For me, though, the Obama readings put the people side of the campaign into the spotlight. In the first instance what functions are necessary to transform energy into action? We saw in Camp Obama how the team trained and skilled up volunteers to get involved. Harnessing that passion and enthusiasm into manageable tasks and then providing the knowledge, skills and tools (e.g. NTL’s responsibility briefing document) to do it was a key endeavour. A two prong approach was at work: devolving real roles to people (“the incredibly simple act of distributing different roles to people”) and providing them with the tools and training to achieve. I am convinced education is part and parcel of involving people, both educating them on the tools, as we see in the story, but also the issues and here again technology can work its magic.

“We go through everything from canvassing, phone banking, volunteer recruitment, our campaign message, how to develop an organization locally” Woodards says.

What makes this process even more effective was the very very clear objective of getting Obama elected; reinforced by the belief that this was a chance to make history.

Pacing and speed lay at the heart of the success, instead of rushing in and working, the strategy was to build an infrastructure that could scale. This shift in mentality to “the slow build approach… of leadership building” paid off when on the first weekend they were able to knock on 2500 doors.

Relationships were everything. And stories helped open up these relationships – instead of a two hour orientation all participants took part in interactive in-depth training, “a powerful experience”. Self awareness was an important part and people were empowered to be leaders.

Interestingly the team understood that they needed to innovate the organizing model and adapt it to their area, so we see in Oxford, Ohio how the team tapped into social networks. If someone went to a bar every weekend then they would try to register voters in that particular setting.

This local focus translated into unexpected results with people undergoing life transformations and reconnecting to their communities: Jennifer Robinson now actively wants to make her community a better place “good organizing changes the world”.

The feature of technology as an invitation for everyday people to participate comes through clearly. And the capacity to identify volunteers and build their willingness and capacity to participate is something to be learned from. Hughes says “what we’ve learned…..there’s huge potential for people who haven’t been involved in politics to discover that, yes, this is something that impacts me”. For me as a UK citizen there is a seed for transformation in this Obama story. The combination of good organizing with decentralization – ‘the neighbourhood team’- and emergence – allowing actors to lead the direction, was explosive in its reach and impact.

Again it’s the ability of technology to build ‘killer apps’ that enabled this capacity: the web utility that the campaign had dubbed “Neighbor To Neighbor”. For me, the question that needs answering is: when it comes to civic participation what is the high value information? Many tools were used in the Obama campaign but the one that held the most potentiality for me was the strategic telemetry and the models that Strasma’s firm built for issue, persuasion and support.

The new collaboration economy is based around four phenomenon:

1. Blogosphere – the ability to hold a running commentary and conversation allows real time interests and collaboration to occur, linking people with similar passions and interests together.
2. Collective intelligence – the idea of the wisdom of crowds holds great potential when skills and knowledge are globally distributed and we live in a world where we can all connect – the Global Talent Pool.
3. New public squares – as someone with a background in knowledge management and an interest in deliberative spaces for citizen engagement this resonates immensely with where I see true value could be built in working together in a technology space.
4. Emergent/Serendipitous Innovation – this marries well with my other interest of complexity and the need to create spaces where sense making can occur rather than forcing a top down approach.

Two examples from the first part of the book stand out: Firstly takingITglobal: an example of where technology can cross borders and connect young people in issues that matter to them. Its potential is for learning in innovative ways which harness technical spaces: participatory active learning could achieve real differences to the textbook learning methods.

Secondly the California Open Source Textbook: here is a real life example of harnessing individuals’ knowledge and passion for the greater good. The collaboration and working together between parents, teachers and students in building content and delivering it through a wiki could revolutionize school materials.

The fundamental tough part of this work centres around the question that must be answered:

What is the important question?

This should then drive resource allocation and help with integrating solutions. Creating these open spaces also holds latent power for improving government transparency, our ability as stakeholders to scrutinize grows rapidly the more information there is online.

In the UK we can now see the voting records of our MPs: http://www.theyworkforyou.com/ and we can now start to consider what open source government may look like. Looking at this idea through the lens of the qualities Tapscott considers important for this work: candor, transparency, freedom, flexibility, expansiveness, engagement and access, may be the starting point: how and on what can we engage and co-create? Could we make better decisions if we were to tap the insights of a broader amd more representative body of participants asks Tapscott. This technology holds the potential to act as a “platform to co-create our services, communities and experiences”.

