Around the Corner

It’s not often that a conference can synthesize relevant technology and policy communities, but the O’Reilly Media Gov 2.0 Summit did just that. The most compelling example of synthesizing technology and policy was the rich dialogue at the close of day one between James Fallows of the Atlantic Monthly and John Podesta, President and CEO of the Center for American Progress.

The dialogue between Fallows and Podesta revealed how each participant understood the role of new media in diplomacy and public policy. Like a hopeful prospector Podesta probed Fallows for evidence that new media was actively shaping public perception of US policy overseas. Fallows, who spent much of the last three years in China, maintained that new media has not yet become sufficiently mainstream to affect public perception. Based on Fallows’ observations, broadcast media, movies and music still play the fundamental role of shaping perception of America and Americans overseas.

Fallows engaged Podesta directly on health care reform. Podesta is optimistic that new media can effectively overcome institutional barriers inherent in traditional media by directly reaching a large enough demographic to influence the outcome.

The Pew Center's New Media Index shows evidence of interest in health care reform in the blogosphere. During the second week of August 24% of postings from bloggers were about health care. That same week on Twitter, however, only 3% of tweets pertained health care reform. The number one topic, at 16%, was Microsoft's support for Internet Explorer 6 through 2014. In fact, four of the top five topics on Twitter were technology-related, which could indicate the Twitter audience is more technology-oriented. However, blogging is more suited to analysis than Twitter's 140-character limit, so perhaps we should expect to find more policy discussions in the blogosphere.

Is new media sufficiently influential to affect diplomacy and policy outcomes? According to the dialogue between Fallows and Podesta as well as the New Media Index, there isn't enough evidence just yet, but health care is one key policy outcome to watch.

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Did you see it coming? Some thought they did.

Switzerland is now the most competitive economy in the world. According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report just released on September 8, 2009, the US is now the world’s second most competitive economy followed by Singapore. Sweden and Denmark complete the top five.

I could say there’s some consolation that we were edged out by only a tenth of a point, but the long predicted decrease in our nation’s competitiveness as reflected in its rank in the Global Competitiveness Index (CGI) should give us reason to take stock of both cause and effect. Have the predictions of the National Academies' Rising Above the Gathering Storm report finally come true? Does the Rand Foundation really wear rose colored glasses as reported by the Information Technology Innovation Technology Foundation? Or can we disregard these warnings and assume that when the global economic crisis subsides the US will once again be the most competitive economy in the world? How important is our competitive rank? Like an athlete, is competitive success about training harder, or as I do on my bike, is it about going back to basics?

The GCI is just one indicator, but the research is well done and a close look at its pillars reveals very useful information about current US competitiveness. The most striking changes are in Basic Requirements and Financial Markets. The US dropped six points in Basic Requirements to 28th out of 133 countries surveyed. Basic Requirements is a sub-index of the GCI associated with low-innovation, factor-driven economies. Its four pillars are Institutions, Infrastructure, Macroeconomic Stability and Health and Primary Education. The global financial crisis resulted in a loss of a full 33 points in Macroeconomic Stability which brings the US down to 93/133. Can you imagine that puts us right between Gambia (92) and the Dominican Republic (94)?

Indicators within each pillar reveal more of the details. Strength of Auditing and Reporting Standards fell by 19, Efficacy of Corporate Boards by 8 and Protection of Shareholders Interests by 14. Troubling losses also occurred outside Basic Requirements. Soundness of Banks fell by 68 points. That puts us at 108/133, just behind Tanzania! Rounding out financial markets, Regulation of Securities and Exchanges fell by 27 points. Two other noticeable changes were a 15 point drop in Business Impact of Rules on Foreign Direct Investment and a 9 point drop in Foreign Direct Investment and Technology Transfer. Whether or not one agrees with these specific measures, it is clear that weak financial markets have taken a toll on U.S. competitiveness.

Despite these losses, the US retains its competitive advantage in the Innovation and Sophistication Factors sub-index. So we can coast, right? No, it’s actually in this pillar that we get our best indicators of how to assess US competitiveness against the National Academies and the ITIF predictions. Overall we lost some ground, but we did gain in one key indicator. We’re now fifth, up one since last year, in Availability of Scientists and Engineers. We lost the top rank to Switzerland in Quality of Scientific Research Institutions. We lost two places in Company Spending on R&D and we’re down one to third place in Utility Patents.

