Dealing with SPIN - the four horsemen

Nicholas Gruen, leading the Australian Government 2.0 task force proposed a new theory of SPIN (Serial Professional Innovation Negation); the theory outlines the very strong political incentives against greater risk taking, which in turn holds up the adoption of Web 2.0 approaches – and indeed quite a few Web 1.0 approaches.

I cross-post my comment from the blog here, but I highly recommend that you visit the original post, and the ensuing commentary - essential reading for anyone interested in technology led change in government.

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Good to see the conversation getting to the heart of the challenges that the TaskForce faces.

Government is a large and complex organisation, with most incentives geared towards maintaining the status quo (because that is the natural state of power in any large complex organisation). “2.0″ is disruptive technology that will re-engineer information flows within government and between government and the people. But the natural order is for strong resistance from within (Machiavelli first pointed this out), and technology will only be effective when operating in combination with other forces.

In my view there are four forces for change that can be channelled to achieve change in government – leadership, economics, heroes and citizens.

Leadership has to come from political leaders – they alone are the ones that can adjust the values that public servants operate within. However, other political issues – education, healthcare, taxation, foreign affairs, environment, transport, law and order – will always be higher up the agenda than reform of the bureaucracy.

Economics is a powerful force for change – organisations change when they can no longer afford to stay the same. In NZ, where I am based, the financial crisis that we faced in the 1980s (as a result of the collapse of our agricultural exports to Britain arising from the EU) led to major reform of the public service. There have been similar pressures in most other jurisdictions, and there is some indication that the current global financial meltdown will create some additional pressure for change. As the current catch phrase goes: “never waste a good crisis”.

Heroes is the word I use for those who operate within the public service to drive change from within. These can range from “skunk-works” activities to free up government information, to personal leadership of high visibility transformational change programmes by senior public servants. The bigger the change, the bigger the fall, and the less incentive to take the risk.

Citizens are the most powerful force that will, over time, create change. The role of txt messaging in the fall of the Estrada government in the Philippines in 2001, and the recent power of twitter in Iran after the election are two dramatic examples. Other examples include the use of people’s choice to drive better performance in service delivery in government administration.

Effective public service transformation have components of all four of these forces acting together. I give three examples here, I am sure anyone on this discussion can create their own:

1. The movement that is currently sweeping through American federal government – started by a combination of leadership (Obama) and citizens (internet campaigning), reinforced by economics, and some emerging heroes within the administration.

2. The current change in California, almost entirely driven by economics at this stage, and needing an enrolment of leadership, citizens and heroes, if it is to pull out of a downward spiral.

3. Government reform in the UK in the 1990s, which used a combination of leadership (Tony Blair) and citizen choice, supported by heroes in various government agencies and only a small amount of economic pressure.

So what should we do if we want to drive government transformation ? Make sure that all four of these forces for change are harnessed to a common future vision. Government 2.0 can deliver lower cost government, economic growth, citizen engagement, and rewarding job opportunities for those in the public service with the courage to seize them.

Society - maybe there is such a thing after all

Margaret Thatcher's famous observation in 1987 "Society - there's no such thing" provided a foundation for the market economy to become the basis for decision making for over two decades. In this year's series of Reith lectures "A New Citizenship", Harvard Professor Michael Sandel argues that the scope of the market economy has extended to effectively create a "market society", removing moral, spiritual or political values, and claiming economics as the only criteria. Government has focused on a core role to correct market failures, not recognising that public policy deals with values that can't be captured in monetary terms.

He provides some wonderful examples of the impact of ascribing a price (economic value) to everything - fees for late collection of children from pre-school in Israel, the option of a tradable quota for refugees, the outsourcing of surrogate motherhood to India, financial incentives in Singapore for educated women to have children and sterilisation for women without a college degree, and the ethics of genetic engineering.

In the final lecture he argues the rationale for keeping markets in their place - rejecting the "spurious science and value neutrality" of economics and "market mimicking governance" that underpin technocratic decision making. Politics has sought to distance itself from core values since the 1950s when Harold MacMillan said "if people want a sense of purpose they should get it from their archbishop; they certainly should not get it from their politicians". We've come a long way in the last fifty years, and Sandell sees the election of Obama as a signal that the American public at least have the hunger for a public life of larger meaning. He finishes by arguing for the return to a politics of common good, rebuilding the infrastructure of civic life - public amenities that create shared citizenship.

I found my way to the lectures through an article by Madeleine Bunting noting that the certainties that have dominated the last quarter of a century – that the market knew best, achieved efficiency and produced wealth – are no longer supreme, and there is a need for a new narrative. She quotes documentary film-maker Adam Curtis :"What we have is a cacophony of individual narratives, everyone wants to be the author of their own lives, no one wants to be relegated to a part in a bigger story; everyone wants to give their opinion, no one wants to listen. It's enchanting, it's liberating, but ultimately it's disempowering because you need a collective, not individual, narrative to achieve change,"

Social Media, within the technology and the tools, contains two forces that drive us in different directions - the voice of the individual and community created content.

