Designing for Civil Society

How not to get a positive presence online

There's a wonderful, cautionary, example over on the ideal government blog about why you should be very wary of letting a PR person use your name informally online. It involves William Heath, who as chairman of Kable Ltd, is pretty well known in UK public sector technology; attendance at the recent UKGovwebBarcamp; and ICELE, funded by Government to promote eDemocracy, citizen empowerment and the like. ICELE are rather keen to promote a big conference in a couple of weeks time. William writes:

Do I know Fraser Henderson?

Someone called Susie Ruston from something called 21cConsultancy sends me a personal invitation to some citizen empowerment symposium

"My colleague Fraser Henderson mentioned he recently met you at a BarCamp event at Googles offices and that you were interested in receiving more information about the next International eParticipation and Local Democracy Symposium blah blah blah Citizen engagement is a key priority to the UK Government as demonstrated by the launch of the CLG ‘Action Plan for Community Empowerment’....Secretary of State, Rt Hon Hazel Blears....Governments position...Action Plan...Symposium....etc etc etc"

Well, it ain’t that personal. I’ve never heard of Fraser Henderson. He certainly didnt meet me at the Google offices because I wasn’t at BarCamp. And who in their right mind goes about expressing interest in eParticipation Symposia? Not me. So this is either a misunderstanding or a fib. I expect everyone who put their email address to the Barcamp thing is getting Susie’s PR sweet talk. What a drag. I wonder if this 21c outfit is Romanian?

There then follow several comments on the lines of |"I got one of those and wasn't at Barcamp either" concluding with another from William (or admin, which I presume is him)

Dear Susie

I don’t know you so I didnt open your attachment. Nor do I know Fraser Henderson so either he misled you or you’re taking his name in vain. Nor was I at Barcamp. And I never expressed any interest in e-participation symposia.

So what’s happened here? Where did you get my email address from, also those of my friends Jeremy and Sam?

Also, what is 21cconsultancy? The only record I can find is something in egovmonitor which says 21cConsultancy is a “professional firm”

Well, I was at Barcamp, and do know Fraser, centre manager for ICELE, who has always been perfectly charming, and who did say he hoped to see me at the symposium. But you won't find much Googling Fraser, which may explain William's puzzlement.
I can't make it to the symposium because I'll be at the Circuit Rider Conference running a workshop with Laura Whitehead and Nick Booth. I hope it will, anyway, be a bit more empowering than the symposium agenda, which looks heavy with plenaries and panels aimed at people in government. Quite the reverse of Barcamp.
Anyway, event preferences aside, it seems to me that the lesson here is, if you are in the online business, but choose not to have a profile online, it's a big mistake to delegate online presence to a PR person. Or maybe there was just some misunderstanding. Either way I think Fraser and Susie should hurry over to William's place and explain. Currently William's piece is the top Google hit for Fraser Henderson ... which isn't good PR. Let's all link there:-)

Update
Fraser and William have now connected via comments on William's blog, and look set for a friendly meetup. Second lesson: with a cheery wave, these things can turn out well. Hope I haven't been too humourless here ... but there is something important about being yourself online (even in emails) buried in this.

Technorati Tags: barcampukgovweb, edemocracy

Barcamping with Government

The UKGovwebBarcamp this weekend, at which civil servants who work on government web sites got together with consultants, contractors and freelances, could help start a round of creative small-scale collaborations to improve public online services.
The way the event came together sets the scene for how this may happen: it was a great example of how people can self-organise to create the topics they want to talk about, and then get together for a blend of presentations, round-tables and chats in the coffee area.
Jeremy Gould, who is head of Internet communications at the Ministry of Justice, put an enormous amount of work in to move things forward, starting last November. Anyone interested signed up to a wiki and a Google group for online discussion, and on Saturday morning turned up at Google HQ not knowing quite what would happen. That was deliberate, because the first task after a round of introductions (name, organisation and three tags/keywords) was to fill a whiteboard with sticky notes setting out the agenda in 20-30 minute slots. (photo below by Jason Cartright)
It worked on Saturday, partly because some of those attending knew it would, based on experience at other Barcamps. You just need some simple guidelines and confidence in people's ability to self-organise in the way they will at Open Space events.

