Public Strategy

Guruvision

As expected, there is now a video of Howard Rheingold’s Reboot Britain presentation – scroll down the thumbnails on the right, his is the last one (though there is lots of good stuff along the way worth being diverted by).  I haven’t watched the whole thing yet, but have seen enough to confirm my suspicion that this was the more interesting of the two he gave in London that week, developing ideas around what it means to be literate and critical in a networked world.  Worth watching.

You can also watch the director’s cut – but the aspect ratio has gone a bit wrong, so I prefer not to.

A tale of three gurus

Months can go by without encountering a single guru, then before you know it, three come along in a single week (actually there were more, but they were so thick on the ground that some I merely brushed past on staircases, rather than hearing them speak).

Second of the three was Howard Rheingold, famous as the author of Smart Mobs, one of the first accounts of how group behaviour is affected in powerful ways by digital technology.  When it came out in 2002, it felt prescient: Rheingold’s expertise was in spotting the signs of a big thing to come and bringing the unfamiliar to life.  By instinct, rather than profession, he is an anthropologist:  what interests him is what people actually do.  By implication, he sees behaviour as an emergent property of human sociability (stretching back to the earliest human tribes) and technological development, rather than as something which can be corralled or directed.

Howard and his jacket each independently has considerable stage presence. He gives a powerful account of what’s going on and why it matters, and has the storyteller’s knack of using examples to illustrate the rate and direction of change.  He starts with epiphanies in Tokyo and Helsinki, realising that people are watching their phones, not talking to them, and are sharing what they see and quickly moves on to the overthrow of President Estrela in the Philippines in 2001 – political power mobilised by text message. Curiously, digging out my copy of the book after writing those sentences, epiphany is the word Rheingold himself uses to describe that sudden realisation that something important was new and different.  He has some telling one liners:  on a school protest by students in Los Angeles, ‘none of these young people joined Myspace in order to co-ordinate political action’.  But while he takes a grand sweep through history (and indeed pre-history) to illustrate his assertion that we are humans because we use new media to do interesting things, from the development of language and the transformational power of successive waves of communication technology, he never really moves beyond being a raconteur – at which he is superb – or indeed much beyond the ideas he wrote about in 2002.  An approach which was radical and full of insight then felt a bit strange being addressed to an audience which was – in part – itself a form of smart mob, including Joanne Jacob’s liveblog of his presentation.

Only, tantalisingly, in answering a question at the end did Rheingold start to share some new thinking, talking about internet literacy and the vital need for people to develop (or, rather, be taught) skills such as critical discernment.  I get the impression that that was a much more central part of his talk at Reboot Britain earlier in the week, which was a session I didn’t get to.  According to Roland Harwood, Rheingold talked there about five forms of literacy we should be teaching our children:  attention, participation, collaboration, crap detection and network awareness.  There is a bootleg-style video of that session available with shaky camera and fuzzy sound.  I am waiting a bit in the hope that an ‘official’ version will emerge soon before watching it [now available here].

Third guru of the week was Manuel Castells who is at first sight the almost complete opposite of Howard Rheingold:  the soberly-dressed academic, introducing his new scholarly tome, Communication Power which was published this week at a 4iP breakfast.  Castells is systematic, rigorous and analytical – but he wears it lightly and in speaking (sometimes more than in writing) makes his thinking very accessible.  In one sense, he and Rheingold were covering very similar ground and it says something about their similarities and differences when you realise that when Castells talks about instant communities of political practice he means pretty much the same as what Rheingold means when he talks about smart mobs.  But it would be a huge mistake to underestimate Castells as a wordy theorist.  Once you start listening, this stuff has real bite.

His starting point is that power and communication are intertwined:

Power is more than communication, and communication is more than power.  But power relies on the control of communication, as counterpower depends on breaking through that control.  And mass communication, the communication that potentially reaches society at large, is shaped and managed by power relationships, rooted in the business of media and the politics of the state.  Communication power is at the heart of the structure and dynamics of society. 

