November 2008 Archives

UPDATED: DECEMBER 1, 2008 AT 18:42

"Our Politicians Fiddle as Innocents Die," blared the Times of India newspaper on Sunday as the political recriminations began in the wake of last week's terrorist attacks in Mumbai. The headline coincided with the resignation of India's highest-ranking internal security official, who said he was taking "moral" responsibility for the tragedy.

While the country's black-cat commandos have been largely commended for their work in the street-to-street (and sometimes room-to-room) combat with the assailants, the Indian intelligence, counter terrorism and surveillance services faced almost immediate criticism for allowing the attacks to happen in the first place.  There are even reports that the government had advance warning.

All of this sounds eerily reminiscent.  The early reporting from India suggests that national governments have not learned the lessons from the failures of earlier targets of terrorism.

It is worth saying out loud that the strengths and weaknesses of the evolving media landscape were also on full public view during this latest tragedy, marking an evolution that can be traced back to natural disasters (hurricanes on the gulf coast of this country or the Asian tsnami) if not before.

Consider stories that were published and posted while Mumbai was still under siege. NPR introduced its listeners to Sreenath Sreenivasan, a journalist who also serves as dean of student affairs at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.  Within in an hour of learning of the Mumbai attacks, Sreenivasan "was hosting a Web radio call-in show with other Indian journalists relaying what they knew."  It was the meeting of old and media, with the conventions of journalism tempering the noise that inevitably follows shocking developments.

Elsewhere, a Reuters dispatch reported, "Bloggers across Mumbai fed live updates ... [on the] ...attacks in the heart of India's financial capital, highlighting the social media's new expanding role in news coverage."  It pointed to photos of the attacks on Flikr, frequent updates of an entry on Wikipedia, a steady stream of updates and comments on twitter and myriad bloggers doing what they could to help.  Clearly, these Web 2.0 technologies are as effective as anything we have seen in terms of immediacy -- a particularly powerful attribute when they are in the hands of those on the ground with unique, authoratative information.  

But, and there is are two big buts here: (a) precious few bloggers and even microbloggers are that close and that relevant, prefering instead the comfort of home half way around the world (present company included); and, (b) something disturbing happened to embedded links as they aged.  Dina Mehta blogged furiously from Mumbai during the siege, originally describing herself as "upset and angry and bereft."  But by Sunday night, visitors to her blog learned that she had grown weary of a secondary problem -- inappropriate and even abusive speech. 

In a helpful clarification (including a corrected URL for her post) to the original version of this post, Mehta wrote me: 

I have only been deleting some comments for this reason as stated in my blogpost: "I'm getting a huge load of comments around the politics of religion, of division and hate at my last few posts on the Mumbai terror attacks. While religion and politics may have a lot to do with the state of our world today, my blog's not the forum to air or feed these divisions. I almost feel it's a violation of my own person. So I am deleting them. Sorry. All other comments and conversations are welcome, as always! The #Mumbai Twitter feed is now flooded with them too. I'm stopping watching it. I'm certainly not playing. For all those who feel they have lots to say - I'd recommend they do something more constructive. Start by reading Ingrid Srinath's post titled This is not India's 9/11 ... and Priyanka Joshi's comments there."

[See comments for full text.]

Another blogger, Gaurav Mishra responded to Mehta's decision by setting out a multipoint plan for confronting extremest commentary.  Citizen journalism has no conventions to guide it, and those that comment are prepared to say almost anything under the veil of anonymity.

[As if to remind us of those things at which Web 2.0 is particularly good, Mishra provides links to events or movements spontaneously conceived on or through the Web to benefits of victims of the 11/26 terrorist attacks -- some local, others global -- Nov 30 Tweetup at Leopold Cafe, Facebook Wear White Event, Facebook Support 11/26 Fighters Event.]

At the risk of making a snap judgment even as the events of last week are still unwinding, the response and the reportage were both only partial successes.  Honoring those who served well is important but taking a hard look at what failed may be where the greatest value lies.  It is the only way to perfect or reform institutions about which we care -- government, media and that still amorphous thing called Web 2.0.

A final note.  There is another post about Mumbai that I struggled to write over the long Thanksgiving weekend.  I couldn't get it right.  Thankfully, CBC essayist Rex Murphy did:

We should not see what happened ... in India - what is happening - as something in a distant country, but as a chilling and depraved assault on on what all decent people share in common.

Terrorism is the murder of innocents as a tactic in the service of fanaticism. It is the anti-politics of our time. It is a threat to us all. The blast was in Mumbai, but its vibrations are meant for every civilized city of the planet.

... It is merely right therefore that we give our thoughts to their particular plight - and offer - to these, our fellow citizens - our alert and full sympathy.

