Two weeks ago I wrote this post, about how it is getting harder and harder to know what are the right paths, the right way points or even the right destinations in life…
Here’s a video that reminded me why it is all so exciting and scary at the same time.
Long live the third curse for we live in interesting times! (Remind me again why I seem to be pursuing curse one and two?)
There has been a lot of buzz around both the guilty verdict and now the judge’s alleged conflict of interest in the trial of the Pirate’s Bay operators.
For those not in the now The Pirate’s Bay is a search engine – like Google – that specialized in indexing “BitTorrents,” a file format often used to download movies, tv shows and large quantities of music. Since many of these files contained copyrighted material like Hollywood movies, there was significant interest in shutting down the site.
What is interesting to me is that the music recording industry – which was the first to fight against online file sharing – has always claimed it was working on behalf of starving artists. Fair enough – I too want to ensure that artists are fed and fairly rewarded for their work.
But this is in part what makes a new challenge to the publishing industry so interesting. Now a group of Swedes are enabling students to use file sharing to share educational materials. According to The Local, The Student Bay makes use of software from Rapid Share and encourages students to scan in and upload pages of course literature into an archive that they can then browse and download from.
I suspect that it is here – in the field of education – where file sharers will find the most fertile ground to transforming how media and copyright works. The movie and recording industries have deep pockets and a strong interest in fighting file sharing. Moreover, they will, for a while at least, be able to claim to speak for artists, even as this is less and less the case.
But the educational book industry? They pay professors virtually nothing for their works. Consequently, since most professors make their money from their salary they don’t rely on books as a revenue stream. Their core interest isn’t to make an extra $300-$4000 from a book that took them months to research and write, it is to know that students everywhere are reading and engaging their ideas.
Moreover, here is an industry that gouges its clients. Physics textbooks hardly need to change from year to year (how much has an intro Physics course really changed over the last 5 years? 10 years?). And yet new books, with new page numbers are created to force students to pay outrageous amounts for work that is – essentially – public domain. Even when educational publishers are trying to serve the greater good and introduce a new textbooks, the cost structure is prohibitive. Because of the short print runs of most textbooks, they tend to be expensive simply because margins have to be that much thicker to justify the investment.
In short, try to imagine the awareness campaign against copyright infringement in the educational sector? What % of the $85 for that physics text book we’ve been printing for 25 years really goes to the author or editor? Movies and music can somewhat justify their prices and copyright protection on the basis of fashion and trends. Educational book publishers don’t have that luxury. This is a mode of production that is broken: it is slow, expensive and primarily serves the interests of publishers, not the authors nor the readers. While the public remains uncertain about how to respond to copyright infringement in the entertainment industry I don’t think they are about to rise up and say: Yes! Let’s protect educational book publishers who pay authors nothing, overcharge students for textbooks and increase the cost of education.
And just in case you think the educational publishing industry won’t try to defend its business model, take a look at this story from Finland. Here, the industry is using legal threats to shut down an attempt to facilitate students lending each other books – in essence, creating a perfectly legal and truly “public” library.
Bookabooka doesn’t host any e-books on its site, but instead allows students to rent their textbooks to their peers. Renting is conducted via traditional “snailmail” (i.e. postal service) and it is mandatory that the textbooks are originals (not xeroxed copies). Bookabooka acts only as an intermediate, connecting the students together and doesn’t handle the shipping or returns of the textbooks.
Maybe file sharers will be forced to temporarily retreat, but here in lies fertile ground for the next battle. A battle where file sharing and the use of creative commons license (or no licenses at all) make the most economic and social sense.
More follow up on the future of democracy and the media. In the comments one reader – Karen – commented:
So….which of you brilliant Gen Y bloggers is going to sit at local park board meetings to find out how they are spending your tax money? Just wondering.
I don’t care whether newspapers live or die. It’s just a medium. (Yes, the singular of “media.”) It may well be it’s an outdated medium. It’s certainly a wasteful, expensive and environmentally harmful medium.