So did we see it coming? Well, we didn’t expect the financial crisis and that’s where the numbers seems to have affected our rank the most. On what we did see, the work of the National Academies and ITIF provide solid indicators of what may become long term trends if not properly addressed through science and technology policy. The good news is that’s already taking place. We haven’t lost much ground yet on these important indicators, but when it comes to competition losing ground is a serious issue. Whether riding my bike, or in national competitiveness there’s usually one safe bet: go back to basics.

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A few weeks ago, in my review of Kevin Kelly’s Out of Control, I contrasted hierarchical command structures with biological systems that are networks of cooperation. In Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web, David Weinberger, co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto, examines how the World Wide Web provides the ideal infrastructure for networks of cooperation in today’s global information society.

Those of you who are following the Management Innovators Bookshelf series may have noticed that I skipped ahead to #7 on Gary Hamel’s essential reading list. I think you’ll agree the complementarity between Out of Control and Small Pieces justifies my choice. I’ll return to Hamel’s #3, the Age of Heretics by Art Kleiner later in the series.

Like a reflection in a mirror, Web infrastructure is ideal because it takes the same shape as the networks of cooperation that use it. Both the Web infrastructure and these networks of cooperation self-organize. And if we drew a picture of self organizing systems, whether physical or biological, they would have surprisingly similar shapes. Although we might assume they're random, they are very efficiently organized in a shape called scale-free. And they both look like Figure 1.

Figure 1

Like Kelly, Weinberger is hopeful. As we read in the final chapter of the book, Weinberger writes “The Web will have its deepest effect as an idea. Ideas don’t explode, they subvert. They take their time. And because they change the way we think, they are less visible than a newly paved national highway or the advent of wall sized television screens.” But Weinberger is also worried. He acknowledges disappointments like the dot-com bust, and he also recognizes that the Web can generate unrealistic expectations about the pace of change: “[…] answers can come quickly. The Web is indeed speeding up the pace by enabling ideas to be heard and discussed faster than ever before, but it takes more than a meme, or an idea virus to work through the implications of a change in bedrock concepts. It can take generations to transform our understanding of ourselves and the world.”

Weinberger writes that identity, space, time, perfection, togetherness, knowledge and matter all shape our experience on the web. And that experience defines a networked culture of cooperation whose collective behavior, like Kelly’s bee hive, is adaptive, distributed and organic. The group seems to possess a knowledge that surpasses the individual intelligence of any one member. While at the same time we preserve and even celebrate our individuality on the Web.

The Web is what we make it and we are what it makes us. The Web is a MirrorWorld. And Weinberger’s unified theory of the Web is a reflection of our culture in the Web.

We are Small Pieces, Loosely Joined.

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I recently wrote about the SmartGrid. Did you know the US is not the only country planning a SmartGrid? The European Union (EU) is also planning a SmartGrid. In fact, the European Commission, the executive branch of the EU, is taking some very important steps to update its electrical transmission and distribution systems. The European Commission sponsors the European Technology Platform for the Electricity Networks of the Future (ETPENF) and leading investors in ten EU member countries sponsor the Desertec Foundation.

When it comes to the production, transmission and distribution of electricity, sustainability matters. ETPENF aims to increase the efficiency, safety and reliability of EU transmission and distribution systems. Efficient, safe and reliable electrical systems means better managed systems. Desertec plans to harvest wind and solar energy from the deserts of North Africa for transmission and distribution to the EU. And for tomorrow, sustainability will require well managed electrical transmission and distribution systems supplied by renewable resources.

A nation's abililty to produce, transmit and distribute electricity has become recognized as part of its global competitiveness. You might remember I previously wrote about the World Economic Forum's (WEF) Global Competitiveness Report (GCR) and Global Information Technology Report (GITR). Both the GCR and GITR include electricity supply in their assessments. GCR in Institutions, Infrastructure where the US ranks 16th for quality and the GITR in Environment, Infrastructure where the US ranks 8th for production.