The server logs at the Merriam-Webster online dictionary have spoken -- "bailout" is the word of the year as much for how often it was looked up than how many industries wanted one. The arbiters of the English language say the trillion dollar word eclipsed favorites from the campaign trail, "maverick" and "vet."  (The list comes out just in time for the much anticipated holiday's slow news days.)

But this year's finalists hold the promise of being red meat -- "bailout" for conservatives, "maverick" for liberals -- at the extended-family Thanksgiving Day feast, which just isn't right because the day is supposed to be about turkey (the original white meat).

Of course, if you received an invitation to Thanksgiving dinner this year, you have probably figured out the wisdom behind the prohibition on talking politics and religion in such settings.

But there is an occupational hazard that could send your tryptophan-saturated hearers face down into the jellied salad.  Infrastructure.

It is an easy shorthand in the private vocabulary of information technology but both high- and low- culture word watchers don't think much of it.

According to no less an authority than Dr. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Director of the Annenberg School of Public Policy at the University of Pennsylvania in comments at the fall NASCIO conference, IT's coupling of infrastructure and architecture has little meaning outside of the technology community and is confusing to the very people with whom CIOs and their kin seek to communicate.

MSNBC commentator Chris Mathews agrees. "Infrastructure is an awful word," he gurgled during an early on-air dissertation on the merits of the depression-era Works Progress Administration (WPA) and how it may be time to try such a scheme again.

But his cable news colleague Rachel Maddow opened her show early on Monday by enthusing about the opening of the federal spigot under the new administration:

President-elect Obama's ... big plan? He's rolling out what amounts to a new "New Deal" to invest in infrastructure. Yes. I've wanted infrastructure to be a sexy political issue for so long now that when I say the word, I can almost hear wakachicka-wakachicka background music in my head - infrastructure, yessss.

That last little wakachicka-wakachicka bit has morphed into a downloadable ring tone under the heading of what Maddow calls infrastructure porn.

Even with infrastructure worth about 115,000,000 returns on Google, when and if real people think about it, they think about roads, bridges and schools.  They don't readily think about the Internet and digital infrastructures.  We run the risk of thinking we are part of this new national conversation when we are not.  We don't share a common definition of the word, a word it should be noted that nobody really uses in casual conversation anyway.

The final caution can be ripped out of context from The Princess Bride, the 1987 Rob Reiner film that has become a perennial favorite rental on Thanksgiving long weekends. In a recurring exchange with Vizzini, Inigo Montoya calmly intones, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."  Inconceivable!  No, infrastructure. 

A bipartisan and independent California state agency is recommending further consolidation of the state's information technology infrastructure, assets and staff under the state CIO.  The Little Hoover Commission, in an ironically-named report called  A New Legacy System: Using Technology to Drive Performance, recommends:

Empower the state chief information officer with tools and resources to oversee a generational transformation of information technology in state government. The state must consolidate resources under the Office of the State Chief Information Officer, including the Department of Technology Services, the Office of Systems Integration, geospatial information functions and the information security functions of the Office of Information Security and Privacy Protection.

Use public money for technology projects responsibly and with transparency.
To rebuild the confidence of the Legislature and the public, the process through which California's technology projects are governed must be open and transparent. The Information Technology Council should expand to include legislative members as well as members from existing technology councils, and it should be empowered to prioritize overall technology projects for the state and aggressively monitor their implementation. The state chief information officer should regularly report on the progress of the state's information technology projects through a more robust Web site.

Use technology to track, measure and improve performance.
The state should encourage and foster the burgeoning development of performance measurement projects throughout state departments and agencies by re-establishing the technology innovation fund and creating opportunities to regularly integrate performance data into the state's management and budgeting strategy. The governor should hold regular public meetings with agency heads to evaluate performance data.

Even while tacitly recognizing that these changes will be difficult and take time, the Commission points to a new model for IT governance as key to a more effective fiscal management in the long run.

In the name of full disclosure, I was one of many who provided testimony to the Commission and worked with its staff in the preparation of the report.  To read the full text of the report, download it here -- LittleHoover.pdf .

I substituted for Georgia Technology Authority Director Patrick Moore at the state's Digital Government Summit yesterday because Moore had 1.2 billion reasons not to be there at the appointed hour.

He was alongside Governor Sonny Perdue to announce the signing of a pair of contracts intended to consolidate and outsource the state government's IT operations.  The larger of the two, worth $873 million over eight years, was awarded to IBM to take over infrastructure -- from the raised floor data centers, mainframes, services and disaster recovery to PC and laptops.  The other will pay AT&T $346 million over 5 years to manage network services for the state.  Both contracts have two one-year renewal options.

The state estimates that it will save an estimated $180 million over the term of the contracts but it comes at a cost to state employees, 92 of whom will lose their jobs in May 2009 and 322 others will be offered jobs with IBM and AT&T.