Clay Shirky says in UsNow: "We are living through what economists have called an positive supply side shock to the amount of freedom in the world. More people can say more thing to more people than ever in history". This tower of babel creates a plurality, a diversity that is rich and fertile - an alluvial plain of ideas - but with no coherent story.

We have examples of endeavours such as Wikipedia, that are only able to be created by a community, working together to create something they could not create individually. The Open Source Software community is another example. Such community efforts deliver efficiency, but the primary driver is an ethical one; as Glyn Moody comments when discussing the General Public License "It is not trying to be “efficient”, it is trying to be ethical; ideally you want both – and in many respects, the culture that the GNU GPL fosters is extremely efficient. But if efficiency and ethics clash, ethics win every time."

Since the 1970s, I have used an example of the trade-off between economic valuations and other collective values that I got from Stafford Beer's masterpiece Platform for Change:

"Mr and Mrs Stubbs wrote to the Times about the Norman Church of St. Michael at Stewkley. The church stands in the middle of a possible runway of a possible Third London Airport. The complaint was that the Roskill Commission, studying alternative sites for the airport, and applying cost-benefit analysis, had adopted a wrong criterion for valuing the church. It seems that an irreplaceable twelfth-century work of art was being valued at the sum for which the church is insured against fire.

This led to considerable discussion. Can we indeed place a monetary value on a priceless heritage,? If it really is priceless, presumably not. Then why not have the cake and eat it - by moving the church, some said. The proper cost would then be the price paid for the move. But the Norman church at Stewkley is not the same church if it is somewhere else replied others. The correspondence was effectively closed by Mr R J Osborn, He said the $100 spend on building the church in 1182, when discounted at ten per cent to 1982, represented roughly $ 1,300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. He did not add 'stuff that in your cost-benefit and compute it'"

If he was still alive, Stafford Beer would be delighted by this year's Reith lectures, and relieved that there may indeed be such a thing as society - emerging phoenix-like from the rubble of the financial crisis.

And just as I was about to publish this, I see that Tim O'Reilly is also musing on the values of our society - great post.

Government 2.0

"Government 2.0" is in danger of collapsing under the weight of semantic satiation - "a cognitive neuroscience phenomenon where intense repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener, who can only process the speech as repeated meaningless sounds" (Wikipedia). The phrase is burdened with so many expectations and meanings, that it may pass out of currency.

Which would be a shame, because behind the overuse there are a number of important concepts that challenge politicians and bureaucrats to think and behave differently, as they discharge their responsibilities as our employees. Here I will unpick some of the threads of Government 2.0, starting with a bit of whakapapa:

My first encounter with "2.0" was the Esther Dyson book - Release 2.0 - which I bought when it was published in 1997 (back in the dead tree era). The term Web 2.0 was first used by Darcy DiNucci in 1999. After that, we had the dot.com boom and bust, and it was not until 2004 that the term was resurrected by Tim O'Reilly and popularised through a series of Web2.0 summits and expos.

Government 2.0 was the title of a 2005 book by William Eggers, but the book is mainly about the application of technology , and there is little reference to the unique characteristics of a 2.0 world. The first time I came across a meaningful exposition of government 2.0 was in a presentation by Tara Hunt in May 2007; Tara took the O'Reilly tenets for Web 2.0 and applied them to government - coming up with nine concepts that are listed here as an anchor for the discussion. I refer back to them often in thinking and in presentations.

Web 2.0 The Web as a Platform The Long Tail Data is the next Intel Inside Users Add Value Network Effects by Default Some Rights Reserved The Perpetual Beta Cooperate, don't Control Software above a single device

Government 2.0 the government is my springboard the long diverse tail of citizens data is .. tricky going to the edges for feedback citizen community is about relationships some rights reserved evolution is an ongoing process trust is the truest way to empowerment government on the go

Since then, we have experienced the meteoric rise of social media, and the effect on the political domain, most notably in the election of President Obama on the back of an internet-savvy campaign, his early release of the Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government, and the raft of open government initiatives coming from the administration in Washington DC.

So, armed with this background, what do we make of the smorgasbord of issues under the government 2.0 banner today? I would like to suggest that they fall into the following categories:

Open and Participatory Policy Development - by bureaucrats

I have earlier commented on wiki government as a tool to get better results from the policy development process. The traditional model for policy development is a hub and spoke model, with the public servant at the center, gathering comments and integrating them in a final policy position. However, we know that the best results come from building on the ideas of others in a rolling conversation, which has the public servant as a participant in a dialog with a broader and diversified community. The approach to public policy arising from the recent Public Sphere conference in Canberra is an example of this.

Connection with citizens - by elected officials

Elected politicians have always placed a special emphasis on connecting with those that they represent; this has been through electoral offices, letters and emails, phone conversations, and their daily interactions with individuals, both in an official capacity (when opening a new facility) or casually (for example taxi drivers or the person in the next seat on an airplane). For these purposes, the new channels of communications such as blogs and their related comments, Facebook, and Twitter, are no more than an additional way of interacting with the public. Successful politicians will listen and talk in these fora and incorporate the ideas in their positions and decision making. However, researchers in both Australia and New Zealand have found that politicians have been slow to adopt interactive and Internet based communication mediums because they are fully engaged with existing modes of interaction with constituents.