Groundswell focuses on how you can use the explosion in new media principles and social technologies to support a business. A number of concepts were useful for their thinking structures and important to bear in mind. Firstly and fundamentally the ability to listen in and listen well to what people are talking about. These technologies have the power to create dialogue and conversation. Relationships are everything and it’s important to think how you can create a space that encourages interaction. Can you create fans and help them connect with you. There are five key steps: Listening, Talking, Energizing, Support, and Embracing (using them to co-design)

What problems are you hoping to answer using Groundswell principles: is it awareness (people don’t know about you), word of mouth (you need people to talk to you), complexity (you have complicated messages to communicate), or an accessibility problem (you cant reach them at all).

POST is a framework for thinking about the issue: people, objectives, strategy and technology.

People: what are your customers (citizens) ready for; what is their biggest issue; what do they need from each other? In the book they offer a Social Technographics Profile tool for helping to understand them: http://www.forrester.com/Groundswell/profile_tool.html

Objectives: is it listening, talking, energizing, supporting and embracing.. What’s fascinating is that this model or framework also works when you apply it to my world of change management. I have been using story and narrative in my work and these steps apply here.

Strategy: how do we want relationships to change: get citizens to become more engaged, carry messages to others etc. Creating a space that encourages interaction

Technologies: which to use blogs, viral videos, wikis, social networks, communities etc. Explanations to be mindful of when thinking about why people participate and contribute include these impulses: altruistic, prurient, creative, validation, recognition, influence and affinity or belonging otherwise known ad “the culture of generosity” or the search for psychic rewards.

A cautionary tale that was used in the reading was the case of Joe Anthony’s Barack Obama profile on MySpace, it had garnered over thirty thousand friends and it was shut down rather than the founders attempting to find a way to work with Joe

And four key types: Creators, Critics, Spectators, Inactives (who can dampen participation) Who are the rebels in your organization, what are the basic rules of engagement? Some of the important takeaways for me include: what do collective contributions and consensus mean for policy making. How will these technologies help make it happen? Why will people want to play? What interesting ways can we get them to participate and invite people to be part of it?

We The Media http://oreilly.com/catalog/wemedia/book/index.csp presents interesting ideas in the way relationships, communication and the ability to have a voice are being dramatically changed. In this blog I will cover some of the most important ones for my world and future work:

1. Transparency
2. Markets as conversations: different dimensions and perspectives
3. The new dynamics of participation and collaboration
4. The push pull dynamic

The rise in the understanding of transparency is one shift: the ability for critical parties to control access starts to change with these new tools and not just in the expected ways. Interestingly in the reading we see this with Rumsfeld turning the tables on a journalist by recording their interview and making it public. The incoming Obama administration seems to understand this and is trying to create that quality. Established power structures must recognise that they can no longer control the information flow especially with these new citizen journalists and must instead think about how this flow can and should work.

An intuitive understanding that these new tools imply is a new dialogue, whether between company and customer, political parties and their constituents or the public and government.

The Company perspective

Markets as conversations: these new tools can transform the ability of companies to have new conversations with their customers although sometimes not in the ways they would hope:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2009/feb/25/ryanair-socialnetworking

Companies can use many ways to change the dialogue with their customers. O’Reilly talks about corporate weblogs although there is a fine line between communication and PR. But he is right when he talks about the need for them to create RSS feeds of their news instead of newsletters; this allows a more active relationship in the transfer of information.

Companies can consider inviting ‘webbloggers’, someone who has become an expert, to participate in the discussion. Interested people will have more rich and complex discussions as they come from a multitude of domains, backgrounds and experiences – more so than a traditional company which will have a language they use and mental models ingrained in the way they think.

The Politics Perspective

Chapter Five of the book talks about citizenship: “This evolution is also about reinforcing citizenship. The emerging form of bottom-up politics is bringing civic activity back into a culture that has long since given up on politics as anything but a hard-edged game for the wealthy and powerful. But a true conversation between a candidate and his public would involve the candidate genuinely learning from the people.”

