Bill's Notebook

“A big reason why the government is inefficient and ineffective is because Washington has outdated technology, with federal workers having better computers at home than in the office.”

Along with this are constrictive policies that prevent federal employees from effectively using social networking applications and being able to install good open source programs.  There are some bright spots but your average federal worker would be much more effective if they were given better technology and the freedom to configure their systems to suit the way they work.

With the advent of social networking, you hear a lot about crowdsourcing, flashmobs, and distributed teams.  Although these can be useful, they also have their limitations due to their unstructured nature.

Jo Freeman’s essay was written in 1970 and concerns the feminist movement but it’s message about how unstructured groups can become even more tyrannical than a formal group is well worth remembering.  It is a long read but well worth it.

A group of teachers and students decided to ponder the question of how many teeth a horse has.  They asked what the function of the teeth is.  How the shape and duties affect the teeth.  The idea of teeth in general.  The learned men spent the better part of the afternoon deliberating on this question.

Finally, one of the newly admitted student cried out in boredom, “Why don’t you just open the horse’s mouth and count the teeth?”

There was a stunned silence.  Several of the older teachers looked at each other.  Then they rose and advanced upon the student.  They grabbed him by the front of his robe and, with much kicking and punching, tossed the student out in the road in front of the academy.  They warned him to never come back again.

The teachers then came back and addressed the remaining students.  “That is what you get for being too practical!”

Yeah, I had one of those kind of days.

This semester I am teaching an online class in political communication.  As I prepared the lectures, I read many articles on the rise of social media-fueled journalism and the corresponding decline of traditional journalism.  Personally, I believe that journalism is undergoing a good transition back to its past role as a public service.  And I believe that social media is the catalyst for this transformation.

Even so, I think that Will Thalheimer makes some great arguments for the other side of the issue.  He claims that the blogosphere only produces shallow reporting that will lead to poor information.  “Eventually, poor information will lead to poor decisions. Eventually the democracy implodes. Some may see signs of this already. Certainly, most of us would like our democracy to be doing a better job.”

This is an important debate because government depends greatly on the media to report what government does and how people are reacting to the government’s actions.

This was in my RSS reader but I didn’t get around to it until now.  Read the following and just imagine the implications for government in 2020:

“Toward Government 3.0

In the future, terms like socialization and commoditization as well as the founding principles of Open Government (transparency, participation and collaboration), will take a much broader meaning, as we face questions like:

• Should we allow people to package public services by composing basic services and information offered by an ecosystem of providers, only few of which would be government?
• Should we make operational data transparent and to what extent?
• Should we crowdsource real-time traffic management to car drivers and their devices?
• Will collaboration extend from citizen-to-government to consumer-device-to-government-infrastructure?
• Will government IT and OT applications run side by side with consumer applications (and share data) on what we call today the “public cloud”?

. . . it seems to me that the focus of almost all government 2.0 efforts today is on socializing data and commoditize some of the processes (e.g. government cloud computing initiatives).  To understand the deeper implications on participation and service delivery, we must open our minds to what “data” will mean in the future, and to how far socializing and commoditizing services and processes could lead us in a world where data from trillions of sources (people, institutions and devices) will be available to virtually every person and every device.

I am not sure we need a term like government 3.0 to conceptualize all this. However, if it helps us get passed the obsession with posting public data and developing social media policies, so be it. It is time to look at how the future will totally blur role, data, service and process boundaries as we know them.”

It’s who can deliver the real promise of the Internet – the right answer.  Bob Pritchett explains how Google “destroyed the web” with their innovative approach to search.  “Do no evil” falls prey to the evil of unintended consequences.

I was initially very cynical of design when I encountered the designer caricature (beret, shades, and a haughty attitude) but I have become convinced of the importance of design thanks to books like The Design of Business.  The basis for my cynicism was that I could not find a good definition of design.  But now I believe that Engineers without Fears has a great list that explains what design thinking is about.

Speaking as a proud owner of the C64, I love this – http://www.kingsquare.nl/jsc64

Hello everyone and I hope you had a good time during the holidays.  I certainly had and that’s why it has been a while between postings.

The latest issue of the Harvard Business Review and before I talk about an interesting article, I want to express how much I like the redesign.  The look needed to be updated and I found the magazine more readable.  Great job!

One of the new features is the “Idea Watch” which is a great roundup of interesting roundup of new ideas for management.  One section, “Neuroscience,” reported on how success causes the brain to change in response to successful stimuli.  What was surprising is that failure has no effect on the brain.  This makes sense in one way because you want the brain to change to repeat successful actions.  But, this also prevents learning from failure.  And in many cases, that can be more beneficial.

For example, when I build a program, I will spend some time debugging the program.  I may try several different approaches before I find the right coding to fix the issue.  I will remember the successful fix but I will quickly forget my unsuccessful attempts.  These attempts may be useful in other instances or may help me in generalizing the problem so that I can create an ever better fix.  There are numerous examples of failures that  turn out to be successes in other ways (think about Post-It Notes).

Thus, you should be just as attentive to your failures as your successes.  Keep a failure log and go through it on a periodic basis.  Instead of beating yourself up over past failures try to find ways to turn them into successes in a different way.  After all, failure or success is in the mind of the beholder.