My attitude to Twitter and the concept of microblogging has changed dramatically in the last 18 months. I’ve gone from “that’s stupid, why would anyone use that” to “I would find living without Twitter very difficult indeed”.

In the last month or so, I’ve started noticing some similarities between using Twitter, and living in an intentional community. There are also some marked differences. I tweeted these thoughts today, but here they are in an expanded form.

First, a definition of intentional community. Wikipedia defines it as:

An intentional community is a planned residential community designed to have a much higher degree of teamwork than other communities. The members of an intentional community typically hold a common social, political, religious, or spiritual vision and are often part of the alternative society. They typically also share responsibilities and resources. Intentional communities include cohousing communities, residential land trusts, ecovillages, communes, survivalist retreats, kibbutzim, ashrams and housing cooperatives. Typically, new members of an intentional community are selected by the community’s existing membership, rather than by real-estate agents or land owners (if the land is not owned collectively by the community). Though intentional communities do not claim to be utopias in the sense of perfect places, many do attempt to live a different and better sort of society, and as such many draw on historical utopian experiments, and ideas in utopian fiction.

For my purposes intentional community also includes families cohabiting, and sharing a flat or house with others. I’ve not personally lived in intentional communities outside of family, flatting, and annual week long residential retreats. I have however talked with a number of people who have lived in various forms of long term residential communes/settlements/intentional communities.

Here are what I see as the similarities, i.e. why why Twitter is like living in an intentional community:

1. You know what time people get up, and what time they go to bed
2. You  know what a number of people in your community people ate for breakfast and dinner
3. Most of your news about the world comes via your social network
4. You overhear lots of conversations between people you know
5. People repeat to you what they’ve heard others saying
6. You can choose to participate or not participate in social interaction at any one time, by entering or leaving the shared social space

Here are what I see as the differences, i.e. why why Twitter is NOT like living in an intentional community:

1. There is no assumption of shared property
2. When people repeat what they’ve heard others saying, they do so accurately (i.e. they normally retweet your text exactly)
3. You can remove someone from your community without having to leave it yourself
4. You add someone to your community without having to have anyone’s agreement (except theirs if they are protecting their tweets)
5. You can have private conversations without any chance of anyone noticing
6. You spend little or no time negotiating social norms or dealing with conflict

A lot of the second group are related to the differences between a single cohesive community, and a social network. Twitter, as a social network, seems to be giving us a lot of the benefits that come with living in a single community (the awareness of others daily activities, opportunities for serendipitous conversation, efficient filtering of news and content based on reputation and trust), without a lot of the downsides.

It will be interesting to see how this medium evolves, and what social needs it begins to meet.

In this fourth post on information management trends in NZ, I look at the phenomenon that is SharePoint.

NB. In this article I focus specifically on the use of SharePoint for Intranets, Collaboration, and team based Document Management. SharePoint can also be used for Enterprise Document Management, Records Management, and as an application development platform, but I don’t explore those in depth here.

The key trend I’m picking is that given the shear number of deployments we’re seeing in NZ, and the capability of some of the solution partners and consultants, by 2010/11 we’re going to continue to see lots of very bad implementations of SharePoint, and some very good ones.

Here’s why.

I’ve been observing SharePoint implementations since the product first debuted in 2001. The software company I used to be part owner of used SharePoint’s predecessor, Microsoft Site Server, to build the first Intranet for one of NZ’s largest insurance companies. They then (after we sold the company and I went out consulting), built an Intranet product on top of the first version of SharePoint and deployed it with a number of large corporate customers.

Like most Microsoft products, SharePoint wasn’t very good in its first couple of versions. By SharePoint 2007 however, there seemed to be general consensus in the industry that the product had reached maturity, and was starting to be very good. It was feature rich, stable, and very well integrated with Microsoft Office 2007.

Why then, am I predicting there will continue to be lots of bad implementations in 2010/11? Firstly, the background context. New Zealand, by international standards has only a handful of real ‘enterprise’ size organisations (5,000-50,000 staff). Most ‘large’ NZ organisations are between 500-5,000 staff, with relatively few above the 2,000 person mark. As such the deployments of ‘Enterprise Content Management’ products and stacks (such as those from Stellent, Interwoven, Vignette, Documentum, Lotus) have been proportionally fewer than in countries with larger organisations, due in part at least to cost. Many NZ organisations have therefore struggled along with shared drives, and Exchange Public Folders (shudder) for longer than their Australian, US and British counterparts. Perhaps recognising this challenge, New Zealand passed the Public Records Act in 2005. Audits begin in 2010. A lot of public sector organisations (in particular the smaller ones) are implementing SharePoint to meet their records keeping obligations. A lot of corporates are implementing SharePoint because of its strengths in collaborative workspaces, and the fact it provides a platform to on which to build useful systems and services (that is much cheaper than the big ECM stacks).

Because of NZ’s smaller scale, Microsoft has a greater penetration in the back office server space in NZ than in larger countries, where Sun, IBM and Oracle products are proportionately more pervasive. Many of the organisations in NZ that had Novell infrastructure have shifted to Windows servers and Exchange in the last few years. That means that in NZ, there are proportionally more Windows servers, and more people with experience deploying Windows infrastructure and developing solutions for the Microsoft platform, than in larger countries.

