Tree of Knowledge

This:

Is how I envisaged PolicyWikiShop being structured.

HT: (the excellent Infosthetics)

Brett at Everything is Changing has alerted me to a new topic-hub at ManyEyes for the Obama policy platform and it got us thinking about the potential for Obama’s open source campaigning to extend its volunteer empowerment from organising to policy development.

ManyEyes is an IBM backed social media tool designed to use crowdsourcing to produce […]

My favourite peer production scholar, the oft under-rated Yochai Benkler (of The Wealth of Networks and Coase’s Penguin fame) is the author of another one of the better contributions to the Rebooting Democracy collection.
Benkler’s Contribution, “Participation as Sustainable Cooperation in Pursuit of Public Goals” largely builds on his previous work on the Networked Public Sphere. […]

Continuing with some of the highlights of the Rebooting Democracy essay series…
While I found Newt Gingrich’s essay to be the most surprising of the collection, it was Steven Clift’s contribution that gave me the biggest ‘Aha!’ moment of the book. The essence of Clift’s essay is that:
government websites don’t have sidewalks, newspaper racks, public hearing […]

The Wall Street Journal has an op-ed today discussing the next book from the Wikinomics authors; Government 2.0. It’s pretty superficial, but this para grabbed me as relevant:

Daniel Mintz, chief information officer for the Transportation Department, has noted how radical it is for government agencies to engage in wikis. They challenge the traditional notion that […]

Check out this longish, but reasonably interesting read from the Vic Gov State Services Authority titled “Towards Agile Government”.
The report builds on the “Digital Era Governance” agenda that Patrick Dunleavy has been promoting at the LSE as well as the work of Tom Bentley at Demos on the future of government services. The Report advocates […]

Just stumbled across the new project from the Wikinomics guys which is right up my alley: Government 2.0.

Here’s the synopsis:

Government 2.0: Wikinomics, Government & Democracy is a global research project that will identify and analyze emerging opportunities to harness new models of collaboration to transform the public sector.

Good stuff.

Mark Pesce at the ABC’s Unleashed Blog has picked up on the WikiPolicy proposal for the Australia 2020 Summit that was floated at ToKBlog a few weeks ago.
While he doesn’t go into any detail as to the important governance issues that would need to be resolved to provide the necessary structures and incentives for such […]

Kevin Rudd’s Australia 2020 Summit has been getting pretty favourable coverage, winning plaudits from The Australian, the Leader of the Opposition and the Blogosphere.
In a nutshell the plan is to “bring together 1000 leading Australians to the national Parliament to debate and develop long-term options for the nation across 10 critical areas” with the objective […]