Tag Archives: public service sector renewal

Lessons from the Globe and Mail's Policy Wiki

I’ve been observing the Globe Policy Wiki with enormous interest. I’m broadly supportive of all of Mathew Ingram’s experiments and efforts to modernize the Globe. That said, my sense is that this project project faces a number of significant challenges. Some from the technology, others around how it is managed. Understanding and cataloging the ups and downs of such this effort is essential. At some point (I suspect in the not too distant future) wikis will make their way into the government’s policy development process – the more we understand the conditions under which they flourish, the more likely such experiments will be undertaken successfully.

Here are some lessons I’ve taken away:

1. The problem of purpose: accuracy vs. effectiveness

Wiki’s are clearly effective at spreading concrete, specific knowledge. Software manuals, best practice lists and Wikipedia works because – more often than not – they seek to share a concrete, objective truth. Indeed “the goal” of Wikipedia is to strive for verifiable accuracy. Consequently, a Wikipedia article on Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi can identify that he was born on October 2nd, 1869. We can argue whether or not this is true, but he was born on a specific day, and people will eventually align around the most accurate answer. Same with a software wiki – a software bug is caused by a specific, verifiable, set of circumstances.  Indeed, because the article is an assemblage of facts its contributors have an easier time pruning or adding to the article.

Indeed, it is where there is debate and subjective interpretation that things become more complicated in Wikipedia. Did George Bush authorize torture? I’ll bet Wikipedia has hosted a heady debate on the subject that, as yet, remains unresolved.

A policy wiki however, lives in this complicated space. This is because the goal of a policy wiki is not accuracy. Policies are are not an assemblage of facts whose accuracy can be debated. A policy is a proposal – an argument – informed by a combination of assumptions, evidence and values. How does one edit an argument? If we share different values, what do I edit? If I have contradictory evidence, what do I change? Can or should one edit a proposal they simply don’t agree with? In Wikipedia or in online software manual the response would be: “Does it make the piece more accurate?” If the answer is yes, the you should.

But with is the parallel guiding criteria for a policy wiki? “Does it make the policy more effective?” Such a question is significantly more open to interpretation. Who defines effective?

It may be that for a policy wiki will only work within communities that share a common goal, or that at least have a common metric for assessing effectiveness. More likely, Wikis in areas such as public policy may require an owner who ultimately acts as an arbiter deciding which edits stand and which edits will get deleted.

2. Combining voting with editing is problematic.

The goal of having people edit and improve a policy proposal runs counter to those of having them vote on a proposal. A wiki is, by definition, dynamic. Voting – or any preference system – implies that what is being voted on is static and unchanging; a final product that different people can assess.  How can a user vote in favour of something if, the next day, if it can be changed into something I may disagree with it? By allowing simultaneously for voting and editing I suspect the wiki discourages both. Voters are unsure if what they are voting for will stay the same, editors were likely wary of changing anything too radically because the voting option suggests proposals shouldn’t change too much – undermining the benefits of the wiki platform.

3. While problematic for editing, the Policy Wiki could be a great way to catalog briefs

One thing that is interesting about the wiki is that anyone can post their ideas. If the primary purpose were to create a catalogue of ideas the policy wiki could be a great success. Indeed, given that people are discouraged from radically altering policy notes this is effectively what the Policy Wiki is (is it still a wiki?). Presently the main obstacle to this success is the layout. The policy briefs currently appear in a linear order based on when they were submitted. This means a reader must scroll through them one by one. There is no categorization or filtering mechanism to help readers find policies they specifically care about. A search feature would enable readers to find briefs with key words. Also, enabling users to “tag” briefs would allow readers to filter the briefs in more useful ways. One could, for example, ask to see briefs tagged “environment,” or “defense” taking you to the content you want to see faster.

Such filtering approaches might distribute readers more accurately based on their interests. In a recent blog post Ingram notes that the Flat Tax briefing note received the most page views. But this should hardly come as a surprise (and probably should not be interpreted as latent interest in a flat tax). The flat tax brief was the first brief on the list. Consequently, casual observers showing up on the site to see what it was all about were probably just clicking on the first brief to get a taste.