IBM and AT&T were effectively sole bidders after two other companies withdrew their bids before the apparently successful vendors were announced.

The award comes on the heels of a decision late last month by the state of Texas to suspend an $863 million outsourcing project with IBM to transfer state records to a centralized computer system.  In a letter to state IT officials, Governor Rick Perry said the company had failed to backup the data of more than 20 state agencies.

As for my presentation, you can download it here [11-08CDGStealThisIdea1.6.pdf].

"My plans require time and distance." That's the quote carved in stone below a statue of Pacific Northwest pioneer Marcus Whitman inside the entrance to the Washington State Legislature. Of course, the commodity Internet has been collapsing time and distance for more than a decade. Still the technology juggernaut's time efficiencies have been frustrated -- by the deliberate process and pacing of legislatures at the institutional level, for example, and by you and me.

There is a name for this neo-Luddism that lurks just below the surface of even the most enthusiastic technology booster: latency. We carbon-based life forms are the prime source of latency in semiautomated processes. Without us there would be no "semi" in semiautomated. (Read: We are the problem.)

This isn't a new problem. Latency has a language of its own in communications media -- mail (Return to sender), broadcast (One moment please), over-the-counter (Back in five minutes), phone (Leave a message), e-mail (This is an auto reply) and mobile, instant messages and short message service (Subscriber could not be found. Message may not be delivered.)

Unified communications (UC), the latest evolution in converged networking, promises to remove these excuses by making the underlying problem -- humans -- more available. Enter "presence" -- described by its supporters as "the dial tone of the future" because it keeps real-time tabs on the availability, ability and preferred mode of communicating. Presence is also the component of UC that's aimed at reducing or eliminating human latency; it's also the key differentiator between UC and previous iterations of any-to-any networks that combine multimedia communications, such as voice, data and video; call control; instant messaging; conferencing like audio, video, tele, Web; and mobility.

Are UCs a sleeper issue? Perhaps. In a recent survey of 82 self-selected public agencies conducted by the Center for Digital Government, 22 percent of respondents reported that presence was the highest funding priority in their communications strategy. That's well behind voice (60 percent) and video (38 percent), in line with data (26 percent) and e-mail (26 percent), and ahead of instant messaging (16 percent) and mobility (11 percent).

Presence is a compelling idea for institutional improvisation and productivity. But presence is also a very personal matter. It's about my presence and yours -- when and how to reach us, especially when we're away.

It reminds me of the first time I was issued a cell phone in 1988 -- convenient yes, but maybe too convenient. Cell phones began to blur the lines between work hours and personal hours, professional spheres and personal space. Two decades later, we have become accustomed to how cell phones have reordered our lives -- call it accidental technological determinism. Presence is smarter than cell phones by themselves -- our planning for presence and response to it needs to be more deliberate because we could use a little time and distance.

This post originated in the pages of GT but this forum creates the opportunity for conversation about it.  What say you? Am I overstating the creepiness factor here or is it just good thinking?

Disavowing that he was speaking in his role as a member of President-Elect Barack Obama's Transition Economic Advisory Board, and disavowing interest in serving as the new administration's chief technology officer, Google CEO Eric Schmidt did provide a hopeful view of the potential synergies among public policy, technology and economic renewal.

Schmidt is also the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the New America Foundation, the organization that hosted the speech and live webcast from Washington, DC on Tuesday.

Echoing incoming chief of staff Rahm Emanuel's rejoinder not to let any crisis pass without taking advantage of it, Schmidt told his audience in the Ronald Reagan Building, "The country has faced many, many more significant challenges. ... Let's take the crisis ... and let's deal with it as an opportunity to get the structure right."

"If you're going to spur economic growth you've got to focus on infrastructure research and development and energy. These are jobs programs," he said, pointing out that the historical record was on his side of the argument, "Infrastructure is the foundation upon which wealth is created"

Even as the heads of the American auto makers and their unions lobbied for loans in front of a lame duck Congress just down the street, Schmidt said that there was a better way to go than invest in past failures, "Let's not just have bailout programs. Why don't we use the stimulus money to get infrastructure built?"

The strongest parts of the speech were those that were within Google's wheelhouse - the democratization of information.  "In our life time, almost all people will have access to almost all the world's information. That is a remarkable achievement."

What's more important, said Schmidt, was having systems as open as the information that they surface and exploit, ""Open systems have this clear promise of innovation and greater choice....  It is that openness, the ability that [allows] anyone can play ... that drives the modern economy....  You never know where innovation's going to come from, but with an open platform, you welcome it,"

Aware of his audience and the location of his speech, the Google chief closed by noting that, in his view, the public sector has been a laggard in adopting new platforms for governing -- including but not limited to blogs and social network, "Government has not embraced generally the tools we use every day....  It's time to do it and do it right."