In July the WEF in partnership with Accenture released Accelerating SmartGrid Investments, a new report that nicely defines the SmartGrid and discusses barriers to implementation and their solutions. The report indicates that electricity production, transmission and distribution require better alignment of regulatory and policy frameworks. Today, the regulatory environment lacks incentives for private sector investment in carbon capture, reliability and security on electrical grids. Tomorrow, the regulatory environment will need to reward risk for investment in emerging technologies that help make the grid smart and distribute that risk among producers and consumers. SmartGrid investments under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act help to reduce that risk.

Cities will serve as as catalysts for SmartGrid investments too: Boulder, Colorado and Austin, Texas are already smart grid cities. And GSA's Public Building Service Office of Sustainable Design leads Federal agencies with investments in high performance green buildings that meet the LEED standard and incorporate sustainable design into Federal workplaces because Sustainability Matters.

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On the afternoon of Thursday August 14, 2003 some 50+ million people in eight states and the province of Ontario lost power. Known as the Northeast Blackout of 2003, this event was the largest blackout in North American history. According to Scientific American, the blackout caused 11 deaths and cost approximately $6 billion.

The events that caused the blackout have been investigated and we've learned that the electrical power grid on which we depend for necessities like lights and heat is really quite fragile. The grid barely meets our current needs and, because it is based on 20th century technologies, our ability to manage it is limited.

As a response to what we learned from events like the Notheast Blackout of 2003 and as a key step toward energy independence, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act contains funding for the SmartGrid Investment Grant Program under the Department of Energy's Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability. The SmartGrid is an update of the 20th century power grid with 21st century technology. Smart metering, reliable and secure transmission and clean energy generation are all part of the SmartGrid.

So how do we create the SmartGrid with updated 21st century technologies? As Federal CTO Aneesh Chopra remarked in his recent speech at the Churchill Club in Silicon Valley, while there's a lot of work to be done, the government's most appropriate level of influence is to support a collaborative approach to standards that will ensure we have a level playing field to deliver game changing innovation.

Standards serve as both a mechanism to constrain costs and as a platform for innovation. Although this statement may seem to be a paradox, collaborative, or open, standards can achieve both by creating the right kind of competition. That is, competition based on delivering better features that give consumers choice in products as well as encouraging mobility and interoperability across producers. Broad participation by producers, both social and economic, as well as the transparent nature of an open standard drives game changing innovation. And open standards bodies remove or reduce barriers to entry (like membership fees) and publish standards openly so social producers can compete with economic producers on a level playing field.

Smart consumers will benefit from standards. IEEE 802.15.4-2003 is one such standard. It is used to specify the physical layer and media access control for low-rate wireless and personal area networks used in home automation devices. On the SmartGrid, home automation devices using smart metering based on IEEE 802.15.4-2003 will inform smart consumers when they can save money on their electrical bill. Imagine a consumer who uses their mobile phone to display smart metering information from their personal area network to avoid peak load costs. Smart!

As a CIO, standards are all around me. They are the DNA of our operations. When applied well, open standards allow Federal agencies to reduced costs and as a platform for innovation.

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Last year when I started Around the Corner I promised a place where we could challenge some of our assumptions, explore something new or discover something unknown. Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World by Kevin Kelly is the second in the list of Gary Hamel's essential reading for management innovators. It presents a wonderful opportunity to challenge, explore and discover.

Kelly, previously the founder and Executive Editor of Wired Magazine and member of the Board of the Long Now Foundation, imagines a world for us in which biological principles can help to enable human collaboration. For instance, the typical organizational structure is very hierarchical and top-down driven. But Kelly suggests a beehive model might be informative for our modern knowledge economy. The members of the beehive do not have formal roles and responsibilities, but each member makes a contribution. The beehive as a whole is adaptive, distributed, and organic. Likewise, a spider web is a useful model to describe the interrelated nature of suppliers, employees, customers, and stakeholders in today’s complex organizations. These and other systems in nature don’t generally follow a centralized hierarchy, but instead work through networks of cooperation. In some cases the group seems to possess a kind of knowledge that surpasses the individual intelligence of any one member. Consider migrating geese. None of the flock have made the trip before, yet somehow the flock knows its migration path from hemisphere to hemisphere

Another of Kelly’s key ideas is that complex systems work best when they grow incrementally: “The only way to make a complex system that works is to begin with a simple system that works. Attempts to instantly install highly complex organization without growing it, inevitably lead to failure..... Time is needed to let each part test itself against all the others...."

