Rowan's blog

The Power of Open: 2.0 Public, Private and Community Sectors

In September, the Open Government Partnership formally launched with a series of high-level meetings highlighting the transformative nature of open governance.
 
Events included a day-long multi-stakeholder discussion, "The Power of Open," that brought together governments, civil society, industry leaders, academics and the media in a series of panels and networking events. The launch page states, these were “focused on the role of openness in improving responsiveness, fostering accountability, creating efficiencies, promoting innovation and growth, fighting corruption, improving performance, and capturing dispersed knowledge in support of smarter policies.”

As part of this, Eight nations (Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, Norway, Philippines, South Africa, United Kingdom, and the US) formally endorsed a broadly-worded Open Government Declaration, all of them openly asserting that their goal is to achieve “greater prosperity, well-being, and human dignity in our own countries and in an increasingly interconnected world.”

This is something I feel incredibly hopeful about - I see increased 'Openness' in the public, private and community sectors as a huge step towards ethical, sustainable, agile progress. Last year I had a (somewhat radical) rant on the need (and possibilities) for crowd-sourced democracy here.

Watch President Obama’s opening address from the meeting, along with comments from multiple countries:


Highlights:

• The UK has ambition to be the most transparent government in the world. Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office, gave an extremely articulate speech and call to action (at 46:59).
• Rakesh Rajani, one of the civil society representatives used his moment well.
• President Obama's closing remarks included a pertinent comment on the challenge of being a human being in a position of power.

Read Susan Crawford’s detailed blog post on the topic, including how you can get involved in the US: http://scrawford.net/blog/

In the private sector:

• The power of the consumer is well known and is being leveraged in the marketing space ('Customer-made' became a trend back in 2006).
• In the B2B space, collaboration between internal and external experts, prospects and clients is becoming commonplace too.
• In large organisations, 'jams' are providing opportunity for internal crowdsourcing, for example, IBM's ValuesJam in 2003 gave its workforce the opportunity to redefine the core IBM values for the first time in nearly 100 years.
• These initiatives have generally been led from the top.

The community sector now has the power to lead and drive big change from the bottom up:

• Nathan Winograd made San Fransico the first 'no kill' state for shelter animals in the United States and went on to make the same change in other places (see 01.45 in video).
• A different example of community leadership is the collaborative, bottom up, coordinated research effort of the distributed http://occupyresearch.net project. Anyone can participate. A team led development of the wiki, which describes itself as "an open, shared space for distributed research focused around OccupyWallStreet / OccupyTogether". They are sharing ideas, research methods, tools, datasets, with a view to writing, analysing, discussing, codesigning new tools, and otherwise developing theory and practice together.

 

So, becoming more open (and finding ways for people from all sectors to collaborate on shared interests, beliefs, ambitions) is perhaps inevitable, since everyone now has a voice and anyone can drive change.

I see two keys to smooth progress in this area - the exact two challenges mentioned in my previous post; imagination and leadership. Scalable technologies have emerged that permit collaboration top down and bottom up. The question is, can a leader find constituents including experts who share interests, beliefs or ambitions - and lead them to;

• define a shared vision that represents ethical, sustainable progress (a 'win' for all constituents)
• and then work towards it in a coordinated way?

The project leader and participants would need imagination and leadership (internal and external) to commit to the possibility of a shared vision and to willingly, consistently collaborate and coordinate with each other over time to achieve win/win progress.

If you’re interested in hearing what OpenGov experts and enthusiasts have to say, feel free to follow this OpenGov Twitter list.

Lets hope the power of 'open' culminates in constituents with expertise collaborating to drive ethical, sustainable progress more transparently and democratically in all sectors.

As the world urbanizes, will the most successful cities result from top-down planning or bottom-up innovation?

A debate has started on McKinsey's 'What Matters' site.

The question: "As the world urbanizes, will the most successful cities result from top-down planning or bottom-up innovation?"

As a change management student, interested in 'smarter cities', I had to have a go at an answer:

 

As with management of any major change, I'd argue that the best results are likely to come from a combination of top down and bottom up approaches.

The 'top' will have access to the strategists/architects, funding, resources etc. However, for the project to be a success, it ultimately needs to work for the residents. These residents' insights and proposed solutions to current problems based on local knowledge (i.e. ideas from the 'bottom', including design innovations from the slums and feedback on implementation obstacles) may be invaluable input to a realistic, implementable new strategy - as well as important in generating buy-in and support for adoption of it from the residents.

If the people at the 'top' are the architects (and the financial sponsors of the project e.g. government), then I think another role is necessary; specialist change managers, skilled in research and communication who would liaise with residents and connect the 'top' and 'bottom' to best effect.

Too often (esp. in government), the 'strategy' team is far removed from the realities of implementation, which leads to less than ideal solutions.