ChangeCamp: Pulling people and creativity out of the public policy long tail

ChangeCamp is a free participatory web-enabled face-to-face event that brings together citizens, technologists, designers, academics, policy wonks, political players, change-makers and government employees to answer one question: How do we re-imagine government and governance in the age of participation?

What is ChangeCamp? It is the application of “the long tail” to public policy.

It is a long held and false assumption that ordinary citizens don’t care about public policy. The statement isn’t, in of itself, false. Many, many, many people truly don’t care that much. They want to live their lives focusing on other things – pursuing other hobbies or interests – but there are many of us who do care. Public policy geeks, fans, followers, advocates, etc… we are everywhere, we’ve just been hidden in a long tail that saw the market place and capacity for developing and delivering public policy restricted to a few large institutions. The single most important lesson I learnt from my time with Canada25 is that it doesn’t have to be that way.

Did Canada25 get a new generation of Canadians, aged 20-35 engaged in public policy? I don’t know.

What I do know is, that at the very minimum, we harnessed and enormous, dispersed desire of many Canadians to participate in, and help shape, the public policy debates affecting the country. Most importantly, we did this by doing three things:

  1. we aggregated together the people who cared about public policy, we gave them peers, friends and a sense of community.
  2. we provided a vehicle through which to channel their energy
  3. by combining 1 and 2, and by using simple technology and a low cost approach – we dramatically lowered the barriers (and csots) to entry for credible participating in these national debates

Today, the technology to enable and aggregate people their ideas, to connect them with peers and to create community, is still more powerful. Our capacity to challenge, push, help, cooperate, leverage and compete with the large institutional public policy actors has never been greater. This, for me, is the goal of ChangeCamp. What concrete tools can we build, what information can we demand be opened up, what new relationships can we build to re-imagine how we – the citizens who care – participate in the creation of public policy and the effective delivery of public services. Not to compete or replace the traditional institutional actors, but to ensure more and better ideas are heard and increasingly effective and efficient services are created.

Long tail of public policy

Individually, none of us may have the collective power of a government ministry or even the resources of most think tanks. But collectively, linked together by technology and powered by our energy and spare capital, the long tail of policy geeks and ordinary citizens is bigger, nimbler, more creative and faster than anything else. Do I know that the long tail of policy can be set free? No. But ChangeCamp seems like a fun place to start experimenting, brainstorming and sharing ways we can make this country better.

Why StatCan is (or could be) like Google

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Statscan Google logoThe other week I gave a talk on Gen Y, Gen X, Technology and the Future of the Public Service at StatCan’s managers’ meeting. The speaker before me apparently told the gathering that they “should be more like Google” if they want to recruit young talent. During his Q&A one of the managers asked how a government agency could be like Google (a legitimate question, I thought) and the speaker didn’t have much to say. Frustrating, no?

Definitely.

But I think there is a good case. While the idea of StatCan emulating one of the best performing, young, hottest companies in Silicon Valley may sound far-fetched, it needn’t. StatCan can be like Google. In fact, it already is.

Look, for a second, a Google’s strategy. Google’s mission is encapsulated in its SEC filing statement:

“to organize the world’s information …. and make it universally accessible and useful”. Google explains that it believes that the most effective, and ultimately the most profitable, way to accomplish our mission is to put the needs of our users first. Offering a high-quality user experience has led to strong word-of-mouth promotion and strong traffic growth. Putting users first is reflected in three key commitments illustrated in the Google SEC filing: “1. We will do our best to provide the most relevant and useful search results possible, independent of financial incentives. Our search results will be objective and we will not accept payment for inclusion or ranking in them.

  1. We will do our best to provide the most relevant and useful advertising. Advertisements should not be an annoying interruption. If any element on a search result page is influenced by payment to us, we will make it clear to our users.
  2. We will never stop working to improve our user experience, our search technology and other important areas of information organization”.

To organize the world’s information… and make it universally accessible. This a huge part of StatCan’s mission. To organize Canada’s information… (now if only we made it universally accessible).

