Networked Publics

3 Posts tagged with the community tag

And the winner is...

 

Civic Apps competitions are all the rage. Enabled by governments making data sets available to the public (and to the tech communty in particular), the idea is simple: bring data together with people who know how to make it useful, invite them make something great, and reward them in public. Washington, DC was first out of the gate in 2008, with Apps for Democracy, the brainchild of Peter Corbett (iStrategyLabs) and Vivek Kundra  (then the District's Chief Technology Officer, now our nation's first Chief Information Officer).

 

Many cities and communities have since embraced similar efforts: New York, San Francisco, and Seattle among them.

 

This week, in conjunction with OSCON (O'Reilly Open-Source Convention and a programmers' paradise), Portland, Oregon honored its own Civic Apps competition award winners – Sara Sharp, Robb Shecter, John McBride, Andy Wallace, Edwin Knuth, Max Ogden, and Gary Kee.

 

Portland Mayor Sam Adams emceed the event. Dozens of tech denizens were in attendance, along with venerable OSCON host, Tim O'Reilly.

 

What the Civic Apps Movement is Really About

 

It's irresistably exciting – the idea that government could make data available to enable new intelligence, create new services, even spur new businesses that meet the real needs of citizens and residents. But there's also something more profound going on here: we are redefining what it means to govern.

 

Tim O'Reilly hints at this idea in the video below ("open source is not about what we thought is was about"), and Andy Wallace reinforces it.

 

 

 

Andy built PDXBus because he wanted to use it (apparently, so did a lot of other people, myself included). Before open source (the behavioral code, not the actual code), Andy might have shared the idea with TriMet and a few friends, but it may not have made TriMet's list of top priorities. And then, who knows?

 

Instead, TriMet made data available that Andy could use to build an application that we could all download onto our phones and never have to stand wondering what to do at a bus stop again.

 

This is one (tiny) example of a broader and ongoing renegotiation of roles between governments, residents and citizens, and businesses happening all around us.

 

Cities and communities that experiment with data and information sharing, engage residents in problem-solving, make it easy for diverse people to connect with one another and their government(s), and allow the lessons of small collaborative ventures to influence the larger structures of governing and managing at a mass scale are laying the foundation for gov – and community – 2.0.

 

And the winner?

 

It's us.

1,010 Views 0 Comments Permalink Tags: innovation, technology, community, collaboration, gov2.0, transparency, cities, tim_o'reilly, portland, andy_wallace, pdx, pdxbus, civic_apps, oscon, open-source, open_source, data_sharing

Social networks matter. They have always mattered. New (social) technologies are helping us better understand how to work with them.

 

The Strength of Weak Ties
Mark Granovetter posited the strength of weak ties in 1973, launching a field of inquiry with a 1985 update focused on the problem of embeddedness - the idea that economic relationships are embedded inside social relationships. A follow-up in  2005 called for an interdisciplinary approach to the "black box" of social relationship so that their impact on economic behaviors and outcomes could be revealed and better understood.


The Science of Social Networks Applied

Most people understand the economic power of networks intuitively - and use them for job-hunting, learning, caring for their families and communities, and a myriad of other things.


Industry has long attempted to harness the power of networks for generating sales, recruiting talent, entering new markets, and cultivating and applying innovation - inside firms and industries, and more recently, through crowdsourcing.


And at the community level, scholars like Sean Safford have been able to show that the health of social networks have a significant impact on the ability of communities withstand economic disruption.

 

But social networks have been difficult and time consuming to document.


Enter technology.


Today, millions of people leave digital breadcrumbs that make their networks visible - from text messages on mobile phones to updates on Facebook or Twitter.


We are creating more efficient and effective ways to map, measure (and cultivate!) healthy networks, as evidence of their economic power continues to mount.

 

New Netwok Finds

Last week, these gems came across my radar:

 

1. Network Diversity and Economic Development (Nathan Eagle, Michael Macy, Rob Claxton in Science Magazine, May 2010 - summary visible with out subscription). Researchers analyzed cell phone data (in Britain) to reveal the social networks of cell phone users. They found that communities whose residents maintain diverse networks were more prosperous than communities  with less diverse networks. Conclusion?

 

"On  a population level, the surprisingly strong correspondence we  discovered between the structure of social contacts and the economic  well-being of populations highlights the potential benefit of socially  targeted policies for economic development."

 

(A plain-English summary of the same study is available at Futurity here.)

 

2. Social Enterprise: It Takes A Network (Raj Kumar, McKinsey Digital, What Matters). The author argues that the network is (potentially) a more effective organizational structure for meeting "bottom of the pyramid" needs when the goals is to assess impact and not just commercial sales. Significantly, this changes the model for "scaling up" and implies the need for alternatives to program- or organization-based measures as the primary indicators of success.

 

As social network mapping and analysis becomes simpler and more accessible, more of us can invest more time and energy in network weaving - building the social networks we now know really matter.

2,215 Views 4 Comments Permalink Tags: innovation, community, development, rob_claxton, michael_macy, social_networks, mark_granovetter, crowdsourcing, economic_power, sean_safford, social_network_analysis, raj_kumar, nathan_eagle, prosperity

Platform (\ˈplat-ˌfȯrm\)

 

Wikipedia identifies 20 different varieties. A Google search returns over 180M results. The word, derived from the 16th century French platte-forme meaning map, first made itself known to me in the form of a pair of (tall) shoes, and later, as a technology environment in which to learn and experiment.

 

In today's public policy environments, "platform" is the new black. Platforms connect voters and candidates (John Kitzhaber for Governor), government agencies and citizens (US Department of Labor on Facebook), community based organizations and volunteers (VolunteerMatch), neighbors and neighbors (PortlandNeighborhoods), and so on, with the Web serving as the underlying operating system for new modes of interacting. (Incidentally, if you are reading this, you are arguably sharing a platform with me and the Smart + Connected Communities initiative right now).

 

The Nature of Platforms

 

In January, JP Rangaswami named four dimensions of platforms at the DGREE 2010 Summit.

 

  1. Purpose. Whether an airport, the stock exchange, or Facebook, platforms maintain a clear purpose that attracts people with an interest in that purpose.
  2. Standards. Because a platform brings people together, it employs  standards so that activities performed by the crowd work better for everyone. In an airport, we all have to pass through security with our  appropriately-sized carry-on bags. In a social network, we share  information about ourselves in order to access people and information important to us.
  3. Participation of different kinds of entities (with different business models). A platform enables a range of activities in which different  kinds of organizations and entities participate. A conference is a kind  of platform, for example, where some people attend as individuals, while  others attend on behalf of firms - probably paying different rates based on when they registered, whether they are sponsoring, or what they  plan to do during the conference.
  4. Action enabled by but independent of platform itself. Social networking  platforms that encourage community-level action demonstrate the power of this kind of leverage everyday.

At its core, a platform is a foundation upon which we build or do other things. It's an enabling system for people to not only interact with their governments, and participate in the delivery of government services, but to actually "[reconstitute] what is a government."

 

 

Increasingly, platforms connect people (from across agencies, sectors, and geographies who might not otherwise meet), data (from anywhere or anything), services (that help people share, learn, act and measure, collaboratively), and possibility.

 

And that makes platform a perfect (if evolving) metaphor for the kind of foundation we need to tackle our most critical challenges and find ways to realize sustainable prosperity in communities all over the world.

615 Views 0 Comments Permalink Tags: community, collaboration, gov20, platform, government, collaborate, gov2.0, governing

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