However, when newspapers die (so what? good riddance) the services that newspapers have traditionally supplied – such as serving as watchdogs for even the smallest municipalities, taxing bodies and so on – remain necessary to a functioning democracy. What happens when governments make decisions with no one watching?
And it’s tedious, people. Maybe some of you are experienced with this. Sitting through three-hour meeting of county commissioners, poring through stacks of facts and figures, following up to ask questions, finding alternate points of view – this is time consuming and not a whole lot of fun. When there are no reporters at these meetings, who will do this? Do you think it is no longer necessary? Will citizen journalists spend hours – unpaid – going line by line over the police board’s budget?
Well, according to Frances Bula, one of Vancouver’s finest journalist’s focused on local politics (she used to work at the Vancouver Sun, and now freelances for several publications, including the Globe and Mail) it is us who are covering this “small” stories. In a recent post entitled “When did civic politics get so interesting?” she states:
It’s hard to remember, but in those days, no one cared about city hall. It used to be me and a couple of Chinese-language-media reporters who would hang out in the pews at city council chambers on Tuesdays. When I went to the committee meetings on Thursday, I was usually the only reporter there. People coming to speak to council issues sometimes thought I was the recording secretary. And it was like that for quite a long time. Years and years, really, although Allen Garr started writing for the Courier after a while so then there was, thankfully, one more person.
This week in Vancouver, when city hall was stuffed like a turkey with news — the budget, cracking down on crummy SROs, whether to allow mixed martial arts events, police budgets being wrecked by gang investigations, Councillor Suzanne Anton grilling the mayor like he was a naughty boy about campaign financing — there were as many reporters and outlets covering the events as at any session of the provincial legislature…
…So, even though I now can’t get a seat at the media table these days if I come late to council, and it feels sometimes like everyone is falling over each other to get the latest little tidbit from the city, it’s okay — and even kind of fun — that it’s crowded.
But then this is what Shirly predicted would happen once the we understood the size of the cognitive surplus that is out there…
Embedded below is an abridged version (10 minutes!) of my 2009 Northern Voice presentation on managing and engaging the community the develops around one’s blog. Specifically, one goals of this presentation was to pull in some of the thinking from the negotiation and conflict management space and see how it might apply to dealing with people who comment on your blog. Hopefully, people will find it interesting.
Finally, a key lesson that came to me while developing the presentation is that most blogs, social media projects, and online projects in general, really need a social contract – or as Skirky describes it, a bargain – that the organizer and the community agree to. Often such contracts (or bargains) are strongly implied, but I believe it is occasionally helpful to make them explicit – particularly on blogs or projects that deal with contentious (politics) or complicated (many open source projects) issues.
At 8:43 in the presentation I talk about what I believe is the implicit bargain on my site. I think about codifying it, especially as a I get more and more commentors. That said, the community that has developed around this blog – mostly of people I’ve never met – is fantastic, so there hasn’t been an overwhelming need.
Finally thank you to Bruce Sharpe for posting a video of the presentation.
So, I hope this brief presentation is helpful to some of you.
(Notice how many people are coughing! You can tell it was winter time!)
Been getting a number of great comments and emails from people on the post on Journalism in an Open Era.
Another blogger I meant to link to he’s ideas on the future of organizations I find smart, edgy and thoughtful is Umair Haque, the Director of the Havas Media Lab who blogs for the Harvard Business Review.
In a piece entitled How to Build a Next-Generation Business Now, Haque’s concludes that the problem that dragged down wall street is in part, the same one that is killing (or transforming to be nicer) journalism. My journalism in an open era piece is set, in part, on the belief that the gut wrenching changes we are experiencing economically are part of a transition to a new rule-set, one that will favour, and possibility require, more “open” institutions and business models. This will require – in part – a new journalism but also real leadership in the private, public and non-profit sector (the type Henry Mintzberg raged about in his excellent oped in the Globe and Mail).
Here’s Haque (bold and italic text is mine) on the subject:
The first step in building next-generation businesses is to recognize the real problem boardrooms face – that we’ve moved beyond strategy decay. Building next-gen businesses depends on recognizing that they are not about new business models or even new strategies.