As many people will know, SharePoint comes in two ‘flavours’. Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS), which is free with Windows servers, and Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server (MOSS) for which Microsoft charges licence fees. Because WSS is ‘free’, and relatively easy to implement, it is to content/document management this decade what MS Access was to data management in the 90’s. MS Access was fantastic in that database applications could be built cheaply and quickly, and awful in that those applications proliferated almost uncontrollably in some organisations, becoming a management nightmare for IT and the business alike. In a similar way, where organisations implement WSS sites without some centralised strategy, governance, and configuration management (or for that matter use MOSS to do the same thing), it’s the same recipe for chaos. SharePoint is a complicated product, and it’s easy to implement poorly, from a usability, content discovery, scalability, and manageability point of view. Because of this, and the reasons above, I predict we will continue to see a great many SharePoint implementations done organically, hurriedly, or just put in by IT, without appropriate user testing, configuration management, and governance processes. This will lead to inconsistencies across SharePoint sites, silo-ed information, and user frustration. Darryl Burling, the SharePoint product manager for Microsoft New Zealand provides some views on how SharePoint skills shortages (both technical and business) in NZ are contributing to this problem.

That’s the bad news. So what’s the good news?

I also predict we are going to start seeing some stunningly good SharePoint implementations in NZ. The reasons for this are:

1. The capabilities of some SharePoint solution partners,
2. The SharePoint Elite initiative,
3. A maturing user community,
4. The work on the human and business sides of SharePoint implementation being done by a small number of NZ consultants.

A small number of solution companies that implement SharePoint have been doing so for quite a number of years. Intergen and Provoke in particular have learned the hard way, made most of the mistakes there are to make, and are now very good at tailoring SharePoint solutions to client needs, and implementing them in a usable, manageable and scalable way. Intergen also has a ‘Rapid Results‘ service where they’ve configured an implementation of SharePoint for very fast, high quality, deployments of SharePoint for intranets with up to 500 users.

In order to validate the growing sophistication and competence of a number of SharePoint implementers, Microsoft New Zealand has launched the SharePoint Elite initiative. This is a certification and training scheme to provide ‘SharePoint Elite Partner’ status to those who meet the standard. Datacom, Fujitsu, Information Leadership, Intergen and Provoke are the first companies in NZ to do this training.

There are now SharePoint user groups in a number of centres, and 2009 saw the first national SharePoint conference (for which there’ll be a followup next year). Knowledge sharing through these fora should increase the comunities’ capabilities. Ian Oliver of Provoke discusses the changing face of the implementation community and ‘raising of the bar’ of customer expections in this blog post.

Last, but not least, there are a small number of people working on the ’softer’ aspects of SharePoint. Information Leadership provide a number of assessment methods, information design, records compliance, and training services for SharePoint. Michael Sampson, a global expert in using SharePoint for collaboration, lives in NZ. He’s written two books on SharePoint - ‘Seamless Teamwork‘ and ‘SharePoint Roadmap for Collaboration‘. In both books he provides a very critical and rigorous analysis of SharePoint’s strengths and weaknesses. Even more importantly, Chapters ‘4. Governance Structure, Process and Themes‘ and ‘5. Engaging the Business‘ from his second book, provide, I believe, extremely valuable guidance on how to manage the human and business aspects of implementing and using SharePoint. If followed, this guidance will help organisations avoid many of the pitfalls I predict above.

So, that’s my prediction. In 2010/11 we’ll see a proliferation of awful to barely mediocre implementations of SharePoint, a number of extremely good implementations, and not much in the middle. As to whether the upcoming release of SharePoint 2010 will make any difference to the above, I’ll let others comment.

Sidenote and disclaimer: I am not a SharePoint consultant, I’m an IM/KM/IS Strategist, so my arguments above are based on what I’ve seen in the industry, rather than through ‘hands-on’ experience implementing SharePoint. In addition, I don’t receive money or consulting work from any of the organisations mentioned above. I try, as much as is possible, to be technology and vendor agnostic. 

This is the fourth in a set of posts on NZ information management trends:

1. OpenSource ECM
2. CMIS will save us
3. Enterprise Social Computing
4. Doing Sharepoint wrong, and right
5. Structured Content
6. Toes in the mist

Next up, Structured Content.

I’m an early adopter. I started Christchurch’s first web design company in 1995. I’m onto my 3rd iPhone. But when I first saw Twitter I didn’t get it. I thought it was stupid. Now I couldn’t live without it.

During the 80s and early-mid 90s advances in computer software and networking were largely the domain of the business sector. Business got the best tools first, because they were expensive. Since the late 90s however, it’s the consumer sector that has driven innovation in software tools that connect people.

Why else would it be that it’s easier to find content on the web than documents within the corporate firewall? Why else is it that it’s easier to find and connect with people on Facebook than it is to find the right people to talk to if you’re working inside a large organisation? This is because the development of those tools has happened at Internet scale and speed, far outstripping the ability of commercial enterprise software providers to keep up (both in terms of innovation, and in time to market). New tools get tested by millions of real users, in real time. Everything on the Web is in beta (well, at least until Google recently took Gmail out of beta).

