Comments on: Gov 2.0: Where to begin – Part 2 of 3

By: greebo

greebo — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 02:32:20 +0000

Agree that communication needs to be two/multiple-way. I think that’s an ongoing challenge and it also involves people listening have a way to participate in the conversation.

By: Tel

Tel — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 23:30:02 +0000

It would take a Minister of Digital Miracles to make Gordon Brown and the British Labour Party popular again in the near future. If the North Norwich by election was anything to judge by, their success in engagement doesn’t impress too many people.

There’s a simple explanation to this. The people of the UK wanted a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty and their dear leaders wouldn’t give it to them. That’s why they are putting skinheads into the European Parliament, because there is no engagement with the present government, because the government is stubbornly not listening to its people. Very likely Lisbon will eventually get to referendum and very likely the UK will vote no. It doesn’t take any fancy website to figure that out, sticking a finger in the air is good enough.

Communication requires someone to say something, and a medium to carry the message, and someone to listen at the other end. You might be making the best medium in the world, but with no one listening at the other end you still won’t have communication.

By: greebo

greebo — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 06:47:30 +0000

Hi Will, thanks for that, I completely agree. I referred to it briefly, but should have expanded it out more.

Hi Malcolm. I think Twitter is good for only the three things I defined. I completely agree that it isn’t a good way to have a conversatino, but it does have its uses 140 characters doesn’t mean just banal thoughts. As someone who has trawled and analysed over 3000 Tweets, I can say there is a lot of wisdom that can be communicated, and there is significant value in the tone of feedback (in looking at community responses to ideas simultaneously presented such as the online video from the Public Sphere). I agree with you on the timeliness, and Twitter is useful only when you control the timeliness (such as the previous example).

It is only one tool and serves a specific purpose which when used right can be very useful. It can also link to blogs and papers that deliver the more in depth thinking and description of a topic.

By: Malcolm Tredinnick

Malcolm Tredinnick — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 01:54:19 +0000

There are lots of little bits I’d quibble with here, but the claims about Twitter really stand out. Come on! It’s not very good for specific conversations. When you used to see everybody’s replies, seeing only one side of a conversation was often incredibly intrusive. Now, it’s entirely invisible unless you happen to be following both people. And the comments are restricted in length to the point of removing anything other than the most banal thoughts. No subtlety at all. It’s also not very good for raising awareness except on really large issues. The problem is timeliness. One generally only receives things in Twitter when they’re seeing it go by and anything else is just lost in the stream. So awareness-raising (or trending, as the Kids 2.0 might call it) only happens for things that get mentioned over and over a long period of time, or else they have a brief lifespan and die. It’s not an archival medium. Compare to more useful things like syndicated feeds or blog comments or even (*shudder*) web forums, where the interested participant can read when they have a moment and respond similarly. Less demanding in the “feed me now” variety.

By: Will

Will — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 01:44:45 +0000

Interesting topic. There is one thing I’d add (or maybe emphasise more as you allude to it at the end of your post); Open Standards. I guess I like your list of Open Source aphorisms and would add some others:

- “Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send.” From a government 2.0 point of view I’d interpret this as meaning that government output should be well formatted and clearly written. It should be in formats that everyone can understand and use (open standards). When comments are accepted however, they shouldn’t be held to quite the same strict standards. Using twitter is great, but having information *only* available over twitter isn’t.

- Standards have “multiple independent and interoperable implementations” (quote from the IETFs RFC2026). From a government 2.0 perspective, this is part of the definition of ‘conservative’ above. Something isn’t a conservative choice if there is only one supplier.

Together there is a strong bias towards open standards in communication. That’s not to say that you could never use a closed standard (e.g. Twitter), but rather that someone using open standards should always have sufficient government access.