A pair of Bronze Medal Award Winners from Washington, DC's Apps for Democracy competition picked up additional honors on Friday night by picking up the People's Choice awards.

The District's new Car Pool Mashup attracted 22 percent of the 3,320 votes and DC Bikes took another 13 percent.

It could be that all of this only matters to a small band of Birkenstock-wearing, open source-coding, Obama-voting, Inconvenient Truth-watching, Latte-drinking residents in Washington, DC or it could foreshadow the democratization of government-held data and the applications that make them useful.  Nothing against the former, but I'm betting on the latter.

In the shadow of the budget preparations by governors across the nation that mark the start the negotiations with their respective legislatures, there is considerable activity to position bills on a wide range of issues.

In Washington state, the 2009 legislature will be asked to act on the recommendations of the state Sunshine Committee to narrow the circumstances under which public agencies can cite attorney-client privilege to prevent disclosure of certain public records.

The original standard in the state's Open Records Act had been that there had to be an authentic threat of litigation against a public agency had to exist.  Two state Supreme Court decisions in particular -- Hangartner v. City of Seattle (2004) and Soter v. Cowles Publishing (2007) -- had a broadening effect on the exemption by upholding claims of attorney-client privilege.  The state's daily newspapers -- individually and through their lobbying association -- claim the result has been the loss of public accountability. 

As worrying for the daily newspapers is what they perceive as a proliferation of exemptions, which started at only 10 in the original 1971 law and have grown to over 300 today, and were a catalyst to the creation of the Public Records Exemption Accountability Committee in mid-2007.

By a 7-3 vote last Wednesday, the so-called Sunshine Committee voted to recommend new legislation that force a tightening of the privilege definitions under the act, and push back against the Supreme Court.  The no votes included a state senator and a pair of public sector attorneys who provide advice to public officials on legal matters.  One of the no votes belonged to an attorney who was enormously helpful to me in the early days of the e-government movement.

The state's largest newspaper has called the trio out by name, and not in a complimentary way, as part of its campaign to have the legislature codify the committee's recommendation.

We are entering the fourth decade of America's citizen-led experiment with open records laws.  They were created around broad principles but refined, as the 300 exemptions attest, incrementally with scalpel-like incisions.  Considering the source of the minority opinion in the privilege recommendation, the legislature would be well advised to avoid replacing the scalpel with the blunt force of a hammer.  

After only 29.5 years in Mississippi state service, Karen Newman has retired from the Department of Information Technology Services.  Apparently a change is still as good as a rest - she joined The Clay Firm last week.  

The answer is in: what do you get from 260 data feeds and $20,000 in prize money?  The District of Columbia says you get 30 days of frenetic activity and 47 applications that mash up public data in ways that government itself may never had the time, inclination and impulse to develop themselves.  Such are the results of an aptly named competition, Apps for Democracy, which all but wrapped up round one today.

The winners range from the useful to the quirky and all point to the potential of democratizing data.  They all put the individual at the center of the transaction, which may be progress enough in rethinking the relationship between citizens and their government.

Here is a briefly annotated tour of the top two tiers of award winners:

Gold (Independent)

iLive.at - Doing errands in DC will never be the same.

Gold (Agency)

DC Historic Tours -- A walking tour planner, powered by a Google Maps-Flikr-Wikipedia mashup, minimizes steps and maximizes experience

Silver (Independent)

Park It DC -- fighting the constant circling, the unnecessary meter plugging and even expensive tickets that come with finding a parking spot in DC.

Where's My Money? DC -- The buck stops at a Facebook Forum on public expenditures, procurement and accountability.

DC Crime Finder -- Ripped from the databases, not the headlines -- a customizable look at crime in the neighborhood.

Silver (Agency)

Stumble Safely -- Making the streets of DC safe for pub crawls.

PointAbout Alerts -- an iPhone app makes crime reports, building permits and other civic  data location-aware in that you see the stuff that is closest to you first

We the People Wiki -- An editable Vox populi for our Web 2.0 times, embedding the voice (or keystrokes) of the people through an editable, peer-led community reference website based on Washington, D.C. public data.

The full list of winners is available at the Apps for Democracy Medal Winner page, which comes complete with the opportunity to vote on the People's Choice award -- and the polls for which remain open until Friday, November 14 at 7PM EST.

The medal winners and the honorable mentions (which are all other entrants for their willingness to innovate, compete and collaborate) are all open source and all are offered to others for refinement and reuse.  Perhaps more importantly, they keep hope alive for redeeming the reputation of a discredited phrase, your tax dollars at work.

