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Government at, and with, the edge: active citizenship in the new joined-up age. Martin Stewart-Weeks Senior Director, Public Sector (Asia-Pacific) Internet Business Solutions Group, Cisco Systems. A starting point?. Paul Baran’s Theory of Distributed Networks.
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Government at, and with, the edge: active citizenship in the new joined-up age Martin Stewart-Weeks Senior Director, Public Sector (Asia-Pacific) Internet Business Solutions Group, Cisco Systems
A starting point? Paul Baran’s Theory of Distributed Networks
Line = a relationship between two people more embedded = central less embedded = periphery Node = a person Centre and edge 1 Connected “embedded”: the degree to which a person is connected within a network
Centre and edge “We have grown used to the centre taking more and more of the decisions, despite the fact that in almost all cases the knowledge, expertise and experience required to inform those decisions are at the edge.” Beth Noveck, author of Wiki Government and Deputy CTO, Open and Transparent Government, The White House
Public goals have become far more entangled with the behaviour of private individuals and organisations outside of government. <Donald KettlThe Next Government of the United States p115>
Among the elements common to successfully resilient systems was an ability to constantly reconceptualise problems, to generate a diversity of ideas, to communicate…and to encourage novelty … The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us And What We Can Do About It Joshua Cooper Ramop197
Pull, not push… “Pull allows each of us to find and access the people and resources when we need them, while attracting to us the people and resources that are relevant and valuable, even if we were not aware before that they existed. Finally, in a world of mounting pressure and unforeseen opportunities, pull gives us the ability to draw from within ourselves the insight and performance required to more effectively achieve our potential.” http://edgeperspectives.typepad.com/edge_perspectives/2010/04/the-power-of-pull-has-finally-arrived.html
Distributed capitalism “The emerging logic of distributed capitalism rewards enterprises that realign their practices with the interests of the end consumer and punishes enterprises that try to impose their own internal requirements or, worse yet, maximize their own benefit at the expense of the individual end user.” Creating value in the age of distributed capitalism, ShoshanaZuboff, McKinsey Quarterly, September 2010
Re-framing innovation Learning from the extremes, Charles Leadbeater and Annika Wong, Cisco, 2010
Southwark Circle is a membership organisation that provides on-demand help with life's practical tasks through local, reliable Neighbourhood Helpers, and a social network for teaching, learning and sharing. http://www.southwarkcircle.org.uk/
Dialogue Cafe Dialogue Cafe Lisbon Amsterdam Rio de Janeiro Tel Aviv London Ramallah ….Berlin, Oslo, Brisbane, Hyderabad, Melbourne, Auckland, Hong Kong, Seoul… Dialogue Café is an initiative which results from the radical but simple idea that people have many things in common and given the opportunity, they will explore their common interests, sparking collaborations and stimulating ideas that address the major issues of today.Dialogue Café is a global network for people who want to learn, share and collaborate. It’s a platform for creativity and innovation, with a focus on cross-cultural dialogue, social innovation, civic participation, arts and culture.
The Tanta Effect “Blogging ‘turbocharged’ the ecology of intellectual discussion – enabling us to tap into the insights of people who would never have received the attention they were due back in the old days where reputations took a decade or more to build and were corralled into specialisms with little cross fertilisation and ‘contestability’ between them.” Nicholas Gruen
Communities and networks, as well as organisations and institutions
eParticipation in Europe: Living in a Bubble? by Andrea Di Maio | September 24, 2010 | 4 Comments On September 23rd I took part in the last summit held in Hamburg by the PEP-NET project, an initiative funded by the EU to network experts in the field of e-participation across Europe. My role was to listen to two of the keynote speeches and then lead into a Q&A session. Panelists were ThanassisChrissafis from the European Commission, who follows the EC initiatives on e-participation as part of programs like FP7 and CIP, and MortenMeyerhoff Nielsen, from the National IT and Telecom Agency in Denmark Thanassis illustrated how and through which programs and measures the EC funded research on this topic, while Morten showed the results of a quite interesting report about e-participation and uptake of web 2.0 technologies in the public sector (here is an earlier version, I believe) Two facts struck me as quite revealing of how difficult and tricky a topic this is. The first one is that, while participation is clearly more relevant and expected by citizens at the local government level, then at national and then at European level , funding seems to go the other way around, i.e. more money for European than for local initiatives. The second one is that, in spite of the many bright and enthusiastic people working in this field, they form a self-serving community that works on the assumption that e-participation is an end in itself, rather than a means to achieve better and more sustainable governance. In my humble opinion, the latter is a far bigger problem that the former. After many years of investments and effort on electronic petitions, democracy, participation, and so forth, there seems to be still little evidence that anything substantial is being achieved. Of course opening additional channels to citizens to intervene more effectively in the policy-making process makes a great deal of sense. The problem remains of whether this is exactly what people are looking for. In a democracy each of us expects to outsource policy making and participation to one or several democratically elected representatives. While putting us in closer touch with our representatives is a valid objective, so that they get a better feel about our wants and needs is essential, the value of enhancing our individual ability to directly influence parliamentary processes is more questionable. Besides opening the debate about whether we should contemplate a move from representative to direct democracies, there is not much that e-participation can achieve without creating two pretty evident problems. The first one is the disenfranchisement of elected representatives and organizations like parliaments themselves. The second one is the total cost of ownership of e-participation: suggestions, comments, petitions need to be processed, and the lower the cost of the participation channel, the higher the costs incurred to handle, moderate, synthesize and act upon citizen contributions. The audience of e-participation experts seemed immune to any cost-related consideration. Somebody raised the cost issue as well as the impact of the economic downturn and global financial crisis, trying to get a reaction that would indicate a change of course or at least a realization that even e-participation will be closely scrutinized in terms of value for money. Attendees did not balk. There seems to be an immutability in how they behave, a strongly-held belief that what they are doing is just, and there will always be room for this topic. I wish them to be right, since the way I see priorities shift across the European public sector tells me something different. Affordability of government services and processes and their sustainability over time become top concerns, and I suspect that also e-participation efforts will have to demonstrate how they measurably contribute to help government produce the outcomes that society demands, with less, much less resources A reality check? ...in spite of the many bright and enthusiastic people working in this field, they form a self-serving community that works on the assumption that e-participation is an end in itself, rather than a means to achieve better and more sustainable governance. In my humble opinion, the latter is a far bigger problem that the former. After many years of investments and effort on electronic petitions, democracy, participation, and so forth, there seems to be still little evidence that anything substantial is being achieved. eParticipation in Europe: Living in a Bubble?Andrea Di Maio | September 24, 2010 | blogs.gartner.com/andrea_dimaio/2010/09/24/eparticipation-in-europe-living-in-a-bubble/