Communication Power, p3

He sees two kinds of power – the power to impose and the power to construct meaning; or the power to coerce and the power of influence.  What has changed and is changing is how the power of influence works:  our current system is based on there only being a small number of influencers (because printing presses and broadcast spectrum are scarce and expensive) and was kept honest only by a small number of professional journalists.  That falls apart in a world of 1.6 billion internet users and more than twice as many mobile phones.  What that doesn’t, of course, do is change anything (at least directly) about the use of coercive power.  Recent events in Iran have been a powerful example of the new opportunities for political organisation and mobilisation created by the internet – but they haven’t had any effect so far on changing anything of substance about the Iranian government.  What’s important though is that while governments can, quite literally, shoot the messenger, they cannot kill the message.  Castells argues that governments cannot turn the internet off:  they can turn off wireless communication, but use of the internet is so completely embedded in how so much gets done that it cannot in practice be turned off, which in turn creates opportunities to route round obvious blocks.

That led Castells to what I think were two distinctions, though sometimes it seemed that they collapsed into each other:  between governments and the governed and between younger, networked generations and older, pre-network generations.  Governments’ strengths in managing not just the exercise of power but the perception of the exercise of power, and in managing the expression of opinion and influence through political parties starts to collapse:  people want to express views about issues, not express choices between parties.  Governments will have no incentive to let go of their power readily, so in the end it will have to be taken from them.

A second line of argument then comes in: that governments are anyway too slow and sclerotic to do anything other than inhibit progress.  Castells’ advice is to ignore them: ‘If we relied on government for innovation we would still be in the stone age’.  The best that can be hoped for from governments is that they provide some funding and do not oppose change; it is to much to hope that they will support it.

I sense that these arguments lead to a conundrum he wasn’t really addressing – and so opens him to the accusation he got from a questioner at the end of being ‘techno-deterministic’.  If younger/more net-savvy generations want to take power with the intention of doing different things with it (and even that expression is probably more deterministic than it should be, there is no hive mind at work here) and governments/older generations don’t want to relinquish power, not least because they have no comprehension of what they might be relinquishing it in favour of, resolution can only come either from a fight (possibly quite literally) or from waiting out the generational change.  But it’s not in either side’s interest for that to happen, or at least for it to happen abruptly or violently, so the really interesting question is whether change can be better managed, and if so how.  I had hoped to have the opportunity to ask that, but didn’t get the chance.

And so to the first guru of the week, left until last because he doesn’t fit the stereotype which in their very different ways Castells and Rheingold embody:  Craig Newmark, who spoke at Reboot Britain last Monday.

I have already written a couple of sentences on what he talked about, and there is not much more I want to add.  What makes Newmark remarkable and interesting is not what he says but what he has done and what he continues to do.  The eponymous Craigslist is phenomenally successful, exceptionally simple (making even google look cluttered and over done), has made a material contribution to the problems of the US newspaper industry by taking a major source of revenue out from under them, and still has its founder doing customer service personally.  One of his themes was that the success of Silicon Valley could be directly attributed to the complete acceptance of failure, and that other parts of the US, to say nothing of Europe, struggled because failure was seen as terminal.

It’s tempting at this point to invent some inevitably spurious grand unifying conclusion which attempts to make sense of the coincidence of all three being in London in the same week.  It’s a temptation almost certainly better avoided, so instead I will end with some slightly random thoughts which found some echo between these three.

One is the qualitative difference in the nature of current changes compared with earlier transformations.  The internet may be no more subversive than the printing press, but its deployment has been compressed into a shorter period and of course, critically, we don’t know how the story turns out

Another is a sense of contempt – or perhaps more weary indifference – about government.  It is seen as a set of institutionalised obstacles, clinging to a view of the world which died sometime in the last century.  For anyone in government who, pretty much by definition, doesn’t think that government is intrinsically a bad thing, that’s a rather uncomfortable state of affairs. 

A third is a sense that there hasn’t been nearly enough change:  optimism about the internet as a force for good, offset by a concern that ways of doing things are a long way short of catching up, not least in education.

In short, all good challenging stuff.  The thing I would now most like from last week is a transcript of Manuel Castells’ talk.  I suspect I am not going to get it, which leaves 500 pages of his book to work through instead.  This could take a while.

