embrace the consequent shift of culture and behaviour too.

As it turns out, this is much harder than it sounds in the public sector, although it’s true that it’s turned out to be much harder in the corporate sector too (even though they might not always admit it). As the Issues Paper points out, we’ve spent quite some time defining what it is that constitutes the requisite behaviour from a public servant, including things like impartiality, balance, fairness and the absence of partisan political advocacy.

The problem, though, is that these definitions were shaped in a world fundamentally different to the one which ‘government 2.0’ is ushering in, including especially the speed with which issues emerge and change, the level of transparency about government thinking and activity and the complexity of the ideas and inputs now clamouring not just to be heard but to be influential.

Somehow we have to find a way for public servants to be able to engage with this world on terms that are both satisfying and safe. Assuming that the twin extremes of prohibition and unfettered licence are unlikely to work, we have to set about finding some new territory somewhere along that spectrum that is fit for purpose.

I have no idea where that point on the spectrum is. My inclination is to be more permissive than not. But perhaps more useful than any single attempt to pick the new sweet spot is to encourage a process of active and energetic experimentation that will get us closer to that outcome, and more quickly, than simply sitting around talking about it.”

Martin went on to say that “For the public sector too, the rising demand for innovation in policy development, program design and delivery and organisational practice is enabled, and sometimes accelerated, by the new tools themselves. In that sense, the rapid spread of use and influence by social networking technologies, and the habits of mind and culture that they reflect and reinforce, is becoming an inescapable feature of public innovation in its own right.”

I found Martin’s description of Web 2.0 to be a good supplement the Issues Paper released by the Taskforce earlier this month. Although the paper provided a good overview of the aim and benefits of Government 2.0, there was one sticking point for me. To say that “The central theme of Web 2.0 is moving away from point to point communications and towards many to many communication and collaboration” just does not sit right with me. For a start the term ‘point to point’ is a technical one and not explained in the paper. Point to point communication is defined by some as direct communication between two end points not using the internet (such as a two-way telephone call). And by others it is used in a broadcasting sense, say like radio communication between two fixed stations. As for me, the central theme of Web 2.0 is participation & interaction. Pure and simple.

Government 2.0 Taskforce is off to a great start

I was one of those who were impressed with the Australian Government’s decision to launch the Government 2.0 Taskforce (#gov2au) on 22 June 2009. The announcement came from Lindsay Tanner, Minister for Finance and Deregulation. Minister Tanner drew some leverage from another high quality gov2 initiative – the second PublicSphere held in Canberra on the same day.

My expectations

As someone with project leadership roles in participative consultation, can I say I’ve had many expectations. Oh yes, when it comes to drawing on multiple perspectives and values (tapping into the broad knowledge base of large groups of people, forging new awareness, better understanding, creative vision and pragmatic action) it all lies ‘out there’ in the crowd. I have known intuitively and know from experience that tapping into the wisdom of an organisation lies in cross-organisational coordination, co-operation and (when it really sings) collaboration.

The magic of Web 2.0 (interacting, sharing, innovating, creating and massive networking) makes organising the wisdom of the crowd much easier… and a much more powerful force. Potentially powerful enough to sit alongside the power institutions of the 20th century – Government and industry.

I’m also very aware that expectations among participants in public policy processes are diverse. The gov2au will be no different as is already evident in the postings and comments on the taskforce blog. Some see the taskforce as a vehicle to set government data free, others to improve e-services and e-accessibility. I too hope that the taskforce meets those expectations.

Some, including the Chair, Nicholas Gruen, see the taskforce as having a transformative role where the business of government is gone about in new ways. It’s that expectation that gets me really excited about the potential of this taskforce. For, despite the tranformative potential of Web 2.0 (and other cultural, social and economic drivers of change – it’s not all about Web 2.0) to change the way people work and how organisations function, the most fundamental change is cultural. Cultural change that embraces facilitation, transparency and shared outcomes. Change of that nature calls for the agencies of government to go about their internal and inter-agency practices in new ways.

btw, it’s great to see four of the taskforce members having already posted to the gov2au blog. The quality of comments to the postings are rich signals of the type of change I really hope the taskforce will become known for driving, more than anything else. For if the taskforce achieves that goal, all other expectations will be met over time.

Participation Divide

I gave a presentation on the social web to a professional services firm yesterday. My two key messages to them were about:

• the fast pace of change; and that
• massive networking changes everything

On the first point I looked back to the early 1990’s – before the public internet and in the days where the few people that had mobile phones carried around what looked like bricks.  Today, there are over 1.6 billion people connected to the Internet and over 4 billion mobile phone users. And we are on the threshold of fundamental change in how people communicate, work and how organisations operate. With the “Participative Web” (Web 2.0) now mature we are moving toward the “Personalised Web” (Web 3.0) where context rather than content is more likely to be king.

The mobile internet space is growing rapidly. Take iPhone for example, with over 1 billion applications downloaded in the last nine months. As I recall, the Skype app is the most popular, helping to spur the Skype user base past 400 million. Such is the ubiquity and potential utility of smart phones, some expect that 80% of Internet connectivity will be through mobile devices.