Users’ expectations are now set by Google for search, Twitter for microblogging, and Facebook for social networking. Users in corporates have to wait (often a long time) for their organisations to implement the technologies they can use for free on the Web.

As a term ’social computing’ could conceptually include everything from email, to document collaboration, to blogging, to wikis, to social network services. For the purposes of this blog post however, I’ll restrict its scope to just talking about social network like services. Blogs and wikis are often referred to as ‘Web 2.0′ technologies, and I’ll leave them there, outside of this discussion. Blogs and wikis are starting to see reasonable adoption in large organisations, even though there is a long way to go. Enterprise use of social networking style tools however is only in its very early stages. I’m picking though that it will be a major trend.

There’s the need here to distinguish between four kinds of uses of social networking tools by organisations:

1. Outward market research - using tools such as Facebook, Twitter and the business services and analytics springing up around these in order to find out what the general public is saying about your organisation/brand/products
2. Outward customer engagement - using Facebook, Twitter and other such tools to actively engage in conversations with your customers (by having a Facebook fan page, a Twitter account for your company etc)
3. Outward employee professional networking - staff using tools like LinkedIn and Plaxo to communicate with their professional networks to ask questions, get help, or recruit new employees
4. Inward communication/collaboration - using microblogging, social networking and similar tools inside your organisation to facilitate staff communicating with each other (as distinct from with customers)

People like Jenny Williams from Ideagarden have fantastic insights into the first two, including some insightful horror stories in her brilliant talk at the Alfresco Asia Pacific conference. While I’m intrigued by marketing and customer engagement, it’s not my area of expertise, and the third use is fairly well understood, so in this post I focus on the fourth use, inward communication/collaboration.

The tools that have been used in collaboration and sharing of information in the last decade include email, discussion forums, intranets, document management systems, collaborative workspaces, and instant messaging. All of these have their strengths and weaknesses. They are useful, but often fail to achieve what they set out to from a knowledge sharing perspective. This is caused, I argue, by the fact that their boundaries and structures are defined by the managerial, functional, or project structures in organisations, not on the way that humans evolved to communicate. Humans evolved communicating in relationships and networks of mutual trust, using narrative to convey and create meaning. It’s how our brains are wired.

Social computing emulates this, using explicitly defined trust relationships between participants. The ‘friend’ relationship in Facebook, and the follow/follower relationships in Twitter allow us to control who hears and sees what we have to say. It’s non hierarchical and the links are controlled by each individual, not by managers or a top down imposed corporate structure.

The promise of social computing applied to inward communication may well overcome many of the failings of knowledge management initiatives. It will do this by making it easier to find out who knows what, who’s doing what, and who’s working with whom. It shifts knowledge sharing from a ‘collect and codify just in case’ paradigm, to a ‘connect and communicate just in time’ one. Knowledge is captured naturally as a part of work, rather than forcibly through management edict.

I have a client, a NZ University, who’s recently rolled out Yammer. Yammer is a cloud computing based service for in-company social computing. It uses the organisation’s email domain as the filter to keep each company’s social network restricted to that company. It provides Facebook style profiles and Twitter style microblogging. In my client’s case, it took off like wildfire, as staff invited their colleagues. Where the organisation has had to use top down change management to get staff to adopt things like document management, and the intranet, this system promoted itself. Yammer seems intent on further integrating into the enterprise, with their release of an Outlook plugin.

Ning, SocialCast, and SocialText Signals are other examples of cloud solutions that let you set up your own social networks. Cloud based solutions will be interesting to some organisations, others I think we’ll see implement social computing behind their firewall. It wouldn’t surprise me if Sharepoint 2010 includes more of this type of functionality. Vendors like ConnectBeam and products like Lotus Connections, SocialText Signals Social Software Appliance and Vignette Social Media are already providing this.

Young people now entering the workforce have spent their teen and university years using social networking tools to relate to each other and manage their lives. They will want access to the same kind of tools in the workplace.

So, my prediction, enterprise social computing is going to be big in NZ, in the 2010/11 timeframe.

Acknowledgements of ideas that influenced this post:

• Jenny Williams for her thinking on the comparison of KM to Social Computing (slide 33 in this presentation)
• Dave Snowden for his many recent podcasts about social computing

This is the third in a set of posts on NZ information management trends:

1. OpenSource ECM
2. CMIS will save us
3. Enterprise Social Networking
4. Doing Sharepoint wrong, and right
5. Structured Data
6. Toes in the mist

Next up, Sharepoint.

One of the big challenges for Enterprise Content Management in the last few years has been the sharing of different content types. ECM covers records, documents, images, emails, forum posts, web content, lists, people profiles, and more recently blog posts, wiki pages, and microblogging. These content types were managed in different stores. Traditionally the only way to get single sourcing of content and sharing/reuse/blending of different content types across different stores was to buy all of the solution components from one vendor. Because of the fast moving nature of the industry even that was problematic as most of the players grew by acquisition, picking up different pieces of the ECM stack from companies they bought. Sometimes they weren’t well integrated in, and compatibility/reuse was only at a very surface level, or was technically difficult to implement.

For organisations that couldn’t afford large integrated ECM stacks (which includes the very large majority of NZ organisations), the promise of single sourcing and content reuse seemed a far off dream.

