Great pictures on AKMA’s flickr stream of the fun today in Chicago – I miss having enough snow here for snowballing.

Two aspects obviously differentiate the Chicago event from the European predecessors that I’m sure will have affected the conversation subtly – fewer women (Lilia, I think was the only one!) and a higher proportion of native English speakers (I’m not as sure on this one, but I’d guess Lilia again might have been the only non-native anglophone).

One post-it I noticed on the window-wiki said “How do you force people to blog?” My glib answer: “The same way we ‘forced’ them to type their own letters”

I’m looking forward to other perspectives as they come up – I’m sure Lilia drummed into them the importance of pinging the topic exchange channel.

This morning my ipodder brought me three minutes of excitement and inspiration.

Gerald Buckley works for AAPG the American Association of Petroleum Geologists and he’s put together a kind of internal communication/diary announcement podcast for them. The combination of heavy technical oil speak and the funky backing track he uses can get a bit surreal, but it’s a great example of what can be done – just 3 minutes of content that (I presume) is totally tailored to the client’s need. Gerald sees it like HTML in 1995, it’s the kind of stuff that anyone could do, but people will pay to have it done for them, at least for now.

This might add some flavour to the Chicago Blogwalk discussion that’s happening in the next couple of days on blogging in corporate settings. I think it’s an interesting example of the way we might go so I’m pinging the topic exchange site to let them know.

Reading Lilia & Stephanie‘s very clever paper on weblog communities, I start asking “Why? What’s my motivation here” (Hey give me a break darling – you can take the boy out of the theatre you know, but you can’t take the theatre out of *this* boy).

No really, why would you want to be able to see where or whether a community exists? Well I don’t care much why *you* would, but I guess what I would want to be able to discern is: “Does this blog represent some aspect of a community of which I would like to be a part..thereof…maybe?”

OK – I can see two cases for me. I feel I belong (and that this blog belongs) to the KM community that’s talked about in the paper. For me I’m clear that this is a group of people who probably would have got together sooner or later as long as they made some form of contact with each other. Initial contacts probably happened by chance or by recommendations and then their blogs and online lives made contact and relationship building easier and made them happen more quickly than you might otherwise expect. I see the most important characteristic of this community as self-selection. I’m a member if I say I am. Other people recognise me as a member and seek out my company based on the quality of what I have to say, but I could lurk and *for me* I would still feel part of the community – I’m only ever one post away from being seen, recognised (maybe even secretly worshipped) by others.

I contrast this with my membership of another community of bloggers. I share my art through nanki – the scanblog. I never write stuff there (well hardly ever) except for replying to comments. That blog is a member of the Blogs Illustrated blog-ring and for that there are more explicit rules, a tribal mark that members must carry and as a ring, the blogs are tied to each other as long as they carry the ring code. You’re either in or your out – and you only get in if Madge says so. When it comes to lurking, well I might see myself as a member without posting anything or joining up, but nobody else would. The barriers to entry are higher (though still not that high). You have to have a candidate blog that meets the criteria an you have to show it to Madge who then says yea or nay.

Now in the first example it’s not at all clear who the members of the community are at any one time – but do I care? No – as long as I cultivate a position of acceptance towards anyone who comes along and says “Howdy, glad to see y’all here”.

I’m not sure what all this means and whether it adds to what the paper says or not but it sure was fun thinking it through!

I’d forgotten that I sketched this on Monday afternoon having just arrived and grabbed a cup of tea – hadn’t seen anyone to talk to yet and so just did this in my Journal. Over the two days I think I saw this guy with the floppy hair here more often than on any stand. For some people these Fatboy beanbags were the highlight of the conference 😉

Nice little google – try searching for

modernising government agenda

and hit the [I’m feeling lucky] button.

Obviously either time to get back to old-fashioned government or even moderner government….

Yer ’tis in case it slips from the top page in google

I do have a prior engagement – well a committment actually, which is why I shan’t be at the LPFC. Whether you can or can’t – just make sure you follow THE RULES.

I’m pleased to announce that Perfect Path will not be donating one single drop of it’s precious Googlejuice to Suw‘s continued ramblings on Simon Pegg & Shaun of the Dead.

I urge you to not.. to do.. to not do.. that thing… either

The Ideal Government Project says:

“The UK is spending a lot of money and effort computerising government. Let’s get a clear idea what we want it to look like when it’s done. Dream a little, and help set out the wish list. Otherwise we might end up with something we did not want.”

