Its been a great weekend in OpenAustralia Hackfest, first let me thank the organizers who have done an amazing job, Matthew Landauer, Alan Noble, Pamela Fox, Henare Degan and Tim Ansell who organized the event. And a special thanks to our amazing sponsorers Google who gave us the space, the food and the great prizes.
A big get well out to Rob Manson, getting sick in the first day and missing out. Hope he gets better soon.
There were some great hacking done on goverment data and some nice things that have not matured to applications during the weekend.

There is one thing, that keeps blinking at the back of my mind.

Is the crowd we are serving the data ready?
Will they be able to use the interface we give them?

It seems there is a gap, a big gap, between the technology world and the political realm. there is always a gap, i was not aware of how deep it is. Reading License to Drive in the Digital Economy exposed me to a troubling figure, a quater of the people in this land are social web illiterate,

“27% of those surveyed aged 14 and over were not currently participating online. These statistics give some indication that about a quarter of those surveyed would struggle to become active participants in the digital economy.”

This poses a big question about utilization of the Government 2. and the usefulness of these tools.
It seems that the information gathered from these types of applications will be biased towards the more capable social layers, thus creating a worse situation to the social segments not represented.
What shell we do?

How can you enable all the crowd to be part of this participation age?
This is a big questions that got some mentioning

My take is that we need to child proof our applications and match them to a crowd of a non technical and non social aware type.
As we develop our systems we should be able to get the information to the users in the most easy to follow and simple to understand thus making it available to all users of the web.
Keep your interfaces accessible, make them conform to WCAG 2.0, if you are not a front end developer DON’T develop the front end.

There was a cry from Tim Ansell, during free hacking sessions and later in the lightning sessions, to find any one who can prettify his interface.

Do the same, there are allot of people that are very capable and would love to do so.

May the web be with you.

Its been 3 weeks since the NSW Sphere and the announcement of aps4nsw competition been announced by our PM Nathan Rees.
There has been some movement in the twitscopia but nothing been announced in the website.
Is this open gov? i know its a competition but you can show the people who have submitted an idea cant you?
It looks like its not picking up in the site, which is deceiving and might lead to less participation.
Even the datansw twitter and site are not giving up any information.
This hurdle is the main characteristic of the information sharing we lack from the government, just seems like this apps4nsw is missing the main point and that is dont be RailCorp!
On another note there is a cry from the people to become more active in the creation and not the discussion over the next social applications. some tweets from today

“@rbuerckner @purserj agreed. Let’s have a mix of thinking and *doing* – lots of small wins and examples needed #gov2au”

“@trib @purserj #gov2au We can think all we want, right now it’s time for doing, need to get on with it”

This is all true but there is a lack in Government participation, not You Penny you are the best, to enable us easily accessing the data, so in addition to that cry i will add use your personal contacts to move the government and make the required data available. there are people inside the parliament house that want this to happen and will gladly help you so just be pushy.

Just a bit more about the enablement of the social age in the government services and the risk that is growing out of it, reading the long article by Charles Leadbeater and Hilary Cottam about the individual making their own decision over the support of the government to disabled people using In Control’s social platform made me think about the possibility to manipulate the system.
The way that the writers look at the personal enablement and the role of the social worker is a bit naive to my taste, the system grew to become what it is today because the clients have driven it to that not because of a conscious decision to endorse red tape and disable their employees with forms. people are looking to manipulate the system and the system is using their employees to be gatekeepers.
My thought is that we need to rethink the way we as a public gatekeep these new social platforms and let the professional do their jobs at the same time.
So let me ask for the new social gate, a tool to enable the community to stop the cheating an robbing of the system and let the money flow to the people who need it most. who is going to take the plunge and thinker the details?

Was looking at the prediction market post by Andrew McAfee titled Mobs Rule, which in my opinion misses the point, he describes one of the companies he is involved in Crowdcast i started pondering about the validity of a prediction market as an enterprise 2.0 tool.
Taking on this tool has some distinct usage for businesses that is capable of generating value.
Avoiding the need to rely solely on the Project Management methodology to predict the delivery date of a product or the end of an it upgrade, adding to that the ability to predict the success of the latest campaign, is a extremely efficient tool that is able to generate significant advantages and better profit.
My personal problem with the Prediction Markets is its a self-fulfilling prophecy once the prediction is out, and it tends to direct the out come more then predict it.
The base product of Crowdcast uses an interface, from the demo, looking quite rudimentary and may be a bit too graphic, seems like it is not a poll like and uses adjustments to select a response.

