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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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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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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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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