I won't try and capture session discussions here, because others are doing that very well - particularly Dave Briggs. You can find other reports here because bloggers are tagging their posts UKGovwebBarcamp and Technorati indexes them all. You'll find a set of photos contributed by participants on Flickr. Relevant web sites are here, videos here on YouTube, and instant (Twitter) messages here.
You don't have to go to all these different places on the web because they are all pulled together in Pageflakes. If someone adds another blog post, photo, video about the event it is automatically fed in there through RSS feeds.
Just as people who, in many cases, hadn't met before were able to self-organise a terrific event on the day, so they we able during and afterwards to self-organise collaborative reporting. Well, with a bit of help from Dave Briggs who created the Pageflake.
The alternative approach to all of this would have been to hire an event organiser and designer, pay for the venue, commission a web site, print out programmes and signs, ask for Powerpoint presentations two weeks in advance, sit people down in rows .... you know the sort of thing. I don't go to them any more. Costly to organise, boring to attend.
Of course there are other ways to organise highly successful events with a mix of the planned and spontaneous. Preparation and structure is needed if you are looking for some specific outcomes. Open space events don't just happen: they require very skilled hosting. A well-designed and edited web site helps people find good stuff quickly.
As usual it is a matter of choosing the meetings and communications technology appropriate to your purpose.

Two things make me hopeful that further collaborations will follow:

First, the fact that people were able to put names to faces - as Jeremy Gould highlights in the video I shot near the end of the event. People who previously read a blog in their field with interest now feel they can call up and suggest meeting for a coffee. (That is, if they can access blogs. I gather many Government departments block civil servants from reading blog sites and other "frivolous" content. Good stuff coming out of UKGovwebBarcamp may help IT managers to relax the rules, at least for communications staff.)
Secondly, there were some specific proposals in one session for turning informal discussions into real problem-solving and development activities. One question asked from the government side was whether consultants would be prepared to go into government departments and join knowledge-sharing workshops without being paid, and without making a marketing pitch. Some of us nodded. If you are putting your ideas and experience into the public domain by blogging, it is a small step - and even more rewarding - to go and talk to someone who may be able to put it to use. You start a relationship, and learn more about the needs of that Government department. You can't by-pass the procurement processes on big jobs, of course, but you are better informed. You may get paid for the next workshop out of the training budget.
Jeremy has now emphasised the opportunities (and conditions) for collaboration on his blog:

We need to find ways to make partnership between those inside and those around government easier - and promote it as as an alternative method to trying to do everything ourselves. We don’t know all the answers individually, but as a collective we can get closer to the ideal solutions.
If we in government want to innovate more, we should also behave more like innovators. The format and style of the barcamp was great and encouraged collaboration and thinking differently. There are other types of gathering and ideas generation techniques that should consider trying - like mini-barcamps, open coffee meets, social media clubs, geek dinners etc. Anything that gets us all out of the day to day work environment is a good thing (probably).

He adds: "Question is, how do now we sustain the momentum generated on the day?"
No immediate answer, but my hunch is that a few people are working on it. Just keep checking in with the Pageflake.

Technorati Tags: barcampukgovweb

Ross rounds up UK Government & Social Media initiatives

Ross Ferguson, until recently the Director of the Hansard Society's eDemocracy programme, has now returned to his native Scotland to work at Dog Digital, started a blog, and is able to offer us some useful insights from his new perspective away from the Westminster bustle.
I talked to Ross at the e-democracy 07 conference just before he left, when he reflected on the past few years in e-democracy. Steady progress made, he felt, but in order to achieve more a greater number of politicians need to engage with the possibilities offered by engagement online. At present developments were too often  driven by officials, companies and activists. Gaining more commitment would involve paying more attention to the way that online working can integrate with politicians'  day-to-day work - rather than focussing solely on their external communications.

Click To Play

Ross has now posted a piece to his blog - UK Government & Social Media… Ones to Watch - which gives us a round-up of initiatives that he sees as promising.

I was lucky enough to start work with the UK Government just as it began to take an interest in what we are now/currently calling social media. That was 2005 and there was hardly anything happening. Today, it's a different story.

