How blogs, wikis and Web 2.x can help keep us safe
How can the endless array of people transforming government use social networking to get faster to good outcomes?
That’s a big question we considered when we conceived “Blindside”. If only government knew what it knew about technology, customers, and social evidence and if only the good people doing good things could connect better hozontally, based on ability and ideas regardless of hierarchy, who knows how liberating and effective it would be. This applied especially to how we keep our society and our systems safe. Much of that is based on secrecy, but far more is surely based on openness and what we share.
Note for example progress on the US intelligence blog Intellipedia. It’s not itself open, but there is a blog about its progress and issues here, with links to intelligent discussion about the strengths and weaknesses of webs and wikis in this culture.
And there’s A-Space (a classified version of MySpace or the CIA-backed Facebook) - see description here (there may be better links).
The point is: are we using these things safely and to good effect here in the UK to understand information assurance and the role of good IT in creating the e-enabled society we want? It’s essential this should be a cross-disciplinary conversation. It doesn’t do anyone any good if we put very secure IT procedures onto a fundamentally ill-conceived project, but the IA people may end up carrying the can. We saw what happened at HMRC. Do we really think good IT security procedures will make ContactPoint/eCAF, Connecting for Health, and the ID System/eBorders acceptable and safe socially? The point is that effective, broad, respectful engagement ACROSS disciplines is essential up front. Social networking is a great way to support this.
You don’t need a £multi-m investment with some hungry, old-fashioned IT supplier or rancid old consultancy to do this. Technically don’t need anything more than the tools we use for Blindside (a blog and a wiki hosted on our mate Chris’s server). It needs some moderation and commitment to participate. We need to learn two things better: to express ourselves, and to listen. Web 2.x can help; that’s what it does.
November 29th, 2007 at 1:12 pm
I am afraid William that this is a bit naive. Yes i agree that Blogs have the potential for useful open discussion, but in the cases you cite, Arch for example use the web as a vehicle to disseminate misinformation and raise anxiety. So the blogisphere gets hijacked by folks who are pushing polemics.
November 29th, 2007 at 4:44 pm
Hi all, I disagree with Jefferson, to the extent that if (big if) the community is wide enough and active enough disinformation is quickly corrected and misusers are shunned, if not banned. I don’t think the idea is naive at all–it’s working Stateside in many more environments than mentioned by William. What may be naive (and if so, I’m as guilty of naivete as anyone) is the assumption that the right size of community and the right level of energy to insure quick correction of mal-posting is easy to establish or maintain.
The primary example is Wikipedia, which (in successive waves) was plagued by bad posting that overwhelmed the volunteer moderators, resulting in strict rules. But they fixed it and in a fairly large research test of 30,000 articles, proved more accurate than the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Here on Blindside, the problem is smaller as we are a) focussed on something other than general interest, b) issuing author’s rights ourselves, c) working with a population that has interests closely aligned with ours. I would bet money that the largest source of error in Blindside is er, me. But I have had errors corrected quite quickly, and (pretty importantly) the corrections themselves have had additional information relevant to our goals.
Happy to continue this conversation–that is what the blogosphere is all about…