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daviding says: There's a philosophical shift to move from information held in private within government departments to free-flowing content.

Web 2.0 technologies are now being deployed in government settings. For example, public agencies have used blogs to communicate information on public hearings, wikis and RSS feeds to coordinate work, and wikis to internally share expertise, and intelligence information. The potential for Web 2.0 tools create a public sector paradox. On the one hand, they have the potential to create real transformative opportunities related to key public sector issues of transparency, accountability, communication and collaboration, and to promote deeper levels of civic engagement. On the other hand, information flow within government, across government agencies and between government and the public is often highly restricted through regulations, specific reporting structures and therefore usually delayed through the filter of the bureaucratic constraints. What the emergent application and popularity of Web 2.0 tools show is that there is an apparent need within government to create, distribute and collect information outside the given hierarchical information flow. Clearly, these most recent Internet technologies are creating dramatic changes in the way people at a peer-to-peer production level communicate and collaborate over the Internet. And these have potentially transformative implications for the way public sector organizations do work and communicate with each other and with citizens. But they also create potential difficulties and challenges that have their roots in the institutional contexts these technologies are or will be deployed within. In other words, it is not the technology that hinders us from transformation and innovation - it is the organizational and institutional hurdles that need to be overcome. This paper provides an overview of the transformative organizational, technological and informational challenges ahead.

UMM is based in UML, which means it's about modeling the information aspects of businesses. This Wikipedia entry seems underdeveloped, so the description should taken with a grain of salt. It does point out that UMM attempts to decouple from implementation technologies such as Web Services and ebXML.

UN/CEFACT's Modeling Methodology, commonly known as UMM is a modeling methodology which is developed by UN/CEFACT - United Nations Center for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business. Goal of UMM The primary goal of UMM is to caputure business requirements of inter-organizational business processes. These requirements result in a platform independent UMM model. The UMM model can then be used to derive deployment artifacts for the IT systems of the participating business partners. UMM at a glance UMM enables to capture business knowledge independent of the underlying implementation technology, like Web Services or ebXML. The goal is to specify a global choreography of a business collaboration serving as an "agreement" between the participating partners in the respective collaboration. Each business partner derives in turn its local choreography, enabling the configuration of the business partner's system for the use within a service oriented architecture ( SOA).

daviding says: Wisdom and knowledge are sticky to experts. However, the advent of "open content" on academic materials challenges the traditional way in which universities interact with students.

"The Internet disrupts any industry whose core product can be reduced to ones and zeros," says Jose Ferreira, founder and CEO of education startup Knewton. Education, he says, "is the biggest virgin forest out there." Ferreira is among a loose-knit band of education 2.0 architects sharpening their saws for that forest. Their first foray was at MIT in 2001, when the school agreed to put coursework online for free. Today, you can find the full syllabi, lecture notes, class exercises, tests, and some video and audio for every course MIT offers, from physics to art history. This trove has been accessed by 56 million current and prospective students, alumni, professors, and armchair enthusiasts around the world. "The advent of the Web brings the ability to disseminate high-quality materials at almost no cost, leveling the playing field," says Cathy Casserly, a senior partner at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, who in her former role at the Hewlett Foundation provided seed funding for MIT's project. "We're changing the culture of how we think about knowledge and how it should be shared and who are the owners of knowledge." But higher education remains, on the whole, a string quartet. MIT's courseware may be free, yet an MIT degree still costs upward of $189,000. College tuition has gone up more than any other good or service since 1990, and our nation's students and graduates hold a staggering $714 billion in outstanding student-loan debt. Once the world's most educated country, the United States today ranks 10th globally in the percentage of young people with postsecondary degrees. "Colleges have become outrageously expensive, yet there remains a general refusal to acknowledge the implications of new technologies," says Jim Groom, an "instructional technologist" at Virginia's University of Mary Washington and a prominent voice in the blogosphere for blowing up college as we know it. Groom, a chain-smoker with an ever-present five days' growth of

The Energy Systems Language (right), also referred to as Energese, Energy Circuit Language and Generic Systems Symbols, was developed by the ecologist Howard T. Odum and colleagues in the 1950s during studies of the tropical forests funded by the United States Atomic Energy Commission. They are used to compose energy flow diagrams in the field of systems ecology.

I was looking at the Systems Modeling Language page on Wikipedia, and noticed this link to Energy Systems Language, by Howard Odum. It's an interesting idea ... although it brings questions to the choice of modeling languages and approaches. No model is value-free.