With a host of initiatives on the go, I thought I'd pick out 10 that I think are particularly interesting:

1. Ministry of Justice - BarCampUKGovweb was an idea floating about waiting to happen, and Jeremy Gould got it off the ground. It's the first event of its kind for government.
2. National Health Service - The Our NHS, Our Future activity is putting a lot of weight on its online engagement components. The issue is meaty and its an intriguing opportunity for NHS stakeholders to direct its development. But will the people come? And how will the government tie up their online with the offline activity?
3. Foreign and Commonwealth Office - when David Miliband arrived, engagement shot up the agenda, particularly online. Not content with just the Secretary of State blogging, staff from across the FCO were invited to get in on the action and duly did.
4. Government Communications Network - the Social Media Review and associated activities, being led out of the GCN, is taking on the challenge of helping an area of government so used to controlling the message to adapt to a new communications environment.
5. Downing Street - it's use of ePetitions was the biggest UK eDemocracy story yet. But will it see out the winter? Well, yes, but with parliament planning its own online petitions system, will time be called on the government's biggest and most infamous social media experiment yet?
6. Communities and Local Government - the CLG rebuilt its corporate website using community software. The CLG was one of the first departments to make a conscious effort to utilise social media. The use of deliberative forums by a range of policy teams is worth watching alone, then you factor in the blogs and wikis and you start to realise the importance of this department's activity.
7. Defra - the software that runs the CO2 calculator, complete with the government data, has been made freely available under general public licence. Google has used it in its carbon footprint widget.
8. DirectGov - according to the ONS, 6 in 10 of the UK's web users have accessed government services via DirectGov. So, where to now? Is there room for a social media angle in the next phase of development?
9. Ministry of Justice - OK, I'm a bit bias but Digital Dialogues, which is in its final phase, has been putting data about government blogs, forums, webchats etc in the public domain since all this social media interest kicked off.
10. SS/SIS - a bit of a flippant inclusion. I've no idea what they're doing with social media but whatever it is, it's bound to be worth keeping an eye on.

Please flag up any others you know about. Maybe there's some similar stuff going on elsewhere in this big globe of ours.

You can see other videos from the e-democracy conference across on the Headstar e-government bulletin live blog.

Technorati Tags: democracy, e-democracy, e-democracy07, politics, e-government

Cisco champions the Connected Republic - and its citizens

Click to Play or go to blip.tv

Some of the strongest advocacy for the democratic power of online networks that I heard at the e-democracy conference 07 was embodied in the work of a private sector company - Cisco Systems.
As Professor Stephen Coleman says in his interview it is the people-to-people power of networking rather than the institution-to-people connection that is proving most powerful these days. Cisco agrees.
Cisco weren't making a great fuss about their proposals, but I was struck by the clarity of the White Paper The Connected Republic 2.0 that they produced recently, and the associated web site. It is a set of resources and a community space for "anyone interested in exploring how connectivity can help transform public services."
The White Paper sets out three imperatives:

• Use the network as a platform for collaboration and creativity
• Make the best use of all available expertise and and experience by "empowering the edge".
• Harness the "Power of Us" to create knowledge, solve problems, and deliver better services.

One of the authors of the paper, Paul Johnston, Head of Cisco's European Public Sector Team, was at the conference chairing a session, so I was able to asked him to elaborate.
He explained that Cisco aims to explain to the public sector - who are of course, major customers - just what the implications of the networked world are. In doing that, Cisco recognised they couldn't just talk it all up, they had to set up a networky site to engage with other people with similar interests. They see it as a voyage of discovery.
Paul is blogging on the site, demonstrating he is prepared to take a critical look the way things are going at present:

The final session had three UK politicians (Andrew Miller, Theresa May and Ed Davey) giving their thoughts on e-democracy. Not surprisingly, they were strongly focussed on the use of Web 2.0 by politicians, political parties and representative assemblies and all three of them made clear that they wanted to embrace these tools. None of them of them, however, seemed to have much sense of the real transformational possibility of Web 2.0. There was very little sense of the scope for opening up all sorts of decisions to public scrutiny and public involvement. It was much more a case of - how can some of these tools give a bit of a boost to our existing democratic processes? Not surprising but it does show there is still a huge amount of work to do in getting people to see the real possibilities of a connected world.
More generally, the conference was a lively event, but there seemed to be quite a lot of ambiguity about what e-democracy really was and could deliver. Professor Stephen Coleman made a typically challenging speech where he called for more e-democracy projects that involved real deliberation and generally more rigorous analysis of the impact different e-democracy projects had had. Interestingly, he wondered whether a key aspect of e-democracy was really citizen-citizen rather than citizen-government. In other words (if I understood him rightly!), projects should be aiming to get citizens interested and talking to each other rather than holding out the illusory possibility that they can interact with government on an individual basis. The most obvious UK examples of Web 2.0 in government are things like the No 10 petition site and David Millibands blog, but I tend to agree with Coleman and think they are a transitional phenomena. The real future are sites that - with or without government support - bring citizens together to discuss and take action on public issues. That, of course, and the much wider issue of moving to a public sector culture of openness and feedback the like of which has never been seen!

