Workshop Purpose:
To explore the societal innovation potential and realities of On-line Community Networks generally and how to begin using an on-line community space to complement our workshop series.
Welcome:
Susan Turnbull, from the General Services Administration (GSA), and on behalf of her co-Chair, George Brett, opened the meeting by welcoming everyone to the continuing collaboration workshop series. She introduced the topic of the day, “On-Line Community Networks”. Susan noted that everyone attending is considered a contributor, rather than visitors. Susan introduced Lowell Christy and Tony Stanco as presenters for the day’s workshop.
Susan reviewed the handouts. The “Federal Architecture and Infrastructure (AI) Committee, Universal Access (UA) Working Group” handout is group’s charter. The “Extending Digital Dividends: Public Goods and Services that Work for All” is a summary of the first product of Collaboration Expedition contributors. The summary was included in a US report that was presented in Berlin recently. The complete guide will be published on CD, hard copy, and on-line soon. This represents the first 6 months work by the Collaboration Expedition workshop contributors. It also represents a blueprint for the future workshops.
Susan introduced Nader Ghobadi, Director of the Technology Center, FAA. Nader would be providing a presentation after the lunch break on the new Community of Practice CD that has been produced for the Department of the Navy. Copies of the CD were made available to workshop attendees.
The next workshop meeting will be held 1/15/2002. Lesley Shneier, Senior Knowledge Management Officer at the World Bank and Bob Turner, Director of the FAA’s Team Technology Center will be presenters. Leslie will share the World Band experience with more than one hundred Communities of Practice. Bob will present on the Virtual Team and Community of Practice activities they are supporting both within FAA and government-wide.
Bob’s group led the development of the Department of Navy Community of Practice CD that Nader will introduce today. The workshop on 2/19/2002 will include presentation by Brand Niemann, EPA. on the Natural Language Interface to Web Content pilot and Neil Scott, Stanford University on Natural Interaction Systems. The workshop on 3/19/2002 may focus on several E-Government projects with a strong focus on XML and the need for coordination among the XML components of the e-gov projects
George Brett, co-chair of the workshop series and Chief Information Architect of End-to-End Performance at Internet2 was introduced. George has been involved in higher education and IT since 1980. He was involved with Gopher, Archie, and helping to introduce the World Wide Web to the United States.
Overview and Implication of the October 2001 report “Online Communities: Networks that Nurture Long-distance relationships and Local Ties” by the Pew Internet and American Life Project by
Lowell Christy, Chairman, City of Mind
Susan introduced Lowell Christy. Lowell is a Social Entrepreneur who focuses on intercultural problem solving and IT management. Lowell’s background includes research at the Stanford Research Institute and telemedicine projects like “Health House”.
Lowell began the presentation by asking, “How do you in the government pursue evolution in government services”? Guidelines include:
The Art of Associating Together – government is moving from the idea of e-communities to e-citizenship. The real frontier is e-citizenship.
Redefining online communities – have to define the parties involved. “Conversation”, a generative activity, is the next frontier.
Lowell pointed out that critics had stated the Internet would cause people to abandon their previous face-to-face relationships and local ties. The Pew report found otherwise. In fact “glocalization”, a term coined by Barry Wellman, seems closer to fact – the Internet expands social worlds and binds people to where they live. For example, 84% of American Internet users have explored 4 or more online groups. 28 million people use the Internet to interact with their local community.
Lowell cited a number of other studies that demonstrate that online communities are self-forming. These groups tend to expand the traditional walls that surround a group and bind the individuals or smaller groups together into larger communities. These groups tend to not be grouped into traditional hierarchies. A few examples provide insight to this phenomenon. First, the number of American Internet users participating in online groups after the September 11 attacks increased by 33%. Another example was a group of breast cancer patients who were given computers by the University of Wisconsin and training to use them to communicate. Researchers found the women who were involved early and communicated often with the group were of lesser education levels than those who had higher education levels. Another pilot project in Cleveland demonstrated that homeless individuals would access kiosks to communicate to a network of doctors and fellow homeless individuals to ask questions and receive medical advice. These individuals sought advice at a much higher rate after this form of access was provided. This research contradicts previous thought that communication is only effective if done via word of mouth or through traditional communication lines. According to Lowell, this is one reason why the dotcoms became dotgones. Many of the services placed online were simply repetitions of previous business practices and communication lines that assumed the same user communities.
Many people who are new to online services tend to embrace online communities quickly as an alternative to traditional communication and community involvement. Newcomers tend to be younger and represent a higher percentage of minorities than other groups. It should be noted that minorities still lag behind other groups in access to online communities and the Internet, in general. Once again, the problem is one of access, as demonstrated in the pilot project in Cleveland. More examples were presented to further understanding of this concept:
· “Learning Citizenship” by Juliet Mayfield demonstrated that there were ways to set up a government system that allowed citizens to take ownership by creating new communities. This facilitates the move from e-government to e-citizenship.
· "Chaordic Systems and Human Futures" by Dee Hock, Founder and CEO Emeritus of VISA, stated that for communities to flourish a commons or “white” space had to be created that would allow all access.