The stunningly total meltdown we just witnessed in the investment banking sector – the end of Wall St as we know it – was something far darker and more remarkable. It wasn’t simple business model obsolescence – an old business model being superseded by a more efficient or productive one. The problem the investment banks had wasn’t at the level of business models – it had little to do with revenue streams, customer segmentation, or value propositions.
And neither was it what Gary Hamel has termed “strategy decay” – imitation and commoditization eroding the returns to a once-defensible strategic position, scarce resource, or painstakingly built core competence.
It was something bigger and more vital: institutional decay. Investment banks failed not just as businesses, but as financial institutions that were supposedly built to last. It was ultimately how they were organized and managed as economic institutions – poor incentives, near-total opacity, zero responsibility, absolute myopia – that was the problem. The rot was in their DNA, in their institutional makeup, not in their strategies or business models.
The point is this: the central challenge 21st century boardrooms must face is not reinventing strategies, or business models, but reinventing businesses as institutions.
Old stuff is breaking fast. The rot is in the DNA – we may, in may circumstances, need a new institutional make up. And the new rule sets need to be understood quickly. Are we coming into an Open Era? I don’t know, but I think open and/or transparent organizations are going to have a leg up.
GCPEDIA (also check out this link) is one of the most exciting projects going on in the public service. If you don’t know what GCPEDIA is – check out the links. It is a massive wiki where public servants can share knowledge, publish their current work, or collaborate on projects. I think it is one of two revolutionary changes going on that will transform how the public service works (more on this another time).
I know some supporters out there fear that GCPEDIA – if it becomes too successful – will be shut down by senior executives. These supporters fear the idea of public servants sharing information with one another will simply prove to be too threatening to some entrenched interests. I recognize the concern, but I think it is ultimately flawed for two reasons.
The less important reason is that it appears a growing number of senior public servants “get it.” They understand that this technology – and more importantly the social changes in how people work and organize themselves that come along with them – are here to stay. Moreover, killing this type of project would simply send the worst possible message about public service sector renewal – it would be an admission that any real efforts at modernizing the public service are nothing more than window dressing. Good news for GCPEDIA supporters – but also not really the key determinant.
The second, and pivotal reason, is that GCPEDIA is going to save the public service.
I’m not joking.
Experts and observers of the Public Service has been talking for the last decade about the demographic tsunami that is going to hit the public service. The tsunami has to do with age. In short, a lot of people are going to retire. In 2006 52% of public servants are 44-65. in 1981 it was 38%, in 1991 it was 32%. Among executives the average ages are higher still. EX-1’s (the most junior executive level) has an average age of 50, Ex 2’s are at 51.9, Ex 3’s at 52.7 and Ex 4’s at 54.1. (numbers from David Zussman – link is a powerpoint deck)
Remember these are average ages.
In short, there are a lot of people who, at some point in the next 10 years, are going to leave the public service. Indeed, in the nightmare scenario, they all leave within a short period of time – say 1-2 years, and suddenly an enormous amount of knowledge and institutional memory walks out the door with them. Such a loss would have staggering implications. Some will be good – new ways of thinking may become easier. But most will be negative, the amount of work and knowledge that will have to be redone to regain the lost institutional memory and knowledge cannot be underestimated.
GCPEDIA is the public service’s best, and perhaps only, effective way to capture the social capital of an entire generation in an indexed and searchable database that future generations can leverage and add to. 10’s of millions of man-hours, and possible far more, are at stake.
This is why GCPEDIA will survive. We can’t afford for it not to.
As an aside, this has one dramatic implication. People are already leaving so we need to populate GCPEDIA faster. Indeed, if I were a Deputy Minister I would immediately create a 5 person communications team whose sole purpose was two fold. First to spread the word about the existence of GCPEDIA as well as help and encourage people to contribute to it. Second, this team would actually interview key boomers who may not be comfortable with the technology and transcribe their work for them onto the wiki. Every department has a legend who is an ES-6 and who will retire an ES-6 but everybody knows that they know everything about everything that ever happened, why it happened and why it matters. It’s that person everybody wants to consult with in the cafeteria. Get that person, and find a way to get their knowledge into the wiki, before their pension vests.