I think Google’s mission is similar to StatCan’s. Indeed the main difference is that StatCan not only organizes Canada’s information; it also creates that data. However, this is a space that Google has moved aggressively into — why do you think it has created platforms like Google Earth? To facilitate the creation of data so that it has more to organize and offer its users. Indeed, what is interesting about Google is that it knows the more information and data that is out there – for free – the more useful and important it becomes. It means more people doing searches, which means more advertising revenue.

So what does this mean for StatCan?:

First, distinguish and separate what you do: “Creating and organizing information about Canada” from what makes you valuable: making this information universally available to citizens.

Second, make yourself the centre of a data gathering, sharing and analyzing eco-system: There are thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people out there who could do amazing things with StatCan’s data. The problem is, it isn’t easy to find, often you have to pay for it, and it is usually only available in HTML charts that aren’t easily accessed, and certainly not dynamically available. If StatCan data was available as API’s and Excel spreadsheets, then a whole ecosystem of multimillion dollar businesses, bloggers and other pro-ams would emerge around it as supporters, collaborators and complementors.

Finally, hire young people to make it happen because if you are open, they will come: Does StatCan want young people to come work for them? Then stop behaving like a 20th-century consulting firm whose job is to hoard data and conduct analyses for clients. (Don’t worry you can still do this). Instead, act like the 21st-century Google-like platform that you are. Your job should be to make your data as searchable, taggable, as pluggable, in short, as usable, as possible. This, in addition to collection, should be the top priority. If StatCan’s data were easily available (say as an API) people would start using it in all sorts of creative ways – this, and this alone will drive innovation, excitement, energy and buzz about Statcan into the workplace. In short, it will make Statcan relevant. StatCan should be a place where young Canadians want to work so they can learn how to handle and disseminate HUGE quantities of data to everyone from the smallest bloggers to the largest companies. That skill set is going to be critical in the 21st century and so such a mission will attract talent top talent, if StatCan gives them the freedom to play and build it.

StatCan is like Google — if it chooses to be. It can’t offer the stock options, but it can offer a cool opportunity to help build the country’s most critical data ecosystem for a 21st century economy. That’s a job lots of geeks would be interested in.

The Financial collapse and the unsaid thoughts of public servants

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Fascinating week in Ottawa. Been having a great time, enjoying brown bag lunches and meeting with friends old and new.

I’m here to talk about public service sector renewal and as the the issue comes up on many occasions people ask me if I think the financial crises and the poor economy will make the government a more attractive choice for gen Yers.

I think the generation lens is the wrong one, because the public service needs not only good gen yers, but also good gen xers. That said, I think the answer, broadly, is no. The crisis will not have a big impact on applications. Richard Florida hit on the reason why on Monday in his Globe and Mail piece about the asymmetrical distribution of unemployment the recession will visit upon the work force.

Critically, government needs to recognize that, these days, it is hiring creative class workers and that this group, by and large, will be significantly less hurt by the economic collapse than service sector and blue collar workers:

Unemployment rates among the working class have been more than triple the rate of those in the creative class and about double the rate of those in the service class over the past decade. Service-class unemployment has been about double the creative-class rate and has not diverged from it in the past 20 years.

And look at the last recession in Canada. Unemployment rates among the working class rose to nearly 16 per cent in 1991, while the creative class and service class experienced much more modest increases.

So will there be an uptick in people interested in working for government? Mostly likely. But expect it to be modest. But also remember. those who decide to apply may be motivated by safety and security, not a sense of public duty.

Oh, and one other thing. I’ve had several friends tell me that people who’ve applied for jobs that have had to wait 6, 9 or even 14 months before getting an offer. For those who are really made to wait, by the time they find out they have a job, the recession could be over…

e-governance: How the White House may evolve

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The other day Taylor emailed me this article on how the internet, and the communities it enables, may reshape politics in America.

What really struck me however was the subtle but important differences in language between the incoming Obama administration and the outgoing Bush administration. The quotes below say it all: On one side you have advisers talking about the internet as a tool to enable transparency and engagement. The subtext, citizens become an extension of government – helping improve program delivery. On the other side you have someone talking about the internet as a broadcast tool, a way to “get the message out.” Here, citizens are separate from government and merely passive recipients of “a message” or data the white house wants it to see.

