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.

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

Transparency, participation and collaboration in Government

On 21 January President Obama issued a memo to the US federal heads of departments and agencies on the subject of transparency and open government. I know this direction is confined to the USA, but the principles have applicability in all democracies.

The aim of the initiative is to strengthen democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government through transparency, participation and collaboration. The memo acknowledges that knowledge is widely dispersed in society and that public officials benefit from having access to dispersed knowledge (as well as better access to information and knowledge held by other departments and agencies).

In summary, the consequences for departments and agencies are to:

• disclose information rapidly in forms that the public can readily find and use
• offer increased opportunities for the public to participate in policy-making
• use innovative tools, methods, and systems to cooperate among themselves, across all levels of Government, and with nonprofit organisations, businesses, and individuals in the private sector.

An Open Government Directive to implement these measures will be developed over the next four months. You can view the memo here.

As well as improving the quality of information and analysis to support evidence-based decision-making, I can’t help but feel this initiative by President Obama has the potential to transform government processes and restore public confidence in democratic processes. The Participative Web has arrived in Washington DC.

I have not seen this memo mentioned in mainstream media, but the blogosphere has latched onto it. Interesting in itself. Maybe that is a sign that the watchdog role of the media is now going social?

In any case, President Obama’s initiative is bound to support and foster social networking and social media. As to the establishment: here comes everybody!

Disconnected Institutions

People have told me I am good at asking the right questions. Here’s a few.

What is the best way to keep pace with social, technological, economic, environmental and political developments?

If your answer was social networking over the Internet, pat yourself on the back. If not, you have some other questions to ask of yourself.

Social networking over the Internet transfers power & influence from institutions to networked individuals. As I’ve said before, mainstream media go to Twitter as a source of breaking-news. Want to know what’s happening on the ground in an emergency, go to Twitter. Want to connect to thought-leaders and their networks? Sign-up to FriendFeed. Want to run a check on what’s hot? Try Digg.

For those that got the right answer to the first question, now ask: What would your organisation’s answer be?

If your organisation is not participating on social networking over the Internet, your organisation is disconnected from an increasingly valuable stream of knowledge and information.

Participatory culture

I say the best presentation at Melbourne’s PubCamp last night was from Stephen Collins on “Slouching towards intertwingularity”.

Stephen spoke about the great attraction and value from using social networking tools to connect to, and collaborate with ”…a vastly greater number of people who think like me, do work like me, like the same things I like, than I ever could before.”

Even though some or many of these ties to people – spread over the world – may be weak ties, they are still accessible. These people help to you solve problems, innovate, inform or share knowledge about events and activities you either would not have heard about, or received via an institutional filter some time hence.

Social networking is the means to create or add value in the knowledge economy and to seek new opportunities.The culture is participatory, a culture where everything is ‘interwingled’. I feel this is something that Asian’s get immediately by the way…a sense of interconnectedness…which is why social networking is so popular in countries such as China and India.

In my six years of continuously scanning the horizon and thinking about the future, I’ve had some experience of ’strategic conversations’ with like-minded people (particularly in Vision 20/20: Future Scenarios for the Communications Industry). That experience triggered my interest in knowledge sharing and knowledge creation. I know that other futures thinkers that have a similar passion about the value in networking with people (Ross Dawson, Richard Hames and Stephen Collins, to mention just three…there are many more). The rise of social networking – particularly in the last two years – has really lowered the barriers to experiencing strategic conversations.

An insight that we developed from Vision 20/20 was ‘networked regulation’. Interestingly, there are now signs of this perception taking hold…and again, it’s to do with the Internet. In his closing remarks at the OECD Ministerial in Seoul last week, Secretary-General Angel Gurria said, “We need to enhance support for informal networks that link authorities and stakeholders in a flexible manner that is responsive to the dynamism of the issues…A more decentralised, networked approach to policy formation for the Internet Economy that includes active participation of stakeholders needs to be the norm” (my italics). Indeed, the OECD Future of the Internet Economy project had a useful forum on…The Participative Web. Promising signs ahead.

Stephen’s presentation was a reminder to me is that I must participate…more actively! Let’s hope the message continues to sink in.

Consuming, producing, sharing through the cognitive surplus

Thanks to Tony at ABC Digital Futures, I’ve seen Clay Shirky’s talk at Web2.0 Explore. You can view the presentation at Calacanis.com.

Using his words, Clay’s insight was to understand that “when people are offered the opportunity to produce and share, they will do it”. The ‘Participative Web’ is that opportunity. Clay describes the migration of people from the TV set to the Web as being of comparable social and economic significance as the industrial revolution.

Some fascinating statistics come out in Clay’s presentation, such as Americans spending 200 billion hours each year watching TV. Imagine the social and economic possibilities if even one half of that time was spent producing and sharing via the Web – using the ‘cognitive surplus’ that has been untapped for many years.

Clay’s view about the inherent attraction to producing and sharing squares with my research on the participative web: that social needs (status, self-esteem, self expression, affiliation, and reciprocity) are increasing being met online.

Finally, Clay’s observation that “media targeted at you but that does not include you” – i.e traditional broadcasting – is on the outer.