We can see how people can also get more involved in issues they care about: “I’d be thrilled to see a million blogs sprout to cover, and be part of, campaigns of all sorts. If you care deeply about health care, for example, start a weblog covering the candidates’ views on the subject. Link to their position papers on a page that lets your readers examine those positions. Then link to news articles that a) contain candidates’ statements, b) offer context to the topic, and c) can help your reader understand the overall issue better. Open your comments section both to readers and campaign staffers, and welcome the discussion that brings better information to everyone involved. You will have done a service.”

MoveOn had a direct influence on voter turnout: http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/millennials_moveon

The Public and Government

Firstly new tools are creating this new dialogue, for example the online petitions site at 10 Downing Street: http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/. Although how much notice is taken of this is unsure.

BBC’s ican I found to be fascinating, although I can’t find it on the web: its role was to assist average people in being activists, “the BBC has created a web-based platform that combines data on issues with tools citizens can use to push their own agendas in the public sphere. The journalists then observe what average people are doing and focus some of their coverage on what the activists are reporting.”

In the UK we can also track our MPs voting records, helping us to understand more deeply the public agenda issues:  they work for you. And we can also let our local councils know about problems on our street in order to get them fixed: fix my street. For me these tools to create new dialogues and to invite the public in to conversations are a future I find compelling.

This is not to say there aren’t challenges in this new world: authenticity and trust being two. There is still a need for an editorial perspective as we see with the Junior Journalists example the process “fuels a sense of both responsibility and ethics” and is key to trust. With the proliferation of content tapping the power of everyone is the best approach. Blogs necessitate candour.

New spaces are opening up the opportunity for new collaborations and dialogue, something that is very exciting considering my area of interest.

Batelle’s book on the search raises interesting questions on power, privacy and the future of technology to shape our behaviours. First I’d like to recap some of the interesting lessons that stand out for me and then I’d like to spend some time on four key attributes: search, power, privacy and the future.

A brief overview of some of the lessons I took from the reading include:

• The potential for new companies to emerge quickly to take leadership in the field
• The power innovation can hold when you create spaces for employees to come up with new solutions or allow them to follow their interests in tacking problems that are meaningful to them (scratch an itch) e.g. Google’s competition on GoogleLabs where the best of the Top 100 project ideas could be viewed
• Older more traditional companies still have a role to play as we see with IBM’s WebFountain product
• The ability of these technologies to quickly make redundant old ways of doing things e.g. Yellow Pages
• Search is only 5% solved: what potential does the other 95% have?
• Recovery vs. discovery as search concepts

The Search

The three rules of search are important to bear in mind for how this capability to organize and make sense of the information available on the web

1. The Crawl
2. The Index
3. The QP (Query processor)

As mentioned search is only at 5% of its potential, it will start to become interesting when the power of the clickstream, which is currently scattered in searches and sites, is brought together into the ‘database of intentions’. Currently the web has no memory so there is still much potentiality to explore.

IBM’s WebFountain is taking search to new realms but mainly for large corporate clients: ‘slicing the web’. Domain specific search allows real power around one area of knowledge e.g. Global Spec – this vertical knowledge helps to go really deep and broad into the content, something that is not possible with Google. Being able to pull all the information available on the web into one place could add real value to certain applications.

Google and Power

The power of Google, inherent in the way it operates, needs contemplation. We see in 2bigfeet.com how Google can disrupt and cause chaos to legitimate businesses operating solely through the web. This organisation was almost decimated when Google reworked their search algorithms to target Black Hat behaviour. In November 2003, having been high on the search results list for big feet, it suddenly disappeared off Google’s search list. And what could the founder do about it – nothing, he could find no-one to help him resolve the issue and almost lost his business.

Although its stated mission statement is “Don’t be evil” this example clearly shows Google has great power to harm, maybe not directly but indirectly when it goes after the spammers. You’re unlucky if you happen to get caught in the cross fire.

We see from Batelle’s great book that Google’s power is not just centred on where you come in the search listings but also in more fundamental ways. Ultimately this is the disruptive power of the web: to undermine previously successful business models when the intermediary role of information holder disappears. Two examples are mentioned: real estate and competitive pricing.

