Building a Movement: Will #gov20 and #opengov die?

I have been reading a few articles that circle around a similar topic. Adriel pens a critique of the use of Government 2.0 as tools alone, not necessarily driven by mission, @cheeky_geeky writes of the death of the goverati, @andreadimaio warns that much of this looks like an attempt to look cool, with cool toys and may not last as a result.

There is a convergence of thought happening right now. A discomfort with the state of things. An understanding, if not given a specific name, that we stand a t a decision point. One where we could push the world in a different direction, or one where we could all be investing money, effort and time on a fruitless exercise. It all depends on one thing at this point – execution.

We are at the point in this Government 2.0 thing where we must all make a decision. Do we push toward specific and measurable goals, actual large projects, concrete investment decisions, or not. Does this become what was once the promise of SOA in the tech world, or green economics in the enviro world, or financial reform currently facing many countries? Or, is this something fundamentally different, which is deserving of not only our trigger fingers on twitter to RT interesting topics, but rather a commitment to roll up our virtual sleeves, stand up and demand a new version of our world and push concrete and sustainable decisions behind it?

There are multiple very large potential futures at play:

1) New Civics – Adam Todhunter made me a fan of understanding context with regard to government and information flows to enable change. The major contextual shift that could come about with a push is restructuring how we think of our structured world. Do we identify ourselves as our geography dictates (I am an American) or as our familial structure dictates (a father and husband) or as my football allegiance lies (Manchester United or Green Bay Packers) or a cross-border group of interested parties attempting to build a notional world that leverages the power of government as a platform upon which a more sustainable world could live?

2) Direct Government – Is the notion of direct government closer to some form of reality? Do our tools lead us to being more empowered democratic consumers? Or does the onslaught of information cloud our ability to act in the civic and political world? Do we as a movement want to push hard in this direction and are we OK with the outcomes it will predict?

3) The Price of Change – And ultimately, are we willing to pay the price for real change? If we build massive public data infrastructures it will require upfront investments. From Governments, from the private sector, from citizens, from some perceived liberties…are we willing? If we take on a new idea of the state, are we willing to carve out the time for this new citizenship? Are we willing to work through the disruptions it will inevitably cause? Are we willing to push a power structure that doesn’t care to be pushed?

I am unsure of the answers the community will give to some of these questions. I do know one thing, we stand at a place that Ban Ki Moon calls the Doing Divide. There is an awful lot of talk happening about open government and Government 2.0 and change, but we stand right now with a smattering of cool tools. Will we drive entrepreneurial action as Mark asks for, will we use these tools for concrete policy outcomes as Adriel asks, will we survive the accurate criticisms from folks like Andrea to be able to drive real and actual investment decisions of national, local and regional governments across the globe?

I am certain that the only way for us to progress is to take those leaps. To act. Not to talk, but to do. And this comes from a deeply personal conviction about change.

I have preached about it for years but only this past year did I live it. Last year I weighed 260 pounds, my cholesterol and triglycerides were actually off the charts (unreadable). My blood pressure was similarly way too high I have been fat my whole life. Until last year, when I decided, to make the decision very personal. And to act. Not to talk about. Not to wonder about it. Not to research it. Not to RT about it. But to do it. And to do it every day.

I have shed 100 pounds in the last year. 18 inches off of my waist. My blood pressure, cholesterol and triglycerides is normal. I jog 2 miles every day. I eat whole foods on regular basis and I love my life again. Because of a personal conviction and a choice to actually do it. The one thing I control is my attitude and what I do each and every day. And that is an incredibly powerful thing to make actual change happen.

So now the time has come to see what we can do as the crowd. Can we turn our conviction into action? Can each of us decide to act? Can we use our tools as a means to an end? Can we accomplish concrete goals? Can we move the movement forward each and every day, even if it is by a very small step?

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Africa: MIT Wealth of Nations, eRegistry #opengov and #gov20 to Drive Economic Growth Globally

Government 2.0 and Open Government Data Could Grow Africa's Welath...

Government 2.0 and Open Government Data Could Grow Africa's Welath...