Rebooting into touch

I have mixed feelings about a day spent at Reboot Britain.  I am glad I went:  I saw some interesting material and had some interesting conversations.  But I also found it quite frustrating.  The event as a whole seemed perpetually to be on the verge of breaking into a rich discussion, but it never quite happened (except to some extent on the extensive Twitter back channel) – so I kept feeling that I was in a building full of bright and interesting people, most of whom were not able to contribute much.  More importantly, though, I felt, in the end that it was less than the sum of its parts.

Perhaps the rebooting metaphor was more apt than was intended.  The point of rebooting is not to create something new or different; it is to restore something old and well established to its original state – which is not, I think, the ambition of most of those involved with Reboot Britain.

But that’s not to say that some of the individual sessions and speakers were not very good indeed.  Since for quite a large part of the day there were seven parallel sessions running, no two people’s experience will have been quite the same.  Some of the highlights for me were:

• Martha Lane Fox, speaking about her new role as digital inclusion champion – an adroit balance of insight and recognition that this is a new area for her, dispelling any thought that this might be a token appointment.  She had some telling figures:  80% of government interactions are with the poorest 25% of people who are much less likely to be online; being online correlates with 10% higher earnings and 25% higher confidence (though it would be nice to see the detail to be clear what is driving what).
• Craig Newmark, who casually observed that it was over three hours since he had done any actual customer service, before noting that Craigslist is self-policing in the same way that the streets are self-policing – in other words, most people behave well most of the time, members of the community can enforce social norms and call for backup if that doesn't work, allowing the ‘professional’ police force to be very small:  Craigslist has a total staff of thirty supporting 50 million monthly users and 40 million new adverts.  Craig’s account reminded me of William Davies’ post a few months ago on policing in Hackney
• Antonio Gould and Matt Marsh who did a splendid double act on commissioning services with a user-led approach.  Antonio managed to put neatly into words a thought that I have been expressing much more clumsily, ‘Designing for ourselves is easy. Designing for other people is hard.’  I will be coming back to some of their thoughts when, as I hope, some of their visual material becomes available.
• Dominic Campbell, Emer Coleman and Andy Sawford who were all thought provoking on a panel about local government, despite the fact – or rather because – remarkably little of what they had to say was particularly specific to local government.

In the end, I am left with some sympathy with Julian Dobson’s assessment from a distance:

The aim is to 'explore how can we take advantage of the radically networked digital world we now live in to help revive our economy, rebuild our democratic structures and improve public services'. It's a noble aim, so good luck to them.

But let's get real. A huge amount of what's happening in social media is the usual educated, well connected middle class people talking to other educated, well connected middle class people.

More good things will no doubt emerge as presentation material and videos of some of the main sessions start to emerge over the coming days.  The thought in my mind as I left the conference, though, was that while I have no doubt of the transformative power of the internet or of the fact that we are only at the early stages of seeing the effect of that power on government (or rather more, at this stage, on politics, which is not the same thing), we shouldn’t underestimate the resilience, for good or ill, of institutions and the processes they support and are supported by.

Not a post about VRM, more a post about lobster pots

William Heath has written a characteristically thoughtful piece about VRM.  Equally characteristically, he sent round an email (starting ‘Dear enlightened public-sector loving friends…’ – who could possibly resist?) seeking comments and responses.  I feel a bit apologetic, therefore, that this is not such a response.  Although perhaps it will turn out that it is.

Enough obscurantism.  Let’s start at the beginning.  VRM is hardly a term in common use (and William kindly points us to to Wikipedia’s explanation).  It stands for Vendor Relationship Management, conceived of as an opposite, the reciprocal of Customer Relationship Management.  CRM is what big organisations do to us; VRM turns the tables and allows us to manage our relationships with them.  So instead of them having lots of detailed (but potentially outdated and inaccurate) data about us, we hold our own data and choose to supply it where and when and to the extent that it creates value for us.  Apart from much else, that, arguably, puts some of incentives in the right place to work effectively:  if I control my name record, it will always be spelled right; if they do, repeated experience is that that they will often spell it consistently and relentlessly inaccurately.  Not only is that a better world for me, it is arguably a better world for them:  large organisations will be liberated from the need for large and cumbersome databases, which cost a great deal of money to build and maintain without ever quite working as well as one might hope.