Participation by public servants in new media

Most government agencies restrict the use of the internet by staff in some form; blocking access to sites and giving a variety of reasons - security, inappropriate use, productivity drain and others. Clearly it is important that information collected and created by the state is protected from unauthorised access, and that confidential and personal information is held securely; but this needs to be balanced with the need to give people the tools they need to do their job. As digital natives enter the public service, access to social media will increase in importance. In the future, I think we are likely to see a separation between core operational systems, which are secured to maintain confidentiality, and knowledge and information systems, which have full access to global internet resources.

Access to government information - open data

Most western jurisdictions have laws that provide for full public access to information as a default, with exceptions to be subject to specific justification; while this legal position is clear, operational practice is far from compliant with the law. There are a variety of reasons given for this, some of which I outlined in my last blog post as government CIO, and all of the barriers can be overcome by public servants who want to deliver better value to citizens. While government collects and stores a lot of information, it rarely has the time or resources to fully use the data; we know that the public will voluntarily add value to raw data, whether it is MPs expenses, adding metadata to historic records, or creating a mashup of data on stolen bicycles. This area is the most exciting for me, and is a genuine example of we-Government.

Other related areas

There are a number of other topics that often get incorporated in discussions on government 2.0. Specific examples include the use of open source, kick starting the local ICT economy, on-line service delivery, ICT capability and skills, identity management and authentication, and better broadband. While all these are important factors in our use of ICT and are all neceesary to improve government performance, they are peripheral to the four key areas outlined in this post. of government 2.0.

Government 2.0 is about using technology to strengthen the connection between people and government activities (funded by taxation and exercised through the authority of elections).

How could I overlook Australia...

who have just launched a Task Force on open government data.

Something in the Air - time for another Summer of Love?

Open data open government - maybe it is a viral infection from the PDF09 conference, or maybe it's an idea who's time has come, but it seems you can't move in cyberspace without bumping into it:

Open Up Government Data - Wired How-To Wiki
opendata.org.nz : Open Government for New Zealand
It Is Time To Explore The Dark Side of Government 2.0
it.gen.nz » Government Information – does it want to be free?
Tom Steinberg: Open house in Westminster - Commentators, Opinion - The Independent
Around the Corner
Planet Open Government Open Source Hacking
VisibleGovernment.ca - Open Government Data Roundup
Open government and Linked Data; now it’s time to draft… « Cloudlands
Wiki Government - Brookings Institution

And it is global - I have just picked posts from the US, Canada, UK, Italy and New Zealand, but I am sure there are others out there.

It's given me a flashback to the 60s - both the song title, and also the optimism that people can change things.




The important thing is that this energy gets translated into action, rather than floating away like balloons in the sky.

"It's like Europe in 1944"

I used this quote last night in a discussion about the redrawing of boundaries in the 21st century global village - like Europe in the post-war period, the new information infrastructure will emerge staggering from the rubble of a recession ravaged global economy.

The information distribution supply chain is being destroyed, and will be reconstructed in a new form. This will happen in all digital media - broadcasting, music, books, newspapers.

There will be new boundaries where value is created and transferred, similar to the national boundaries that were created at the Potsdam conference in 1945.

In the period after the end of World War II, the Bretton Woods agreement also created a new financial order that has provided the foundation for international trade for the last sixty years. The main architects of these post-war arrangements were USA, Great Britain and USSR.

In the new information economy, the architects are not so easily identified, and their sources of authority are not clear. The new trans-national ecosystem will be founded on high speed fibre and wireless networks connecting houses and people around the world. Each person will have instant access to all the world's information, and the ability to create and update information directly.

Countries and government are exploring different routes to get there (for example Digital Britain, published last week), but there appears to be almost universal agreement on the end state of ubiquitous connectivity. The points for discussion are - how long until we get there, and who will pay for the infrastructure investment.

The business case for an infrastructure investments is often challenging, and the case for fibre to the home (FTTH) is no exception. As Dr Arthur Grimes comments "The potential uses for some infrastructure may not be dreamed of when the initial investment occurs". With FTTH, innovations in education, health, aged care, and environmental management will deliver huge benefits, but these will not always reflect in the bottom line for the investor.

However, communities and countries that arrive at the end state earlier will be in a powerful position to secure decision rights when the new boundaries and financial arrangements are being determined. A strategic challenge to be sure.

Down come the walls

When Twitter has the starring role in the lead item on the 6pm news, you know that social media is a real phenomenon. Talking about Iran, Kevin Anderson from the Guardian said " Regimes that used to keep an incredibly tight control on information have lost that control. In the past this (..the conflict over the election results..) would have been airbrushed out of history"


The twitter feed is Persiankiwi and is a current and graphic example of the twilight of sovereignty referenced in the previous post.


This sort of activity is seen as liberating in the context of repressive regimes - providing transparency and a voice for the people outside of tightly controlled media channels. But it is global - the disruptive force of social media makes no judgement on the government that it disrupts.