I have the honor of sitting on a board that came from MIT and specifically from Julius O. Akinyemi, the great thinker behind the eRegistry project.  The Wealth of Nations Project, and the board charged with making it real, is positioned to alter the very nature of capital structures starting in Africa, but clearly exportable to other lesser developed nations.  And Government 2.0 will play an instrumental role.

Julius has agreed to do a guest blog here on FixingPotholes.com, but until then I wanted to post a bit about the basics and the opportunity.

The project is aimed at unlocking the power of dormant trillions of dollars of local assets in parts of the world that lack a system to accurately peg that value and securitize the assets to grow local economies.  The theory of the project also embodies the local design movement in emerging markets and does not inaccurately place existing securitization strategies on top of markets that lack some of the developed world characteristics. To quote Julius,

“We will provide through economic modeling, a global standardized index that financial institutions can use to better assess individual’s worth and improve the lending practices. This process will generate needed capital in developing nations. Additionally, this process of asset securitization will provide transparency and accountability for invested and loaned funds to the various nations by the World’s financial organizations e.g. IMF.”

The transparency angle was certainly enough to get me interested in getting involved, but the best part is that the project envisions utilizing the crowd to add to securitization and leverage ICT to create a level of comfort to capital to allow the system to drive secure lending practices based upon accurate identification of risk and value in lesser developed parts of the world.  The idea is that we could develop an eRegistry to tap into local crowds to identify asset value and securitize it to an extent that the inefficiency in the current global market is corrected and the value unlocked.  The great point is that this is extensible, through open government data initiatives, to a degree that eGovernment systems can be enabled across the globe.

“As with the development of the Internet, which did not come from a single technology but from the timely convergence of multiple streams of technological development, the convergence of new technologies has the potential to enable asset owners, regardless of location or type of asset, to partake in an artificial nervous systems that can begin to sense, capture, record, transmit and even value an asset in nanoseconds via the eRegistry.

By the same token the “eRegistry” could be used as an eGovernment Revenue Generation base, Census and Population Control Issues database, Disease control and Health and wellness resource etc. The “eRegistry,” when enabled with data mining capabilities and localized economic models that consider local economic nuances, can easily predict future pricing of assets, local market behaviors and, when intelligently used with proper governance processes, will build a second understanding and “layer” of that society for both individuals and the community at large by allowing for another, more global perspective of individual and communal wealth to emerge. With this model, a new Digital Global Common Currencywill emerge that can enable global open capital sourcing. The eRegistry will enable us to build an Entrepreneurial Information Exchange Platform that could be analogous to a real-time global commerce commodities trading floor. The Information Exchange will also become an open platform for Virtual Doctors and Health Care Services, Local Commodities Trading, Media for Capital Generation, Quantitative tool for Micro credit lending efficiency, as well as products and services brokerage functions.”

I am unbelievably excited about this project and look forward to working with Julius to help drive the idea and the execution of it.  But, as always, the success of the endeavor clearly depends upon the community that reads this blog, discussing and debating and promulgating the idea.  We are already starting to work out the details, but we all remain committed to advice from our global government 2.0 community to truly tip the world in a new direction.  We will present a demonstration of the concept at the World Economic Forum in Davos coming up, lets make that an incredible experience by getting involved.

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Call to Action: Government as a Platform Globally #gov20 and #opengov

Is This Board the Government 2.0 Opportunity We Need Globally?

I sit on the Board @ the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Public Diplomacy Initiative and we had a great meeting yesterday in Washington, D.C.

Outside of the impressive resumes of all the folks involved, it was a great conversation.  We have a great mission to go after which the Governance committee is finalizing after yesterdays meeting, but will focus upon the need to create an organization that will serve as a Corporation for Public Diplomacy (based roughly upon the remit that the US Corporation for Public Broadcasting has served in their area of expertise).

