Communities Dominate Brands

The data flow wars [2]

In my post The data flow wars I wrote

...data, and the extraction and refining of that data to support commercial communications is about to become mainstream - this new currency will becme the black gold of the 21st Century - in the future we will fight over oil, food, water and data. If we are living in a world that is increasingly networked, if we are living in a world where social intraction is a primary function online and on the mobile and on converged platforms, then you need data analytics that can understand these social data flows.

So - ladies and genl'men tonite in the Blue corner we have the master of disaster, Gooooooooooooogle and in the Red we have the play it again sam, faster than you can say wow that was a double combination Youuuuuuuuuuuuuu Tuuuuuuuuuuube.

Its gonna get painful

The internet giant Google is being forced to hand over the personal information of every person who has ever watched a video on the YouTube website as part of a billion-dollar court case in the US.

A judge in New York has ordered that Google, which owns YouTube, must pass on the details of more than 100 million people - many of them in the UK - to Viacom, the US broadcasting company which owns channels including MTV and Nickelodeon.

The data will include unique internet addresses, email accounts and the history of every video watched on the website, giving Viacom's experts the ability to conduct a detailed examination of the viewing habits of millions of people around the world.

Via the Guardian

and its no laughing matter.

Kurt Opsahl, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation

The court's erroneous ruling is a setback to privacy rights, we urge Viacom to back off this overbroad request and Google to take all steps necessary to challenge this order and protect the rights of its users

Google correctly argued that the data should not be disclosed because of the users’ privacy concerns, Kurt Opshal said in a EFF blog post

De-schooling Society

Having lunch with a friend Sophia Parker, ex-Demos. She is the author of Unlocking Innovation. Why citizens hold the key to public service reform And perhaps also of relevance The Journey to the Interface. How public service design can connect users to reform.

We were engaged in a deep conversation at RIBA the other day concerning - how one creates and shares knowledge and information in a networked society. How one builds a better society and that the logic and way of doing things in a networked society is different to what one did in an industrial society.

Sophia, mentioned Ivan Illich famous for his book - Deschooling Society (1971), which according to wikipedia is

a critical discourse on education as practised in "modern" economies. Full of detail on then-current programs and concerns, the book's core assertions and propositions remain as radical today as they were at the time. Giving real-world examples of the ineffectual nature of institutionalized education, Illich posited self-directed education, supported by intentional social relations, in fluid, informal arrangements

Illich writes

Universal education through schooling is not feasible. It would be no more feasible if it were attempted by means of alternative institutions built on the style of present schools. Neither new attitudes of teachers toward their pupils nor the proliferation of educational hardware or software (in classroom or bedroom), nor finally the attempt to expand the pedagogue's responsibility until it engulfs his pupils' lifetimes will deliver universal education. The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring. We hope to contribute concepts needed by those who conduct such counterfoil research on education--and also to those who seek alternatives to other established service industries.

Illich arose out of a conversation about dyslexia - as all 3 of my children are gifted with dyslexia. And the fact that I had spent the last 15 years of my life supporting my children in the private sector - as the state system does not educate the child - the state processes the child. And for dyslexic's its even worse, they fall out the bottom, off the sides - with low self-esteem because the system says they are not intelligent, nor useful nor relevant to society.

My frustration is this is not how you truly enable all children to fulfill their true potential. In a networked society Illich's views I think make even more sense.

the institutionalization of education is considered to tend towards the institutionalization of society, and conversely that ideas for de-institutionalizing education may be a starting point for a de-institutionalized society

All institutions built and created over the last 150 years are premised upon the linear mindset of the industrial era - in a post-industrial society - what Sophia also touched upon, and I hope she will personally expand more about is, that its not the vision, the big hairy audacious goal that what drives these organisations on a day-to-day but the process of treading water.

Sir Ken Robinson in a presentation said

We educate our children from the waist up, then we focus on their heads, and then we only educate one side of their brain. The whole purpose of education is to produce university professors. Who live only in their heads. Their bodies are only there to transport their heads to meetings.

Read here the text of Deschooling Society

Illich opens his book so...

Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby "schooled" to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is "schooled" to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question.

But perhaps Achieving world class public services published by the Cabinet Office today might provide a ray of light?

Government 2.0 a rubbish name for a good initiative?

I really enjoyed this article in the Guardian Government 2.0 is a rubbish name for a good initiative

Government 2.0 is a daft term. Its first airing, as the title of one of those management-consultant books on "how the digital revolution is transforming government and politics" was at least fresh. But that was in 2005. That said, government 2.0 is a useful code - purely temporary, and in the absence of anything better - for a fascinating revolution happening in British public life. This is a new and nearly ubiquitous enthusiasm for the power of information, including but not exclusively web 2.0 innovations, to improve public services. Look at this week's draft constitution for the NHS, with its talk of professionals being steered by the output of "digital dashboards". Watch for the forthcoming policing green paper, the white paper on local government "empowerment" and the cross-government strategy on digital equality. All will be stuffed with ideas about giving citizens the information they need.

The Cabinet Office published today the following

The Prime Minister today outlines a bold vision for transforming England's public services. In a Cabinet Office report “ Excellence and fairness: Achieving world class public services ” published today, he argues that although public services have improved dramatically over the past decade they are not yet world-class and a new stage of reform is required.

The objectives

1). Empowering citizens who use public services: extending choice and complementing it with more direct forms of individual control, such as personal budgets, opportunities for people to do more themselves, stronger local accountability, and providing greater transparency over service performance. 2). Fostering a new professionalism in the public service workforce, which combines increased responsiveness to users, consistent quality in day-to-day practices, higher levels of autonomy from central government wherever those at the front line show the ambition and capacity to excel and greater investment in workforce skills. 3). Strong strategic leadership from central government to ensure that direct intervention is more sharply concentrated on underperforming organisations, while the conditions are created for the majority to thrive more autonomously.

The Guardian writes

This is exciting stuff. Twelve years after John Major's enfeebled administration first suggested computerising citizens' dealings with officialdom, e-government is evolving to a new concept of administration.

Technology and learning - a thought for the day

In April 2006, Susan Greenfield sponsored a debate ( More ) in the house of Lords based around the impact of the latest technologies on the way young people might think and learn differently from previous generations.

In her book The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century - ( book review she writes

The more I thought about it, the more fascinated I became with how we define ourselves and others, which in turn relates to how fulfilled we are as individuals

She goes on

In his book The Meaning of the 21st Century, James Martin argues that we shouldn't just ask what is going to happen, but how we are going to shape the future

This is interesting in that I believe people are perhaps starting to believe that fact - as Howard Rheingold says

What we make is up to us

Why the furniture of traditional advertising fails within a social media context

Dave Cushman at Faster future blogspot has put together a slide deck explaining the above principal

| View | Upload your own

Nice one Dave and JMac adds his own contribution

All good stuff and of course this all comes down to communication based not upon Interruption but Engagement

As Bill Gates was quoted as saying

the first digital decade, centred on the keyboard and the mouse, is over. The second digital decade will be more focused on connecting people