The judges are sequestered in an undisclosed location with an array of laptops, iPhones and other devices to decide who has done the best job mashing up the District of Columbia's data. 

The Apps for Democracy program is detailed in previous posts on internal catalysts and the use of cash incentives.

The results will be summarized here in an updated post as the results are known, with the details available at Apps for Democracy as soon as the $20,000 in award money is allocated.

The Office of the President-elect has launched change.gov to be the public face of a much watched and anticipated political transition.  Like its content, the web address -- "change" being the watch word of the Obama campaign coupled with the exclusive dot-gov top level domain -- blurs the once bright line of distinction between campaigning and governing.

National Public Radio ran a good piece on how the web tools that served the campaign so well can be applied to advancing the new administration's objective.  NPR correspondent Mara Liasson points out that one of the effects may well be to disintermediate the media by creating citizen activists who advocate directly with congress on the administration's behalf.  It is worth noting here that the conventional media is not the only institutional interest at risk of disintermendiation -- you can and should add entrenched bureaucracies to the list.  For them, this is a change that they can believe will happen to them, whether they like it or not.

It is followed by an clever little essay by comedian and NPR regular Paula Poundstone on what she is willing to do to breath life into the promise of change ... at least for now.

The answer is in the room.  The room, in this case, was a discussion of changing the way government works at the conclusion of re:public VII: a gathering of those who choose to lead, an invitation-only event convened in Tucson, AZ by e.Republic's Center of Digital Government.

The answer is in the room, taken more broadly, recognizes the power and potential of internal initiative in changing the way organizations work.

As a case in point, Veterans Day came with a pair of announcements that new veterans-only social networks were launching, not by upstart newcomers but by incumbents that have been protecting and promoting the interests of veterans -- Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, working with the Ad Council, launched CommunityofVeterans.org on Tuesday and the Veterans of Foreign Wars brought www.myvetworks.com online this week too.

But that may be just scratching the surface.  Back in the room in Tucson, the assembled panel had all gone deeper in their respective jurisdictions.  Here are brief summaries of their case stories:

On the Spot: Open Source and Authority to Change

Vivek Kundra, CTO for the District of Columbia, says formal cross-agency agreements to surface and share data has made it possible to democratize DC's data -- for the good of the District and democracy itself.

It has resulted in the surfacing of 260 data feeds across DC government and a 30 percent reduction in requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

As noted in an earlier post, the internal initiative to create the 260 feeds was a necessary precondition to creating Apps for Democracy, the $20,000 competition to mashup the District's data.

This final judging is slated for this Thursday but the contest has attracted a steady stream (with at least one developed every day) of open source apps for platforms from Facebook to iPhones Apps -- including ones that let you know when the next metro train is coming, give you real time notification of crimes and disturbances in progress or allow you to customize tour routes in the DC based on your interests.

Kundra says the Apps for Democracy is part of a deliberate process to rethink the way government is done and in which "citizens and NGOs co-create" the future with and for government.

Kundra says that a future of that time involves confronting entrenched bureaucracies.  He asked for and received the authority to make hiring offers on the spot -- successfully attracting 100 new people into public service that would have otherwise been snapped up by the private sector before government-as-usual could act. A more startling HR move is a parallel mechanism for showing others to the door.  The district has also implemented daily performance reviews to identify people who are simply not working (out) and get them off the public payroll.  The daily performance checks enforce expectations that everybody gets something done everyday.  If you are not getting it done, you have until tomorrow or the next day to start.  And if you never start, your employment ends.

Building an Arc

The City of Sacramento, CA, is partnering with Westinghouse to vaporize and monetize trash.  So says Sacramento City Manager Ray Kerridge who, upon first meeting, appears to be the kind of guy who has a well thumbed first edition of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  Listen a little longer and it becomes clear that he could write Zen and the Art of Repairing Government.

Kerridge enthusiastically detailed joint plans between the city (with a 5% percent ownership stake) and Westinghouse (the majority owner at 95%) to build earth's largest Plasma arc gasification plant.  Riiight, as in Bill Cosby's Noah.

Wikipedia helpfully describes Plasma arc gasification as "a waste treatment technology that uses high electrical energy and high temperature created by an electrical arc gasifier. This arc breaks down waste primarily into elemental gas and solid waste slag, in a device called a plasma converter. The process has been intended to be a net generator of electricity, depending upon the composition of input wastes, and to reduce the volumes of waste being sent to landfill sites."  Right.

That is exactly what Kerridge says the sacred northern California city will do.  Gone will be the expense of trucking Sacramento's garbage to far away landfills.  What's more, the scheme will redeem slag's good name because in this new brownish green economy, slag has economic value and a new name -- feed stock.