I’ve noticed more than a few people commenting about Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s recent quote about Twitter:
“Speaking as a computer scientist, I view all of these as sort of poor man’s email systems”
Apparently he made the statement at Morgan Stanley’s technology conference (Live notes here via Dan Frommer). I’m sensing that a number of people – especially twitter fans – feel like the statement was a little harsh. Perhaps, but taken in a broader context of his statement I don’ think that was his intention.
“In other words, they have aspects of an email system, but they don’t have a full offering. To me, the question about companies like Twitter is: Do they fundamentally evolve as sort of a note phenomenon, or do they fundamentally evolve to have storage, revocation, identity, and all the other aspects that traditional email systems have? Or do email systems themselves broaden what they do to take on some of that characteristic?”
What is interesting is that Schmidt is comparing Twitter to email – as opposed to what people usually compare it to, blogs (hence the term micro-blogging).
I actually love twitter comparing twitter to an email platform because it’s key constraint – that it limits users to messages of 140 characters or less – becomes a key benefit (although one with risks).
What I love about twitter is that it forces writers to be concise. Really concise. This inturn maximizes efficiency for readers. What is it Mark Twain said? “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” Rather than having one, or even thousands or readers read something that is excessively long, the lone drafter must take the time and energy to make it short. This saves lots of people time and energy. By saying what you’ve got to say in 140 characters, you may work more, but everybody saves.
Of course, this creates two risks: First, Twitter is totally inappropriate for all sorts of communications that require nuance and detail. So you’ve got to figure out what requires detail and nuance and what does not. (and there is a surprising amount of communication that does not – but the mistakes can be painful) Second, in addition to nuance and detail, the short comings generally associated with email – the opportunity for misunderstanding, taking things out of context, triggering someone emotionally – are still present. However, they are probably about the same since, interestingly, because people recognize you only have 140 characters they may be more forgiving in reading your tweet than they are in reading an email.
So Twitter may be a poor man’s email, but it can allow for much more efficient communication because it shifts the time costs from the reader to the writer. Schmidt is right to point out that that creates limitations and challenges, but it also creates huge opportunities. There are a ton of emails I’d prefer to get as Tweets… now if only I could download them into my email application…
Just got back from a week on the road and have given 4 out of 5 of my lectures on the future of the public service. Best part of the lectures? The Q&A, always lots of smart comments, critiques, ideas and thoughts coming out of the audience.
One theme that came up was that public servants feel they are suffering from information overload. There is simply so much going on around them and it is impossible to keep up with it all. This is especially true of those in the senior ranks.
This is why the public service needs bloggers. Not to communicate with the public but to help public servants manage and understand all that internal knowledge and information.
The simplest way of explaining this is to refer to one of my favourite authors – David Weinberger – who noticed that (outside government and on the internet) we already have a solution to the problem of too much information. As he states in his 2008 Bertha Bassam Lecture at the University of Toronto – the solution is to create more information:
In the early 1900s we faced the challenge. We were told over and over again in alarmist books and articles that we were going to drown in the ocean of information. Watch out! There’s an information Tsunami coming… fell everybody! We are all going to die…!
And it turns out there was way more information than anybody expected. Orders of magnitude more. We can’t even imagine the amount of information that there is. And yet we are doing pretty well. I’m not drowning. You drowning? I’m not drowning… we are doing pretty well.
And the reason we are doing pretty well is that the solution to the information overload problem is to simply generate still more information. That is information about the information, or as we like to say meta-data. And so that is what we’ve been doing. And by doing that, by generating this information about the information we are able to manage and find and build and collect and make our way through it.
This is what blogs often are: meta-data. They sift through the information that is out there and tease out what is important and what is relevant and write it up in a readable and accessible fashion.
So if public servants feel overwhelmed by information one of the main reasons is that they have no filters. There are few, if any bloggers within departments that are writing about what they think is important and what is going on around them. What is actually happening versus what is simply smoke and mirrors. I suspect that if you allowed public servants to blog, you could cut down on email traffic and, more importantly, meetings (which are a drain on everybody’s time) by at least 25%. Want to know what my team is up to? Don’t schedule a meeting. First, read my blog. Oh, and search the tags to find what is relevant to you. (you can do that on my blog too, if you are still reading this piece it probably means you are interested in this tag.)
