[LINK] Social computing for government and business

[Tom Worthington]

The Web Standards Group Meeting in Canberra 26 July, 2007 was devoted 
to applying social computing to business 
<http://webstandardsgroup.org/meetings/index.cfm?event_id=97>:

* Collaboration, innovation, distribution: social computing adoption 
benefits for government and business, by Stephen Collins, acidlabs 
<http://www.acidlabs.org/services/blog/>.

Stephen argued that social computing can be used for government and 
business. He confused me at the beginning by putting up a photo of 
someone and saying they had popularized "Enterprise 2". Apparently 
this is term for Web 2.0 applied to business. Social networking makes 
relationships between people visible and explicit and Stephen argues 
this would help in business. However, it is not clear to me this will 
translate to all business or social cultures. Web 2.0 social networks 
seems to imply a very naive view of how social and business 
relationships work. Stephen argues that organisations can build up 
the trust needed to make social networking work in government. This 
seems to have elements of the matrix organisation about it. Stephen 
suggests that social networking tools can be used, with appropriate 
security and some short guidelines. It occurred to me that military 
personnel are trained to use social networks and so are more likely 
to cope with the online equivalent more than other organizational staff.

However, this assumes that there will appropriate reward mechanisms 
(such as pay) for those who contribute to the social network and some 
way to detect and moderate the behavior of those who are unable or 
unwilling to play the game by the rules. Real world organisations 
have complex overlapping, fluid groups. Even formal political parties 
have factions and, as when there is a conscience vote, someone can be 
in several different groups with conflicting aims simultaneously. 
Much the same behavior occurs at technical standards meetings. Online 
systems for running organisations need to take this into account.

Examples: NLA Wiki, AGIMO GovDev, Network of Public Sector Communications NZ.

* Goldilocks and the three bears: a story about social computing in 
government by Matthew Hodgson, SMS Management & Technology 
<http://www.matthewhodgson.com>

Matthew argued the folk taxonomies to be used by government agencies 
to better communicate with their clients. Tagging could be used as a 
bridge between the wording used be clients via topic maps to strictly 
structured taxonomies. He argued that systems used for records 
management systems, such as Tower Software's Trim, are too rigid for 
many work purposes. Tagging examples he used were Technorati, flickr 
and Blogger. He argued a tag cloud could be used for reporting what 
client relevant activities the organisation had undertaken.

At question time I asked if semi-automatically added tags could be 
used, with the same technology as used by search engines for 
understanding documents. Matthew replied this can be done, but the 
organisation has to have suitable tools. In one project the 
technology is being used to reformat information.

What I found most useful was an example web page which showed the 
formal taxonomic term at the top, a definition of the term and the 
folkosonomy tags at the bottom. In this way there could be a 
translation between the bureaucratic formal language and what is used 
in the real world.

On Monday, Roger Clarke will argue at the ANU that Web 2.0 is a valid 
area for formal research 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2007/07/researching-web-20.html>. Given 
that the ANU is, in effect, the university for training the 
Australian Government, perhaps that research can include how to apply 
Web 2.0 social computing to government. This might be a way to extend 
government to more remote areas and make it relevant 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2007/06/internet-to-empower-indigenous.html>.



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                http://www.tomw.net.au/
Visiting Fellow, ANU      Blog: http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/atom.xml