And Sacramento produces 5,000 tons of feed stock every day, which they will be able to sell as the raw resource for the gasifier.  The stuff that comes out of the gasifier has added value in the making of green products.  Under the agreement, Sacramento will get a cut of that too.  If that wasn't enough, Kerridge says the city is also looking at the possibility at taking garbage off of other cities (for a fee), provide it as feeder stock (for a fee) and take a third fee for its share of the value-added products.

Amid looks of disbelief and furious note taking in the room, Kerridge -- whose voice still carries a residual British accent -- reminded the audience of an old saying from his native England, "Where there is muck there is money."  The new world translation will be worth watching.

The Education Dividend

The Commonwealth of Virginia's strategic partnerships on infrastructure (Northrop Grumman) and enterprise applications (CGI) are credited for bringing hope to hard scrabble southwest Virginia.  The collaborations are on track to help create 700 jobs.  But the opportunities surface problems of their own -- what if the jobs go begging for want of workers with the needed education and skills? 

For all his work on creating and sheparding the partnerships, Virginia Secretary of Technology Aneesh Chopra loves the challenge that comes with these more complex, stickier questions.  The first part of the state's response is called plugGED In (notice how GED is imbedded in the name) which combines adult literacy, skills assessment, and workforce development.

Thanks to internal initiative, the commonwealth was able to stand the program up in only 6 months.  But they did not do it alone, particularly in the area of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) where the education gap was particularly pronounced.

Virginia reached out to a non-profit "open course" start-up, the CK Foundation, which describes itslef this way on its website:

Our mission is to reduce the cost of textbook materials for the K-12 market both in the US and worldwide, but also to empower teacher practitioners by generating or adapting content relevant to their local context. Using a collaborative and web-based compilation model that can manifest open resource content as an adaptive textbook, termed the "FlexBook", CK-12 intends to pioneer the generation and distribution of high quality, locally and temporally relevant, educational web texts. The content generated by CK-12 and the CK-12 community will serve both as source material for a student's learning and provide an adaptive environment that scaffolds the learner's journey as he or she masters a standards-based body of knowledge, while allowing for passion-based learning.

Generating and adapting content relevant to a local context was exactly what is plugGED In needed. Chopra says they issued an open call for contributors and collaborators for their own untextbook that focused on the skills the commonwealth sought to develop.  They received responses from over the country, with would-be collaborators ranging from an 11th grader to major research universities.  The result: a custom open source physics flex book that will be available in February 2009, which Chopra proudly points out is the speed that the market needs and puts the conventional textbook industry to shame.

On the exit question, the panel offered a few random elements on the secrets to change that you can believe in -- and get done:

• Be bold enough to take on entrenched bureaucracies (and have the necessary air cover from your appointing authority in place before you hit the streets);
• Convince your people that their lives will be better;
• Remember that attorneys answer the questions that they are asked -- "what are the barriers to doing this?" gets a very different answer than "how can we do this?";
  
• Push innovation down as far as it can go in the organization.  Innovation is embraced downstream when the people in the trenches believe its theirs;
• Create a war room to prosecute the change with military-style discipline -- but only build a war room if you are relentless about it and willing to stake your career on it; and,
• Remember that innovation cannot come at the cost of consistent and reliable service delivery -- blocking and tackling on the front lines buys permission to keep working on the next new thing just behind the curtain.

There is a lot here to digest, and this summary may not have done their cases justice.  Expect a return to some of these ideas in subsequent posts.  And your thoughts are welcome and encouraged by adding your comments below.

It may have been an unfair request but biographer Neal Gabler's task was to divine leadership lessons from the life and work of Walt Disney. The night before his talk, when I met him in Tucson on the eve of a leadership retreat -- called re:public VII; a gathering of those who choose to lead, convened by e.Republic's Center for Digital Government -- Gabler said he was debuting a short list on the subject.



The short list was extracted from a long book -- Gabler's 633-page biography Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination.  The next morning, in front of group of public officials and employees, he debuted what might be called 'Disney on Management' with the caveat that he did not want it to devolve into the stuff of greeting cards or motivational posters.  The talk did not.  With apologies to Gabler, the following summary may.

Here is the short list of what Disney did, for good or for ill, in creating an industry and sheparding the company that bears (and bought) his name:

1. Infallibility Helps.  Disney failed early and often, but never considered himself a failure.  He was driven to be the best at something -- he set out to define the then new craft of animation and it defined him.
2. Business Plan Optional.  He insisted that high quality was enough of a business plan.  Disney also had the curious practice of repeatedly hiring efficiency consultants to study the studio's practices only to toss their reports and recommendations when it became clear that acting on them would put unneeded (or at least unwanted) constraints on the studio -- and the man who reigned over it.
   