I was impressed for several reasons.  First, this is seen as an effort that will embrace public diplomacy but by leveraging clearly the channels existing in the private sector.  Second, I came ready to pitch the ideals of Government as a Platform, govcamps and open data initiatives as enablers.  But the pitch was almost immediately accepted as the best way forward.  I expected a fight to get the idea embedded, but the agreement with the position was nearly universal and immediate.  This is impressive and a sign that the eventual organization will be on good footing.  Finally, it has got a great and secure foothold in a document authored by David Abshire, Special Counselor to the US President, President of the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress and co-founder Center for Strategic and International Studies.Abshire is making six policy recommendations in this admittedly draft version of his paper which has a tentative title of, A Public Strategy for Global Engagement.  There are two I want our movement to pay close attention to.  First, he advocates in the draft to “create and fund an independent grant-making Foundation for International Understanding”.  Second, he recommends “enhancing track-two diplomacy”.

Foundation for International Understanding

Abshire calls out “The explosion of digital media technologies is rapidly giving rise to an “always on, always connected” culture around much of the world. To revitalize our nation’s global engagement, we must embrace this new communication paradigm, which is increasingly dominated by “social media” that allow mass collaboration and instantaneous organization with little regard to national borders.”  This alignment of interests with the global government 2.0 movement is the opportunity we have been hoping for.  If our board is successful in creating this organization we would have much needed help in building the platform that citizens throughout the world could leverage to unlock their own power in economies throughout the world.  We have very important decision makers looking to us for ideas on how to structure a new institution that could help shape the platforms upon which new pushes for change could land.

This would be a grant-awarding organization but will also be providing platforms for success.  Instead of building the solutions themselves, I saw receptiveness to pushing awards to the creative masses in the world yearning to provide needed connections, apps and ideas.  We discussed several things which would have been great outcomes from such an effort, but that the group would not need to DO itself (Meedan, Kiva, Changemakers, etc).  In particular the focus was empowering innovators for positive change.

Track-Two Diplomacy

The second vital piece is our support of track-two diplomacy.  Basically, this theory admits that the Government itself does not have the resources or foreign credibility to accomplish many of their public diplomacy objectives.  Specifically called out, and why I was invited to join the Board, is the need to leverage the channels that are underutilized in the private sector (they also mention channels in the Education sector).  I have added to the discussion not just private sector channels, but also civic sector channels including official groups and less structured channels like the multitudes of govcamps, apps contests, churches, unions, activists and others that we could capture the passions from with this effort.  I believe we are seeing a shift in how this global community or movement is being perceived and our time is now to take advantage of the orientation.  This gives us the much needed moment to scale out our efforts to reach citizens who care from every corner of the world.  Track-two diplomacy should, by necessity, include advocacy FROM the people who have traditionally been the object of public diplomacy efforts.

In short, if we build the platform, the world will not only come, but become deeply engaged in building the world the way they each would love to see it.

The call to action:  I will be providing the group a short paper describing what we would like to see the organization do from a programmatic perspective.  Should we sponsor global app challenges?  Should we fund platform building innovations?  Should we sponsor massive investment in global govcamps to foster collaboration, innovation and progress?  I do have opinions but would love to hear more from the folks in the community about how we should respond?  Comment on this blog, DM me (@mattmiszewski) send me an email mattmis@microsoft.com.

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Kingdom of Jordan: Building a Regional ICT Platform #gov20

His Excellency Minister Marwan Juma, Leading Jordan ICT with Government 2.0

His Excellency Minister Marwan Juma, Leading Jordan ICT with Government 2.0

Was enlightened today from my interactions with the Minister of ICT of Jordan, His Excellency Marwan Juma and the new Government CIO Nabeel Al-fayoumi.  I walked away encouraged by the aggressive stance that both of them have taken in establishing Jordan as a regional hub for ICT activity in Government.  In particular, their interest in cloud computing was illustrative of their advanced orientation toward accomplishing regional growth and cooperation.

The focus on internal activity was right minded in order to gain shared services adoption and cloud-like service delivery internal to the government first.  That focus will allow them to also positively affect macro economic indicators that are holding back some of the potential for global investment in Jordan as such a regional hub.  And they are paying very close attention to the way in which organizations like the World Economic Forum are ranking their efforts and have committed to specific internal KPIs that tie back to measurements used by the WEF in their judgements.

