ZenBiz Radio

Taped Tuesday, Jan 27 on Zen Biz radio - Peter Rawsthorne talks about self governance.

Player by Podbean.com

Off the wall

Social media/ web 2.0 is just beginning.

Unglibbing ourselves

Listening to CBC Radio in the car this morning - a young couple describing her ('their') pregnancy in a witty way: "It's kind of like science fiction..."

Oh?
(turning radio off)

Science fiction can be fairly described as an Image, a reduction, or a projection of the life we live. Skipping along the surface of our life, and its births, marriages, and deaths, in a glib, culturally schooled way, allows us to disregard the actual content of our life, or treating it as an aberration.

Web 2.0 doesn't have to be about more and thicker streams of glibness. There is alot of glib out there, and the glib filters are coming onto the way we use websites, IM, Twitter, Facebook, emails, Skype calls...

Thinking this morning: What's valuable is still valuable. For any person in any group, whether it's the CBC, my company, or your business, that real, humane, and direct communication is not just valuable, but a prerequisite - or it'll be filtered out.

Leaders embrace their own transformation

Worth rebroadcasting:

"The benefits of the information revolution can be fully realised only if governments play a central role in this transformation. It is imperative that they reassess their roles and functions, both to transform the way they function and how they relate to internal and external actors. To play this central role, governments need to begin by embracing their own transformation."

Great article by Nagy Hannah

On the road to Enterprise 2.0

The Road status tool was built by volunteers, during the bad weather. It is a small, simple example of realizing a potential that we rarely quantify, by making use of new social media tools.

The map with its road segments can be reused for other applications. Our next step, after completing the geo-tagging of roads, is to enable ad hoc loading of photos as well as text to the map. By anyone.

There are other next steps.

Implementation of simple new tools and initiatives such as these can only accelerate in the next few years. It is all about fulfilling the emergent expectations of participation among people within and without the enterprise - in this case, the government.

Enterprise 2.0, defined by Harvard Business School's Andrew McCaffee as "The use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers" helps fulfill the organization (in this case, the govt administration)'s strategic objectives, with limited overhead. It also potentiates people on the margins - in this case citizens. In old corporatespeak terms, this is win-win.

Issues of ownership and liability have to be ironed out along the way; one role of the organization is to trade off sole responsibility and ownership for the involvement of many. This give and take has to be negotiated with awareness and some grace, and in fact negotiating the changing relationship is a large part of the communications exercise. The humanizing notion that lubricates this change is the growing notion that we are in it together.

What is emergent is not a new socialism, but a new recognition of, and ability to deliver on, the nature of group behavior. Along the way, the nature of the org and the constituency changes; we need to measure this change to maximize benefit.

On BOWEGOV, very interesting work so far, and I am pleased to be part of it. Finding some fascinating & rewarding group/personal interactions all along this road.

Political Studies 330

It was a pretty boring Political Parties course, and it was 1977. Some students were discussing how to encourage more voting - people weren't getting a voice because they were apathetic. Voter apathy is the enemy of democracy etc. Good people were asking, how can we get them involved.

Well it struck me that this concern about voting was a kind of specialized obsession. Shouldn't citizen engagement be something much more wholesome and fulfilling than this, after all.

That self governance will be better enabled using web tools is probable. After all, there are economic drivers ('more for less') propelling it. But probable success factors are all about money and efficiency and intention, spirit and design. Thinking the litmus test is - does this BOWEGOV etc help people come home to themselves. How to measure this may be 'happy' indices, or, put another way - 'spirit of giving/sharing' indices.