3. Not Just an Organization. Disney was all about creating community -- a community that was intensely loyal to him -- but it foreshaddowed by decades all that Web 2.0 social network talk.
4. Inspire, Inspire, Inspire. Disappointing Disney was a terrible thing to do, and the people around him knew it, and did everything in their power not to do it.  Inspiring his artists was the key to transcend simple cartooning and make animated features in which audiences believe the characters are alive, and have a heart and soul.
5. Trust Yourself. Disney did not collaborate, he directed.  It was his vision, and those around him were charged with making it real.  It made him a micro manager of the first order, and not necessarily a good thing for the organization. When Disney stopped trusting himself, the studio started using focus groups, which were no substitute for his iconoclastic leadership.
6. Take the Long View. In 1935, Disney pioneered the production of color animated films because he believed that, decades later, there would be color television and black and white films would not hold their value.
7. Maintain Control. Disney did, it made him indispendable and the company knew it -- so much so that life insurance was taken out to pay back share holders in case of his death.
8. Reinvent Regularly. There were a number of Walt Disneys over the years, each adapting to or anticipating the next opportunity.

In the end, Disney was better than anyone else than imagining the future, and then building it.  Gabler would quickly add that was true insofar as brother Roy O. Disney was around to check Walt's unbridled enthusiasm and find ways to pay for it all.

In the discussion that followed, Gabler reflected on this future of biography.  Biographers rely on the written record, from the first postcard Disney received to his death certificate -- to all of which Gabler had unprecedented access.  Documents were also central to his biography of Walter Winchell and a history of Hollywood studio chiefs.  He worries that the craft and its products will suffer, or perhaps disappear, as the written record becomes less complete.  The worry was shared by many in the room but others protested that the nature of the record will change but will still be available to future biographers.  The optimists drew analogies between postcards and instant messages and pointed out that proper archives would embrace more than just physical artifacts.

In discussions after the session, some attendees swooned over the reminder to wish on a star while others concluded that the words and Disney and leadership should never be used in the same sentence.  "What was the lesson I took away from it?" asked one attendee who was quick to answer his own question, "He was a lot of things but not a manager ... and he may have just been crazy."
 

The trip to the seventh annual re:public retreat for those who choose to lead provided a chance to get caught up with friends in Arizona over the weekend.

At breakfast on Sunday, we met with a friend who is a veteran of health care IT systems implementation and training.  She had moved here three years ago after a long career at public hospitals in the northwest.  The then new job was with a hospital system run by a religious order.

There is much in common between the two environments.  The same software, the same organizational resistance, the same tight budgets, the same aggressive time lines and the same team dynamics.  But there was at least one notable difference.

This morning's breakfast came as the launch of the next iteration of the clinical information system loomed only seven days away.  The team was pressing hard against deadlines, working long hours to ready the system for the go live next Saturday at midnight. 

In double checking the final countdown's task list, a colleague reminded our friend that there was one final requirement for the go live -- finding a priest to bless the new system as it went into production.

After a flurry of e-mail, she found a priest who was happy to help but there was one last contingency -- a page at 11:00PM to make sure he was awake at an hour much later than his normal bedtime.

There is a conventional wisdom among public employees: vote your job.  That usually means voting for the incumbent whose administration signs your paycheck rather than the challenger who ran on a platform of eliminating government waste, which could include your job.

It is a different story around the cabinet table, where the members are supposed to be the first choice of the appointing authority.  When the appointing authority changes, and when there is a change in party, resignation seems obvious.

There is sometimes a case to be made for retention over a political transition.  The speculation about the possibility that Defense Secretary Bob Gates would be held over by the incoming Obama administration is a case in point.

Sometimes continuity matters, sometimes there is a non partisan path forward, sometimes the plan is working, and sometimes the incumbent is uniquely credible in the community of interest such that spanning changes in appointing authority and even party make sense.

With eight of the eleven gubertorial elections on Tuesday night returning incumbents for another term, the issue of transitions may not seem relevant.  But returning governors often see the new term as exactly that - new.

Re-election forces soul searching and a hard look of what worked and what didn't. What remains undone and will the current strategies and players get them to done? In such circumstances, legacy becomes more important than continuity.  

It takes little intuition to figure out whether you are part of the next administration when the call comes thanking you for your service, couched in some awkward talk about going in a new direction.  

But what if doing the right thing for the good of the order comes down to your own initiative?  It may be helpful to see yourself as others do.

• When the track record of projects has been obfuscated to mask overruns in cost, time and scope, or bug lists are kept from partner agencies to save face, it is time to write that letter.
• When you have earned a reputation as a hatchet person, because the person who dismantles a program is rarely the right person to build a new one, it is time to write that letter.
• When you do not have a good and clearly stated answer to the simple question, what's next?, it is time to write that letter.
• If you have never been caught making a decision, it is time to write that letter.
• If you have a customer base of only one -- the appointing authority -- it is time to write that letter.  (Conversely, if you covertly complain about the appointing authority to curry favor with customer agencies, it is time to write that letter.)
• If you spent the good old days marginalizing people whose help you could now use to work through the hard times, it is time to write that letter.
  