Privacy

Controversy exists around the privacy aspects of search. In the first instance is the “potential to rewire the relationship between us and the government”. In the UK at the moment there is a massive debate on privacy concerns and what the government is and isn’t allowed to do: here is a recent Guardian article. Whereas here in the US it is an even more challenging environment due to the implementation of the Patriot Act and the huge challenges to civil liberties. I find it scary to imagine how your online behaviour could be used against you and how information could be held and retrieved at will: surveillance vs. privacy rights – what a grey area that could be.

And it’s not only this aspect that worries. What about behavioural advertising targeting: he ability of these search sites to track peoples’ behaviour and hence present relevant adverts. For example, I remember when Gmail was first introduced and the concern people had that Google was viewing their mail and then presenting appropriate adverts.

The Future

Bearing in mind these two concerns it is still an exciting world presented in the book. One area I found to be particularly exciting was the concept of platform integration. The example given of the couple reading babycentre online and then being able to directly order programmes to be delivered to their TV and watch them straight away has huge value to the user. And being able to report from your phone on disasters or to use technology to help each other as the co-founder of twitter, Evan Williams talks about at TED.

The potential of the clickstream is huge. The balance between discovery and recovery is an interesting dynamic to understand further in terms of the potential of search to add value to our lives. And the shift to the Semantic Web will add real intelligence through the use of metadata. When all of our information is digitized, all our photos available to share, no worries about PC crashes and losing everything then we can relax and make the most of our time at our screen. The search engine can be our intelligent agent or reference librarian who can present us with the answer to our queries, anytime and anywhere. We really have no concept yet of what the future looks like, but it will be exciting to see.

“The perfect search engine,” says Google co-founder Larry Page, “would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want.”

Web 2.0 is the natural progression / evolution of the way things were to the way things currently are. A technological revolution with similar impact on the way things work as the industrial revolution had on our physical world. What came before helped shape what follows, but there was some intrinsic thinking and change that could only come from experiencing the old way of doing things.

The key component of this change is the fact that the internet changed from being a means of communication to a platform in its own right. From linear to interconnecting bubbles and communities of interest that connect through the platform.

By increasing the number of people who play, the standard of the game rises. Without the rules being established, it is hard to attract an audience to participate but once the rules are established inclusion has to drive improved overall performance. Safe = Risky, Risky = Safe. We used to think that Safe was good, but quickly it becomes predictable and boring. Embracing change and risk allows inclusion and safety in numbers, and exclusion leads to unforeseen cost through lack of voice. Innovation in assembly opens up the possibility for small players to play in the game and hopefully make money, although the revenue models are still unclear.

“A conversational mess of overlapping conversations” http://www.oreilly.de/artikel/web20.html

Trackbacks, two way links, hyperlinking and permalinks – these are all tools or terms which point to how this overlapping and linking happens. According to O’Reilly these tools help demonstrate authenticity and relevance of content and facilitate blogging’s ability to shape search engine results: see Google and Page Rank http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

Conversations lie at the heart of this whole new future so being able to see who is responding to ‘who and what’ must be visible. This is made easier by RSS feeds which allow content to be pushed to you rather than you having to go out and pull it to you – helping to make sense of what I worry to be information overload.

A key function of the new platform is participation instead of publishing and for me this is the true potential and area of fascination. As a person with a knowledge management background I know how difficult it is to keep content relevant – we see this with the older tools of content management. Participation allows the community to manage its own content and make it relevant as we demonstrated in the superb example of Wikipedia. The old model was the centre controlling the information and knowledge – vetoing it, and having to be responsible to make sure things didn’t go out of date. In this new world this role is decentralized to a passionate community who has an interest in the content. No longer does it have to be managed from the top which old school corporations will find very uncomfortable.

I worked with an innovative group who were trying to work in new ways: Sparknow. We championed working in different ways, thanks to an inspirational non-leader, Victoria Ward, and for many years have been users of  basecamp, a web based software tool, as a way of managing our workload – it was much more efficient and effective, with notifications and the ability to see the history of the work with nothing done in the old school email way. The last project I worked on used a wiki to develop content – this collaborative editing was such an effective way of participating in projects and produced a toolkit for a large government department that was the product of many people working simultaneously.

