culture

Digital lit.

It strikes me that digital literacy is becoming more and more important, as more and more of the things we do in life are digitalised.

It helps to understand how computers work if you want to buy some music these days, or watch a film, or read a book.

Not just the physcial act of downloading, and paying, and pressing the buttons to get it to display. But also some kind of knowledge of the companies providing the service, on what terms, and with what motivations.

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Howard Rheingold in his book Net Smart outlines five key skills needed for digital success:

  • Attention
  • Crap detection
  • Participation
  • Collaboration
  • Network smarts

I dare say all those five are required for existing at all in the digital world we are increasingly finding ourselves in, and not just when we are doing what is apparently digital stuff. Even when you’re offline, you need to be thinking through these things.

Jaron_lanier

I’ve been reading a bit of Jaron Lanier‘s stuff lately, which resonate with a few of the folk that read here. He’s a digital visionary, who these days isn’t sure we are headed in the right direction… This from a recent interview with John Naughton (who himself has some interesting perspectives on these issues):

The thing to remember about HTML, though, is that Tim [Berners-Lee] was not trying to redesign the world. He was trying to do a quick thing for a very particular context – a physics lab. The beauty of HTML was that one-way linking made it very simple to spread because you could put something up and take no responsibility whatsoever. And that creates a society in which people display no responsibility whatsoever. That’s the problem…

Societies and cultures become locked on to ideas. The “open culture” idea – which was really just an experimental thought in the 1980s – has now become an orthodoxy with its cadres of adherents. I dearly wish I could make them realise how experimental it was and how we should not treat it as anything sacrosanct.

The idea that there is philosophy behind the tools we are using in an interesting one, and that those philosophies may come to define and change our behaviour because of the tools we decide to use. I do believe that the ability we all have to publish the things we create is incredibly affirming and powerful, and a good thing. But other stuff worries me, such as the fragmentation of culture and identity into tiny pieces, and the way our culture is being handed over to Silicon Valley companies that don’t necessarily have our or society’s best interests at the forefront of their priorities.

Currently this most affects those that create and publish content, although in the near future, as gardens get walls built around them, it will become a bigger and bigger issue for those that consume culture: whether text, books, music, video, whatever. Oftentimes it is making a value judgement between convenience and control – which often correlates to closed and open, respectively.

However, we are where we are. If we are to shape where we will go next, we need the skills and understanding to make the right choices, to protect ourselves both as individuals and as communities. We need to keep our wits about us and our eyes open. But how many people can we really say do, right now?

Opportunities for serendipity

Excellent stuff from Andrew McAfee:

I think serendipity is part of what underlies Metcalfe’s Law and a big part of the explanation for Eric Raymond’s insight that ‘given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.’ Knowledge workers and their organizations should be doing everything possible to increase opportunities for serendipity. This means searching broadly for information, narrating work so that others can become aware of it, asking questions to the biggest possible audience without presupposing who might have the answers, and generally contributing to and drawing from the biggest possible digital commons. This is what Enterprise 2.0 should be all about.

More on recruitment and talent management

GeeknRollaFollowing up on my earlier post on good things to look for in people when you are hiring – Recruit the internet-savvy – I picked up on some useful notes whilst at TechCrunch‘s GeeknRolla on recruiting into startups, which I think are useful for pretty much any organisation. I also think it’s interesting to think how public services can learn from the culture of startup businesses, including around recruitment.

The talk was by Pete Smith from Songkick, which is a service that lets you track all sorts of information about your favourite live music acts, such as upcoming concerts, videos and recordings.

Here’s the notes:

  • Hiring is a top challenge for a startup and getting it wrong can serious affect momentum
  • Always be hiring
  • Better not to hire though, rather than to compromise on talent and drive
  • Very inefficient to hire from outside your network – plan for this
  • Grow your network as it’s the best way to hire good people
  • Have a hiring roadmap, build it into other choices: buildings, perks, and the tech you use
  • Risk taking in hiring comes later in a startup’s life, not early on
  • Vet applications ruthlessly before even meeting people
  • Spend as much time growing your network as you do looking at ‘non-network’ candidates
  • Hiring devs – use coding exercises then phone interview, then tech interview, then a ‘pairing session’ (not sure what that is)
  • Everyone you hire initially is vital to establishing the culture of your startup
  • How to recover from hiring errors: make sure you leave things on a good note. Don’t let people leave under a cloud. Make decision quickly but manage the exit – don’t let it drag on. Better to leave work undone than allow the wrong people to keep going.