That’s not a small matter.  William says that ‘VRM will allow a transformation that is living, human, and compassionate’.  It will cut costs, improve the quality of public services, de-tox the database state, and be the basis for co-creation (moving us from being customers to being participants).  That’s great – and the fact that I am rushing over all of this isn’t because I don’t see the force and attraction of VRM:  given a choice between a VRM world and a CRM world, VRM has a lot going for it.  But particularly because William is interested in the public sector, there are two critical questions to address, not just one.  And what this post is really about is those two questions, using VRM as an interesting and thought provoking example, rather than focusing on the substance of VRM as such.

The first question is the obvious one:  where do we want to go?  That is a critically important question and it can look like a hard question, sometimes an impossibly hard question, which is not the same thing.  But it is often a great deal easier than the second question:  how do we get there from here?

The reason why the second question is hard usually doesn’t have much to do with whatever is being proposed in isolation, it has to do with dealing with the installed base and with the consequence of decisions made in the past, sometimes a long time in the past.  To take a very different example, the reason why it is impossible to fit air conditioning on London’s deep tube lines is that all the design decisions were made a hundred years ago on the basis of the technology then available, the requirements then understood and, critically, the absence of anything to learn from  as they were the first of their kind anywhere in the world.   The result is that there simply isn’t room in the tunnels for anything more than the current trains, the cross sections of which are necessarily pretty much identical to those of a century ago.

So the VRM challenge is not just that vendors/service providers/government departments hold information in big databases and that many things might work better if instead the data were distributed, held and managed by individuals, or even that there would need to be some means of getting data from one set of places to another.  It is that every bit of process – human, clerical, IT system, legal framework, behavioural expectations – is currently designed, or rather has grown up over the years without very much overall design, on the assumption that data is to be found in databases.  That is an enormous challenge, dwarfing any kind of transformation programme I am aware of anywhere in government (or anywhere else for that matter).

That’s where the lobster pots come in.  They are easy enough to get into, but hellish difficult to reverse back out of, as any number of unhappy lobsters could testify.  They account for an awful lot of things:  electoral systems tend to be like that – they evolve in a particular direction, but having done so can be very hard to change if the direction stops being the most useful one.  That’s not the fault of the people wanting the new direction – their entire aim in life is to provide us with a better way forward which avoid the problems of the past.  But although it’s not in any way their fault, they are still stuck with the challenge, because if they don’t have an account of what the trap door looks like in their particular lobster pot which would allow us to swim away, their concern risks seeming very abstract.  Or in other words, what you have to say about how to get there from here is one of things which can add to the weight of what you have to say about where we should be going.

None of that is intended as a recipe of despair.  Just because change is hard, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t keep trying to do it.  But it is an argument that if we don’t think as carefully about the change process as about the desired change outcome, there is little point in worrying too much about the outcome because we aren’t going to get there.

So I suggest there are two things which the advocates of VRM need to do.  The first is to recognise that data and the control of data are components of much larger and more complex systems and to start to think aloud about the implications of one for the other.  The second – as a matter of some urgency - is to find a better name.  VRM is a very smart formulation, but it’s not one that will ever easily go mainstream.  It is a negative definition in being coined as the opposite of CRM, which makes a neat point but will never catch on with people who don’t have any idea what CRM is in the first place; it is a definition which points in the wrong direction – the whole point is that the focus is not on the vendor; it is a definition which is too narrow – you can describe government services in many ways, but vendor is not generally one of them; and it’s a TLA in a world already considerably over-populated with such things.  It’s also a tiny example of the lobster pot challenge:  it will be much easier to change the name now than in the future once it has become part of the installed base of language.  And if it feels hard to change the name now, how much harder will it be to change the substance of our approach to managing data for the future?

Random thoughts from the Tower

Tower 09 was over a fortnight ago.  My notes are, as always, close to illegible.  The attribution of thoughts to speakers may bear no resemblance to what they think they said.  The failure to attribute thoughts to speakers does not mean either that they didn't have any or that they weren’t interesting.  I was only there for the morning, so have nothing to offer on the afternoon sessions.  

Steph Gray talked about some recent DIUS research.  His killer factoid was that 55% of young people have friends over when they use the internet – in other words, being online is not a single isolated or isolating experience.  That has some huge implications for understanding and seeking to influence people’s behaviour.

