At interesting article from the Economist about the new wave of civic engagement we call social innovation. The article is heavily focused on the UK and US experience, but touches on some common issues around the drivers for social innovation, why it differs from past approaches and the new models that are appearing to address the challenge of social innovation ventures for achieving sustainability and impact.

Rather than focusing on the volunteerism aspects I've typically seen highlighted here in Australia (i.e. a few activists and technologists getting together to build a Web-based solution to a community problem in their spare time), the Economist describes social innovation as a new form of public-private partnership:

It differs from the fashion in the past couple of decades for contracting out the delivery of public services to businesses and non-profit groups in order to cut costs, in that it aims to do more than save a few dollars or pounds—although that is part of its attraction. The idea is to transform the way public services are provided, by tapping the ingenuity of people in the private sector, especially social entrepreneurs.

However, the article points out that "so far the enthusiasm for social entrepreneurship has run ahead of its effects". One of the new models for dealing with that problem is the concept of a social-impact bond, which provides funding, but only costs public money if the social innovation achieves its social impact goals. This is necessary so that social innovation can actually achieve the scale and impact it needs to make a difference to the community.

Still, this doesn't mean that there isn't an important role for volunteers in social innovation - they mention Participle in the UK, who are attempting to "redesign the welfare state 'bottom up'" with pilot projects like the Southwark Circle. BTW the most recent Tech Weekly podcast from the Guardian includes an interview with Participle's Charles Leadbeater. Listen from about the 26 minute mark.

Unfortunately as read this article I could only reflect that the social innovation conversation here in Australia is still very immature. While I am hearing some people in the Australian Government 2.0 community talk about related social innovation methods like service design, we are still very much focused on the issue of upgrading government rather than exploring the possibility of creating new kinds of public-private partnerships (and the mechanisms that will support them) that really could transform the effectiveness of public and community services.

listen now | download audio

Interesting discussion about identity versus reliable identity:

Charles Arthur talks to the man who put the "e" into e-democracy – Steven Clift – about whether we should be forced to use our real names online. Plus Meg Pickard talks about anonymity and web publishing – is it a good thing?

You need to listen from about the half-way mark.

BTW I was actually having a look around to see if there was any further discussion of this concept of reliable identity, and came across these 2004 and 2006 class notes on Techno-Identity from MIT's Sociable Media Group.

This part on individual identity is very relevant, so I've quoted it in full:

Without identity, there can be no reputation. In order for the history of one's actions and of others' assessments of those actions to become "reputation", a few things are necessary. We must be able to identify the person, we must be able to communicate, and we must have some form of memory.

In the online world, identity, communication and memory cannot be taken for granted. Whether you can know who are the others in a space, whether you can communicate with them, whether the history orf their actions or of other's reactions to them persists and is accessible - in a mediated envionment these are all matters of design. The creators of the environment can choose to incorporate them into the interface, to allow (or require) users to provide such information. Many do not. There are numerous forums in which anonymous contributors write; there a places where communication among participants is difficult or discouraged. In such circumstances, reputation cannot be a socially motivating force.

In the online world identity, the ability to connect an action to a particular person or a sequence of actions to the same being, is especially problematic. The crux of individual identity is the body, which is absent online. One way of establishing identity in the mediated world is to connect the online persona to a physical being. Sometimes this is straightforward: if I sign my writings with my real name, my email address and work place, I've provided clear ties to my physical world self, connecting the online persona to the real wold self.Yet sometimes it is less straightforward: what if 10 people are colectively creating a single virtual persona? Another way is to use history and reputation to establish an online pseudonymous identity sufficiently robust and valuable to have at least some of function of an embodied identity, in that harm to the pseudonymous persona is significantly costly. If I spend a lot of time and effort establishing an online persona, that persona can have a functioning reputation; however, its value is still much lower than that of the embodied self: I am likely to be much more willing to discard even a long running persona than I am to risk bodily imprisonment or harm.

Anonymity, pseudonymity and known identity exist on a continuum of verifiable connection to a single physical self. Anonymity means that there is no connection to a physical self and little persistence in time. Pseudonymity means that there is no connection to a physical self but there is persistence in time. A pseudonym can have a reputation.

• 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.

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.

Just to let you know that I have a couple of conferences coming up this month and in July where I'll be running workshops:

 

Knowledge Transfer and Retention, 24th-25th May, Sydney

 

On the second day of this conference, I'll be running a workshop on designing a simpler, smarter, social knowledge transfer and retention approach. In this workshop I will be using our Social Business Design framework to explain how to tap into collective intelligence, improve productivity through in-the-flow knowledge transfer and do more with less.

 

Public Sector Marketing, 28th-30th July, Canberra

 

I will be running a full-day masterclass on the last day of this conference, to provide an A-Z guide to implementing a social media marketing strategy. This will be based on Gov 2.0 Taskforce Project 8 guidelines, developed by Headshift, however I'll also be providing an overview of current current Web trends and their impact on policy setting and public sector marketing.

 

As always, come along to either of these workshops ready to participate!

Cross-posted from the Headshift Australasia blog.

AN estimated 5000 deaths, two million GP and outpatient visits and 310,000 hospital admissions could be prevented every year if an effective IT system were rolled out - saving up to $7.6 billion in health costs annually, according to an analysis for release today.

I'm always a little cynical about this kind of number of crunching. I'm all for saving lives, but remain unconvinced that we can actually build the better IT systems they call for - the health industry doesn't have a great track record here after all.

However, listening to a news report on the radio today about a community protesting about the reduction of services at their rural hospital here in NSW today, I couldn't help thinking that we don't just need better technology, but better ways of managing complex systems like the public health system. We need global systems that allow local solutions, not one big homogeneous business process engine for health care.

This is because not everything in health (and other community service areas too) can be boiled down to a transaction, like medication or lab tests. Even if we can achieve it, improving health transactions with IT will only take us so far in improving patient outcomes (and ultimately saving tax payers money).