Check it:

Craig Newmark, founder of online classifieds site craigslist.com, served as a technology adviser to Obama and is an advocate for a more open and responsive government.

“In New York and San Francisco there are so-called ‘311’ programs,” he said. “The idea is that it’s customer service for local government and if you need a pothole fixed you contact 311.

“Well let’s start expanding 311 systems to all of government,” he said.

“There’s also the whole transparency thing,” Newmark added. “The Internet is all about transparency. The first phase is the election campaign then, afterwards, getting some real grass-roots democracy in there.”

David Almacy, who served as Internet and e-communications director for President George W. Bush, said the Internet is “a very powerful tool in communicating the president’s agenda.”

“The Internet is basically a 24-hour seven-day-a-week spokesperson,”
Almacy said. “While we’re sleeping at night it’s still available for those who are searching on energy legislation or the war on terror or the war in Iraq.”

CEO compensation – a symptom of institutional decay

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So reading Emergence sprouted another thought regarding the increasingly bankrupt (literally and figuratively) model of the classic bureaucratic organizations. Again I point to Umair Haque’s post on the recent financial crisis:

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.

I think Umair is on to something and that CEO salaries may make for a great case in point.

For many years the left has decried growing CEO salaries as a sign of the market’s excesses – or worse, of a broader culture of greed. But excessive senior management salaries are, from an investors perspective, are a symptom of a staggeringly flawed institutional model. If your business depends that much on the one person at the top – if the current and future value of the entire organization rests in the hands of one person… then yikes! Shareholders beware.

The idea that a CEO is worth 1000, or even 100 times more than the “average” workers in an organization isn’t just a problem from a morale or ethical perspective (it may or may not be). If your average worker isn’t contributing that much value in relation to their ultimate superior than you have a massively top heavy – and hierarchical – organization. One where, I suspect, Umair would find there are poor incentives, near-total opacity, zero responsibility, absolute myopia. To be sure, ideas are probably not being floated about, and they are almost certainly not successfully emerging from the bottom up.

In short, it isn’t a happy place to be. And it turns out the markets may not think it is so good either.

Comfort with ambiguity

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Finally polished off “Emergence” by Stephen Johnson (another post on it here) – the last 30 pages have been lingering for about 2 weeks.

Johnson’s ideas continue to touch on themes I’ve been explaining to others for two years now. More recently, on why boomers continue to misunderstand their Gen Y cousins. Take for example, Johnson’s conclusions about what video games are doing to all of us (but Yers in particular):

The conventional wisdom about these kids (gen Yers) is that they’re more nimble at puzzle solving and more manually dexterous than the TV generation, and while there’s certainly some truth to that, I think we lose something important in stressing how talented this generation is with their joysticks. I think they have developed another skill, one that almost looks like patience: they are more tolerant of being out of control, more tolerant of that exploratory phase where rules don’t all make sense, and where few goals have been clearly defined. In other words, they are uniquely equipped the more oblique control system of emergence software (and, I might add, emergent systems more generally).

While the boomer vs. gen Y comparison is generally apt, l think even more than being generational this is class based. Emerging creative classers are not only comfortable with this exploratory phase, they actively need it. This is why the large bureaucracies (but not necessarily large organizations) struggle to attract and retain both the demographic and the class. They often force upon their workers too much structure, to much rigidity on the front end, evaporating the creative opportunities where we might imagine something better, bigger or more effective.

A note of caution too for those who think the financial collapse augers a new era of safety in large bureaucracies. Don’t fool yourself. It was the large bureaucracies of the banks and government regulators, working in tandem, that got us into this mess. While some creative classers may attempt to retreat to the safety of a large government or private sector institutions I suspect that many will do just the opposite. As bureaucracies become still more risk averse and controling their capacity to foster to new ideas and approaches will be that much more constrained. The “outside thinkers” will be in still greater demand.

Which government embraces Facebook? (hint: it's not ours)

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A few weeks ago Dave D. kindly sent me this article out of England about how junior public servants are teaching their senior colleagues how to use facebook.

And just in case you think this is an ad hoc thing…

Cabinet Office minister Tom Watson yesterday said Whitehall mandarins had been given new guidelines ‘to encourage civil servants to take the first steps to engage with online social networks’.

