Archives
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
- August 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- March 2007
Categories
- Congress
- Defense
- General News
- Health
- Health IT
- Homeland Security
- IBM suspension
- Industry
- Info Security
- Intelligence
- International
- IT management
- Law
- OMB
- Oversight
- Policy
- Politics
- Privacy
- Procurement
- Program Management
- Project management
- Risk management
- Security
- Spending
- State and Local
- Technology
- Telecommunications
- Tip Thursday
- Virtual World
- Web
- White House
- Wireless
- Workplace
What's happening in the federal IT community
By Wednesday, May 28, 2008 | 11:52 AM
The wiki concept is a part of the larger concept of social networking. Given the astonishing success of Flickr, Wikipedia, Facebook, MySpace, and other social networking platforms, enormous attention is focusing on the potential value of social networking in the business and government arenas. Some argue that because far more talent resides outside an organization than inside it, companies and government agencies should strengthen their performance by tapping into the knowledge and wisdom of non-employees.
While proponents of social networking emphasize that it is a new phenomenon rooted in the growth of the Internet, this is not true. Social networking has been with us for a long time. For example, from its beginnings, science has progressed by having scientists articulate their theories and findings publicly, then having other scientists in the scientific community critique them – sometimes savagely! Scientific knowledge gradually accretes through a give-and-take process of exposing ideas to scrutiny, then refining them. The principle is that if a new idea cannot withstand close scrutiny, then it lacks merit and should be discarded. This is the same principle underlying the building of Wikipedia, where a point is articulated then reformulated many times by subsequent generations of contributors. Through this process, weak and frivolous points are winnowed, and strong ones remain.
History is filled with examples of self-governing social networks arising to deal with problems of interest to collections of people. The compilation of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) was similar to the construction of Wikipedia. When the OED project was launched in the 19th century, some thousands of volunteers contributed slips of paper that offered examples of how individual English words were used. In a matter of a few years, some 3,500,000 slips of paper had been submitted to the editors. This was a volunteer-based social networking collaborative effort that preceded the Internet by more than a century.
Increasingly, we ask: “Does it make sense to transform government into a self-governing social network?” The first reaction of many people would be: “Are you crazy? Do you want mob rule?” But a little knowledge of history shows that this idea isn’t so far fetched. Consider that when democracy arose in Athens in the sixth century BC, all free men participated in gatherings where they freely debated policies that should be pursued by the Athenian government. More recently, town hall meetings in the USA form the basis of policy development in many smaller communities. In both these cases, governance is based on give-and-take discussion among members of the community – it is not imposed by the impersonal machinations of bureaucracy.
As I mentioned in an earlier blog, government itself is taking steps to tap into the “wisdom of crowds.” The creation of Intellipedia is a good example. After the 9/11 disaster, the US intelligence agencies realized that owing to their lack of information-sharing and coordination, they were unable to anticipate the al Quaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Consequently, they established Intellipedia to gather insights from intelligence personnel operating in all the intelligence agencies in order to span organizational boundaries and capture the collective intelligence of smart people.
When thinking about introducing social networking concepts into government, perhaps the most interesting question is: How far can we go in this direction? Obviously, we face Constitutional constraints on how we govern the USA. But this shouldn’t stop us from raising intriguing thought questions: Can self-regulating social networks replace Congress and the President? In creating regulations, does it make sense to develop them in the same way that Wikipedia entries are created? Should policies be created by communities of interest comprised of people who are most heavily affected by them?
Given the growing force of social networks, it is time to start – in the words of Herman Kahn – thinking about the unthinkable.
Comments
Yes it can. I am a promoter of the wiki govern. I love the idea. We don't need politicians to run the world. They have let us down too many times. We need managers and wiki gardners instead. a new wiki platform will make it happen and it is not impossible. it is not easy. it wil take years to be perfectioned and it is a huge change, i will ask the next U.S president to consider it. I promised to send him a letter as soon as he will be elected. The only people who dont' like this new real form of democracy are the politicians that will lose all the power .....and who cares? power will be on us eventually and thats what we want. don't we? It will be the first and real mass democracy ever done in the world. no precedent. no greek, no romans, no one has never done such a thingh before. Nothing is more exciting than this kind of project to me. This will really change the world. And I am sure it appeals all the simple people like you and me as we have the chance to be heard, like it happen today in the social website and blogs like this. It is time to shift the power to the mass. Thanks internet, thanks web2.0. and I also agree with kevin Bushey all the way.
Regards,
gianpaolo grazioli
http://gianpaolograzioli.blogspot.com
It is fairly easy to get the ear of your elected representatives, they do want to hear what you think. They need to hear as many different viewpoints as possible to refine a resolution.
If you run into one that's doesn't want to hear you, then help to elect someone who will -or- run yourself.
As far as social platforms are concerned, it makes it that much easier to see what type of employee you are hiring by visiting their MySpace page and the pages of their friends.
Already There | Friday, May 30, 2008 | 11:23 AMIn a word: no.
Even in classical Greek times, it was recognized that a functional pure democracy was limited to groups with a fairly small number of members, such as the free men of Athens or, to flash forward, the inhabitant of a New England town. Past a certain point, a representative democracy, a republic, becomes necessary.
The same gatekeeper function is present in the scientific world you mention, with peer-review limiting access to the prestigious journals and serving to dampen the voices of the crowd - even in a limited crowd as the potential contributors to narrowly focused scientific journals such as "Applied Physica B: Lasers and Optics." The current efforts to open this up (sometimes dubbed "Science 2.0") is stumbling along, with one prime concern being how to limit the addition of content to information posted online for comment.
Wikipedia began as essentially a true democracy, but began to devolve into chaos, necessitating the addition of formal gatekeepers to attempt some level of rigor (with mixed results). Wikipedia is still more a democratic structure than a republican one, and its mixture of virtues and faults mirror that schizoid structure. Has it stayed a pure democracy, it would be unuseable.
So, in regard to turning the government into a giant Wiki, it just cannot be done. While there are undoubted virtues to be realized from facilitating citizen input, it should go without saying that there have to be ways to limit the input that gov't decision makers will get and consider. Can you imagine, for example, a HHS proposal for funding abortions being opened to public comment? Setting aside the predictable cooridnated onslaughts from members of National Right to Life, NARAL, etc., the comments from ordinary citizens would amount to little more than email spam. Even a proposal to widen a local highway, if opened to easy public comment, let alone direct control, would in many cases degenerate into name-calling chaos.
So, IMHO, pure democracy just won't work for a modern, mixed demographic country of 300+ million. Maybe in Finland? Probably not even there.
John Douglas | Thursday, May 29, 2008 | 10:15 AMSocial Networking is part of a larger system of monumental change being advanced by Web 2.0 technology. Government entities at federal, state and local levels have an enormous challenge to train and adopt this new culture of knowledge creation and sharing via social networking or other means. Even corporate America has a ways to go in opening up the pipelines of information sharing to improve corporate value and revenue streams. Every information age worker should read "The Future of Work" and "Wikinomics" to learn more about this fasninating topic that's here to stay.
Kevin Bushey
Knowledge Concepts and Solutions LLC