There is a growing importance of a new kind of journalism, participation between trained, experienced, professional journalists and the citizen.
Trumped by the Daily Telegraph in exposing the British MPs expense scandal the Guardian is fighting back in a unique way using crowdsourcing (using the talents of the crowd) to sift through 70,000 receipts and expenses claims submitted by MPs.
The Guardian has developed an “Investigate Your MP” tool with the idea that “many hands make light work”. The best themes that emerge will be published in the newspaper, with credits for the author.
The application allows users to point out whether a claim from a set of PDF images realised by Parliament is interesting - such as a duck island - and worthy of further scrutiny.
This is very similar to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk which uses the power of crowds by enabling companies to outsource manual tasks for a small financial sum to workers at a lesser cost than hiring staff to do tasks computers struggle with.
The difference is instead of being used as a semi exploitive commercial enterprise, crowdsourcing is exposing MPs abuses and improving governance in the UK.
It’s also fun. There is a voyeur feeling in wading through pages of MPs claims and discovering how much of - our money - they have spent on their new bathrooms.
Hats off to the Daily Telegraph in breaking the scandal but it cannot be good that a single newspaper with its own bias continues to set the agenda by dripping feeding stories into the public domain.
In engaging thousands of people, passionate to get something done the Guardian is showing how citizen contributions can compliment professional journalism by uncovering stories that the political class would prefer never to see the light of day.
Friday, June 19, 2009
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
International Organisations in a Connected World
Today citizens increasingly expect to be able to collaborate with their governments online and no institution funded by the tax payer can ignore the need to interact and be transparent with the people it serves. Today's tech-savvy world demands tech savvy global institutions and the complex challenges faced by organisations such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), United Nations (UN) and the Commonwealth will increasingly test them. To respond effectively to this new depth of challenge, these world bureaucracies must redefine how they make policies, share information and manage operations and move away from the industrial age and into the information age.
Although progress is slow international organisations have begun to leverage the power of Internet based-based tools that have been used for decidedly non-governmental and more social or consumer based activities.
Surprisingly it is the Commonwealth with its limited resources and the lower profile that has been more adept to the web2.0 challenge. By using wikis, blogs, folksonomies rating and comments on its website the Commonwealth shows itself to be more willing to open up and engage with the population of its member countries than many of its larger brothers in the international arena.
The United Nations with its membership of 192 countries, huge budget and the expectation that it will provide a lead to solving global problems is shamefully the worst performer in its use of collaborative technologies on its public website.
The UN.org is about as read only as can be, neither do they have a social network of their own or a presence on one such as the Commonwealth has on FaceBook. Although the UN Secretariat is doing a woeful job of using networking tools some of its agencies such as UNESCO UNICEF and WHO do use these them as another channel for their news. As does the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) which is both on FaceBook and has developed its own networking tool.
Where the UN scores higher is with its use of YouTube. In 2008 the United Nations launched its television channel on YouTube in an effort to reach a broader and younger audience. The World Bank, World Health Organisation and OECD also have a YouTube channel.
Although these organisations want to use YouTube to reach a younger audience the content on their sites is very corporate and unappealing to youth. The Commonwealth is the one organisation that has made an effort to use YouTube to involve youth in their channel by pioneering user generated videos at major conferences and with an innovative proposal to highlight its unique diversity by running a Commonwealth YouTube talent contest.
Blogging helps to give some personality to faceless bureaucracies and many international organisations have developed their own blogging areas. The World Bank has an informative private sector development blog site which gathers ideas about the role of private enterprise in fighting poverty. The UN Secretariat does not have an official blog but there is a site developed by the United Nations Foundation called UN Dispatch. The OECD also operates a separate blogging site called Spotlight which provides a forum for discussion.
The Commonwealth has gone a step further having recently trialed live blogging from the health ministers conference in Geneva and will do the same from the education conference in Malaysia where youth participants will also contribute. At the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting to be held in Trinidad in November attended by the Queen and many country leaders, the Commonwealth Blog Network will offer unique personal perspectives from one of the world's largest regular summits.