I wonder if any Public Servant or Conservative Cabinet minister would be willing to share the same idea with our PM… likely not.

Oh, to live in a country with an open government

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So the British Government doesn’t just release masses of data so the people can mash it up – they are now offering a prize to the best mash-up. Sadly, our (Canadian) government couldn’t be more secretive with it’s data.

Government EntropySure there are some low hanging fruit that I (with the help of my trusted colleague Jeremy V) was able to get and use to create this mash up of the location of government offices. Sadly, their ain’t much (that is publicly available!) to mash it up against…

Ah, the things the public would do with the data it is supposed to own and have access to, if only its government would let it…

Sometimes it’s hard not to feel like we’re uninspired, secretative and falling further, and further, behind.

The Open Source Public Service

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Consider these to quotes side by side:

First,

“Human beings generally take pleasure in a task when it falls in a sort of optimal-challenge zone; not so easy as to be boring, not too hard to achieve. A happy programmer is one who is neither underutilized nor weighed down with ill-formulated goals and stressful process friction. Enjoyment predicts efficiency.

Relating to your own work process with fear and loathing (even in the displacing, ironic way suggested by hanging up Dilbert cartoons) should therefore be regarded in itself as a sign that the process has failed. Joy, humor, and playfulness are indeed assets…”

– Eric Raymond, The Cathedral & The Bazaar

(BTW: Who would have thought that the entire line of Dilbert cartoons – their humorous reflections on how organizations (dis)function – could be made depressingly painful in one brief phrase.)

Second,

“Disability claims and stress leaves are soaring. For many public service managers, the work-life balance is so unhealthy that one major federal department has tried to implement a BlackBerry ban between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m., so that people can reclaim some of their personal time. Management scholars are using the public service as a laboratory to study workplace dysfunction…

…The discussion about public service renewal is ongoing, but one valuable contribution arrived this week. In a report released Wednesday, the Public Policy Forum, an Ottawa-based think tank, succinctly identifies some of the key problems facing the public service. Few of these observations are likely to surprise Ottawa insiders, but it’s useful all the same to see them legitimized by respected researchers.

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The report confirms, for example, public servants feel so tangled up in procedure and regulations they are unable to get meaningful work done… Yes, public servants need to be accountable, especially in the post-Gomery universe, but if the “web of rules” is completely extinguishing every spark of innovation and producing the most risk-averse organization in the country, then there’s a problem.”

– The Ottawa Citizen Editorial Board

The narrative of the public service as a byzantine, rule bound place has become so accepted it is now unquestioned gosple. The truth is always more complicated. I know of, and occasionally hear from, people who work in places where (usually small) teams of public servants work in flat collaborative groups that are able to achieve great things. But the narrative exists for a reason – as the above Ottawa Citizen piece attests. This is why where you work in the public service (and often who you work for) is far more important than what file you work on.

So how much work in the public service falls within the optimal-challenge zone described by Raymond? More importantly, how many public servants would continue to do their job if they weren’t paid? 10%? 35%? 50%?

My suspicion is that the open source community for public policy is actually quite large. It includes those in the public service – who are tied up and tied down in their silos, but also extends much further. The problem is that it is tied down by process and an industrial model to “churning out” policy that doesn’t work well with today’s knowledge workers.

Canada25 showed that hundreds and indeed thousands of young people wanted to think about, engage in, and write about public policy in their spare time. All we did was allow them to focus on whatever they wanted and create as frictionless a process as possible. The result? Four well received policy papers in 6 years on top of numerous smaller projects, debates, discussion groups and countless other outcomes I don’t even know about.

The main point is that “open” can work in policy development. So maybe it is time to set the public service free? To allow policy analysts to self-organize and focus their attention to where they believe they can best contribute, rather than having hundreds if not thousands of them babysitting files that simple don’t move?

Why not treat policy challenges like open source software programs. Create a policyforge (modeled after sourceforge) where the policy can reside and where the module policy owner, can foster a community and accept its ideas, opinions and edits.

Will it work? I can’t guarantee it. But we’d better start experimenting because the one thing we do know. The current system is beginning to crack.