· Concept of “Generalized Reciprocity” by Peter F. Drucker states that rises in participation are almost always linked to circumstances of high challenge, when personal skills are used to the utmost, generating reciprocity between the participants.
The above all led to a central concept of accepted ambiguity. By enabling the citizenry to self-organize outside of traditional governmental control, government agencies will have to deal with “many democracies”. The traditional push of governmental information from one -to- many will be replaced with a many- to- many relationship. In addition, the self-organizing nature of this type of citizen involvement will also lead to a loss of alignment of agency priorities with citizen priorities. Lowell noted that this type of arrangement will lead to emergent intelligence, but will likely be difficult to gather from a government perspective.
There have been three (3) cybernetic revolutions in the world. These include:
· 1620 - Bacon’s “Novum Organum” where the concept of group participation leads to expanded/shared knowledge (scientific method).
· 1776 - Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations” where the concept of the “Invisible Hand” in the world marketplace is explained.
· 1776-1787 – Introduced a key idea behind democracy, that all people “know something”.
These concepts contributed to the notion that communities produce value through their ability to self-organize and increase the collective knowledge of the whole. The concept of e-democracy takes this evolution another step and leads to the question that has to be asked by government agencies: “Whose knowledge is it”? As explained, conversation often produces an outcome that is not expected from the process. The challenge of today’s government is to provide resources to its citizenry to allow democracy to flourish and to understand how to gather and interpret the knowledge generated by these communities that support better and more informed governance.
Dialogue:
Q: George Brett – Is there a difference between asynchronous conferences and email?
A: Lowell – They are similar. Asynchronous is new to learning.
Q: George Brett – Email is a “push” technology whereas chat is a “pull”. Don’t most leaders shy away from pull technologies?
A: Lowell – There is a tendency within government to use push technology, such as email. There seems to be discomfort in using “chat” as it is anonymous. This is due to a concept of leadership, where you lead by telling or pushing information in a one- to -many fashion. The idea that the ephemera, or leftover artifacts of conversations may be the most important information produced is often lost in this arrangement. If you examine non-traditional face –to-face communication, the ephemera provide the spindles to the center of the wheel to allow the observer to understand the context of the speaker.
Comment: George Brett – This is why we see a resurgence of video teleconferencing.
Lowell explained that the concept of a Cognitive Spatial Environment allows an individual participant to experience government rather than just receive information about it. The idea can be best explained using the Amazon.com model where a user is given and continues to build a profile. In a Cognitive Spatial Environment, the community is organized and presented to the user in a context he/she understands. This leads to a sense of reduced risk and higher levels of participation, purpose and accountability.
Q: Rick Smith - Accountability or Responsibility?
A: Accountability, actually. Example provided is a pregnant teenage Japanese girl seeking information regarding medical and cultural issues related to her situation. She does not want to sort through 130,000 textbooks about teen pregnancy, but wants to communicate with other Japanese teenage, expectant mothers. This is the information that is most valuable to her. Therefore, she is accountable to the community to accurately portray her context in order to receive useful information that will guide her.
Q: Rick Smith - Isn’t she actually responsible for this rather than accountable?
A: She is responsible for her context to get the information she needs. However, she is accountable to the community in providing future context to other participants. The concept of Network Exchange Learning Value is useful here to understand that communities will self-regulate and determine responsibilities of the group.
Comment: George Brett – Introduced idea that information flows are islands and peninsulas rather than networks and hubs.
Lowell responded that he believed this was true. The evolution of Mosaic is an example where the value of the conversation is relational. Only in context is the information valuable. How do you set up the information so it is experienced rather than transaction- based?
Comment: Larry Koskinen – Democratic government was designed to speed up decision making, yet our government is ponderous. Trust, learning and ephemera are the “things” that are of value. The current environment is not adequate to deal with the complexities of the modern world.
Comment: Lowell – The World Trade Center disaster provided an example of self-organizing groups. Small groups worked together in an extremely time sensitive situation to help each other survive. The current technological environment does not allow this to happen due to the pervasive central government thinking by our agencies. Further, government cannot use the family model as a starting point. This model is binary (one parent – one child) and today’s model is many- to- many. The intelligence in a community is in the linkages, not the brain.
Comment: – The context of the conversation is very important, however, communicating within the wrong context can lead to “bootstrap hell”.
Bill Smith Comment: – The most effective way to avoid this is to organize around purpose. Research has demonstrated there are at least 5 dimensions or fields required to relate the individual to the whole.
Comment: Lowell – Would propose that this would be like a “disco ball” whereby one ray of light can be refracted into an unlimited number of views (contexts). He explained that the octagon has been used throughout history because the human brain can only understand 7 dimensions plus itself. This suggests a membrane rather than a Ft. Knox model, similar to the Chinese concept that “all currents go to me”. The Chinese people routinely sign their artwork to demonstrate to successive generations who owned it, and that they had cultivated themselves as individuals to be worthy of improving on the artwork. This provides context to the origin of the artwork.