I have some more time with the delegation tomorrow to discuss more of the details of the possibility of improving these global scores.  And I am always happy to pass along great global case studies from the readers on this blog, twitter and elsewhere.  Please let me know what you would like passed along.

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Government Needs to Understand Risk, Not Simply Avoid It

Risk in Government is Misunderstood - and the Move to the Cloud or Government 2.0?

Risk in Government is Misunderstood - and the Move to the Cloud or Government 2.0?

Professor Goldsmith does a great job of analyzing the nature of risk aversion in Government in the States.  He calls out the true costs of eliminating all risks.  As an example the choice to shut down *all* drilling in the Gulf after the BP incident this Summer.  Over 30,000 citizens were put out of work so that we could be happy with exercising a huge challenge in the public sector – our need to be binary.

Now I get the ironic nature of a guy from Microsoft taking issue with anything binary.  But for me it is one of the trickiest challenges in all of Government.  We tend to see things as either on or off, a one or a zero.  And even passionate pleas from carer civil servants all too often fall on deaf political ears.  It i a problem that most of my public sector CIO friends struggle with regularly and is, in  my opinion the difference between success or failure.

I argue a lot for the tight alignment of public sector CIOs to their political leadership.  Successful CIOs understand the deep political context and admit to its validity despite personal concerns they each may harbor.  The point is that if our global civil servants understand the political context more deeply they can more accurately asses and contextualize the risk for their political leaders.

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Japan: Kan’s Victory Could Stabalize Japanese Politics to Build their Platform #gov20

Japan's Finance Minister Naoto Kan reacts after voting in the Democratic Party of Japan party election in Tokyo

Japan's Finance Minister Naoto Kan reacts after voting in the Democratic Party of Japan party election in Tokyo

The LA Times reports on Naoto Kan’s victory Tuesday which clears the way for stability in the challenging role of PM in Japan.

Japanese politics can be difficult, but hopefully this will lead the way to the possibility for GaaP thinking to be further supported.  The Central Government has been involved with numerous efforts including METI’s Open Government efforts very recently (As well as JTA, MEXT and University of Tokyo).  The more we can utilize this calm in the storm to create a lasting peace, the netter we will be set to help push Open Government in Japan.  Hopefully Kan’s background as Finance Minister will lead the way to economic platform thinking as well, helping to lead Japan, and the world, ot of the recession.

METI’s efforts must be extended into the rest of Central government and the Prefectures must also adopt open government stances.  Tokyo is well positioned to accomplish this and more and a number of regional governments could help Kan by taking the lead as well.

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Government as a Platform: Financial Platforms and Basel III versus #Gov20

Bank for International Settlements, Basel, Switzerland - Basel III versus Government 2.0

Bank for International Settlements, Basel, Switzerland - Basel III versus Government 2.0

My 11 year old daughter as well as my nearly 21 year old sister both tell me that my status updates make little to no sense to them and that they find my posts boring :) .  Well, they should probably tune out for this one.

Basel III recently found agreement in Switzerland to a new banking regulatory scheme that has been years in the making.  While it has heightened importance due to the existing economic conditions, Basel has been vital for years.  In terms of our work on Gov2.0, it is a good example of stable platforms which can be built and can even be modified to allow for non-state actors to perform upon.  And with regard to the ongoing debate over things such as the need for long term horizons in building GaaP’s, this is certainly one that fits the bill.

In a recent OECD paper they even go well beyond the normal political timelines and are looking post-Basel III already.  Good for them.  While I am in general a laissez-faire type of guy, these types of frameworks, or platforms, are a must for all of us to live inside of sustainable change environments.  The details of the rules may seem arcane, but it is important that regular citizens start to consume some of these things and push for each of our governments to find common ground on financial and banking reform worldwide.

In particular I appreciate the OECD actually bringing up and attempting to address the grey market in their paper.  It is vital that our open government efforts and our regulatory frameworks, don’t simply contemplate the world as we have planned it to be, but rather, the world as it actually is.  This also goes to the heart of data reliability and data integrity as Ellen brought up at G2S this past week.

So, even though my sister and my daughter will not have read this far, thanks to the Basel II contingent in living out the Government as a Platform vision.

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