Enter CMIS - the Content Management Interoperability Services standard. Think of it in the same light as the way major database vendors standardised on SQL in the 1980s. CMIS was formally initiated in October 2008 by OASIS, following work by EMC, IBM, Microsoft, Alfresco and others on the proposed standard. It is now governed by a multi-vendor technical commitee that works to:

“standardize a Web services interface specification that will enable greater interoperability of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems. CMIS uses Web services and Web 2.0 interfaces to enable rich information to be shared across Internet protocols in vendor-neutral formats, among document systems, publishers and repositories, within one enterprise and between companies.”

More specifically, CMIS provides standards for a set of Web Services and RESTful APIs to allow different content repositories and systems to:

• search for and discover what different content types (Object Type definitions in CMIS language) and capabilities exist in a repository
• create, read, update and delete content objects
• file and categorise content objects
• navigate and traverse a hierarchy of folders in a repository
• create versions of content objects and see their version history
• query to retrieve content objects by specific criteria

Currently the specification is at version 0.63 and is actively being worked on. It provides a Domain Model, a Schema, and sets of bindings for RESTful AtomPub, and Web Services. These are available here.

So what does this mean in practice? Once implemented it will be a way to break down the silos, and enable reuse of content amongst multiple systems. It should allow ECM applications, portals, and intranets to be built that aggregate content from a range of CMIS compliant repositories, and allow them to be mixed and mashed up in a ‘loosely coupled’ way. You’ll be able to have best of breed repositories/content applications, from different vendors, and join them together seamlessly.

Let’s look at some practical examples.

Scenario 1

Imagine you’re a government agency with a web site built in Drupal, and you’ve implemented Alfresco for records and document management. You’ve got a set of policy documents that you need to publish on the web. The traditional method would have been to work on the documents in the document management system, create a final version, send it to your web manager who’d upload it to the web site’s document repository, delete the old version, and make sure the new version appears in the right places on the site.

With CMIS you’d be able to have a content store for published documents in Alfresco, with appropriate metadata describing them. You’d then have a live query from Drupal to Alfresco using CMIS to retrieve those documents and display them. No going through the web manager, no uploading and deleting documents to and from the web site, just the completion of a controlled publication process, with the documents automatically displaying on the site. This example is already achievable with the CMIS Drupal-Alfresco module, and Alfresco’s draft CMIS implementation in Alfresco Community 3.1 and above.

Scenario 2

Let’s say you’re a University and you’ve implemented Microsoft Sharepoint to manage structured content including course information, news items, and staff profiles. You love Sharepoint’s handling of content workflows for news production and editing, and its ease of integration with Microsoft Office, but you want to publish the news items in multiple places including the public web site, the staff Intranet, and the learning management system. For various reasons these are built in EpiServer, Plone, and Moodle respectively. You’d also like some news items to be published to the new research collaboration system built in Sakai. Through CMIS you could have the news items stored in Sharepoint, and accessible from each of these systems, again with simple queries via REST or SOAP. Let’s say you’re also using Sharepoint for your records management solution. You could then have documents that are put into Moodle and Sakai automatically result in copies of correct versions being stored in Sharepoint for appropriate retention and disposal.

While this example isn’t all achievable yet, you can already use Sharepoint Server 2007 to access external content repositories using CMIS. Here’s how.

Conclusions

CMIS will open up the enterprise content management space to more innovation, remixing, and creative solutions than we’ve ever seen before. Organisations will be able to choose best of breed components, and glue them together with relatively minimal effort. Solutions won’t be restricted by vendor lock-in, but will be responsive to real business/user needs.

This is the second in a set of posts on NZ information management trends:

1. OpenSource ECM
2. CMIS will save us
3. Enterprise Social Computing
4. Doing Sharepoint wrong, and right
5. Structured Content
6. Toes in the mist

Next to come, Enterprise Social Networking

I’ve just been asked to Chair the Brightstar Information Management conference in Wellington in March next year. As such, I’ve consolidated my mental meanderings on IM trends into something a bit more cohesive. Here’s what I’m seeing coming:

1. OpenSource ECM
2. CMIS will save us
3. Enterprise Social Computing
4. Doing Sharepoint wrong, and right
5. Structured Content
6. Toes in the mist

I’ll write about the first trend in this post, then the others in subsequent posts.

OpenSource Enterprise Content Management

It’s been a big year for the ECM marketplace.  Two of the major pure play ECM vendors Interwoven and Vignette were acquired by other players (Autonomy and OpenText). Other major players Stellent, Documentum and Filenet were acquired by bigger multi-solution vendors over the last three years.

These deals are seen by those such as CMS Watch as being largely good for shareholders, and largely bad for users/buyers of those systems. The ECM market has become something like the ERP market, with a significant proportion of product licence costs simply paying for the expensive sales process. In New Zealand we don’t have too many organisations large enough to spend the $500k-$1M to get a fully integrated set of ECM components from those big vendors, but even so, the NZ 500-2000 person organisation market has been looking for an attractive ECM platform. The desire to be able to deliver document capture, document management, records management, intranet, digital asset management, and collaboration in an integrated way is compelling as organisations try to deal with ever mounting volumes of unstructured information.

