chieftech’s blog

User participation is now an established feature of the economy, spreading from product development and software to a much broader base of activities, such as marketing and manufacturing, and sectors, including social media, automotives and cosmetics, among others. Early analyses of user participation pointed to the importance of building large communities, creating effective incentives for participation and implementing more flexible forms of organization. Looking back a few years later, the good news is that active participation continues to spread. The bad news is that harnessing participation is more difficult than we thought. Stimulating a continuous flow of high-quality contributions should be the focus of companies that want to take advantage of user participation.

Well, actually, if you've been hanging around knowledge management and collaboration for a while you wouldn't expect it to be easy :-)

I still think Clay Shirky sums this up best - you need:

"a successful fusion of a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain with the users"

OPEN source software offers one cure for clinical system implementation woes, as authorities struggle to find solutions that meet all medical requirements, a leading health informatics researcher says.

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Rather than the all-in, big-bang approach of a full CIS (clinical information system) implementation, an open, standards-based approach would allow a more incremental, lower risk approach, with organic expansion based on lessons learnt.

I think the mixing of terminology around open source software and open standards is a little confusing in the piece. However, what is clear is that complex environments, like we find in health care, need new approaches to information technology to avoid the mistakes of the past. This includes open source software, open standards, etc but also new approaches to procurement, support, solution design and project management. Just focusing on open source software itself is missing the bigger picture of the challenge. And what about the hardware too?

This is just one from a set of great sketchnotes by Matt Balara from Web Directions South this year that covers Suze Ingram's presentation. Anyway, its great to see other people talking about Service Design here in Australia. This is something I mentioned back at NSW Public Sphere.

These are my slides from NSW Public Sphere yesterday. Shortly after my presentation, the NSW Premier announced the apps4nsw competition and data.nsw.gov.au, which is exactly the kind of initiative I was advocating in my presentation.

Also, if you're interested in exploring this concept of public service co-design (or simply service design) that I mentioned, there are some links referenced at the end of this recent Headshift paper for the Centre for Policy Development.