Measuring social media

December 23, 2009

A long time ago, in social media terms, the Guardian published a piece about the 1% rule (Guardian 20 July 2006). The piece was picked up in a recent http://europa-eu-audience.typepad.com/ entry entitled “What is the 0.9% rule?” These were all to do with how much comment is made upon Inernet posts and what standard vale can be placed upon this. The Europa-eu piece also picked up a recent David Berkowitz post  on MediaPost entitled “100 Ways to Measure Social Media“.

In my own paper, accepted for Ethicomp 2010, that I’m currently completing, I’ve considered a few of the simple metrics I’ve employed to keep track of my own research blog. I certainly wouldn’t have time to record a hundred or anywhere near that! But perhaps they may provide some experimental data for someone with time on their hands, which I don’t currently. We do need to consider whether time invested in the social media is worth it and whether it can become anymore than ‘vanity’ publishing.

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Co-production again

December 20, 2009

Christmas greetings and thanks go out to Adrian Barker at the IDeA who, in his blog, pointed out the existence of “The Challenge of Co-production” from David Boyle and Michael Harris published by NESTA, in cooperation with The Lab and nef.

Co-production is no stranger to this blog with some nine mentions of it in the recent past and two particular posts about it from January 2009, the first of which was entitled Co-production.

It’s some 25 pages of tight small print but is  a useful introduction to what might be done, without offering any solutions, but it does clearly point out some of the existing issues:

P.6 – “The ‘choice’ agenda has been at the heart of policy towards public services for most of the past three decades, but there is increasing doubt about whether it has succeeded in delivering what people actually want.”

P.7 – “The increasing use of consumer language has encouraged people to behave towards public services as they would towards any commercial supplier. Equally, by focusing entirely on people’s needs – rather than what they can contribute – services have tended to dissempower their users and have  done little to prevent needs arising in the first place.

P.8 – Reproduces definition of co-production from: Parks, R. B., Baker, P.C., Kiser, L., Oakerson, R., Ostrom, E.,Ostrom, V., Percy, S.L.,Vandivort, M.B., Whitaker, G.P., Wilson, R., (1981). “CONSUMERS AS COPRODUCERS OF PUBLIC SERVICES: SOME ECONOMIC AND INSTITUTIONAL CONSIDERATIONS.” Policy Studies Journal 9(7): 1001-1011. which states – “process through which inputs used to produce a good or service are contributed by individuals who are not ‘in’ the same organisation.”

In general a useful addition to the literature on co-production.

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NDL

December 17, 2009

NDL have produced their latest (sixth) report on ‘Integration and CRM Systems’. As one would expect from a commercial organization they require  you to register by email with them at info (at) ndl.co.uk in order to receive it but it does reinforce my own academic work and they have managed to cover over 50% of local authorities, getting them to complete it over the ‘phone.

In summary it states:

P.2., talking about eforms and CRM – “our research has shown that both of these technologies have been applied as a veneer, masking continuing areas of inefficiency from public view.”

P.3., discussing NI14 – “very little activity is taking place based on this data, with most authorities still ‘collating’ or ‘analysing’ their data sets.”

P.10., examining integration of back office applications – vast majority have only integrated between one and five applications with their CRM.

P.10., very few have CRM’s transacting directly with back office.

P.11., over half of authorities are only partly complying with NI14.

P.13., “we draw the conclusion that many of the smaller District councils see middleware as an expensive and largely non-essential overhead that is impossible to justify.” Which I quite agree with!

P.14., with regard to Government Connect – 46% are firmly convinced that it will never shown any value!

As to the last (Government Connect), from this IT Manager’s perspective, using it continues to be a slow and agonising process, as technical issues still arise, although some process improvements in Benefits are showing. However, there are still a limited number of government departments playing the game, although they’ve been told to exploit it. If they all got on board more quickly it would really demonstrate some value!

2 Comments | customer satisfaction, e-government, engagement, Metrics, NI 14, NI14, Systems thinking, transformational change | Tagged: , , | Permalink
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E-democracy

December 14, 2009

A long-time lurker on the W3C e-government  group, J.H.Snider, posted links to his  2001 commentary in Government Technology, E-Government vs. E-Democracy where he argued “that it is harmful to equate e-government with e-democracy reform because the motivations leading to the two types of reform are so different.  If you are a government official opposed to e-democracy but supportive of e-government, I think conflating the two terms is good political strategy.  But if you’re a democratic reformer, you want to reserve separate terms for e-government and e-democracy.”

He also provides a link to a more recent article of his on the politics of e-democracy entitled ”Would You Ask Turkeys to Mandate Thanksgiving? The Dismal Politics of Legislative Transparency“, published in the Spring 2009 issue of the Journal of Information Technology & Politics.  

I have little trouble agreeing with him having found e-democracy often sidelined, one way or the other, in the e-government debate by officials, politicials and academics. Some using e-democracy as a sales pitch for e-government, some the other way, whilst some just mix the two up. I continue to ask, as Snider does,
whether politicians are going to delegate power that easily!

If you are of a less cynical outlook you may be more appreciative of the new 388 page book from Stanford University “Online Deliberation: Design, Research, and Practice” from editors Todd Davies and Seeta Pena Gangadharan  (Creative Commons licensed) and its free for the PDF!

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Looking East

December 13, 2009

Amongst my colleagues within the Information Society Doctoral Programme at De Montfort Universityare a fair few from the Middle East and North Africa, so I’m reasonably au-fait with elecronic government in that region.

According to the media, a recent report from Booz & Company encourages those countries to follow the customer-centric approach finally becoming acceptable in other parts of the world including the USA, Europe and Australia, although I believe its been there a little longer in other Asian countries, where the culture was different. I couldn’t find the actual report anywhere on the Booz websites but the press report covers a lot.

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