Out of Control is not a quick read, but it is a thoughtful book that challenges the reader to think about future possibilities. As technology professionals we know from what we experience every day that success requires careful attention to every detail and that progress is slow and most times really quite laborious. Possibilities are endless in Out of Control. It is worth the reading because we're too often led to exclude possibilities rather than wonder what's Around the Corner.

It's on my bookshelf and I hope you have the time to add it to yours!

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Hey, I'm Rick Murphy. Casey's out and gave me a guest spot to share some thoughts on where we are with what some folks are calling Web 3.0 and what it might mean in our lives and our jobs.

Web 3.0 is really just the idea of a smart Web that helps people at home and work. Remember that Web 2.0 is a response to the perception that heavyweight planning and technologies were slowing us down. Our tools were too complex. We quickly put blogs, wikis and other social media utilities in place that shifted complexity away from our tools, but cause us to manage that complexity. For an excellent talk on this issue, see Ross Mayfield's All Things 2.0 Are Made of People, part of PARC's Beyond Web 2.0 series.

The success of Facebook and Twitter increase the information available to us. Now that we all have 500+ friends and Tweets streaming at us faster than we can read, how do we keep up? Our lifestreams are overrunning our lives. Whether we tag our family photos or search the Web, we expect to get all relevant results and exclude the ones that are irrelevant so we don't have to filter them ourselves. We need a smart Web that reduces the burden of the complexity that we've taken on ourselves. Web 3.0 is the idea that we can add some smarts, known as the Semantic Web, to Web 2.0. These smarts help us at home and work by reducing this complexity.

So where are we with Web 3.0 and the Semantic Web? Since the 2001 Scientific American article by Tim Berners-Lee, Jim Hendler and Ora Lassila, both skeptics and supporters have sought evidence that the Semantic Web has been adopted. The good news is that the favorable climate for innovation recently accelerated adoption of Semantic Web technologies. Most recognizably, both Google and Yahoo announced support through their Rich Snippets and Search Monkey offerings. The UK Government moved the London Gazette, a four hundred year old publication, to the Semantic Web. You can hear more in this podcast from my colleague John Sheridan, Head of e-Services, of the UK Government's Office of Public Sector Information. Datasets from data.gov are already available for the Semantic Web and our team has used Semantic Web technologies in our Enterprise Architecture practice.

Web 3.0 is the idea of a smart Web that helps people at home and work. Facebook will produce more meaningful information about relationships among family and friends. We might discover meaningful trends among Tweets. And we'll spend less time filtering inaccurate search results.

Web 3.0 and the Semantic Web are happening now, but they won't happen all at once. And there's no more appropriate time to recall the well known William Gibson quote: "As I've said many times: the future's already here, it's not just very evenly distributed."

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Have you ever wondered how and when innovation happens? Can managers demand it? Can we put it in our project plans? Can we just reprioritize it when we get too busy? Although these questions seem rhetorical, each one causes us to ask how and when innovation happens. Is innovation, much like creativity, neither intentional or something we can turn on and off? Does it just happen?

There's no one answer to these questions, but there are patterns we can observe from successful innovation.

Take the opportunity to watch this TED talk by Tim Berners-Lee on The Next Web. In this talk Tim tells the story of how he created what we now know as the World Wide Web. In March of 1989, while a software engineer at CERN, Tim handed Information Management: A Proposal to his supervisor Mark Sendall. Sendall wrote "vague, but exciting" on the paper, put it in his drawer and nothing happened. Eighteen months later Sendall told Tim he could "do it on the side as a sort of a play project." Some twenty years later we know the Web not only as an essential global information and business resource, but also a part of the critical infrastructure on which our national security depends.

This is an interesting enough anecdote, but there's a pattern. During the fall of 1992 at the National Center for Supercomputing (NCSA) Marc Andressen and Eric Bina had enough time available to start a side project based on Tim's work at CERN. The project soon became X Mosaic, the world's first widely available graphical web browser. Within a few years the Mosaic team formed Netscape Communications Corporation which a few years later was acquired by America On Line (AOL) for about $4 billion.

Today, Google recognizes this pattern in its operations plan and it calls the pattern 20-percent time. Engineers are encouraged to spend 20 percent of their time working on projects of their own choosing. Google does not enforce 20 percent time and engineers work on behalf of Google during that time. 20 percent time is so successful that about half of Google's new product launches originate from what engineers create during their 20-percent time.