At this summit the Commonwealth will also use Twitter, a free micro blogging platform that connects people in real-time and enables its users to send and read other users' updates known as tweets which are limited to 140 characters from either a mobile phone or a computer. Twitter is about as hot as you can get on the social web and is never out of the press with celebrity endorsements from Paris Hilton, Demi Moore, Oprah and the UK's own Stephen Fry.
While the United Nations Secretariat misses an opportunity by not using twitter some of its agencies are showing UN headquarters how it's done: UNESCO, UNICEF and the World Health Organisation all have twitter accounts through which they distribute their news. The OECD also has a twitter account but the Commonwealth has taken it a step further by following 10 Downing Street's lead and integrating the twitter feed into the homepage of the Commonwealth website.
Perhaps wikis offer one of the most useful platforms for international organisations to collaborate on information sharing. A wiki is a user editable website which allows its members to be able to add new content or alter existing material. The online encyclopedia Wikipedia is an example of how successful wikis can become.
International organisations have begun to dabble with wikis: OECD has created wikigender to facilitate the exchange and sharing of knowledge on gender issues and the United Nations has water wiki developed so that water sector professional can find and share experience and knowledge about water related work in the international (UN) context. The Commonwealth has also recently launched a wiki called Commpedia so that all 90 Commonwealth organisations can add their own information and promote their cause on a single site.
Although a wiki offers a superb platform for collaboration it is also vital that international orgaisations open up the data they collect so that it can be used in innovate way allowing citizens to co-design in the digital age to make services better. Many governments are already doing this with the UK offering a £20,000 prize for the best mash-up that improves lives.
The World Bank has been collecting massive amounts of data, for the past 50+ years, and now possesses one of the richest repositories of information about economic development in the world. To help people use this data they have developed World Bank Open API that opens the wealth of the World Bank's global economic data to the outside world, in a standard, easily accessible way. Open API allows third parties to develop mash-ups (a combination of data from different sources) and applications with the World Bank data and easily create different kinds of interesting visualizations and insightful reports.
International organisations also need to be aware of and ready to utiilise new technologies as they are developed. An example being Google Wave which is being released later this year and is likely to be as revolutionary to collaboration as email has been to communication.
So what more could international organisations be doing in today's web2.0 world:
The impenitence of the world’s major international organisations has been exposed once again by recent global events and the the need for reform so they represent the world of the 21st century and not that of last century is acute. If these organisations want to stay relevant to the next generation, it will be hard for them to ignore the global reach of social networks and collaborative technologies as a way to interact directly with the digital natives. And this is not just an exercise in youth outreach or PR but an engagement with the future face of the international community.
Although progress is slow international organisations have begun to leverage the power of Internet based-based tools that have been used for decidedly non-governmental and more social or consumer based activities.
Surprisingly it is the Commonwealth with its limited resources and the lower profile that has been more adept to the web2.0 challenge. By using wikis, blogs, folksonomies rating and comments on its website the Commonwealth shows itself to be more willing to open up and engage with the population of its member countries than many of its larger brothers in the international arena.
The United Nations with its membership of 192 countries, huge budget and the expectation that it will provide a lead to solving global problems is shamefully the worst performer in its use of collaborative technologies on its public website.
The UN.org is about as read only as can be, neither do they have a social network of their own or a presence on one such as the Commonwealth has on FaceBook. Although the UN Secretariat is doing a woeful job of using networking tools some of its agencies such as UNESCO UNICEF and WHO do use these them as another channel for their news. As does the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) which is both on FaceBook and has developed its own networking tool.
Where the UN scores higher is with its use of YouTube. In 2008 the United Nations launched its television channel on YouTube in an effort to reach a broader and younger audience. The World Bank, World Health Organisation and OECD also have a YouTube channel.
Although these organisations want to use YouTube to reach a younger audience the content on their sites is very corporate and unappealing to youth. The Commonwealth is the one organisation that has made an effort to use YouTube to involve youth in their channel by pioneering user generated videos at major conferences and with an innovative proposal to highlight its unique diversity by running a Commonwealth YouTube talent contest.