I wish we had heard more on the day. I think the Cisco view chimes with that of Matthew Ellis, chair of ICELE, but not necessarily - as Matthew said in his interview - with many of those in charge of our democratic institutions.

Tags: e-democracy, e-democracy07

Announcing UKGovweb barcamp - with an open invite

Whitehall Webby Jeremy Gould, whose day job is web manager at the Ministry of Justice, is making a very direct contribution to the promised new politics of Government-citizen collaboration: he's inviting us to help transform government by sharing expertise in the use of social media tools.
Jeremy's Ministry is responsible for the Governance of Britain initiative, which underpins Gordon Brown's enthusiasms for promoting engagement, as I outlined here.
Jeremy has just announced a get-together in January for anyone interested in innovation online as applied to government. Although it is billed as UKGovweb barcamp, and mainly aimed at people in or near to government,  the wiki page offers a pretty open invite to enthusiasts:

This event should be of interest to all who work in the UK government digital media community: permanent civil servants, contractors, consultants, agencies, advisers, supporters, observers, and critics.

Here's the full post:

Announcing UKGovweb barcamp:

Those of you who read this blog regularly, or get cornered by me in the real world, will know there are two things in particular that I am particularly passionate about

* clarity around government online strategy, and
* how to innovate online, especially piloting the use of social media tools

I think these are important issues for government webbies (and by government, I don’t just mean Whitehall but right across the public sector). Talking to colleagues I know that these issues important to them too.

I’ve been talking for a while with colleagues in the transformational government team (they who are driving the website rationalisation / convergence, and other related, initiatives) about how we can harness the collective knowledge and intelligence of all those with an interest in improving how government does all this web stuff. Its becoming more important as we start to explore the possibilities and opportunities of government online beyond our corporate websites and intranets.

My proposal was to run a barcamp event, where those who want to participate in  developing ideas, sharing their expertise and swapping tips can come together as a community. For those not familiar with the barcamp concept, check out the wikipedia page. The key point is that you come if you have something to offer and you participate, rather than simply observe.

I’m delighted to report that they agree, so I’m pleased to seed the message here that we aim to have the event run across the last week of January 2008 (Saturday 26th/ Sunday 27th). I say ‘aim to have the event run’ because it will only work with the input, energy and enthusiasm of the participants. We have suggested a proposition and date, we’re hoping that enough people will want to be part of this to come along and also to help organise the event.

A page has been set up on the barcamp.org website. Please visit it, and sign up if you want to be part of this event.

If you know others who might be interested, let them know about it. In particular, if you blog then please point your readers to the page on the barcamp website.

I really do hope that together we can work together to get a common sense of purpose, and share some innovative ideas about government’s approach to all things online.

Maybe I'm wrong to make a direct link to the Governance of Britain/new politics initiative - and the barcamp is strictly apolitical - but I find it incredibly heartening when a civil servant goes that bit further to practice emerging policy, and notions of openness. At a weekend too.
Disclosure: I have done some consulting for MoJ, helping civil servants use this engagement design game. Maybe barcampers would like to play too.

Technorati Tags: socialmedia, socialtech, ukgovweb

UK Parliament now has online consultation

William Heath at  The Ideal Government Project welcomes news that Parliamentary consultation goes online:

Hooray. Parliament has got a consultation site, plugged into the Select Committee work. First up is Medical Care for the Armed Forces (Defence Committee) and Local Government and the Draft Climate Change Bill.  It’s taken a while, and it’s a slow start. Ross at Hansard Society points to the journey here, and the breakthrough when MPs themselves moderated this. Parliament is where consultation can make a huge difference (even if a number of MPs Don’t Get It). This should be an essential medium for NGOs. If it’s helpful and unofficious, it could go far.