I hope they have more interfaces that enable the users to make a selection though.
Crowdcast promise to bring the market internally and make the organization as the crowd to do the selection.
This is probably good in a very limited type of organizations, one that could have the internal critics, the huge ones. if you read te book the wisdom of crowds you are probably familiar with the two basic assumptions that the crowd needs to bet on the score and needs to be heterogeneous to achieve the best predictions.
So how can we make this a part of the toolset if the enterprise is not as big as it needs and certainly not as heterogeneous in the thought process and loyalty to the company.
I love the google prediction market experiment excerpt

In the last three years, Google has conducted the largest corporate experiment with prediction markets we are aware of. In this paper, we illustrate how markets can be used to study how an organization processes information.
We document a number of biases in Google’s markets, most notably an optimistic bias.
Newly hired employees are on the optimistic side of these markets, and optimistic biases are significantly more pronounced on days when Google stock is appreciating. We find correlated trading among employees who sit within a few feet of one another and employees with social or work relationships.
The results are interesting in light of recent research on the role of optimism in entrepreneurial firms, as well as recent work on the importance of geographic and social proximity in explaining information flows in firms and markets.

So how do we even the score with some pessimism? Look no further! We need to expose this to the external public as a quiz with prizes.
That could be a solution to the issues, but its not a silver bullet due to the type of information exposed to the decision guesser, and i am going back to the book where all the guessers were expose to the entirety of the data even if it was classified in the case of the submarine.
How can we make this a better tool to the enterprise? i say, again, make it a flexible tool that is used in several scenarios and let the organization culture set the pace.
Making a tool that is not just for the intranet or just for the internet, as Predictify is, will enable the organization to add this web 2.0 tool to the Enterprise 2.0 utility belt.

After my last post on Enterprise 2.0 i thought i will not see this, AIIM have put out an article questioning the readiness of an enterprise leaders to the Enterprise 2.0 scheme.
Initially i thought this was a very good subject they are touching as most of the leaders of the IT departments are no keen on introducing the Web 2.0 to the organization and not seen the value of it.
But it seems to match more the target of the AIIM to get these people in to the training and certification, over elaborating the process and misleading as a way to push you to go collect more data.
One of the examples that is rooted in a fear more then truth is

Remember that these tools can generate a huge amount of additional unstructured content. Some of it is very much relevant, may be discoverable and may need to fall under whatever Records Management Policy is already in place.

That was presented as a friendly advice, the one you need to fear most, this advice is more an echo to a fear then a truth, if you use collaborative tools to coexist with your business process your collaboration will become part of the process.

• Structure
• Process
• Current Practises
• Team Strategy
• Communication
• Innovation
• Leadership
• Strategy
• Industry
• Technology

…
Each one of these factors needs evaluation and an acceptance of the conclusions to go forward in order to improve. Best practice and experience however tells us that this is not always easy or even achievable.

So why do you want us to even try making this evaluation? is there any chance that we will beat this challenge or its only here to confuse us more?

This whole attitude to the Web 2.0 in the enterprise is just further delaying adoption by businesses and making them less likely to adopt them in the near future, defeating the purpose of the Enterprise 2.0.
You ask what is the purpose? The ability to use technology to drive the business to success (read more here).

So what should the Enterprise adoption plan be? When the AIIM are moving the crowds to do futile research.
The adoption of tools as platforms, like wiki’s ratings Comments and others should be done by the groups seeing value in using them and not as a methodology.
Guidelines should be placed for adoption, matching the organization disciplines, but if rating of documents is not generating any value adopting it at the organization level. on the other hand the technology should be available to project teams to enable it on their content if they perceive value in it.
The Call should be to the “elastic Enterprise 2.0″ rather then a predefined compulsory set of tools for the organization matching all the teams needs.
There are some people that will look at this and laugh stating every person on the office will not use the software available and default to Outlook and Word. This truth is so 2006 my grandmom uses the internet and chats with skype and email, she is 85. Many people in organizations are on Facebook, use a messenger of some sort, have a gmail and are aware if not using twitter. the social era is here and it should penetrate the organizations quick, very very quick.