chieftech’s blog

I was really disappointed that I missed the public forum with Ezio Manzini, held in Sydney last week. However, I did manage to find this recorded excerpt from a presentation he made in 2008 where he talks about service design and social innovation.

• Enrol - I'm enroling for the first time
• Update - I've changed house or name
• Check - Check if I'm currently enrolled

This is not an official AEC website. It has been made by an independent advocacy group as part of our campaign to make enrolling easier.

Government 2.0 doesn't have to be about running nice fluffy community consultations online or getting MPs to use Twitter. It can be deeply practical too. So, with a federal election coming in Australia, advocacy group, GetUp!, have created a site to help people enrol or update their electoral role details online.

The fact that they've even created this site raises the question of why you wouldn't just use the official Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) site? Well, because you can't actually enrol online - the GetUp! site captures your enrollment electronically, but then faxes the form to the AEC.

However, according to the Sydney Morning Herald an AEC spokesperson has warned:

"A digitally constructed signature wouldn't be valid, and we would require a hardcopy signature on an enrolment form"

This is odd, because the AEC will accept a scanned form via email. However, I've always thought that an email was good enough anyway under Australian law?

However, perhaps what is more concerning it the attitude all round with this problem. Why wouldn't we want people to be able to enroll to participate in one of our most import civic rights, using the most convenient method possible? It also reminds me that digital inclusion is a two-way street.

UPDATE

Apparently, the AEC was swamped by people trying to beat the deadline for enrolments, which caused a few problems.

From the Daily Telegraph:

THE Australian Electoral Commission went into meltdown yesterday as thousands of first-time voters tried to register.

The AEC pleaded for patience as its fax lines jammed and many frantic voters swamped the phone lines trying to report the problem. A spokeswoman said the AEC was trying its best to cope with an unexpectedly large demand.

And the SMH:

The rush to join the roll ahead of the Monday night deadline was so fierce the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) at lunchtime boosted its call centre staff by 200 to 700.

The AEC website also crashed for almost an hour as Australians rushed to register to vote ahead of the August 21 poll.

I was recently asked what is a fairly frequent question... what's the difference between the popular social suite software options, aka enterprise wikis, which includes products like Confluence.

Personally I think one of the stand out features of Confluence is its rich text editor + macro capabilities. In some respects, if you aren't thinking about Confluence with this in mind, then really I'm tempted to ask why are you even considering Confluence. Confluence isn't just a wiki, its an enterprise social swiss army knife. Or as I like to think about it, its the social computing equivalent of the spreadsheet. :-)

However, it can be difficult for novice users to get into using macros and other advanced Confluence features. But this sneak peak of Confluence 3.3 from Matt Hodges really shows how its becoming easier and easier for anyone to become a Confluence wiki ninja and make existing ninjas even more productive.

I'm only just starting to catch up on the commentary from some of the recent run of Enterprise 2.0 related conferences. I really enjoyed this recording of CSC's Mark Masterson's lively and rapid presentation at the International Forum on Enterprise 2.0 held in Milan back at the beginning of June. You can read more about C3 in Claire Flanagan's case study post, including her slides from the Enterprise 2.0 conference in the US this month.

In fact, a big hat tip to the forum's organisers as almost all of the presentations appear to be available on Vimeo and many presenters have also shared their slides online. I haven't even begun to work through all this content.

Meanwhile, over at the Enterprise 2.0 Boston 2010 conference, Dion Hinchcliffe shares his thoughts on that event and identifies his two biggest take-aways:

• Designing Enterprises for Loss of Control; and
• Enterprises Are Going Social.

Likewise, you can also watch recordings from Boson online too.

I'm sure there is more I've missed, but I'm still working my way through some unread feeds!

Wired magazine's Steven Levy says the 'Hackers' of the late 20th century set the philosophical base for the digital information age of today -- and he says their mind-set will shape our future.

I remember reading an electronic copy of Steven Levy's Hackers book downloaded to a PDA (I'm pretty sure, if I recall correctly, I had a Psion Series 5 at the time) during my daily commute across Sydney harbour back in the later part of the 1990s. I remember it feeling quite subversive just to be reading an electronic text, while everyone else had their heads stuck in a newspaper! Of course, the beauty of this book is that it challenges the common view of what hacking culture is all about - less about being illegal and more about being collaborative, through open technologies and an open and experimental culture.

In this radio interview with Levy, he comments:

There were so many people who read my book and told me it changed their lives, and this was then a fantastic experience. For me, to see so many people who have read my book saying it had an effect on them.

I'm not sure this book changed my life, but it certainly was very influential. It really must rank along with other books like Cluetrain (which Euan Semple reminded us about in his workshop at Headshift yesterday) and Being Digital as one of the classics of the digital era. BTW It appears that Hackers has recently been re-released as an updated 25th anniversary edition.

PS. What other *classics* of the digital era would you recommend? Feel free to add your suggestions to the comments.