As part of the same sequence, Steph also said that 50% of employers use wikis for business purposes.  I am not immediately sure how plausible that feels:  if it means that the employees of 50% of employers sometimes use wikis (where wiki ≅ wikipedia), quite possibly.  But if it means that 50% of employers are using wikis for some core business purpose, I would be surprised, to put it mildly.  Either way, though, rooting our thinking in how people are actually doing things rather than on some vague hope of what we might want them to do is indisputably the right way forward.

Ed Mayo offered a stark contrast.  What people want is things which are fun, easy and popular (and if I understood him right, as much social as popular in the narrow sense).  What they tend to get from public services is boring difficult and lonely.  He gave a powerful example of an anti-smoking project for pregnant women in Sunderland:  when the campaign was aimed at the women, it wasn’t very effective; when it worked with the women, its effectiveness went up ten-fold.  That resonated particularly strongly, partly because I had been thinking for other reasons about the risk that the experience of a service might directly undermine its effectiveness, and partly because it so strongly reinforced Steph’s point about the internet as social activity.

The surprising star of the show for me, though was Mervyn Davies, the Minister for Trade and Investment.  I will use the fact that he has been a member of the government only since January as my thin excuse for never having heard of him.  The focus of his speech was much on government directly, and rather more on applying his experience of working at Standard Chartered and as a non-exec at Tesco.  What distinguishes Tesco, he said, is fanaticism about customers – the voice of the customer pervades everything:

• when we track the customer, what is their experience like?  the young people in our organisation will have the best ideas
• both Tesco and Standard Chartered succeeded by empowerment
• transformation requires greater experiments; that entails mistakes, which must be accepted without blame
• but lessons have to be learned – which can only happen if they are talked about openly
• talking about mistakes shows a commitment to listening and is a requirement for continuous improvement.

There wasn’t a single board meeting, he said, which did not focus on incidents of poor customer experience, which all need to be talked about at the top table in detail.

When Davies did turn to government, he said that one of the contrasts he had noted with his private sector experience was that in government the window of opportunity for decision making is very short, because of the intensity of media interest, with the result that there were strong pressures to short-term protective decision making.  Those in turn are therefore more likely to be tweaks to existing ways of doing things rather than radical change – but the world is changing so fast that business models inevitably are out of date, so we need to be open to radical transformation.

I wonder for how many public sector organisations it is true that the primary focus of board conversations is customers and their experience.

Is the Tower still made of ivory?

The Tower 09 conference a week ago was interesting , a slightly smaller follow on to the bigger and brasher event a year ago.  It was a curious event – quite a lot of good stuff, but in a format which feels increasingly old fashioned, and with a very strange sense of its place in the world.

Tom Watson opened with a good speech, of which both text and video can be found on the Cabinet Office website,  and which  included a quietly revolutionary line:

Fifteen months ago, Power of Information was yet another document lying in the middle of our Whitehall in-trays.  Now, I consider it the blueprint for the core business of government.

John Hoggard liveblogged the whole thing and there was plenty of back channel conversation.  Richard Allan, Steph Gray and Ed Mayo provided rich food for thought.   Mervyn Davies made a really powerful speech, linking his past experience as a company director to his current experience as a minister. So why did it all feel a bit frustrating?

Part of it was that at an event which was all about engagement, responsiveness, collaboration and co-production it seemed particularly odd to be sitting silently watching presentations, with a few minutes of roving mic Q&A to end each session.  I talked to Richard in the break, who said it now felt very strange to him being on a stage doing a monologue, and we agreed that we wanted something that wasn’t quite a bar camp or unconference,  but certainly wasn’t a traditional conference either.

Part of it was that at an event which was all about communication, opening up data, allowing people to repurpose and build on what others have done, the material is all locked away.  The links two paragraphs back are all to blogs and bios, not to anything to do with the event.  I have just had an email with a link to the presentations, but with a stern warning that they are only for attendees and are hidden behind a user name and password, a reflection of the old view that value comes from scarcity, rather than abundance.  Lord Davies’ speech seems lost altogether – he didn’t use slides, and there is no reference to it on BERR’s lists of speeches and press notices.

And part of it was that at an event which was about people connecting and communicating more efficiently, using opportunities created by technology, but where the technology itself is in an important sense incidental, the conference was described on the brand new Cabinet Office digital engagement blog as ‘a joint Cabinet Office/Intellect conference on Government IT’.  Well, yes.  But no.  Really no.  Government IT is a huge and important subject, but this wasn’t a conference about it.

