The point of this post: When looking at “success stories” in the adoption of new technologies, we have to think carefully about how repeatable they are.
“One of the most challenging things to figure out in the government space is which technology trends are fads versus real long-term trends,” said Green in an interview with ComputerWorld Canada.
Wise words. And they apply not only to technology.
I was thinking the other day abou
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Added by David Tallan on August 17, 2010 at 11:38am —
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The point of this post: The real problem with Facebook’s privacy practices is the failure to manage and live up to expectations.
Let me preface this by saying “I am not a privacy professional.” My government has privacy professionals. They’re good people, know the legislation far better than I do and think more and deeper on these subjects. This is just my personal perspective. So, for what it’s worth…
There has been a lot of press re…
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Added by David Tallan on June 1, 2010 at 12:30pm —
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The point of this post: Just as the web changed our model of content publishing, so it will change our model of application development. Government IT shops need to evolve to keep up.
Publishing and the Web
Once upon a time, a writer would write a book (and re-write it and re-write it). Then a publisher would take the finished product, set it irrevocably in type, print a lot of copies and distribute them. The book was a finished prod
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Added by David Tallan on May 8, 2010 at 9:05am —
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Those who follow the "Web 2.0" hype know that the hype has moved on. People are talking now about "Web 3.0" or the "Semantic Web". However, in government, we are behind the times. We're still talking about "Gov 2.0". The time has come for us to move on, too.
Here in Canada (and in many places elsewhere in the world) we are seeing a growing disconnect between the citizenry and their government. That's why we see so many calls for "democratic renewal". People are not seeing the "once ever…
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Added by David Tallan on March 29, 2010 at 10:07am —
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Kevin Kelly is one of those old-time Internet institutions. He’s the founding executive editor of Wired magazine and a former editor/publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog. His Cool Tools blog is one I follow regularly through the RSS feed. I was recently referred, h
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Added by David Tallan on March 2, 2010 at 1:28pm —
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There’s a lot being written about Gov 2.0 these days. Much of it is repetitive or otherwise easily ignored. SOme of it purports to have the easy answers. SOme of the best just raises the interesting questions. There were a couple of interesting questions raised in the “
What Gov 2.0 is making me think” post by Quinn Norton in his blog
Quinn Said.
- We all know the commonly accepted
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Added by David Tallan on September 11, 2009 at 1:40pm —
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Lac Carling is an annual conference of bigwigs from the IT and service delivery sides of the Canadian public sector: federal, provincial and municipal. The first one was held in Lac Carling, Quebec and it's moved around since then but kept the name. This year it was held in Niagara-on-the-Lake from June 14 - June 16. The theme for this year's conference was "Govt. 2.0 - The Value Proposition". I wasn't scheduled to be there. I got an email on Sunday June 14, on the five-hour drive back from "Kid…
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Added by David Tallan on June 18, 2009 at 12:47pm —
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Here's another one of my soon to be patented (:->) reports from a conference I didn't attend, brought to you through the benificence of the Twitterverse.
Unfortunately, it isn't as complete as I'd like. After TransparencyCamp, when I discovered that the Twitter Search runs out after 100 pages of history, I new I'd have to find a different solution for Gov 2.0 Camp. I expected this one to have a lot more tweets than the last. (And I was right!) My solution was to grab the RSS feed for the #go…
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Added by David Tallan on March 31, 2009 at 11:06am —
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Over on the Facebook Gov 2.0 Club Group, there's a discussion going on about the biggest barriers to Gov 2.0. I thought I'd post my ideas here.
It's a great question. Ultimately, I think the greatest barrier to Gov 2.0 is the fear of loss of control.
This can affect Gov 2.0 efforts within the organization (things like Intellipedia, Diplopedia and GCpedia). Enterprise-wide collaborative efforts that are aimed at breaking down silos can run into real cultural and policy barriers. But ultimately,…
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Added by David Tallan on March 15, 2009 at 7:29pm —
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I couldn't make it to TransparencyCamp, but it sounded fabulous. I did wade through 100 pages of Twitter Search history (as much as it keeps). Here's what I came up with, for what it's worth. Unlike my other summaries, while this is in chronological order, more or less, the fact that there were a lot of simultaneous sessions, makes this less a session summary and more a lot of great points to ponder and resources to check out. You can find more material from TransparencyCamp at:…
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Added by David Tallan on March 1, 2009 at 11:30pm —
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This is another easy blog entry. I've just scanned through the Twitter stream emerging from a conference session, removing duplication, so that we sitting at our desks can reap the highlights of what was said. Let me know what you think of the concept and the format.
In this session, Bruce Burton presented on Diplopedia, the State Department's enterprise-wide wiki for collaboration and knowedge management. Each item begins with the name (or handle) of the Twitter user who is reporting). You can…
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Added by David Tallan on February 11, 2009 at 12:49pm —
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This is an easy blog entry. I've just scanned through the Twitter stream emerging from a conference session, removing duplication, so that we sitting at our desks can reap the highlights of what was said. Let me know what you think of the concept and the format.
In this session, Jeff Braybrook and Thom Kearney presented on GCpedia, the new enterprise-wide collaboration tool recently launched by the Government of Canada. Each item begins with the name (or handle) of the Twitter user who is repor…
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Added by David Tallan on February 10, 2009 at 1:30pm —
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This is the third of three in a mini-series of blog entries. In
the first blog entry, I described Gov 2.0 as a world of “permeable boundaries”, characterized by crowdsourcing and collaboration, and described the challenges that created for leadership. In
the second blog entry I looked at some model organizations that are already working (and v…
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Added by David Tallan on December 12, 2008 at 9:00am —
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This is the second of mini-series of three blog entries. In
the first blog entry, I described Gov 2.0 as a world of “permeable boundaries”, characterized by crowdsourcing and collaboration, and described the challenges that created for leadership. In this blog entry I’ll look at some model organizations that are already working (and very effectively) in that sort of environment and what they might have to teach us. In t…
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Added by David Tallan on December 10, 2008 at 9:00am —
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In this first blog entry I'll explore the main changes that Gov 2.0 will bring and the corresponding changes that will be needed in the style and culture of our leadership and organization. I'll argue that the primary change of Gov 2.0 is the creation of "permeable boundaries". With increasing engagement and collaboration, work and decision making will no longer be kept in one area and one organization.
In the second blog entry (coming Wednesday) I'll look at organizations where an inspiring le…
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Added by David Tallan on December 8, 2008 at 10:57am —
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Yesterday evening I went, with a number of Ontario Public Service colleagues, to a talk by Rahaf Harfoush. Rahaf was a member of U.S. President-Elect Barack Obama’s Presidential Campaign’s New Media Team and she was talking about “Applying Barack Obama’s Social Media Strategy to Your Brand’s Communications Needs”. Here is a summary of what she had to say.
After a quick overview of her experience with the campaign, she presented her 6 key lessons:
Lesson 1: Give new media a seat at the table…
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Added by David Tallan on November 28, 2008 at 4:18pm —
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That question has been cropping up a lot recently. It's going to be a whole new world. Surely it will demand new things from us. The thinking around here is - not so much. It's the same old competencies applied in a new context. Let's take a couple of examples:
1. We recently had a speaker who was talking about the impact of Web 2.0 on journalism, communications and government. He rightly pointed out that a significant effect of the change to "citizen-journalism" is the loss of the editorial ro…
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Added by David Tallan on November 18, 2008 at 4:47pm —
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