Thursday July 1, 2010 at 8:00am

Urban Food Store + Cafe

Corner of Marcus Clarke and Edinburgh Streets
Acton, Australian Capital Territory 2601 Get Directions

James Dellow, Daniel Siddle and Chris Adams from Headshift invite you to join them for breakfast to chat informally about Enterprise 2.0 and other related topics like Corporate Social Networks, Knowledge Management, Intranet 2.0 and Workforce Collaboration.

As this is Canberra, we expect there to be a strong Government 2.0 flavour, but very much focused on the issues of internal collaboration and inter-agency collaboration. (As we like to say, if you want to be social on the outside, you need to be social on the inside too!)

Come along to ask questions and share your experiences of introducing social computing to the enterprise or your government agency.

Please RSVP on Upcoming or simply add a comment below.

BTW Sorry its not quite central Civic, but I've been told its a great venue and the breakfast menu looks great (PDF).

I had the honour of presenting this Vital Issues Seminar today for the Parliamentary Library, at Australia's Parliament House. In between interruptions by the bells, Sen. Kate Lundy chaired the meeting and even managed to throw me some curly questions to deal with.

Also demonstrating that the Parliamentary Library is walking the Gov 2.0 talk, you will find a copy of my slides and also a sound recording* of my presentation on the Parliament's Website. This I should add is not only a great resource for people working in parliament, but also those that wouldn't necessarily normally have access to these sessions either.

*BTW that noise at the beginning is the bells ringing through the PA system.

Glenn Archer, Department of Education: Cultural change is the most profound challenge for public servants.

No real surprises in this article, reporting on a series of roundtables held by MIS Australia with local public and private sector CIOs, talking about their experiences with collaboration technologies. It certainly reflects my own experiences with the organisations I've been interacting with this year, particularly in the government sector where my biggest concern is that the importance of internal collaboration hasn't really been debated much in the Gov 2.0 conversation (see Lee Bryant's excellent post that gets to the heart of that problem, for all sectors).

Unfortunately, no real change on the private sector front, although I do detect a little thawing of attitudes towards employee use of social networking and social media. However, its pretty much been the case for the last decade* that some companies get the value of collaboration technologies (like instant messaging, one of the oldest tools in the current collaboration suite) while others will continue to lag behind.

You can view this as a problem, but personally I think it points more to the fact that those that get the value of collaboration technology have the opportunity to use them as part of their competitive advantage. So the real issue is, are they actually getting those advantages from the tools and technologies they've invested in.

Ok. I'm going to say it again... I can't believe we are still having this debate about instant messaging technologies as if it was something new. There - I've done it.

When I picked up this book, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. Tim Brown and IDEO would both be well known to anyone interested in design and innovation, but along with this fantastic reputation I also get a sense of exclusiveness - so, my initial thought was to wonder if Brown would actually reveal any of the secrets behind design thinking and his work at IDEO.

To answer that question now, the answer is both yes and no. You shouldn’t expect to pick up Change By Design and find a manual that will give you a short cut to design thinking. Instead, what you will find is two things - an introduction to the patterns of design thinking (part one - "What is design thinking") and stories of how design thinking can be applied to business and society (part two - "Where do we go from here?").

The narrative of the first part of the book really does a good job of capturing the essential differences between classical management thinking and design thinking. Just to pick out a few of the topics covered, they include:

• How designers collaborate.
• The processes of analysis and synthesis.
• The use of observation and empathy.
• Using visual thinking and story telling.
• Risk taking through experimentation and prototyping.

Overall I found this first part of the book the most interesting and as Brown promises, this does provide a framework for design thinking. I think the first part of the book probably caught my attention more than the second part because I came to it already convinced of the value of design thinking - I didn’t really need further evidence or help to understand where it could be applied. However, if you are new to design thinking or need further convincing about its application to real business or social issues, then the second part will be very worth while.

The final pages of the last chapter also provide some useful pointers for everyone to remember:

• Don’t ask what? Ask why?
• Open your eyes.
• Make it visual.
• Build on the ideas of other.
• Demand options.

I also enjoyed the reference to Victorian engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel that Brown uses to both open and close the book. I have often thought there was something different about the engineers of that era and perhaps Brown is right - people like Brunel and innovators that followed him were in fact design thinkers of sorts:

What they all shared was optimism, openness to experimentation, a love of stroytelling, a need to collaborate, and an instinct to think with their hands - to build, to prototype, and to communicate complex ideas with masterful simplicity. They did not just do design, they lived design.

If I had one major criticism of this book, then it would be the book itself rather than the ideas it contains. We are teased by a fantastic mind map on inside cover, which provides a visual table of contents. But the rest of the book contains just a few incidental sketched diagrams (and they all look like elements from a MBA’s play book, not a design thinker). Unfortunately I think Brown missed a fantastic opportunity to both engage his readers more effectively but also to show case different techniques for sharing stories and patterns.

Despite a missed opportunity with the actual design of the book itself, Change By Design is still a very good read - you will probably get more value from it if you are new to design thinking since as a package the book really provides a great introduction to the topic and examples of how to apply it. But just remember that design thinking is both a process and also an attitude, so don’t expect a step by step manual.

BTW While you are waiting to get hold of a copy of Change By Design, you can read his HBR article on design thinking or watch this TED talk.