In  2005 John Newton, co-founder of Documentum and John Powell, former COO of Business Objects founded Alfresco. They employed a number of former engineers and Employees from Documentum, FileNet, OpenText, Interwoven and Vignette. Their mission was to create an open source ECM platform. They used best of breed open source Java components, including Spring, Hibernate, Lucene and MyFaces. Their business model was to have a GPL community edition, and an Enterprise edition with paid support at about a tenth of the cost of the older proprietary ECM solutions.

I first reviewed Alfresco in late 2007 as a part of a web content management (WCM) project for an NZ University. Although its WCM component was relatively underdeveloped compared to the likes of Drupal, MySource Matrix, EpiServer, Sitecore and many others, the underlying platform was sophisticated. I was sure Alfresco was going to be big. Up until the last year or so however, there’s really only been Lateral Minds in Australia who’ve been implementing Alfresco in New Zealand, with some large government ministries and private companies.

Now Catalyst IT, Solnet, Coretech, and probably a few others I don’t know about have started implementing Alfresco in NZ. I predict Alfresco will be big in NZ, soon. My reasons for this prediction are:

• Due to the Public Records Act audits starting next year, many organisations are looking for records management solutions that provide benefit above and beyond traditional RM products
• With version 3.2 Alfresco provides a robust platform for records management, document management, and digital asset management, at a price that is right for the mid-size organisations (on a global measuring scale) that we have so many of in NZ
• It has an immensely scalable Java content repository which makes for lower hardware costs, again appealing in a cost conscious market like NZ
• Its lightweight RESTful architecture for customisation means solutions will be able to be deployed quickly and cheaply
• Alfresco integrates well with the open source WCM product Drupal, which has a large installed base in NZ both in government agencies and the private sector
• Alfresco Share is an alternative to the collaborative workspace features of Microsoft Sharepoint, and while currently much less feature rich than Sharepoint, has enough to make organisations take a look at it
• There is emerging support and implementation services from NZ vendors
• Lateral Minds are trading in NZ, are providing expert services that come from several years of working with Documentum and Alfresco, and are the Certified Training Partner for Australia and New Zealand

So, that’s my prediction, Alfresco is about to take off here. We’ll see whether 2010/11 proves me right. More on the other trends in further posts this week.

I’ve been listening of late to Dave Snowden’s podcasts (mostly keynotes from various KM conferences around the world). In the last year he’s added a strong focus on social computing, as, in inimitable Dave style, he’s in the last three years leaped head first, experientially, into the world of blogging, editing the Wikipedia pages on KM, Welsh Rugby and other topics, and into Facebook and Twitter.

In his recent podcasts Dave poses the argument that social computing is bring the 3rd wave of change in management science, the first two being Taylorism (scientific management based on functions), and Business Process Re-engineering (horizontal integration/optimisation of processes across and between functional silos). He explains this in the context of his work on narrative, using the cognitive rather than social sciences, and in relation to the many methods he has developed for sense making in complexity.

He also suggests the use of a new double loop iteration method using blogs and wikis to develop policies, strategies, and other plans in organisations.

I was fascinated therefore, to hear Australian Senator Kate Lundy explaining her use of exactly the same method in her PublicSphere events for consultation with citizenry on public policy issues.

Had Kate been listening to Dave? After her talk last week, I asked her whether she was familiar with Dave’s work, as he has been in Australia frequently, but she hadn’t. I asked Pia Waugh, Kate’s advisor on such things, and she too had not heard of Dave’s work. Pia had simply taken and adapted such methods from the open source community.

So, unless Dave had seen and copied Pia & Kate’s methods, which seems unlikely as Dave was podcasting about this before Kate launched her first PublicSpheres, I think we’re seeing the separate emergence of nearly identical approaches, perhaps based on fairly similar starting conditions.

First, I’ll look at the methods, then explore the starting conditions, then I’ll ask Dave, Kate and Pia to challenge any of my assumptions and hypotheses.

Dave, in a number of podcasts, describes the traditional method for collaborative document authorship. People meet, discuss an issue, someone takes notes then goes away and writes up a draft in Microsoft Word. They then email it to others and request feedback, using tracked changes. The initial author then struggles with the mire of integrating the suggested changes into a document, the group meetings in person again, and around we go.

He then proposes a different approach. First, get a group of say twenty staff with an interest in the issue to blog about it once a day, for two weeks. If people are unfamiliar with blogging, get an IT person to sit down with them at 4pm each day and help them write their blog, teaching them new blogging concepts and features as they go. Once this process is complete, employ a technical writer to synthesise all the raw material from the blogs into a cohesive draft document and put it on a wiki. Using a technical writer enhances the quality of the first draft, and more importantly removes the issue of ownership of the draft by a staff member. Where strong ownership of a draft by a single person exists, they will be resistant to having it changed, and others will be reluctant to contribute. Once the wiki is up, give the people two weeks to edit the wiki until a final version is agreed upon. For training in wiki editing Dave suggests getting staff to spend a couple of months editing pages on the Wikipedia as that has highly developed coaching and mentoring systems, along with robust methods for disciplinary action against those to transgress the rules and established cultural norms.