There are now over 5 million Australians using Facebook at least once a month, half of them using Facebook everyday. Internationally there are over 200 million people on Facebook with 500,000 people joining every week. Then there is MySpace, Bebo, Orkut, Goofy2 and many other social networks and bulletin boards around the world. Part of my presentation yesterday was The Conversation by Brian Solis that shows how many apps there are and their diverse use, all based around that very human activity of conversations. Twitter growth has been just amazing over the last quarter. FriendFeed appears to be on a winner with the introduction of real-time multiple person conversations. During my presentation I spoke about the benefits of the social web to productivity. I spoke about a re-balancing of power between institutions and distributed groups of people.

Now, I had a mixed reception to my presentation. Most of the younger people present were nodding their heads. Some of the older people just shook their heads. They have choosen not to participate, perhaps just regarding the social web as a fad, preferring to assume it will not make much difference to them. Perhaps they just don’t realise that having conversations – that very real and powerful human activity – is happening online as well as offline. It is better to integrate the two, far better, than to assume online conversations are not hear to stay.

Now that is a serious issue. This participaton gap may well be looked upon as a productivity gap, and sooner rather than later.

Openness, participation and scale: Web 2.0 rules of thumb

A large part of my horizon scanning research last year was on emerging communications and media business models. I needed to explain the main underlying trends likely to shape emerging value-chains and business models, so I came up with these three over-arching trends for ease of ‘conveying the message’ and to help retain the message:

Openness – socially, commercially and technically (standards and code) driving a culture of collaboration

Participation- the people formally known as the audience creating and co-creating, forming new connections and augmenting existing connections via social media and social networks online; and service providers facilitating interaction with their customer and the public

Scale - where location and size are no longer barriers to offering services or content online, challenging the scale advantages of mass media and telecommunications

Those three forces are driving growth and innovation in communications and media. My conclusion was that any communications & media business model that lacked those three drivers had a limited shelf-life.

Why am I posting this now? It was Vodafone’s move to “embrace open source with open arms”. I think this is biggie. Vodafone is a global mobile operator and from a sector that has strived to maintain control over what goes over their networks – such as Skype.  The EU is now on to that.

All well and good – my analysis is standing the test of time. But of course “it’s the economy stupid” applies as well. The global economic meltdown occurred afer I completed by research above and that factor has obviously caused Vodafone to re-think its strategy. No longer in a position to grow by acquisition, the company now accepts that “the only way to create a fertile environment for innovation is to have open platforms and leverage them”.

There is another twist as well. While reflecting on the Vodafone development, it occurred to me that the three over-arching drivers are applicable to individual netizens (consumers) and to instititutions generally as well as business.  To make the most out of the web, embrace the 3 x Web2.0 rule: openness, participation and scale. Of course there are major challenges to people and organisations taking up that challenge: the modus operandi for the 20th century has been one of control and acting independently.  Now we are in a century of co-dependence and collaboration – at least that is where innovation and growth is coming from. Perhaps a more apt phrase is “it’s the culture, stupid”.

Web enabled politics and stakeholder engagement

This posting is for those interested in new ways to engage with stakeholders and citizen-engagement in rules-making – in other words, those of you thinking about ways to improve stakeholder engagement in consultation processes and rules development. One of the contributing factors to a fall-off in political engagement over the last few decades is due to individual perceptions of a lack of influence or control. Much of what goes on in democratic processes between elections is led by sectoral interests who achieve power through organising institutionally (the organised few) in contrast to the influence of citizens (the dis-organised many). Well, although it is early days yet – the Obama administration for example is experimenting with different platforms – the web has the potential to change that.

Earlier today I listened to a Radio Berkman podcast on web-enabled political system. Gene Koo, a Berkman Fellow, was interviewed on how the Obama Administration could build on what they have done to bring about a web-savvy democracy based on values of transparency and engagement. One of the advantages of the web is that participation can scale at no marginal cost. Achieving citizen engagement in rules-making sessions would overturn the institutionalised power of a few. Koo talked about the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rules-making process and the power of lobbyists to influence how the law gets enforced, and the potential for citizen engagement to participate, in effect contributing the ‘wisdom-of the-crowd’ to EPA rules. I feel there is potential for similar citizen-engagement in Australian rules-making processes…or at least to draw in a wider contribution from those who would not otherwise have the time or the money to participate in institutionalised processes.
 
Last Monday I went to a presentation in Melbourne on engaging stakeholders using Web 2.0 hosted by Futureye and BangtheTable(who claim to be an independent space for discussing public policy). The presenter, Crispin Butteriss, made some useful points about online consultative processes including that they:

•  are accessed by people from work between the hours of 8.00 am – 6.00 pm
• unearth real issues, not necessarily those identified by politicians or bureaucrats
• can shatter myths about what people really think about particular issues or public services
• make it easier for small-sized community groups to participate as well as individuals
• can use a range of tools, although some are better for particular uses (wikis are good for communities of interest; web forums are better for exchanging views, blogs are a useful public relations tool and to record the history of decision-making, mapping tools are good to cluster regional interaction)

Crispin had some hints about managing risks from online participation, such as:

• promoting the site widely so that the process is not hijacked by special-interest groups
• moderate post-comment as people find pre-comment moderation annoying
• once you make the call to start the online conversation, stay with it