An old friend taught me a long time ago that success in this business is based on competence and trust.  If that is not the way you are seen up, down and across the organization, it is time to write that letter.

Do it.  Now.

If journalism is still the first draft of history, it is understandable that President-elect Barack Obama dominates the post-election coverage.  The Spectator's blog on all things American has compiled a long list of potential cabinet picks for the Obama Administration -- it is as speculative as any other such list but it provides a clue as to how intently overseas observers are watching every move of the incoming administration.

But there were other personalities in play, including eleven governors.  Here is the briefest of summaries:

Delaware, where it is good to be first (constitutionally): Upstart Jack Markell (D) will replace a fellow Democrat Ruth Ann Minner who was prevented from running for re-election by term limits.  Markell's predecessor was quietly effective in making technologies work for the disproportionately older population of her small state.  It is a good foundation and thoughtful strategy on which to build.

Indiana: Mitch Daniels (R) won re-election in a landslide, an exception to his party's performance elsewhere in the country.  During his first term, Daniels increased infrastructure spending from $244 million in FY05 to more than $867 million in 2007.

Missouri: State Attorney General Jay Nixon (D) will succeed Gov. Matt Blunt, the 38 year old Republican incumbent who decided not to run for a second term earlier this year.  Nixon's campaign centered on what the New York Times called "a scathing critique of Republican control," making continuity through the transition unlikely.

Montana: The iconoclastic Brian Schweitzer (D), who gained national attention for his opposition to REAL ID as a reckless unfunded federal mandate, and who has worked to increase energy production (oil, wind and electricity) at home, won re-election by a wide margin.

New Hampshire: John Lynch (D) easily won re-election by landslide proportions, despite claims by his opponent that the state was losing its New England charm under Lynch's leadership.

North Carolina: Beverly Perdue (D) will build on a sixteen year run during which Democrats have held the governors office.  North Carolina's leadership in the process of becoming digital has ebbed and flowed over the years, perhaps the reflection of strong personalities that pioneered the move into the Internet era and enterprise architecture.  Those initiatives helped earn NC a Top 10 finish in 2004, a full 12 positions higher than where the state has been in both the 2006 and 2008 Digital States rankings -- 22.

North Dakota, which made a six position upward move to 17th place in the 2008 Digital States survey: John Hoeven (R) told reporters that re-election would bring with it a continued emphasis on economic development, particularly through the state's "Centers of Excellence program, an initiative that ties the state's universities to the private sector in order to create higher-paying jobs and new business opportunities for North Dakotans."

Utah, which earned the top ranking in the 2008 Digital States survey: In another counter trend Republican landslide, Jon Huntsman (R) won re-election by a large margin.  Known for his pragmatic approach, Huntsman pioneered an energy-saving four day work week for state employees and where, by design, online self service ensures no loss in public service.

West Virginia: Joe Manchin (D) easily won re-election to a second term, running a track record of infrastructure investments, cutting the size of state government employment two years in a row, and saving as much as $350 million in government reform and streamlining initiatives.

Washington, which placed fifth in the 2008 Digital States rankings: Christine Gregoire (D) has apparently defeated former state senator Dino Rossi (R) in a rematch of a contentious and almost-too-close-to-call election in 2004.  The incumbent governor made an acceptance speech based on declarations by the AP and other media organizations but without benefit of a concession speech by her challenger.  The Rossi campaign says it will make a statement on the race on Wednesday afternoon.  The margins in key counties are wider for Gregoire this time around, making the multiple recounts and court challenge that delayed a final judgement in 2004 unlikely.

What remains unchanged is what Digital Communities blogger Bill Schrier forecasts as "an agonizing election week [ahead] as King County (Seattle) slowly and painfully counts its ballots." Schrier says a little technology could go a long way toward shortening the count, and making it more accurate.  And while he says there is plenty of blame to be assigned to King County itself, the Luddite-like disposition of a little known federal agency is not helping.

With a rough and tumble campaign behind her, Gregoire promised progress on creating a sustainable economy in the self described evergreen state, "It will be green, clean and the envy of the world."

UPDATE AT 11:43 AM: Saying "we just couldn't make up the gap," Republican challenger Dino Rossi conceded the governor's race to the incumbent.

Vermont: Jim Douglas (R) won re-election to his fourth term as governor.  Douglas ran, in part, on the state's "e-State Initiative [which] is already helping to achieve my goal of creating a universal network of high speed wireless phone and internet services that reaches every corner of our state by the end of 2010."