Over at Whitehall Webby Civil Servant Jeremy Gould looks at the reality of the process, and the difficult of integrating it with offline processes:

Online consultation across government is patchy and this development should set a good example to the rest of us to up our game. But there are a number of problems with this:

• Select committees call witnesses and take evidence from experts in their investigations, online consultation extends this questioning to a wider potential audience.
• Government departments, on the other hand, have a specific process to follow when engaging in consultation exercises (note on the following - I’m not a consultation expert) - a detailed published document with a series of set questions, a three month period for replies to be sent in, later on a published collation of the responses to the consultation.
• This latter procedure is optimised for the printed word, its quite formal in its approach and doesn’t translate well to the online world. Some have tried, with varying degrees of success, but fundamentally it doesn’t make best use of the medium (for the record, we offer the consultation documents as .pdf files and the list of questions as a MS Word document that can be emailed back to the consultation team). I understand that there is a piece of work across government working to modernise the regulations on formal consultation. But I don’t know how digital communication is being considered as part of that work.
• Although there have been some initiatives to improve the use of online tools in government consultation (in particular, Hansard Society’s Digital Dialogue programme) they seem to my mind flawed. Piggybacking a formal offline process doesn’t bring out the best in online - the consultation period is too long, the requested responses are too structured, and the choices often too limited to encourage genuine debate and discussion.
• A perennial problem of government digital communications - lack of resource and expertise - sometimes hampers online consultation. In my experience, moderation causes difficulties for consultation teams who seriously underestimate the time and effort this will require.

Jeremy adds:

Maybe government consultation, in its current form, can’t be successfully replicated online. Instead, perhaps we should look to the stage that precedes formal consultation - development of options to be put to consultation - as the opportunity to make best use of the digital tools available to us. We could call it something like online deliberation and provide a space to encourage genuine debate.

As long a significant proportion of the population do not/cannot engage online, and a more formal offline consultation process is required, then the less likely that we will be able to crack online consultation.

I think it is enormously helpful to have views from inside as well as outside Government, although this can be risky, as  SoSaidThe.Organisation reflects in Three Types of Government Blogger.

Proved again: being open gathers supporters

One of the main principles for getting people engaged in a project, programme, online community - whatever - is that early involvement  creates a sense of ownership and commitment. So I shouldn't really be surprised that the New Media Awards nomination for the Open Innovation Exchange has attracted a string of supportive comments.
Of course, some of these are among the scores of people who collaborated to develop, in public, a £1.2 million bid to Cabinet Office. In this case support from friends and collaborators is exactly what it is about, since the project we are bidding for is an innovation exchange.
In particular, I think the support is a bit different from the self-nomination and promotion criticised by The Register in the modernising government section ... isn't it?
Since all comments are public, I've taken the slight liberty of copying below. As I've written here, I'm one of the judges, but not for this section. You can still comment here. Judges meet for the  awards July 2, but interviews for the tender are June 12 ... so we might know before judging whether or not we have the contract. End of promo ... over to the commenters:

The Open Innovation Exchange bid process was really interesting to be involved in - and for me has already sparked off many new ideas and actions... hopefully it will have the chance to be put in place and to spark many more for many more...
Submitted by Tim Davies, 18 May 2007

Even playing a small role and exchanging ideas with one or two other participants was an interesting and stimulating exercise which allowed new connections to be made and other ideas to be generated. This is an approach I will use elsewhere.
Submitted by Paul Nash, 19 May 2007

At last - the opportunity to create without bending to the preconceptions of fund holders
Submitted by Barrie Duke, 19 May 2007

It was a brave step to take, and pleasing to see that it actually arrived at a result, with an open-ness of process that was both astonishing, rapid, and productive!
Submitted by Roger Greenhalgh, 19 May 2007

It was really good to be able to just challenge ideas and feed into improving the bid, without the requirement to 'carve out a slice' for my institution.
I could dip in and engage in the ideas, without devoting 5 days full time to bid writing. Great experiment. Deserves support. And what is an innovation exchange for if it's not about SHARING ideas.
Submitted by Andy Dearden, 21 May 2007

Whether or not the team win the bid or not, they’ve done something genuinely new. It’s one of the neatest institutional hacks I’ve seen in a long time.
Submitted by Paul Miller, 22 May 2007

A completely refreshing and original approach to writing a bid. They totally deserve to win!!
Submitted by Matt Stevenson-Dodd, 22 May 2007

A very innovative approach that encouraged reflection on the drivers of innovation
Submitted by Kerry McCarthy, 22 May 2007

It will be very interesting to see what results from this revolutionary idea. It deserves to succeed if only to embarrass all past and present bidders for not seeing that this is a way forward.
Submitted by Keyham Books - Rural Enterprise, 22 May 2007

