City Government 2.0 – Austin’s Opportunity

There has is a “healthy” online discussion among Austin netizens about the latest RFP and (retracted) contract award for the sorely needed update to the City of Austin website.  Links:  Omar Gallaga’s digital savant blog on Austin360,  Sarah Coppola’s statesman.com City Beat Blog.  I added the following comment to each of their blogs today:

I’m glad to see that the COA is delaying the vote on the site redesign.  I commend Omar for originally surfacing this story, and for sticking with the comment thread.  That this discussion is happening in the open is great.  How many other COA RFP-to-contract award processes face this much netizen light of day?

Ideally, the forum for a discussion like this should be hosted by the city (irony intended).  And, any online forums hosted by the city should also allow for reg’d participants to not just compose/comment, but also vote up other posts/comments too (Whitehouse.gov did this just today in their first online presidential town hall meeting – a watershed event in government 2.0).

I’m starting to enumerate functional requirements for the redesign now.  Where is the RFP?  Can anyone share a link to the original RFP?  I can’t readily find it (or much of anything) on the current COA site. (update: Omar has added a link to the original RFP at the end of his post)

One comment mentions that the RFP did not specifically require Plone/Zope as the platform.  Can anyone confirm this?  If true, then where is this requirement coming from?  As a tax paying Austinite though, I am very pleased that at least a Free/OSS platform strategy is in play.

I hope the current RFP (or the new one now that “the city’s new communications director and new chief information officer need more time to review options for the project”) will not be limited to functional requirements that facilitate business us usual.  It should also define requirements that open visibility into the business of the COA in new ways, allowing for online interaction and feedback from residents in ways that currently aren’t possible today.  As whitehouse.gov demonstrated today, net based social media is creating a whole new paradigm.

Heck – we are home to the most important new media/tech interactive conference in the world today (SXSWi).  Wouldn’t it be great if there was a panel discussion in next year’s SXSWi agenda like this?… “City Government 2.0: Come to this panel to learn how the City of Austin designed and implemented their widely acclaimed interactive city government web site.” …with the panel comprised of the our Mayor, the COA CIO, and leaders of the *AUSTIN BASED* firm that led the successful and widely emulated project.

In the age of community – CIO as “benevolent facilitator”

In 2007 I was very privileged to lead a team of IBMers in writing this Redpaper:

I wrote most of the chapter on community dynamics.  Here is an excerpt (section 3.1) from the paper:

Community: a cornerstone of TAP strategy
Simply stated, without community involvement TAP, as it is designed, would fail. Community participation is the critical element that the program must have for success. To illustrate the defining importance of this, consider the following operating principles for TAP:

• TAP allows any IBMer to identify as an Early Adopter, by virtue of their own interest in the offerings available on TAP.
• It is the stated policy of the TAP management team that they do not make any effort to prejudge the ultimate value of an offering being considering for boarding on TAP. If it meets a set of basic criteria (see “The boarding questionnaire” on page 43) then the offering can be hosted on TAP. They let the dynamics of the Early Adopter community determine the ultimate value of the offerings.
• The TAP management team declared that the needs of the community will also guide how TAP itself is managed and how it evolves over time.

Supporting adherence to these operating principles is not something that is necessarily easy to do. Especially when you consider the last principle listed. It is in the nature of IT organizations in large traditional companies to attain power and control so that they can preserve their influence and importance. In order to support these principles, TAP management must put a great deal of emphasis in the program on minimizing the organizational inertia and bureaucracy that inevitably develops when small programs become large.

And this is where we come to the vital importance of community. The TAP team can design hosting systems and program management processes to effectively minimize scaling costs as the program grows. But to minimize development of organizational inertia and bureaucracy, so that the nature of the program itself can easily change to meet the needs of the community, what you really have to do is affect a transfer of those powers to the community: the organizational inertia becomes community inertia, and bureaucracy becomes community-based governance. When this type of ‘transfer of power” takes place, then TAP’s adherence to those operating principles becomes inherent. Also, the role of the supporting IT organization takes the form of benevolent facilitation.

I think that the role of CIO as “benevolent facilitator” will become an underlying theme common to successful social computing initiatives in the enterprise (ie. enterprise 2.0).

What does this mean for our clients?  Very few enterprises will need their own internal full-blown version of a TAP program.  But most at some point soon will need to deploy social computing platforms such as IBM’s Lotus Connections.  So, thinking within the context of an enterprise Connections roll out, how does the IT department grow into the role of “benevolent facilitator”?  I think they need to start by deploying it to the business and managing it from whole new perspective. Instead of the traditional top down finite feature function command/control point of view, they manage it from the bottom up, as a social computing innovation platform.  Connections is very open and extensible. Its definitely a platform – not just a monolithic application stack. My gut tells me that this is the best strategy for positioning Connections (or any extensible social computing platform for that matter) for long term success and measurable ROI in the enterprise.