None of which is to say that it was all bad.  Quite the contrary, lots of stimulating good ideas – and I will reflect on some of them in a separate post.

Before you can find a solution, you need to be clear about the problem

The publication of the advert for the new Director of Digital Engagement has prompted an outburst of commentary, with two of the most interesting contributions both coming from Steph Gray, who is systematically crowdsourcing the real requirements of the job.  And of course that process works both ways:  it makes visible what the crowd thinks about the job, but that then makes visible something about the crowd as well.

Steph's first contribution looks at what needs to be done, eliciting 21 propositions completing the sentence “I would like the Director of Digital Engagement to...”.  Anybody is free to add to the list and to vote on their own and others' ideas.  The voting is showing an interesting pattern, with three clear groups:  one idea which has led the voting from the outset, a second group of six ideas with consistent strong support, and a long tail of fourteen ideas with gently declining scores (the lowest score is one vote, meaning that not even the person suggesting it thought it was that good).

The leading idea is Promote the procurement of small, creative suppliers,  addressing the very specific - and very real - problem of how to do quick implementations in a world of cumbersome contracts with large IT providers which were never designed for small guerrilla projects on the cutting edge.  The first idea attempts to solve the problem by changing the rules on procurement; interestingly, the second-ranked idea - Set up an online deliberation platform for government - is aimed at a variant of the same problem through the provision of a platform which means it only needs to be solved once rather than many times.

The second tier of ideas aren't quite as easily lumped together, and it would be completely unfair to generalise, but I am going to anyway.  Several of them are broadly (very broadly) about how to get the tools into use and get useful things done with them - promoting experimentation, making sure that civil servants are blocked from social media, and more generally and more succinctly, implementing the POIT recommendations.

This is all good - and necessary - stuff, but it's all a bit technocratic.  I know the frustration of  cumbersome supplier arrangements designed for a different purposes in what feels like a different era - but is it really the single most important barrier we face?  We know there are some great people doing fantastic work but who feel weighed downby the environment in which they have to operate, and there is no question that doing something about that would be very well worth doing.  But doing all of them will do relatively little to ensure that “the use of world class digital engagement techniques should be embedded in the normal work of Government”.  Owen Barder puts it pretty starkly:

Here is a job I might have applied for if I were in London… But I’m quite glad not to be eligible…

In plain English, the post will have no staff, no budget, no power, and yet Ministers expect you to see to it that within two years the UK Government will make world class use of digital engagement.

Good luck to whoever gets this job!

That neatly brings us to Steph's second contribution to the debate, focusing this time on the sort of person needed to do digital engagement, rather than on what they should do.  It's not specifically focused on the Director post - though presumably the implication is that that person should embody elements of all the types Steph identifies:

• Campaign strategist
• Community manager
• Social media developer
• Digital mentor
• Social reporter

Describing roles within digital engagement

View more presentations from Steph Gray. (tags: digital engagement social media)

A team capable of filling all those roles and the different mixes of skills behind them would be a very powerful one.  It's notable - and no doubt part of the point being made - that only one of them is a techy role in any normal sense, reinforcing the idea that it's the engagement which is at the centre of digital engagement.  But there is, I think, something critical missing, at least for organisations where many senior decision makers are somewhere between unfamiliar and uncomfortable with all of thus - which I suspect covers most of the UK public sector.

There are some important lessons from the US presidential transition here.  Mark O'Neill and Paul Canning both report on Thomas Gensemer's recent visit to the UK, with Paul picking out what I think is the key line:  “None of this is a technology challenge; it's an organisational challenge, being willing to communicate with people”.  To take that one step further, David Robinson has spotted that the transition allows a before and after comparison:

Barack Obama's web team is certainly one of the best that has ever been assembled. His staff did a fantastic job on the campaign site, and produced an also excellent, if slightly less dynamic, transition site at Change.gov. On its way to the White House, however, a team comprised of many of the same people seemed to lose its mojo. The complaints about the new Whitehouse.gov site—slow to be updated, lacking in interactivity—are familiar to observers of other .gov sites throughout the government.

