Tree of Knowledge

Tom Watson MP, the Minister for Transformational Governance (and the UK’s first Parliamentary blogger) has a really interesting job. Since January this year he’s been tasked with using Information Communications Technology (’ICT’) to re-centre the UK government around the citizen. Yeah, I know, it sounds like a bit of a wank, but he’s doing good things – check out this recent article for a flavour.

At any rate, he recently blogged about the Brown Government’s Power of Information Report (currently available on the excellent ‘Comment is Free’ communal document discussion site). The PoI Report is an interesting discussion of how Information Communications Technology (’ICT’) can be used to expand access to government information and improve public services and government more generally. It’s worth a read.

However, what really got my attention was Watson’s comments about the cultural changes needed within government to take advantage of the communicative and organisational potential of new technologies:

The 19th century co-operative movements had their roots in people pooling resources to make, buy or distribute physical goods. Modern online communities are the new co-operatives.

Mrs Watson is a regular user of Netmums. It’s a great site. Parents chat, and offer, I’ve been there, advice on everything from baby whispering to school admissions. Except it’s not just a handful of mums and dads, it’s thousands of them, available in your living room, 24 hours a day.

Sounds like hell well, it’s a lifeline when your baby’s screaming at four in the morning, you have no idea why and you just need to know you’re not alone. But my point is, imagine if quarter of a million mums decided to meet at Wembley Stadium to discuss the best way to bring up their kids. Midwives would be there dispensing advice. Health visitors, nursery teachers, welfare rights advisers would be there. Even politicians would try and get in on the act. But when twice this number chooses to meet together in the same place online, we just ignore them. That’s going to have to change. . . .

We also need to look at the way Government talks to itself. Whitehall is arguably Britain’s most important knowledge factory, but we’re using out of date tools. . . .

To do this within the system I would like to see more use of techniques commonplace now in the wider world, internal blogs, wikis, discussion forums, shared workspaces, all still quite rare within the machine. . . .

Despite the hype, policy makers still have a fairly large blind spot when it comes to the way that Information and Communications Technologies are not only changing the ways we communicate, but are also the ways we organise ourselves and associate with one another. It hasn’t been the revolution that people were predicting in the 1990s, but there is more than enough evidence that society wide changes are taking place that will ultimately change the nature of government. As Bill Gates said during the first tech boom; we tend to overestimate the potential for change in the short term, but underestimate it in the medium to long term.

There is enormous potential for improving government in the medium term by modernising intra- and extra- governmental communications. Unlike the major e-government pushes of the past, more of these new communications platforms do not rely on major ICT investments. Unfortunately, the biggest hurdle to their adoption is something far more problematic than government finances; it’s the need for cultural change. That’s not something you can achieve with a budget appropriation.

HT: Buzz Machine

Update: Jacques Chester at Club Troppo has now posted something along the same lines.

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