Key to this approach will be how you position it along the spectrum of innovation platform vs. top down managed application offering, based on client situation. You can certainly position and manage a Connections deployment either way. And maybe in practice it will be both ways… a sandbox for technically adept widget developer-contributor/early adopters, and a consumable service for business users. You can tell where I think the long term sweet spot is.

Viewing Obama and Bush speeches through wordle

Pushing chunks of text through Wordle can create some very interesting and sometimes revealing results.  The first Wordle output below was generated using the text of President Bush’s 2008 State of the Union speech.  And the following wordle output was generated using the text of President-elect Obama’s convention acceptance speech plus the text of his victory speech in Grant Park.

Bush – From 2008 State of the Union transcript:

Obama:  from combination of 2007 convention acceptance and Grant Park victory speech transcripts:

CurrentCost adventure begins

I hate to look at our power bill every month.  And I want to help save the planet.  So I love the idea of having a home power consumption monitoring system that provides a real-time indication of how much energy you are consuming, and how much it is costing you.

There are many options out there now for devices like this.  I recently discovered that some of my IBMer colleagues in the UK are having a great time hacking on the CurrentCost device.  So I decided to give that one a go, knowing full well that I might have some integration problems hooking it into my house here in the US since the device is designed for UK households.  The fact that there is significant community activity focused hacking/extending the device’s output very is important to me.

I sent a note to CurrentCost inquiring about how to purchase and ship to a US consumer.  I received this response…

Hi Chris,

You may or may not be aware we have a very keen IBM community here in the UK, it may be due to that you have made contact?

Ordinarily we don’t ship overseas – the product, although adaptable is designed for the UK market. However, we like to support the IBM community and if you’d like to receive a unit, we would happily welcome your feedback for (possibly) altering it for your region.

If you would like to receive a unit with my compliments, please let me have a delivery address.

Kind regards

Martin Dix

Fantastic!

Yesterday the device arrived via FedEx.  Thank you for including the custom data access cable!

CurrentCost device OOB

Now – I’m pretty sure that household current in UK is single phase 220v all the way to the wall sockets?  My house is standard US setup around here:  two phase 220V coming in, split into two single phase 110V hot buses in the power distribution box, with some circuits connecting across both buses to bring two phase 220 V to large appliances.

Question:  by placing the single induction coil sensor around only one of the two mains (thick black wires feeding into the top of the breakers below) will it be able to accurately sense the power being drawn by all of the loads in the house?

I’m thinking the answer on that is no.  I’m guessing it will sense the current coming on only one of the 110V buses plus the current from any 220V loads across both buses… effectively missing all of the 110V loads on the bus connected to the other main that it is not clamped to.  (I’m hoping I’m wrong?)

Austin Social Media Club Presentation: “IBM Gets It”

Wow! It was a fantastic, energizing experience for me to be the featured presenter last night at the Austin Social Media Club monthly meeting. I hope everyone enjoyed the give-and-take as much as I did. Calling the meeting a “give-and-take” doesn’t really do it justice. At times I felt like more of a facilitator than a presenter. We had a very stimulating exchange of ideas and talk – just like I expect every time at SMC meetings.

Here are links to the sources and sites I talked about:

My day job:
http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/

On top of my day job:
http://www.slideshare.net/almondjoy/redbooks-wiki-central-texas-dita-ug-presentation

IBM Social Computing Guidelines:
http://www.ibm.com/blogs/zz/en/guidelines.html

Social computing at ibm.com – the developerWorks community site:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/

Social computing inside IBM (look for the link to the presentation file, “IBM: Web 2.0 Goes to Work”…)
http://en.oreilly.com/webexsf2008/public/schedule/detail/3354

It was fun! I look forward to seeing everyone again at the next meeting.

Central Texas DITA UG Presentation: using DITA in BlueWiki

I was invited to present an overview of the BlueWiki project as part of a panel discussion of DITA and Wikis at the Central Texas DITA Users Group last night. Since its a DITA group I was thinking I’d be going pretty deep on the DITA integration aspects of the project. As it turns out, the discussion went all over the social computing map. From a business as usual point of view, wikis certainly are provocative. Especially to a bunch of information development professionals used to working with highly structured CMSs and business processes. Thanks very much to Anne Gentle for hosting the event (and doing all the behind the scenes coordination too). It was a lively meeting and I plan on being there for the second half of the two part topic next month.