Kate Lundy’s PublicSpheres work in a very similar way. So far they’ve done three, on High Speed Bandwidth, Government 2.0 and Australian ICT & Creative Industries Development. They have a beginning, a middle, and an end. People are first asked to post comments, links to papers, case studies and ideas to the relevant PublicSphere blog post comments, and to blog themselves using the tag ‘publicsphere’ and Twitter with #publicsphere. All of this is then summarised and presented at an in person workshop, where there are face to face discussions, presentations, live streaming of the event to those who can’t be physically present, and ongoing blogging and twittering. The content is then synthesised onto a wiki, and the public are given two weeks to edit it. It is then closed off, and turned into a nicely presented PDF, and submitted to relevant Government Ministers as a briefing paper. The most recent PublicSphere had 1100 tweets, 100 in person participants and 400 remote participants on the workshop day.

So, if these two, very similar approaches emerged separately, what were the starting conditions that enabled this? I suggest the following:

• An experiential rather than theoretical understanding of the utility of, and differences between, blogs and wikis
• An understanding of the importance of multiple iterations in a sense making process (Dave from complex systems theory and the non-interventionist facilitation practices he’s developed, and Pia from the open source community’s ‘release early and often’ practice)
• A belief that the authentic opinions of individual participants can be abstracted up into a cohesive whole, without the biased intervention of ‘expert’ consultants or policy analysts
• A lack of fear that people might say the ‘wrong’ thing
• A belief, not in the ‘wisdom of crowds’ (individuals making decisions in isolation from each other, with the correct answer being the median), but in the collective intelligence of a complex system (one in which the system lightly constrains the participants, and the participants’ actions affect each other and the system itself).

Am I right? We’ll see what they say.

At the Open Government Data Barcamp this Saturday I was asked to facilitate the closing session. The purpose of the session was to come up with a shortlist of projects to be worked on the next day at the hackfest. Nat Torkington, while not physically present at the event had been looking over our shoulder virtually on Twitter, and had beseech-ed us to leave the weekend with some real things built. How on earth was I going to pull this off?

There were 160 people at the Barcamp, and three rooms, a large auditorium, a medium sized room, and a cafeteria. Earlier in the day I’d facilitated a session on environmental data management in the medium sized room, with about 40 people. That was about capacity for that room, so I really had to use the auditorium. The challenge with facilitating in an auditorium style setting is that it’s very hard to get people up and moving to do Post-it note clustering exercises, and small group work is impossible. I only had 45 minutes to get suggestions brainstormed and short listed, and I wanted to involve everyone in the process.
During the day the 60% or so of people with Internet connected devices (iPhones, laptops and netbooks) had been twittering the event using the #opengovt tag. I’d been keeping an eye on all the tweets using Twitterfall.

So I decided to experiment with a hybrid electronic/analogue approach. I got the people with Internet connected devices to sit in the middle of the rows, and those without to sit at the edges. I then got a couple of people to hand out Post-it notes and pens to those without devices, and asked them to write suggestions for projects to work on tomorrow, one per Post-it. I also asked those with devices to tweet the suggestions using the #opengovt tag.
I then had the Twitterfall projected onto the large screen so everyone could see the suggestions rolling in. There was one every 30 seconds or so for a good 15 or 20 minutes. Dan Randow and Jonathan Hunt were on stage with laptops summarising the suggestions on the open.org.nz wiki.

Once people had finished writing suggestions on the Post-it notes I got those on the edges of each of the rows up on stage, and got them to put the Post-its on a wall I’d covered with large sheets of paper. I gave them the standard instruction to ‘put like with like’ and keep moving the Post-its until they had stabilised into categories. Two of the people were given vivid markers and asked to draw circles around the groups of Post-its and give each group a title.

After this was all done we had a set of suggestions, with an emerging set of priorities based on the categories of Post-its and the frequency of suggestion tweets on particular topics. I took photos of the Post-it clusters and emailed them to Mark Harris who later that evening summarised it all down to six projects for the Hackfest.

The projects were:

• FixMyStreet
• A Register of Official Information Act (OIA) Requests
• Improving the Open Data Catalogue
• Data feeds and APIs (including DigitalNZ, and a project to geo-code and map NZ elections NZ data at polling station level)
• Public Transport
• Developing open data success stories and case studies

In the morning these were written up on big sheets of paper at the front of the room, and Mark asked for expressions of interest in working on each project. The cat.open.org.nz project didn’t need any work currently, as it was waiting on software from the Sunlight Foundation to be ready to migrate to. The Transport project was seen as a bit difficult to achieve on the day, so the remaining four projects were selected, and a table assigned for each project. People got to work, and the results so far can be seen by following the links above.

For a much more comprehensive write up of the whole Barcamp, see Julie’s fantastic post on Idealog.

Can politicians embrace social computing in a way that is open, honest and truly participatory, rather than simply cynical bandwagon jumping? Was David Cameron, UK opposition leader wrong when he said that “too many tweets might make a twat“? It seems so.

The visit of Senator Kate Lundy to New Zealand, and the talk she gave to a packed room at Archives NZ on the evening of 26 August, proved, irrevocably, to me, that at least one politician is using social computing in a very powerful and authentic way.