These thoughts chime in with some activity coming out of the IDeA with regard to talent management, recruit and workforce planning. In the current financial climate, there is a lot of talk of cuts and redundancies which has the potential to be incredibly damaging.

So, the IDeA have launched an online resource, on ‘organisational redesign‘ with some useful case studies and guidance. A thriving community of practice also exists too (with various layers of sign-up required).

I honestly believe that local authorities could make massive improvements to their efficiency and levels of service if they recruited better, and made better use of the talent they already have. I consider myself to be a great example of the failings of local government workforce management. Some of the things that are important, I think, are:

  • To get people to do a good job, they need a good job to do
  • Innovators and the enthusiastic should not be treated as troublemakers or weirdos, but be treasured and made to feel special
  • Staff should be trusted. If you genuinely can’t trust all of them, give the good ones leeway
  • Give people the tools they need to be able to do their job well
  • Value things like curiosity, generosity, cooperation and openness
  • Allow the good people in your organisation to find each other
  • Have proper systems and processes in place for inventive people to be able to suggest and progress good ideas

The IDeA are also organising an event in Birmingham on 19th May, called ‘Designing a fit for the future organisation‘. I’m going, because it sounds pretty interesting. Hope to see others there.

The internet is not another channel

I had a pleasant day last Wednesday at the joint NPIA and ACPO event on ‘Policing 2.0’, at the invitation of Nick Keane.

(A quick word in praise of Nick. I have known him for over 3 years now, and in all that time, he has been quietly plugging away at the NPIA, whispering in ears, promoting ideas, talking with others. When things weren’t quite going his way, he never gave up, or had a tantrum, but quietly got on with things. All that effort is now bearing fruit, and the police should be grateful that they have Nick. Every organisation should have a Nick – in fact, they probably do. Find him, or her, as soon as you can, and treasure them.)

I presented a mid-morning slot titled ‘Whose Police is it, anyway?’ – my attempt at a mildly amusing reference to the recent MyPolice saga, which has now thankfully been resolved in a sensible way.

I won’t go into the details of the farrago – the links above will fill you in – but the one lasting impression I got was that quite a lot of people don’t take the internet, and those that inhabit it, terribly seriously. This is a huge mistake and a massive missed opportunity for those that take this view.

This tends to take two main forms. One is that any digital element of a project is left until the last minute before it is considered, meaning that things are inevitably rushed, and not as thought-through as they could be.

The second form is, as I alluded to in the title of this post, that online is considered as just another channel. The fact is, though, that the internet is not a channel. The internet is not the same as your newsletter. It is not the same as your advertisement. It is not the same as your poster.

The internet is a big, important thing. In my presentation, I drew on Stephen Fry‘s analogy from the Digital Britain summit last year, when he described the internet as a city. A place where people meet socially, where they go to work, where they play games together, create wonderful things, share knowledge, thought and jokes.

Like any city, it’s also a place where bad things happen. But like a city, the answer to that is not to shut the bad places down, or build wire fences around them, but to try and root out the bad people and convince them of the error of their ways.

Therefore, like any place where people are so active, they care about the internet. It matters to them. It isn’t something that should be disregarded as a plaything for geeks, or somewhere that only sad, lonely people use to find friends (it is, of course, both of those things, but not exclusively).

Open source wouldn’t happen without the internet. Wikipedia wouldn’t happen without the internet. MySociety wouldn’t happen without the internet. Data.gov.uk wouldn’t happen without the internet. Guido Fawkes wouldn’t happen without the internet. Of course these things all have their flaws, but the fact that they happen at all, and have the impact they do, is a remarkable testament to the culture of the net, which every individual and every organisation has something to learn from.

Here are my slides – a few won’t make much sense, but they were all trying to make one point or another, some more profane than others.

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