The article cites seven criteria for assessing whether a new innovation is Web2.0:

1. The Web as Platform
2. Harness Collective Intelligence e.g. Wikipedia and Flickr’s folksonomy
3. Data is the next Intel Inside
4. End of the software release cycle
5. Lightweight Programming Models
6. Software above the level of the single device
7. Rich User Experiences

Who owns the data could be the leading indicator of financial success for organizations in the future. The ability of the web to reach out further means there is potential for smaller companies to not only to have collective power but also to make an impact. One way we see in the article is by creating mashups – a super name indeed!

“The Web 2.0 lesson: leverage customer-self service and algorithmic data management to reach out to the entire web, to the edges and not just the center, to the long tail and not just the head.”

I find the tagging aspect, such as we see in our delicious group, most compelling in terms of how we make sense of the world. As someone who has bumped up against complexity principles in my work I believe that emergent principles are at the foundation of this mess of information and how it can start to make sense. My instinct is to want to have everything mapped out for me, but I intuitively know that with a medium like this you can never map all of it and it again comes down to trust that sense will emerge through the collective action of many.

Finally we have discussed in class who we should be wary of the trend of naming things 2.0 – the Kennedy School has started a Government 2.0 community and also there is a social network for government page when we apply the seven criteria above do they fit? I will explore this in my blog in June.

Linux shows randomness of opportunity. Many thought Windows had a monopoly on the operating system and then Linux came! Even those in the know were surprised. The complexity seemed too great to overcome hence the need for things as big as this being dependent on a ‘Cathedral architect!’

What were the lessons learnt and why did the thinking behind the need for Cathedral architects get overturned by the randomness of a bazaar?

The need to scratch your own itch seems to be the answer. Open source allows you to tackle problems that you come across and which matter to you. You can either do it within a community and add it on as a function or take over the reins and drive it until you are satisfied – by which stage someone else will be willing to take over and take it to the next level. The shared IP (intellectual property) allows for this to be a natural progression. The need for change is the same with Empires and companies – sooner or later the components become complacent and they lose their dominance.

Release early release often – why try and perfect without drawing on the ability of those around. This model really taps into the power of many – the wisdom of the crowds and mass collaboration; imagine the power of that collective intelligence. People like to feel useful and helpful and this methodology allows them to take ownership, feel involved and buy into the process and not have to wait for too long before seeing the next incarnation. Also the more people who are individually driving their own agenda, the greater the likelihood of them finding issues about functionality which can then be addressed and mended by them having access to the code.

Being given lots of ideas from lots of people which you can decide on relevance and order of incorporation allows you to see the ‘wood from the trees’. Sometimes by being too close, you cannot get the full user perspective. Things often can be simpler than we make them and being able to take perspective and distance helps in this process. Trying to imagine issues and challenges rather than allowing users to actually tell you about theirs is harder than listening.

At the start, the end product has to be a promise of collaboration and usefulness. People will only come to the bazaar if it is useful. The audience will be wide and varied and active. Those visiting Cathedrals – do so to admire and get without challenge. They do not want to interrogate as much as appreciate. The manager of the bazaar needs to be able to sift through the good from the bad and be willing to get certain things wrong in the pursuit of the ideal combination of stalls and the right degree of interaction. It is very much more hands on and wide reaching in its functionality.

Passion is the best driver of change and therefore being able to communicate and interest others with similar passions in a community is the key to a successful bazaar. It seems more complicated, but richer as a result of the journey.

The Cathedral will allow its doors to be opened to almost anyone, but really it is focusing on the small audience of people who are believers to the subscribed denomination. The bazaar is open to anyone, but it is only those that get it that want to stay and often these are free thinkers who want input. As the models of subscription fails to offer varied tastes, the option of dipping into variety seems to hold the winning formula.

This could take the form of CRM – Citizen Relationship Management. The dialogue needs to be two way:

1. understanding what each party wants to find out from the other
2. educating the parties – providing clear information on what’s possible