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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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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Thanks to everyone who helped plan and execute as well as those who attended this year's Management of Change Conference. I believe our experience together with Vivek Kundra, Clay Shirky, Rob Carey and Aneesh Chopra was truly transformative. And I hope those who were not able to attend will search Twitter on our hashtag #MOC to follow our tweet stream. Feel free to retweet or share your thoughts here.

Over the next few posts I'll share my thoughts on topics covered by the speakers. I'll start with Aneesh Chopra, Federal Chief Technology Officer, whose role is to foster technology related economic development. If you haven't heard Aneesh, be sure to watch this video from January's State of the Net Conference, sponsored by the Congressional Internet Caucus. He's a truly inspiring speaker.

As GCN's Wyatt Kash describes here, Aneesh revealed his early plans on open standards, crowd sourcing, cyber security and government research and development. One of his key priorities is to identify “game-changing” innovations that improve government performance dramatically rather than incrementally. As an example, Aneesh referred to a recent partnership between the Commonwealth of Virginia and NASA Langley to upgrade the Viriginia high school physics curriculum. The curriculum had not been updated in many years and topics such as nanotechnology were not adequately covered. Through an open, collaborative process, the group developed and launched the “21st Century Physics Flexbook,” in a matter of months rather than years as would normally be the case, and at almost no cost to taxpayers.

Aneesh also spoke extensively about the importance of the government's research and development mission. So, just some R&D background for my readers. In previous posts I mentioned the World Economic Forum's Global Information Technology and Global Competitiveness reports. These reports show wide ranging outcomes from research and development policy. How a policy differentiates research from development, basic from applied research and private sector from public sector investment strongly affect Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

The National Science Board, part of the National Science Foundation maintains, annually, a report called the Science and Engineering Indicators that provide insights into national and international trends in R&D. Although U.S. R&D spending has fallen to about 2.6% of GDP, the U.S. maintains a very competitive position in R&D. The U.S. spends more than any other nation on R&D and more than the entire G7 nations. A few other nations like Brazil, India and China are increasing R&D expenditures as a percentage of GDP. Private sector investment is a very large percent of U.S. R&D funding, upwards of 70%. Private sector expenditures focus on development. About 60% of U.S. basic research is conducted is universities and most of that is Federally funded. U.S. R&D is geographically concentrated. Four states - California, Massachusetts, Texas and Illinois perform more than 70% of all computer and electronics R&D. The U. S. is the leading source of new patent inventions compared with Europe and Asia. Finally, multinational corporation's R&D expenditures outside their own country continue to rise. Overseas R&D by U.S. multinationals is shifting away from Europe to emerging Asian markets.

It's a very nice report, and I highly recommend it. However, as Aneesh pointed out, it is difficult to capture and measure the return on investment from R&D spending. He also mentioned the need to capture outcome metrics that help us understand the benefits accrued from R&D.

Welcome Aneesh Chopra and thanks again to all who participated in this year's Management of Change Conference!

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Today, much of our work is done in groups. Whether on a Federal committee, on a project team in support of Agency mission or at home serving our communities, much of what we do is through participation in groups. What makes a group successful (or not)?

Thanks to Jonathan Grudin of Microsoft Research for the wonderful reference to Joseph McGrath's Time, Interaction and Performance (TIP): A Theory of Groups. Prior to 1991, behavioral research focused on controlled studies of small groups in well defined experiments. Experiments accurately measured a group's ability to produce results, known as its production function. Experiments typically included solving single task problems. The researcher supplied the complete set of resources required to solve the problem and group members were kept in isolation during the experiment. Needless to say, this approach of measuring how groups produce the best output is a very Industrial Age approach, in the same vein as the famous time and motion studies conducted by the industrial engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor.

Today, thanks to McGrath’s research, we know that group success is about much more than widget output. Factors such as the overall well-being of the group and support for members in that group are critical for a group’s success in the real world over a period of time. Group well being describes the activities of the development and maintenance of the group as a whole and the relationships among members. Member support describes the ways in which the individual is embedded within the group and the relationship between the individual and the group as a whole. These two functions encapsulate the nature of interaction in McGrath's Theory. To gauge the effect of time, McGrath studied the effect on group functions when groups are embedded in society and groups whose members change.

All too often the groups in which we work focus exclusively on the production function with little regard to group well being and member support. But I believe that emphasizing group well being and member support leads to better outcomes. This is especially true as our groups become more geographically dispersed and we have less day to day contact. Professor Steve Kelman of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, in his post entitled Collaboration success - The Facebook model redux cites a study in which what Kelman calls personalized groups were 18% more successful than depersonalized groups in achieving settlement in a negotiation. Kelman's personalized groups are composed of negotiators who had pictures and biographies of their negotiating partners and were able to exchange emails prior to starting their negotiation.

McGrath's group well being is most likely at work in personalized groups. Because members were able to personalize relationships through pictures and biographies, group production increased significantly. Kelman's post on personalized groups doesn't speak to member support, but I think there are many stories out there to be told about member support. Do you have a story to tell about your role in a group? It could be a success, or how the group could have done better with more member support. Where do you see the role of leadership in member support?

What about group well being? Have social media, or collaboration tools changed group well being in your groups?