If anyone wants to understand capacity building in it's real sense look no further.
The service development model that's been developed here turns current thinking on it's head. At last an opportunity for the sector to learn from itself through doing and developing new services. Much better than being trained to do by others.
Submitted by Simon Marshall - What's Your Point ?, 23 May 2007

An example of what can be done by people who are not afraid to try something different. Open Source in action and a worthy winner of the category.
Submitted by alex stobart, 23 May 2007

A model which, if widely adopted, has the potential to produce real change and save the time wasted in writing "failed bids"
Submitted by Peter Gray, 24 May 2007

Technorati Tags: innovation, openinex

Now I know what I am - an institutional hacker

After I moved from journalism into the fuzzier fields of consultancy, facilitation and process design years back my mother used to say: "I understood your job when you were a reporter .... now I can't explain what you do to my friends". I still haven't got a good one-liner, but Paul Miller from Demos and The School of Everything may have cracked it for me.
He's picked up on our Open Innovation Exchange and the nomination for the New Media Awards:

Nick Booth (of the mighty Podnosh) has written more on David Wilcox's open source bid to the Office of the Third Sector. He's also nominated them for an award, which I think would be thoroughly well deserved.
Whether or not David and the collective win the bid or not, they've done something genuinely new. It's one of the neatest institutional hacks I've seen in a long time.

I now have the line ... used to be an old media hack, done a bit of new media hacking, now an institutional hacker. Thanks Paul!  Could you just repeat that over on the nominations site, please? Nick likes the term - need to check what Simon Berry, who did a lot of the real work, and the rest of the team think on the exchange site.

Technorati Tags: innovation, openinex

Modernising government - from outside as well as in

The Open Innovation Exchange, which is promoting a new collaborative model for improving public services, has been nominated in the modernising government section of the New Statesman New Media Awards. I'm one of the judges, but won't be looking at that section, so I think it's OK for me to urge you to go to the nomination here and add your comment. Click the rating link and you can decide if we are worth any stars.
Just to be totally open about this (of course) the nomination arose because I met up with ace podcaster Nick Booth at the recent NS debate, told him all about the exchange and ended up being interviewed for Nick's blog. I guess I must have convinced him of the value of the project - so thanks Nick.
As Nick explains, and you can read here too, the original idea for the OIE was to develop collaboratively, in public, an "open source bid" for a £1.2 million tender put out by the Cabinet Office. The job is to create an exchange for third sector organisations to share knowledge and experience, so they can deliver better public services. We think that process has been a terrific success and we are in with a great chance of winning against 20 other bids. If we do, we'll invite the losers to join us; if we don't we'll have made a lot of friends and learned a lot.
In his post, Nick considers whether this is New Madness or New Model

New Madness?:
Clearly competitors know what you’re proposing and can nick the best ideas and neutralise or undermine others. The collaborators though placed copyright restrictions. Anything lifted from the bid had to be credited. If it was then developed and evolved competitors were asked to put that back onto the site. Naive? Perhaps, we’ll know eventually.
Who does the government deal with? A shifting collaborative process has many stakeholders, but ultimately the people handing out the money will want to know who’s head is on the block – who is resonsible for delivering. hat may give and internally generated single organisation a stornger hand.
After that though I’m struggling with the problem of madess because for me it is a really a ...

New Model:
Closed doors, closed minds. Cards to the chest bidding can lead to bidders being blind to the best ideas. The open source tender had at least 500 minds involved.
Planning and delivery are different.… Often the people who will have to deliver are not involved in the bid. Someone comes along to them afterwards and says we thought you could do this for this much money. The open process could solve many of those problems earlier.
It raises everyones’ game. With an open source bid in the frame all the competitors have find ways of beating that bid in terms of ideas and value for money. that can be good news for the public.
It builds flexibility into delivery. By collaborating openly at all stages it should be much easier to innovate along the life of the contract. It also creates transparency in delivering, which should make it easier for full feedback whilst the contract is delivered.
The winner can still involve the losers. As David says, if their bid wins one of the first things they’ll do is talk to the losers. likewise if another bid wins it may make sense for them to approach the consorium for input.
You never know where the ideas will come from. Online collaboration improves the chances of bright new notions coming form unexpected places.
It challenges old ways of working - which with government can often be a great thing.
Losing is a good thing – well not really, but if an open source bid fails a much wider range of people have learnt from the process and learnt from the failure.