Susan thanked Lowell for the presentation and concluded with a few comments. She asked the group to imagine the state of government online in 15 years. She challenged the group to explore how to become a Community of Practice demonstrating how to be a pacesetter, through a shared purpose of citizen-centric government, toward better ways of bringing forth common value.
Lunch Break
Demonstration of “Building Communities of Practice – Creating Value Through Knowledge Communities” CD by Nader Ghobadi.
Nader Ghobadi is the Director of the TeamTechnology Center, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
Nader explained that the CD contained over 1000 pages of data about Communities of Practice across government. He explained that within the Team Technology Center at the FAA, their focus was on building Communities of Practice by providing tools and a conducive environment. Presently they host 7 communities, including one for the Indian Health Service that serves over 500 tribes.
Comment: George Brett – An example is Mobil Oil that used the Community of Practice model to deal with engineering issues. The difficulty they encountered was one of closure of issues and governance of the community.
Comment: Nader – The UA group from his observation may be a Community of Interest rather than a Community of Practice. He emphasized that current tools could facilitate progress to shared results.
Open Source as International Social Movement and Driver for Global Development and On-Line Community Foundation by Tony Stanco
Tony Stanco is a Senior Policy Analyst, Cyberspace Policy Institute of George Washington University and Founder of FreeDevelopers.net
Susan Turnbull introduced Tony Stanco. Susan stressed that open source software was a means to reduce barriers to entry.
Tony began with a discussion of a previous presentation to the World Bank outlining how developing countries might use open source software as a springboard to economic development. This principle holds true for states within the U.S.
Presently, the U.S. is the world leader in IT and software development. This is critical to the economy and international power. Software is a high value industry, with profits approaching 85%. This presents a unique opportunity for developing countries to skip past the industrial revolution to the IT revolution by adopting open source standards. This is a critical international issue.
Open source software is not just technological. It is about democracy, equality, and human rights. It acts as an economic equalizer much the same as a policy. These rights may be too important to leave to companies.
The open source free software community created LINUX outside of the international corporate arena. LINUX has 29 % of the server market presently, while 48% of international development projects plan to use LINUX. 300,000 developers in 70 countries are using LINUX today. Why? LINUX is more secure than traditional software where backdoors can be installed. This makes it the preferred software of the National Security Agency.
India is an example of a country that has a large number of developers, yet India does not share in the wealth of the IT industry. The profit margins associated with traditional software have kept profits outside of India. If India were to invest in training its developers in LINUX or other open source software, the power of the IT industry would shift.
Q: – How does LINUX deal with the escalation of size in populations?
A: Tony – There is high resistance to hierarchical rule and structure of direction within the LINUX community. Therefore, LINUX continues to migrate along a self-organizing path. If universities were to adopt LINUX programming into their teaching, the mass of developers using the software would be more centralized in direction due to training and perspective.
Comment: Mark Frautschi – Half of the IT degrees earned in the world are currently earned by Indian students.
Comment: Tony – Correct, India’s middleclass is currently larger than the entire population of the U.S.
Adjournment:
Susan thanked everyone for coming to today’s workshop and indicated that anyone who wanted to stay and continue the discussion could do so. She invited everyone to return for the January 15th workshop.
Introductions by Workshop Attendees:
Susan Turnbull – GSA, Chair, Senior Program Advisor, Chair, UA group, and Co-chair UA Collaboration Expedition (susan.turnbull@gsa.gov)
Mark Frautschi – Independent Consultant, Shakesphere & Tao Consulting (frautschi@bigmindmedia.com)
Nick Guzman – George Washington University, School of Medicine (guzman@gwu.edu)
Sonia Guzman – Webalization, Translation and Localization Solutions (sguzman@webalization.com)
Lowell Christy – Chairman, CityofMind (lowell@cityofmind.com)
Karl Hebenstreit – GSA, Systems and Accessibility specialist (Karl.Hebenstreit@gsa.gov)
Larry Koskinen – Consultant, Digital Government (Lkoskinen@aol.com)
Tony Stanco – George Washington University, Cyberspace Policy Institute (stanco@seas.gwu.edu)
Rick Smith – Maximum Performance Group (daddy.rick@attglobal.net)
Matt Kern – PCI (Mkern@Productization.com)
Joyce Bissonette – CyberSeniors/CyberTeens (Jbisonne@vt.edu)
John Scott – Center for Public Service Communications (jcscott@cpsc.com)
John Huth – John J. Barcklow Foundation (john.huth@verizon.net)
Nader Ghobadi – Technical Director, FAA TTC (nader.ghobadi@faa.gov)
Susan Chase – World Bank (schase@WorldBank.org)
George Brett –Chief Information Architect of End to End Performance, Internet2 and Co-chair, UA Collaboration Expedition(ghb@Internet2.edu)
Hank Whittier – FASI, Department of State (Whittier@state.gov)
Judy Douglas – EDS, Principal, E-Government Community of Practice (judy.douglas@eds.com)
Paul Mrochinski – EDS, Managing Consultant, E-Government Community of Practice (paul.mrochinski@eds.com)
Jeff Guyot - EDS, Consultant Specialist, E-Government Community of Practice (jeff.guyot@eds.com)