Group items tagged

1) what data should the government share and 2) how does data influence the public sphere

The optimists decry the modern instantiations of bureaucracy and policy in which democratic governments operate as the source of democratic ills and support the normative idea of an informed and engaged public.  Pessimists counter that the normative model of democracy most accepted in the literature is a novel construction that is not grounded in the natural behavior of citizens.

The innocence of Americans is either explained as a rational choice under the principle of rational ignorance (Downs, 1957) or explained as something inherent in the lack of mental sophistication in humans.

Government 2.0 attempts to correct the problems of information diffusion by assuming that people are simply unable or unwilling to find information in the offline world.  If the barriers to information acquisition are lowered then, the theory goes, people will be more likely to find, synthesize and use information in decision-making processes.

Feedback loops: Who will be active in these loops? How will the public respond? 

People usually think about explicit citizen participation, but some of the most pwrful Web 2.0 tools aren't about that: it's about ppl who are participating w/o knowing they are participating. Google is actually one of the great engines of harnessing participation, anyone who clicks on a link is participating, a link is a vote, meaning hidden in something they're doing already. Wikipedia isn't the only place where people are contributing.

The amount of data being shared/collected about people is growing exponentially, old notions of privacy need to be replaed by ideas of visibility and control: give more control over who gets to see it. We are better off with more visibility and control than stopping people from collecting data. The data is incredibly useful, applicaitons depend on data, people willingly giving up that privacy about where they are all the time.

many programs go wrong, generically, (what worries me) government is still very much an insider's game, we have not yet really built a system that allows real participation

Another gov 2.0 observation: it's very hard for a government agency to start over, it's not like private sector, where companies with bad ideas go out of business. Government agencies don't go out of business. (consumers benefit from newspapers going out of business) We don't have creative destruction in gov't, the basic machinery of it just gets bigger and more entrenched. Need to figure out how to start over: what not to do

The toughest part about Web 2.0, Gov 2.0, etc, might be the role of management. It used to be about defining the outcome and monitoring the progress towards that outcome. In Web 2.0 you don't know what that outcome is, it's a huge leap of faith, and takes a tremendous amount of adjusting to that approach. Do we need a different set of metrics? Yes. Media is intersecting with technology, technology is a new channel for media, even Hollywood is changing: oh my goodness, we have to create entirely new financial models!

"The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed." It's a cultural issue here, people are stuck in the past and we need a new wave of innovators or we should just expect slow results.

Twitter's been focused on openness, and his response was that it's a "survival strategy." New ideas, new concepts, new applications — all flow to open organizations. That's a great way to express the point that for next-gen organizations, openness is now table stakes: fail at it, and you're not even in the game.

That's what 21st century organizations look like: networks, not pyramids.

Doors versus windows

That's pretty radical. Wall St, Detroit, Big Food, Big Software and HMOs are just a few for whom win/wins have mattered little, if at all. It's a simple, powerful way to frame next-gen strategy in a nutshell.

, Ev said: better connections, better information — better choices

Just as the fundamental challenge of the 21st century is making authentically, meaningfully better stuff, for the 21st century media it's communicating in better ways — not simply bombarding the reader-"consumer" with more, bigger, louder ads.

Erasing information asymmetries is where the future of advertising lies. But you can't get there unless you can build a 21st century business first.