Here’s what Kate had to say:

The ‘3 Pillars of Open Government’ are:

1. Citizen Centric Services
2. Facilitating Innovation
3. Open and Transparent Government

1. Citizen Centric Services

There are three tiers of government in Australia, local, state and federal. One of the big challenges is achieving an appropriate level of coordination between these three tiers, so you as a citizen you are not mired in the mesh of bureaucratic red tape. For example, even moving house and getting a new broadband connection can hit each of these three spheres.

How do we deploy geospatial data and geocoding data held by government? One site that demonstrates this is the Australian stimulus package projects and investments. where you can tap in your postcode and it will show you the projects in your area, how the money is being spent, and how the projects are going.

How do we engage citizens in the process of service delivery? The Australian Govt2.0 taskforce is the way the current government is codifying the potential uses of Web 2.0 technologies to facilitate citizen engagement. Government agencies are large bureaucracies that often act as silos. The Govt2.0 taskforce aims to provide input to Cabinet on a number of policy ideas that would never have come up from individual agencies, or even through a set of agencies working together. It includes a blend of both public and private sector leaders in digital innovation. The taskforce reports in December and has been asked to come to Cabinet with some excellent ideas that can be implemented immediately, and some examples of exciting things we can do in the future. The taskforce is focusing on showcasing innovations that are happening in the public sector and then can be emulated, mashed up and remixed. Kate said that “Unless we create environments where we can ask citizens how they want things done, we’re crippling our ability as a nation to innovate.”

2.  Facilitating Innovation

The Govt2.0 methodology was designed as an example of facilitating innovation through digital technology. The core focus of facilitating innovation is about opening access to government data so both public and private institutions can build useful services and tools on top of it. This adds value to the datasets, as well as providing better ability for collaboration between the government and broader community. An example of this in action was the recent emergency management response and coordination in the Victorian bushfires in Australia.

Kate mentioned the report that’s just been released in NZ on the significant economic benefits of open access to spatial data. In a digital environment, technologies enable collaborations that provide economic benefit and can enhance the way government works. It’s about not being afraid of sharing.

3. Open and Transparent Government

All constituencies want greater accountability from Government.

Australia has made a decision at Cabinet level to change the default position of government in relation to public sector information. Government now will make everything publicly available unless there is a reason not to. There are still complexities and costs around the Freedom of Information Act, and these are a profound barrier. The policy statement from Cabinet however changes everything. A default position of openness is a great place to be. The time the most dynamic change is possible is during a change in government, and during a recession.

Australia has a reform of the Freedom of Information Act legislation underway in order to reduce the complexities and costs of information that would otherwise be publicly available. Their National Archives policies on openness have helped with this process. They also have an Information Commissioner Bill before parliament currently, Kate believes that this role will be quite central in guiding agencies to make their information more accessible in a digital environment.

She said “Open standards are absolutely critical, they are tax payers’ insurance against government project cost blowouts in the future.”

Kate made an interesting and important distinction between transparent and accessible government, and transparent and accountable politicians. The line between these is a bit blurry at the moment, and that  conversation needs to be furthered at a public policy level. There is a need to separately understand agency public consultation through social computing technologies, and politicians using the same method to create more open conversation with their constituents. This will get very interesting when the advice politicians are getting from their agencies/officials conflicts with the advice they get from open, social computing enabled engagement with citizens.

I was hugely impressed by Senator Kate Lundy’s enthusiasm, passion, and belief in the viability of increasing openness in government. More on her innovative PublicSphere methods in a subsequent post.

I’ve just been to the ANZLIC metadata presentation held by Land Information New Zealand (LINZ).

ANZLIC is the Australia & New Zealand Spatial Information Council. They provide leadership in the collection, management and use of spatial information in Australasia.In Australia they are working on the standards for a national address register, including standards, schema etc, but stop short of the implementation.

They are associated with, but independent from The [Australian] Office of Spatial Data Management facilitates and coordinates spatial data management across Australian Government Agencies.

ANZLIC is working on a range of initiatives, including ANZsi, a spatial marketplace, similar to GeoConnections in Canada. This will provide a marketplace for all spatial resources in Australasia. It will include integration with and to existing supply side infrastructre and initiatives, and anticipates demand side involvement.

They believe that spatial data use is becoming an everyday thing, involving off the shelf technology, increased user knowledge (due to Google Maps, Google Earth etc), and driven in part because at least 80% of government transactions have a ‘where’ component. They challenged us to think of what fell into the 20%, and the audience couldn’t come up with any government transactions that don’t have a spatial component.

ACIL Tasman did a study which estimated that inefficient access to data reduces the direct productivity of some sectors by between 5-15%. (Summary of findings here). ANZLIC sees metadata as an important solution to this problem.

They used the metaphor of a can of spaghetti to explain what metadata is. The can’s label includes a title (product name), an abstract (product description), a statement of quality (99% fat free, no artificial preservatives or colours), instructions on use (heating/cooking directions), a detailed list of fields in the data (the ingredients), and the extent of the data (weight, nutritional information). They also illustrated the importance of the use of standards with this story “Two Teams, Two Measures Equaled One Lost Spacecraft“.