There's solid evidence that innovation happens when employees have time and opportunity to investigate projects beyond their core duties. That does not mean that managers have lost control, or that employees are not working on behalf of the organization. Not all organizations recognize 20 percent time in their ops plan, but all organizations can create an environment that encourages how and when innovation happens.

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The Aspen Institute holds its annual Ideas Festival each summer. This year the festival was held from June 29 though July 5. The 2009 Festival theme was, “Ideas That Work,” and had four tracks: World Affairs and the Global Economy; Arts and Culture; Life in America; and Managing Planet Earth.

The Festival gathers recognizable leaders, thinkers and doers at the Institute to share their ideas. Traditional media outlets typically provide limited coverage of the Festival. This year my favorite magazine, The Atlantic, is running a special ideas report and recently the Festival started sharing ideas through a video library.

This year there's a twist. Because sharing ideas widely is as important as being at the Festival, the Institute is extending its reach by recruiting at least 140 attendees to share ideas from the Festival through Twitter. (The number 140 is relevant because Twitter updates are limited to no more than 140 characters.)

You can track and share open ideas from the Festival by searching Twitter, using the search term #AIF09. This search string is called a “hashtag,” denoted by the pound sign at the beginning. Prior to the Festival, organizers established this hashtag to give everyone a common reference point to track updates from the Festival on Twitter.

There are other ways to track ideas from the Festival too. Because of Twitter's 140 character limit, users abbreviate the ideas they share as memes. The term meme was first introduced by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 best seller the Selfish Gene. Memes are units of cultural information with specific meaning that are replicated throughout a culture. Memes can be abbreviations or terms whose interpretation requires tacit knowledge.

"Chimerica" is a good example of a meme used at the Festival. Chimerica was coined by Harvard historian Niall Ferguson to describe "China's strategy of dollar reserve accumulation that has financed America's debt habit." By simply searching Twitter on Chimerica, you’ll find Tweets from all the attendees that used that meme in a Tweet.

Twist provides a graphical view of Tweets containing a meme. Enter Chimerica in Twist and you will see a time series plot of Chimerica Tweets. Twist also displays the Chimerica Tweets in a list below the plot. Mouse over the plot and select a specific point in time to browse the Tweets.

Tweets are an excellent way to share ideas. Whether through hashtags established as a convention or by plotting the time series of memes, you can be part of the Aspen 140: Open Ideas Project.

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I hope that by now you've had the opportunity to follow the speakers who appeared at the Management of Change Conference. Aneesh Chopra, Rob Carey, Clay Shirky and Vivek Kundra were all very well received. Vivek Kundra provided his very compelling vision for a Federal government that is open by default. "Open by default" means that the beginning presumption for federal agencies is that their data should be published and publicly available, unless privacy or security considerations indicate otherwise.

Several days ago Vivek Kundra, our federal Chief Information Officer, spoke at Wired magazine's Disruptive by Design Conference where he elaborated on that vision by describing the work of Federal Agencies on data.gov. Nancy Scola of Wired reports: “The premise behind behind Data.gov goes to the philosophy around transparency and open government that the president has been talking about. What we want to do is democratize data and democratize information and put it in the public square,” said Kundra. “The default setting of the United States should not be that everything should be secret and closed.”

An open default setting allows the American people to find innovative paths to society's most compelling challenges. You might remember that in my first post here on Around the Corner I mentioned Nassim Taleb's Black Swan. In the Black Swan, Taleb, a notable economic skeptic, identifies selection bias as a high risk to large-scale problems. The Skeptic's Dictionary defines selection bias as the "self selection of individuals to participate in an activity or survey, or as a subject in an experimental study." Of course, Federal IT investments are not experimental studies, but the open by default setting removes selection bias by allowing any and all American citizens to actively participate in mashing up their own data in ways that they determine. Organizations like the Sunlight Foundation play an instrumental role in democratizing data by sponsoring x-prizes or contests like the ongoing Apps For America 2.

This week the government is accelerating the publication of data. Data will be published in as many formats as possible, as close to raw as possible, and there is a preference for machine readable formats.

I hope you will have the opportunity to mashup your data. You can find it here. If you can't find it yet, there's more on the way.

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