Agreeing on a strategic intent / measurement criteria upfront would provide a tangible way to assess the merit of new design and implementation strategies - this would facilitate agreement on which ideas (from the 'top' and/or from the 'bottom') have most merit. Measurement criteria could include specific objectives for each of the triple bottom line measures (Economic, Environmental, Social), incl. things like; energy efficiency, water & waste management, air quality, transportation solutions, community building (e.g. creating social areas for 150 people, if you use Dunbar's number as a guide) etc.

If no measurable criteria is set, how can the work ever be deemed a success? David Gurr, in his comment on the McKinsey question, described Canberra (in Australia) as a "charming and liveable city, with character and style". As a newish resident of Canberra, I agree it is liveable, but disagree that it has charm, character or style (for many reasons I won't bore you with here)! Clearly he and I are judging Canberra based on different criteria.

 

Following this logic, I imagine the first steps in a large, successful town planning / city design program could include:

1. Hiring a change manager skilled in research, facilitation and communications to liaise between the architects and the residents (i.e. the top and bottom)

2. Collaboratively defining the strategic intent (vision / objective for the city) via inputs from the top and bottom and solidifying this into specific measurable objectives, to be used as criteria to assess the merit of ideas.

3. Working with the architect to define a strategy that meets the strategic intent & specific objectives/criteria, gathering and taking into account the 'bottom up', broad based strategic ideas & inputs from residents.

4. Finalising the strategy/plan, ensuring that implementation obstacles residents raise are taken into consideration.

5. Over time, the change manager could engage with the residents to ensure the implementation of the finalised strategy/plan goes smoothly and the items implemented (whether they are recreational facilities, cable cars etc) are adopted by the residents.

 

Clearly, this collaborative approach would take much more work than a top down approach that assumes what residents want. My opinion is that a city that is likely to last for many generations is worth that investment.

Interested to hear other's thoughts.

 

Google, can you find my slippers?

I've been really busy lately. Not just like the 'busy' I was before.

I guess this is what happens when you set yourself a big mission at work, (which recently turned into an official global role) involving lots of o'seas travel, start a part-time post grad course and commit to moving house from Sydney to Canberra (for my husband's work).

If I have any available free time in Canberra, at least I will be able to entertain myself by suggesting to Canberians that polititians replace themselves with crowdsourcing (see my previous post). That should get some classic reactions ;-)

I have another idea on how to use the additional capacity of the National Broadband Network; augmented reality search engines. I've been complaining to Google for a long time that they don't help me find my lost horseshoes. Soon I will be adding plenty of household items to that list (e.g. the items hidden in box 38, located at the bottom of the pile of boxes in the storage room, waiting to be unpacked).

Given the world is becoming smarter with billions of data sensors in products, wouldn't the natural next step be to design tiny microchips (smaller than the ones designed to track rubbish) that could be placed on all your items (or inserted as part of manufacturing), then build an augmented reality app search engine to find them... Kind of like this app which IBM built for Wimbledon, but enabling us to find our kettles, misplaced iPhones, favourite slippers (which my dog likes to take into the garden) and keys...

Would this be useful to anyone else out there? Who do you think will provide this solution and how long do you think it'll be till we get it? Hopefully I will have had time to find my slippers by then...

 

Student Insights on Smarter Cities

IBM held a Smarter Planet University Jam, a massive online collaboration event where nearly 2,000 students offered their progressive take on what would make a better, smarter world. 

The students from over 200 universities in 40 countries discussed a number of topics, including the environment, education, work skills, and healthcare.

"Students are confident that their future will be a smarter place – a world where they will drive cars that get 100 miles per gallon, learn in virtual classrooms connected with students across the globe, and where they can run their businesses on a secure, energy-efficient and interconnected grid. They are boldly challenging the industry to transform that vision into their reality, and IBM is committed to meeting that challenge," said Jai Menon, vice president of technical strategy and university programs, IBM.

“The Smarter Planet University Jam was one of the most exciting and innovative experiences I have ever been a part of. IBM is setting the standard for the corporate world to start learning from the people that depend on them,” said Taylor Vogt, a student majoring in political science at Pace University.

Much of the jam focused on progressive and smart-growth ideas related to water management, healthcare, universities, open source technology, and city building.

“This kind of free-flowing forum is extremely vital to the sustainability movement, where far too often good ideas are never shared or worse, never listened to. I was proud to be a part of this experience,” said Vogt. 

Sounds like it was a success. Read the full details in the 'News In Business' article.

Jeremy Hodge + a couple of the interns at IBM, Daniela Retelny and Michelle Morrison put together a short video reflecting the results from the jam as well as another survey they conducted independently among a group of college students. The video is now on the 'Building a Smarter Planet' blog.

*The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.