Blogging helps to give some personality to faceless bureaucracies and many international organisations have developed their own blogging areas. The World Bank has an informative private sector development blog site which gathers ideas about the role of private enterprise in fighting poverty. The UN Secretariat does not have an official blog but there is a site developed by the United Nations Foundation called UN Dispatch. The OECD also operates a separate blogging site called Spotlight which provides a forum for discussion.
The Commonwealth has gone a step further having recently trialed live blogging from the health ministers conference in Geneva and will do the same from the education conference in Malaysia where youth participants will also contribute. At the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting to be held in Trinidad in November attended by the Queen and many country leaders, the Commonwealth Blog Network will offer unique personal perspectives from one of the world's largest regular summits.
At this summit the Commonwealth will also use Twitter, a free micro blogging platform that connects people in real-time and enables its users to send and read other users' updates known as tweets which are limited to 140 characters from either a mobile phone or a computer. Twitter is about as hot as you can get on the social web and is never out of the press with celebrity endorsements from Paris Hilton, Demi Moore, Oprah and the UK's own Stephen Fry.
While the United Nations Secretariat misses an opportunity by not using twitter some of its agencies are showing UN headquarters how it's done: UNESCO, UNICEF and the World Health Organisation all have twitter accounts through which they distribute their news. The OECD also has a twitter account but the Commonwealth has taken it a step further by following 10 Downing Street's lead and integrating the twitter feed into the homepage of the Commonwealth website.
Perhaps wikis offer one of the most useful platforms for international organisations to collaborate on information sharing. A wiki is a user editable website which allows its members to be able to add new content or alter existing material. The online encyclopedia Wikipedia is an example of how successful wikis can become.
International organisations have begun to dabble with wikis: OECD has created wikigender to facilitate the exchange and sharing of knowledge on gender issues and the United Nations has water wiki developed so that water sector professional can find and share experience and knowledge about water related work in the international (UN) context. The Commonwealth has also recently launched a wiki called Commpedia so that all 90 Commonwealth organisations can add their own information and promote their cause on a single site.
Although a wiki offers a superb platform for collaboration it is also vital that international orgaisations open up the data they collect so that it can be used in innovate way allowing citizens to co-design in the digital age to make services better. Many governments are already doing this with the UK offering a £20,000 prize for the best mash-up that improves lives.
The World Bank has been collecting massive amounts of data, for the past 50+ years, and now possesses one of the richest repositories of information about economic development in the world. To help people use this data they have developed World Bank Open API that opens the wealth of the World Bank's global economic data to the outside world, in a standard, easily accessible way. Open API allows third parties to develop mash-ups (a combination of data from different sources) and applications with the World Bank data and easily create different kinds of interesting visualizations and insightful reports.
International organisations also need to be aware of and ready to utiilise new technologies as they are developed. An example being Google Wave which is being released later this year and is likely to be as revolutionary to collaboration as email has been to communication.
So what more could international organisations be doing in today's web2.0 world:
- Follow the example set by companies such as Dell and Starbucks in the private sector. In their online idea storms customers submit their ideas, then fellow-customers vote on them - some gain a following, others die on the vine - and the companies implement the best of them. I would love to see this platform for mutual engagement used by institutions such as the UN, IMF and the Commonwealth to make them more relevant to the people that they serve.
- Learn from the example of micro financing sites such as Kiva that empower individuals to lend directly to unique entrepreneurs around the globe allowing them to lift themselves out of poverty.
- Make more use of wikis by studying how municipalities such as the City of Melbourne are using wiki technology for public consultation and collaboration allowing people for the first time to directly contribute their ideas to enhance and develop the city.
- And finally follow President Obama's example from the US election with his use of social networks and the creation of MyBrarrackObama.com. This platform became a powerful tool for mobilising, participation and engagement. All which international organisations need to do if they are to be effective.
The impenitence of the world’s major international organisations has been exposed once again by recent global events and the the need for reform so they represent the world of the 21st century and not that of last century is acute. If these organisations want to stay relevant to the next generation, it will be hard for them to ignore the global reach of social networks and collaborative technologies as a way to interact directly with the digital natives. And this is not just an exercise in youth outreach or PR but an engagement with the future face of the international community.
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