As we developed our bid, it became clear that a lot of people were interested in what we were doing precisely because it could be a new model extending beyond the Third Sector Innovation Exchange. If we really want to modernise government it can't be done just from within, or through specifications and contracts tightly drawn up by those inside government.
We need new ideas on how to invent, as well as how to deliver.
If you would like to join in that discussion you can do below, at the Open Innovation Exchange, or maybe even better on the New Media Awards site, because that might help us win. Hope that's not too partisan. If we do win we will, of course, invite the losers to join in our further development.

Technorati Tags: innovation, nptechuk, openinex

Open innovation meets wikinomics

I'm with Paul Caplan in being really excited to see the guys who produced so much buzz with Wikinomics are now taking their gospel of innovation through open collaboration into the public sector. It's great encouragement for our team in the final hours of putting together an  "open source bid" to Government for a £1.2 million Innovation Exchange.
It seemed a bit crazy, when we started a few weeks back, to produce a competitive tender document in public promoting open collaboration as the means to improve third sector delivery of public services ... but as you can see from our Open Innovation Exchange website it's attracted a lot of support and great ideas.
The team, led by Simon and Jane Berry, are working on the final version today and Simon will be delivering it to the Cabinet Office tomorrow.
Anyway, back to Wikinomics. Government 2.0 is starting a global investigation around these initial themes:

Renovate the tired rules that inhibit innovation with new models of Web-enabled collaboration that cut across departmental silos to improve policy outcomes, reduce costs, and increase public value
Achieve breakthroughs in public service delivery and organizational effectiveness by deploying emerging Web 2.0 technologies
Understand what today's global youth really expect of government and how they will behave as citizens and consumers of public services
Differentiate employee recruitment programs to appeal to the incoming wave of Net Generation workers
Reinvigorate democratic processes with technology-enabled approaches to policy-making, problem solving, citizen engagement and stakeholder consultation
Solve enduring policy challenges with collaborative approaches to issues such as climate change, education, health care, and national security

Paul Caplan offers his own take which certainly resonates with me:

It’s all good. I’ve argued a number of times (here and here for instance) that Government needs to go through the sort of shifts that the corporate and media worlds are working through. I’ve also hopefully made clear that the sort of revolution we are talking about is not just a communications and marketing (let alone a ‘presentation’, thanks Gordon, issue) no it is about open sourcing policy too.
So the Wikinomics project is all right by me… in fact I’ll go as far as to say Mr Tapscott, Mr Williams and Mr Brown, “can we do it in New Britain?”
Mr Brown is already promising “national debates”, “consultations” and all the rest of the ‘top-down-made-to-look-like-bottom-up’ rhetoric. I’ve worked in Government long enough to know that its only when those developing, and crucially delivering, policy have a real stake in the process that change will happen.
Sure we citizens need to be involved in the thinking but there are a lot of citizens in government and they’re not all “Sir Humphrys” many are bright, articulate, imaginative and passionate people. But often they do not have the systems in place to make a real contribution (create the Network/Wiki effect).
There is real potential in Government. If some of the people I have met in Government and in the satellite Third Sector, could be given the space to build (policy and delivery) solutions riding the ‘Wisdom of Crowds’ et al, politicians would have some real material to work with.

Paul argues for a public space where officials would join in development of ideas and practices for innovation:

This cross Government Wikispace does not take the place of the broader Government-Public Wikispace the guys have set up. It runs alongside it. I would argue though that a parallel one is necessary:

It would stitch Government into the process. They would be inside not outside
It would have to have Government support in terms of resources. If they’re paying civil servants to  think, they’ll have to listen.
It would have real backing. Government would be able to create a space where its staff could speak freely and openly (even if it is only on the GSI intra/extranet)
It would be able to bring together technical as well as creative thinking
It would not fall victim (or look like it could fall victim) to vested interests

Creating a cross-Government wikispace, a safe and secure, embedded, resourced and supported space (on the GSI or not) would be to harness the very expensive, extensive and experienced power across the public sector.

Wow - that's even more ambitious than our Open Innovation Exchange. Certainly makes us feel we are on the right track.
Do come across to our site. If you have a comment we might just squeeze it into our document - but in any case we'll keep the site open and look out for more examples of collaboration to develop better public services, government and democracy.

Technorati Tags: collaboration, open source, openinex, wikinomics