ANZMET Lite is a tool that has been developed by the OSDM, with the help of the jurisdictions. Its target user groups are organisations with up to 30 resources requiring metadata records to be published, contractors who are collecting resources on behalf of clients, and are required to provide metadata records. It allows for the production of linked (connected to the resource) or unlinked metadata records. It also allows for parent/child relationships between metadata. There are a number of classes in the parent/child hierarchy, including dataset, service, model, tile, document, and many others.

There is also the ANZLIC metadata profile, and the profile guidelines, which include a mapping between AGLS / NZGLS and the ANZLIC Metadata Profile.

The tool is pseudo opensource, in that its origins were in the Australian Defence Force, who won’t let it be fully opensourced. You can however get the source code, and modify it, as long as you notify OSDM of the changes, and provide them back.

LINZ is working with MoRST to create a GeoNetwork node for NZ. In the meantime metadata created using ANZMet Lite can be emailed to nzgo@linz.govt.nz for external publishing. More information on NZ Geospatial Office activity at www.geospatial.govt.nz.

As an independent consultant I’ve always worked hard to be technology agnostic. This means understanding (and to the extent that I can, using) the full range of operating systems, desktop and server software platforms, stacks, and development tools and languages. It also means mixing and mingling with people from different parts of the IT landscape, including free software advocates, Microsoft evangelists, and everyone in between.

I use Linux, Windows and MacOS on a daily basis, and for the last 10 years have been watching with interest the philosophical and commercial battle between opensource and proprietary software. About three years ago however, I started wondering whether the next big battle wouldn’t be between Microsoft and Linux, but rather it would be between Microsoft and Google.

It first started being described as ‘Application Service Providers’, then ‘Software as a Service’, and it finally seems to have settled on ‘Cloud Computing’. ASPs had promise, but in terms of infrastructure and middleware provision seem to have suffered in part from lack of initial scale to get the required cost benefits. SaaS has had some successes, such as Salesforce.com and others.

What’s made me really realise that the space has changed from an idea to a business reality is not the media, the reporting, or the fact that ‘Cloud Computing’ on Google Trends has almost overtaken SaaS. It’s the people, and the business names.

I’m seeing a third set of people emerge, they’re not OpenSource stallwarts, or Microsofties, they’re Cloud junkies. They’re embracing Google Apps, Amazon’s S3 and EC2, and to a lesser extent, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace and others. They’re starting businesses in New Zealand with names like Cloudbreak, Waveadept and Memia Cloud Services Architecture. They’re advocating, promoting, and selling Cloud based solutions. They’re starting to address and answer questions about sovereignty of data, privacy, security, disaster recovery, service level agreements and contracts with cloud providers, and total cost of ownership calculations.

In New Zealand we’ve seen these companies helping Auckland University put 50,000 students on Gmail, and NZPost moving 2,100 staff to Google Apps.

I recently went to an event in Wellington hosted by Cloudbreak and Waveadept.  There were a couple of telling quotes from Google staff:

“Is email [provisioning] core to your business, I hope not because if so you’re in competition with me” (and implicitly, you’re going to lose…)

“Microsoft Office is like Photoshop, every business should have a couple of copies”

I don’t agree or disagree with these statements, but they are telling. They signal a potential shift from the way we’ve been using information technology over the last ten years.

Is cloud computing just an obvious next step after the server virtualisation movement we’ve seen in the last five years? Will organisations move everything to the cloud? Or will they maintain a mix of proprietary/opensource solutions hosted behind the corporate firewall, and couple that with some Cloud based services.

There are some obvious benefits to cloud computing:

• Reduction in risk of data loss/security breaches due to people losing their laptops or thumbdrives while travelling
• Cost take out, i.e. switching from a mixed fixed cost (capex) + variable cost (opex), to a purely variable cost model
• It gets rid of the challenges of building out your own overcrowded server rooms/data centres
• Improved functionality rolled out in real time, without having to go through painful upgrade cycles
• Reduced time to value in implementation of new services

There are also some real risks and concerns about:

• Performance and reliability over Internet connections and the (limited) bandwidth we have in & out of NZ
• Sovereignty of data (data sitting under different jurisdictions and laws)
• Control over the data, and restricting others from using it inappropriately
• Risk of the cloud computing provider holding the data going out of business
• The implications for staffing levels in IT departments

The SSC recently released a set of guidelines about Government Use of Offshore Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) Service Providers to help agencies make good decisions about venturing into the cloud computing realm.

On the small business front, I have a friend who’s started a niche online business providing parent-teacher interview scheduling services for schools. It’s being adopted at a much faster rate than he’d imagined. Although he has expertise in providing web hosting services himself, he’s now very glad he decided to build it in Google App Engine, as it’ll scale to meet the increasing demand in a ‘pay as you go’ fashion.

While the way it will play out is still a little misty, it’s clear cloud computing is going to have a major impact, and I predict we’ll see a lot more startup companies with cloud based metaphors in their names.

In closing, I’m reminded of the ever prescient Mark Andresson, founder of the Netscape browser. In 1999 he started a company called Loudcloud to provide managed Internet services. It was a bit before its time, but even so evolved into a successful business that HP acquired for $1.6B…

As the resident Designer at Egressive I've been working on tarting up the company's brand and getting some consistency in place without losing the culture of the place.

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