The Open Government Challenge

Sometimes worlds collide and it is a good thing. Recently, my interest in enterprise collaboration has intersected with my engagement in local civic affairs and my exposure to the principles and practices of Open Government.

After several years of working at it, I have become quite proficient using social collaboration tools as integral part of how I do work - how I collaborate with colleagues and share knowledge in my professional life. So much so that I have come to take the use of social technologies for granted.

In my personal life I have been involved for the past two years in the successful efforts to reunite the two Princeton municipalities, The Borough of Princeton and Princeton Township. As of this past new year's day we are one community with one government. I was active in the grass roots effort to pass the consolidation ballot measure and then after the measure passed I was a resident volunteer on the information technology subcommittee of the Transition Task Force (TTF).

The TTF and its subcommittees were comprised of resident volunteers, elected officials, municipal administrators and their staff. The members of the TTF and the subcommittees collaborated to collect and analyze data, consider alternatives and make recommendations to the elected officials.

As I reflect on my experience on the TTF I must say that I believe that it was an excellent example of what I have come to understand to be the principles of Open Government. It was transparent, participatory, and collaborative. But the practices were not up to the Open Government standards. We did not utilize social technologies, such as a collaboration platform or a collaborative document management capability to collaborate. We were very reliant on face-to-face meetings.  Multiple versions of working documents had to be manually combined and reconciled.

We were committed to transparency and openness, all of the meetings notices were published in advance and the meetings were open to public attendance. However as a group we lacked the requisite knowledge and experience to employ social technologies effectively in practice. Despite the fact that all of the volunteers were highly skilled in their areas of expertise, we did not have a critical mass of savvy social technology users. Part of the challenge was also due to the time constraints imposed on the effort by the aggressive timeline from public approval to required transition implementation. There simply was not enough time to educate the group and establish these capabilities upfront in the process.

As I go forward I intend to expand my interest in enterprise collaboration to include the growing Open Government movement. I hope to put these principles into practice in my community. How about you?

Working Out Loud

Happy New Year!

Just over two years ago +Bryce Williams described a new type of behavior at work that is enabled by social collaboration tools. On his blog he posited that "Working Out Loud" = Observable Work + Narrating Your Work.

Image: http://johnstepper.com/2012/05/26/working-out-loud-your-personal-content-strategy/

Social media platforms enable "many to many" communications in a way that was not previously possible. And while there is great value in sharing content with your network of connections after it has been created, there is even more value to be gained by collaborating to create content in first place. Whether it be by capturing comments from a close colleague or serendipitous feedback from an acquaintance, leveraging the knowledge, skills and experience of the network to create value comes by creating together.

But the opportunity to exploit the leverage available to us is dependent upon our willingness to change the way in which we work, to expose our work to our colleagues and to invite others to contribute.

I have been experimenting with Working Out Loud as I perform my duties as an adviser to my client and as a leader on my project and in our consulting organization. To get started, I have made a few adjustments in the way in which I work, including:

• Establishing open groups on our internal social business collaboration platform for the team that I lead on my client project as well as other work related teams to which I belong,
• Inviting my direct team members, as well as extended team members, to join the groups,
• Posting a number of reference materials to seed the groups with material,
• Customizing the group spaces using available widgets to provide a continuous flow of fresh links to relevant internal and external content via tags and keyword searches,
• Updating my status on the platform routinely to reflect topics that I am working on,
• Publishing drafts of documents under development, with a statement of intent and structure, and inviting colleagues to comment and update as needed,
• Referring to content on the group page during meetings using an overhead projector and a web-meeting / teleconference,
• Actively sending a link to content on the group page in lieu of sending copies of content as an attachment to an email,
• Actively engaging in discussions and responding to requests for help,
• Publishing a blog, both internally and externally, related to my area of interest - enterprise collaboration,
• Religiously tagging my content to improve its search relevance.

I am pleased with the results so far. In particular, recently a few of my colleagues have started Working Out Loud as well.

Have you tried to do things differently, to Work Out Loud? Please let me know what you think or what your experiences have been so far.