Still more interesting would be that some people in a department would start to blog about what is going on, on the ground. An ADM wants to know what really matters to those on the front line of program? Reading the blog of a front line officer might give him or her more insights, more quickly than simply asking their DG.
And, of course, what happens in the real world would happen in government to. Some people, who write well and on topics others care about, would have more people read there posts. Others, who were more niche, or who wrote on things that were less relevant, would get less traffic. Reputation and merit would guide information rather than authority or, worse, access to the ministry’s email list.
In this world, the relevant information finds you and you it, rather than the information that someone else thinks you should know. That is how you solve the information overload problem in government. So let the bloggers run free.
One of the challenges I’m most interested in is how we can wed “open” systems to government hierarchies. In a lecture series I’ve developed for Health Canada I’ve developed a way of explaining how we do this already with our 911 service.
To begin, I like using 911 as an example because people are familiar and comfortable with it. More importantly, virtually everyone agrees that it is not only an essential piece of modern government service but also among the most effective.
What is interesting is that 911, unlike many government programs, relies on constant citizen input. It is a system that has been architected to be participatory. Indeed it only works because it is participatory – without citizen input the system falls apart. Specifically, it aggregates, very effectively, the long-tail 0f knowledge within a community to deliver, with pin point accuracy, an essential service to the location it is needed at a time it is needed.
I’ve visualized in this slide below (explanation below the fold)
Imagine the white curve represents all of the police, fire and ambulance interventions in a city. Many of the most critical interventions are ones the police force and ambulance service determine themselves (shaded blue). For example, the police are involved in an investigation that results in a big arrest, or the ambulance parks outside an Eagles reunion concert knowing that some of the boomers in attendance will be “over-served” and will suffer a heart attack.
However, while investigations and predictable events may account for some police/fire/ambulatory actions (and possibly those that receive the most press attention) the vast majority of arrests, fire fights and medical interventions result from plain old 911 calls made by ordinary citizens (shaded red). True, many of these are false alarms, or are resolved with minimal effort (a fire extinguisher deals with the problem, or minor amount of drugs are confiscated but no arrests made). But the sheer quantity of these calls means that while the average quality may be low, they still account for the bulk of successful (however defined) interventions. Viewed in this light 911 is a knowledge aggregator, collecting knowledge from citizens to determine where police cars, fire trucks and ambulances need to go.
Thus to find a system that leverages citizens knowledge and is architected for participation we don’t need to invent something new – there are existing systems, like 911, that we can learn from.
With this in mind, two important lessons about 911 leap out at me:
1) It is a self-interested system: While many 911 callers are concerned citizens calling about someone else I suspect the majority of calls – and the most accurate calls – are initiated by those directly or immediately impacted by a situation. People who have been robbed, are suffering from a heart attack, or who have a fire in their kitchen are highly incented to call 911. Consequently, the system leverages our self interest, although it also allows for good Samaritans to contribute as well.
2) It is narrowly focused in its construct: 911 doesn’t ask callers or permit callers to talk about the nature of justice, the history of fire, or the research evidence supporting a given medical condition. It seeks a very narrow set of data points: the nature of the problem and its location. This is helpful to both emergency response officials and citizens. It limits the quantity of data for the former and helps minimize the demands on the latter.
These, I believe, are the secret ingredients to citizen engagement of the future. A passive type of engagement that seeks specific, painless information/preferences/knoweldge from citizens to augment or redistribute services more effectively.
It isn’t sexy, but it works. Indeed we have 20 years of evidence showing us how well it works with regards to one of our most important services.
A couple of Vancouverites can be seen below talking about the danger currently facing the future of the internet here in Canada as our government allows the telco’s to determine who will be the winners and losers of the digital age.
If you haven’t already I’d strongly encourage you to head over to the “SaveourNet.ca” facebook group and become a member.
eaves.ca 
