PublicSphere – Government 2.0

All tools have intrinsic politics and technology is the tool of now.

Godfrey Reggio

On Monday I attended the PublicSphere Government 2.0 conference hosted by Senator Kate Lundy at Parliament House. I went along because I have recently become interested in how Web 2.0 tools might be helpful in supporting engagement within and between government agencies. I was also interested to experience a conference/meeting that was organised in this way: 150 participants in the room, others watching the live stream from all over Australia (at least), lots of speakers giving 15 minute presentations, live Twitter and blog feeds up on the screen as people spoke. Mark Schenk from Anecdote pretty well summed up my (mixed) reaction in a post on their website on Tuesday. Here’s what he liked and didn’t like with a few square bracketed editorial comments from me.

He liked:

• 15 minute presentation format – this forced [most] speakers to have a few clear messages
• The diverse technologies available meant there was something for everyone [but the organisers apparently learned a lot about getting reliable wifi access in somewhere as secure as Parliament House and people trying to watch the live stream from behind organisational firewalls were quite frustrated]
• Meeting some very interesting people [yes!] and catching up with some people that I haven’t seen for ages
• It was very well organised and all up it ran pretty smoothly [but perhaps wasn’t as well designed as it could have been]
• Seeing the passion in Kate Lundy’s eyes for getting this stuff happening [and listening to the enthusiasm among speakers and participants for the opportunity this presents to enable more people to have more of a voice]

He didn’t like:

• The constant stream of presentations with no provision for discussion. It appeared that the organisers thought that electronic interaction via twitter and commenting on the live blog obviated the need for people to speak to each other. Exacerbating this was the preference for eating into the few breaks to make up time.
• Realising that he couldn’t cope too well with the multiple inputs while attempting to build a mind map of things that resonated (and watching others appear to handle it with ease) [I was merely trying to take notes and watch the Twitter feed]. He did learn a lot about twitter on the day. [I learned a lot about my own struggle to pay attention to multiple inputs!]

When I sat down to write this post I had in mind that I wanted to say something about the tools we use and how they enable and constrain at the same time. This was a conference format that enabled vast amounts of information and comment to be “transmitted” very quickly. For me it was a fascinating example of a “polyphony of unmerged voices”! One of the gurus (apparently) of this kind of stuff, Clay Shirky author of the book Here Comes Everyone talks about publishing first and filtering second. This conference was a wonderful example of that. Lots of people speaking at once, using whatever location and medium they found easiest – on the understanding that they would individually and collectively then find a way of “making sense” of what was said later.

This TED presentation from Clay Shirky sums it up pretty well for me:

Do I think this Web 2.0/Government 2.0 stuff has potential to change the way we work. Absolutely!

Will it be easy? Absolutely not!

Like all tools these ones aren’t easy, they are no more of a silver bullet than anything else and there is the usual risk that people will be tempted to throw the baby out with the bathwater.  But they clearly provide ways in which more voices can be engaged and they clearly can enable us to do our own sense making before, during and after the event. As such then they provide an interesting way of maintaining multiple conversations across time and space.