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I've been following the use of technology in social entrepreneurship for the past few years. A social entrepreneur is someone who recognizes a social problem then organizes, operates and assumes risk, as in a business, to create social change. The goal is to utilize market forces to achieve some social good. Technology leaders like Pierre Omidyar of eBay are very active in social entrepreneurship. Of course not everyone has the capital of the Omidyar Foundation, but everyone can make a difference and technology allows us to make a big difference together.

I recently learned about Free Rice. Free Rice donates 10 grains of rice to hungry people around the world through the UN World Food Program for every word you get right in an online word matching quiz. In 2008 the combined efforts of all players donated 43,942,622,700 grains of rice. At 50,000 grains per 1kg bag, that's about 878,852 bags of rice.

So how was so much rice donated in 2008? Answer: The network effect. Social media utilities like Facebook allow us to make a big difference together through our social networks. Yes, it's on Facebook too. Imagine if every time your friends log into Facebook, they answer ten questions and their friends answer ten questions, and so on. If your social network, like the internet, is scale free, and you have lots of friends, then you have the ability to help fill a lot of bags.

So if you love challenges, especially word games, in addition to doing some good you can have fun and keep your vocabulary sharp.

Play, Learn and Do Good !

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The global financial crisis overshadowed today's sessions at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The World Economic Forum is an international non-profit organization that is committed to improving the state of the world by engaging leaders in partnerships to shape global, regional and industry agendas. It holds an annual meeting at this time each year and 2009 is its thirty-eighth year of international leadership. In addition to the global economic crisis, other topics for this year's meeting include energy, climate, governance, poverty and education.

Technology plays an especially relevant role at the World Economic Forum this year. In addition to the now-mainstream webcast and podcast information delivery channels, this year social media utilities allow us all to better engage, debate and attend. It may come as a surprise that we can be part of such a remote conference, but through Facebook, Twitter and Youtube we can do just that, at least virtually.

Citizen journalism is very active through Youtube and MySpace Citizen Reporter channels. The World Economic Forum sponsors an open group on Facebook with over 2,100 members. You'll also find chat sessions and a Youtube channel. And for the most current updates, follow the Davos tweets on Twitter.

The World Economic Forum continues throughout the next four days. I hope you will have the opportunity to engage, debate and attend. Enjoy !

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Did you know that Ward Cunningham created the first wiki in 1995 ? Why is it that it took more than ten years before the wiki became recognized as an icon for all things 2.0? What makes a technology useful today, that went unrecognized yesterday ?

As I've considered these questions, I've come to recognize both near term drivers and long term patterns of innovation. Today, our values drive technology adoption. We value participation over exclusion. And the availability of technologies like the wiki make everyone's participation possible at a reduced coordination cost. We demand a little less from a wiki than a traditional business application, in terms of rich function and features, but we value more the collaboration and participation that a wiki can provide.

Clay Shirky, in Institutions v. Collaboration, contrasts the effect of these near term drivers on patterns of innovation both within and outside institutions. Shirky explains why we value participation and how it shapes technology adoption today.

Over the longer term, there are recognizable patterns of innovation across industries and markets. Clayton Christensen, the Robert and Jane Cizik Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, provides insights into these patterns. In the Innovator's Prescription: A Disruptive Solution to the Healthcare Crisis, Christensen observes two patterns. First, a sustaining innovation pattern occurs in the market place when a market leader engages in either incremental investment or breakthroughs. Christensen describes a second pattern which he calls disruptive innovation that occurs when a new entrant undercuts the market leaders at lower cost while satisfying their needs, but with typically lower performance.

Today, wikis and many other 2.0 technologies indicate patterns of disruptive innovation. In parts of the software community where wikis were first developed, simplicity and collaboration became more highly valued than formal planning. Over the past few years the venture capital community has invested heavily in 2.0 technologies. Where do you see these innovation patterns fitting into your Agency?

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There's no doubt that social media has captured just about everyone's imagination recently. Marketing channels are currently packed with the promise of higher productivity, shorter life-cycles, reduced coordination costs and peer-to-peer engagement. Whether all this ever happens, or not, have you ever wondered why social media caught on ? Or, are you asking yourself whether social media is just another fad like pet rocks and mood rings ? The good news is there's a science behind social media and that's why it works.

Social media is grounded in a new science called complexity. The science of complexity is an interdisciplinary study of the dynamics of the structure and behavior among the parts as well as the relationships between the parts and the whole that make up a system. The most notable research has been conducted in and around the Santa Fe Institute within the past twenty-five years. During this time, the science of complexity has produced a few surprising and important discoveries. First, we now know that between order and chaos is self organization. Social media and social networks are just one example of self organization. Bees and ants self organize, as do many chemical and biological systems. Second, we self organize as a network instead of a hierarchy. Networks are more efficient because they allow us to skip levels in the hierarchy. Of course the Internet is the most recognizable example of a network, but if we drew a picture of the links on the internet and all the friend links on Facebook, we'd find they take the same general shape.

There's much more to say about networks, self organization and complexity, but what does this mean to Federal agencies ? I think we'd all acknowledge the Federal government is a complex system, as are Federal agencies. Our planning and governance activities help us better organize and work together more productively. And social dynamics are a large part of how productively we work together. We saw how well President-elect Obama's campaign used social media to mobilize their constituents. Federal agencies can do that too. So in 2009 my team and I plan to take a closer look at the power of social media as a mechanism to encourage stakeholder engagement.

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