Louise helpfully points out that it would be a good start if the public sector learned a little, and made use of the clever people in other sectors who’ve already been there, and I agree, though I do (naturally ) have some sympathy for the managers (as opposed to the politicians) who are implementing e-government.

It’s a bit annoying with the site as it stands that there’s a hurdle to contributions – it maybe is just my perception and it may be really simple, but it’s simpler for me to blog here and link than to request the ability to post something longer and broader than a comment on something someone else has said.

William Heath tells an interesting story about data use in Finland. My take on government’s use of data about me is this: the problem is not in initial capture and first use, it’s about what happens to it then, how secure it is, how I get to know what it is, how I get to change it if it’s wrong, how I get to change it if it changes, whether I get a choice about whether it’s stored or not, whether I have any control over who else sees it and whether I have any control over what use they put it too – and then the chain of people who might pull it out of the place I put it and so on and so on and so on. My life is too short for me to be carrying out that sort of information management for the benefit of government – and I don’t want to pay for an army of civil servants who will manage it, imperfectly, on my behalf.

Even if this were fixable, I then come to the fact that I know that judgements will be made about me based on an abstraction (some data or combined information drawn from data about me) and that no matter how well managed it is, that sooner or later that judgement will be wrong, and that the wrongness of that judgement may have a wide range of implications for my personal life, by business, my career and my financial security. It matters not whether the judgement is wrong because the data’s wrong or the process for making the judgement is wrong – I want to be judged for who I really am, today, rather than the part of the story that I happened to hand over four years ago, while I was hungover.

So that’s one point!! I don’t want the sort of customer service from Government that I get from NTL, Northern Rock and anyone else who makes business decisions about me based on the numbers, rather than on a personal contact with me.

NEXT. (You shouldn’t have asked, you really shouldn’t)

I want less of a reliance on data to judge organisations (yes, those who know what I’ve done in a previous life will find this hypocritical), I think we had to go too far in order to know we’d gone too far – now it’s time to pull back a bit.

I want e-gov projects to be right-sized and not doing stuff that could be better done by a private concern, with a good balance of bottom-up-ness and top-down-ness – I don’t want everything to be one-size-fits-all and I don’t want it to be entirely “customised” to me (see above) – can we spell “intelligent” and “diverse”?

I want projects to be grown up about risk and unafraid to be imperfect.

I want projects to be open and accountable and I want some assurance that the money is being spent wisely, without auditors sitting on the shoulder of every project manager who then has to jump through a hundred hoops.

And then I want every single project and every single public servant to understand that installing the technology won’t make the change all by itself – you will have to do the job of government differently, you will have to accept that times have changed and what really open government really means – it’s scary and unpredictable, but much more worthwhile than hiding behind those bomb-proof curtains.

Yes we will moan, yes we will groan, yes we will say you’re wasting our money, yes we will point out the obvious solution that you’ve entirely missed. And yes, we will be wrong too and sometimes rant without good reason – but that’s what people who are paying for a service are entitled to do.

So I guess I’d better stop here and get on with my tax return.

Darn those pesky folk at we make money not art
for pointing to the old computer museum. Can’t they see I’m supposed to be working?

OK this is the first computer my father bought in the early eighties – whizz bang spec: 16K ROM 16K RAM (expandable to 48K!!!) and running at a cool 1MHz, yeah that’s one megahertz, woah!

But the PET 2001 with a BASIC from some bunch of kids in a garage called Microsoft, was where I learned:
10 INPUT “What is your name?”, x$
20 FOR i = 1 TO 10
30 PRINT x$
40 NEXT i

This one
looks like a later 3xxx series given the clickmatic keyboard but I am ready to be put right.

See? I can do techno-nerd.

David Gurteen is launching a new publication:

“For some time I have felt the need for a publication that focused on
thought leadership in the fields of learning, creativity, innovation,
KM and personal development. My colleagues Clive Snell and Peter
Williams of Bizmedia with whom I run the Gurteen Knowledge Conferences
and Learning Events have also felt this need. So we are jointly
launching a new monthly journal “The Global Knowledge Review” (GKR).

If you subscribe before the end of September 2004, you will receive a
special introductory discount – 30% off the normal price.”

David’s conferences and knowledge cafes are always excellent and I expect no less from this venture – Go read.

TOC for Sample first issue available free at GKR