What happened? It's not plausible to suppose that Obama's staffers have somehow gotten worse as they have moved from campaign to transition to governance. Instead, they have faced an increasingly stringent and burdensome array of regulations as they have become progressively more official. The transition was a sort of intermediate phase in this respect, and the new team now faces the Presidential Records Act, the Paperwork Reduction Act, and a number of other pre-Internet statutory obligations. This experience teaches that the limitations of the federal web reflect the thicket of rules to which such sites are subject—not the hardworking people who labor under those rules.

Putting all that together, it feels to me that the missing component is a broader sense of change management:  how do government departments (and other public sector organisations) become places where radical, bottom up approaches t0 problem solving flourish?  One approach is to say that that is itself a bottom up process - “the top can't stay top for the bottom is shifting” as Brecht put it in a rather different context.  That may well be right - but I am not sure that it is going to be right enough quickly enough for the Director of Digital Engagement to meet her targets.  The alternative approach is to put more emphasis on internal change, not primarily as a goal in its own right, but as a way of accelerating the process.  And ‘alternative’ is probably not the right word:  it's more like a catalyst, a way of accelerating the reaction which we really care about.  Emma Mulqueeny puts that neatly

If you could have two days of a great, proven geek and combine this with three days of someone who knows how government works now, with the empathy to nurture that which has been created or started so far in scattered spaces and the foresight to recognise and develop the skilled civil servants already doing this stuff (no I am not blowing my own trumpet, am not a civil servant); that would be a good thing

So what is the crowd telling us about itself?  A little bit of evidence mixed with a healthy dose of interpretation points me to three indicators of where we have got to:

• For very good reasons, a lot of the change we have seen so far is at the edges - it's easier, safer, more productive and considerably cheaper to be subversive there than at the core of delivery.  That can lead to more widespread and deeper change - indeed, in the long run it will lead to more widespread and deeper change - but it's a hard and slow way of doing it.  In the early stages, it's probably also the only way of doing it.  What we are now seeing is the beginning of the transition to the next stage of change,  a micro-instance of the innovator's dilemma together with the frustration of slow change.
• Much of the public sector social media conversation is about social media rather than using social media (with the valuable and valid exception of social media bootstrapping - using the practice of social media to enhance and deepen the practice of social media).  Cabinet Office guidelines notwithstanding, it is still far from easy for civil servants to blog the substance of government. Again, those are not signs of weakness or failure; they are indicators of where we have got to in the change process 
• This is still a tiny minority. The total number of votes on the 21 propositions implies that about 40 people have voted.  That suggests the existence of a big enough group to make a difference, but one which remains a tiny fraction of the population it is seeking to influence.  To take just one subset of that, there are 4,750 senior civil servants, who form a group which it is critically important to influence but is largely innocent of any understanding.  Most of them won't be on the leading edge of any of this, but many more have the power either to facilitate or to obstruct and it is critically important which of those they choose to do.  That choice will be based not on whether all this is a good thing or not, but on whether it helps them achieve their objectives - so what they need to know is whether and how it will.

So there is definitely a job to be done.  And this is a job for a generalist - not any random generalist, to be sure.  For both the skills and the positional authority needed to make this work at the next level, she will need the status - and therefore the money - which in the Whitehall pecking order is the quick indicator of who comes where.  Whether such a paragon exists, whether even such a paragon could meet the expectations set in the job description, and whether the job description is written in a way which maximises the chances of the right people applying all for now remain uncertain.

How far away is the new world?

Martin Stewart Weeks has a question. 

For the most part, government is not being done in recognizably different ways and certainly not ways that, in any reasonable interpretation of the word, would count as ‘transformation’ . Underlying structures and systems remain largely unchanged. It’s even harder to discern much real shift in underlying culture and behaviour. The compelling and provocative insights of the kind of world that Charles Leadbeater sketches in his new book We Think (as just one example of many analysts and writers) - open, collaborative, subject to new forms of collective intelligence, breaking down the silos etc - are notable too often for their absence in the settled and intractable world of public policy and public management. 

Am I being unfair?

I think the short answer is ‘yes’.  It is unfair, because there is an unspoken switch of focus in the comparison.  No, there isn't yet much shift in underlying culture and behaviour in public policy and management.  But that is surely because the public sector largely reflects the wider society of which it is part, not because it fails to.  Most organisations do not live in a web 2.0 world.  People reading blogs are a small minority, people writing them are a small minority of that minority, and the conversations we have among ourselves are not representative of how the rest of the world thinks about and does things.  For the most part, business is not being done in recognisably different ways - or at least, it is instructive to think about where it is and isn't. 

Take the level of resistance and incomprehension shown by the film and music industries.  The signals for change have been clearer, the potential rewards for change much greater, alternative models far more obvious and key parts of the market much more ready to change than is true for most public service providers.  Napster showed the big labels what the future looked like in 1999:  they chose to look resolutely in the other direction.  Mark Cuban dared to challenge the idea that DVDs should come out months after cinema releases and later suggested that the best thing to do with film soundtracks was to give them away - and is treated as an idiot by the rest of the industry. 

Those are interesting examples for a couple of reasons.  The first is that both industries are inherently digital, so might be thought to be more likely than others to recognise and respond to the challenge of the changing environment.  The second is that in both cases they have embraced changes in the means and methods of production while resisting changes to the means of distribution:  the dynamics of the back end and the front end have been very different. 

Government is, of course, about more than production and distribution.  It is about engagement and participation too.  Most of us are free riders there, just as we are with wikipedia and linux.  Amazon and Netflix will use their customers' actions and opinions to improve the recommendations they make - and in a delightfully recursive way, Netflix is using the wisdom of the crowd to improve the way it uses the wisdom of the crowd - but they don't want us to talk back.  I am struggling to think of a mainstream commercial service where the principles of marketing as conversation are really at the heart of the approach. 

That leaves social media.  It's pretty self-evident that government is not much like Facebook.  But in many ways it would be odd if it were:  government is not about democracy, it is the thing to which we apply democracy.  Facebook is more a substitute for an evening at the pub than it is likely to be for an evening at Conway Hall.  It is a good thing that No10 is playing with twitter, but right now that's on the margins of the margin, and it is probably more important that Patient Opinion is doing what it does - which of course is not a government service at all.

Governments are as vulnerable to the innovator's dilemma as anyone, so it is not altogether surprising that this should be so.  And it is made more difficult again by the fact that it is rarely if ever straightforward to innovate in government services without the consent and participation of government - which is essentially the point Tom Steinberg is reported as making in Martin's follow up post - so reducing the power of the disruptive newcomers to replace conservative incumbents by innovating round them.

So is government slow to change and to embrace the new opportunities created by its changing environment?  No argument there.  Is there greater shielding from the effects of that environmental change in government than in other sectors?  Yes, probably (though that needs to be a description, not an excuse).  But is all that a sign that government is operating in some different and more antique world than other large, long-established organisations?  That's much less clear.  As I have reflected on before, there are reasons for change in government being slow which aren't intrinsic to its being government.

Blogging “blogging”

Seth Godin is providing advice on how to blend in with the natives:

A blog is something you have (unlike a Facebook). And blog is also a verb. As in, “I have a blog, this blog, which you probably found by googling me. I blogged about Facebook (which I'm on but don't use often). I don't IM, and I'm impossibly lax about friending people.”

It is easy and pointless to sneer at those who don't get it.  Much more interesting to apply the principles of language maps to chart where the invisible boundaries come.  One of those boundaries forms around “a blog” used to mean a part rather than the whole: “I wrote a blog” rather than “I have a blog”.  I have started to hear the former usage - which tells me that too many people are trapped on the wrong side of an iron curtain they do not know is there.

Gestures and symbols

Change has to start somewhere.  Sometimes that starting point can be - or has to be - big and dramatic, but probably more often it's small and tentative.  We may know where we want to get to, we may know the direction in which to start off, but there cannot be a second step until after there has been a first.

When it works, the first small steps can be a powerful symbol of the intended greater change.  But when the necessary change is large and the initial  steps are small - particularly in relation to the capacity of those making the steps - the effect can be more gesture than symbol.  As in so much else, it is the perception of the observer, not the intention of the actor, which determines which is which.

And so we learn that civil servants will no longer be drinking bottled water at meetings.

Whether that should count as gesture or symbol is not a question which has a right answer.   But anybody who wants to manage change should pause to reflect on which it is - and why.