This was the first conference I have ever attended without looking at it through the lens of instructional technology and I must say that I was quite surprised to discover what I did. Thinking back on it, there wasn’t very much there for an IDer to be that interested in. Sure there were a couple of sessions and in that context, the keynotes were entertaining, but now, looking at things through the lens of engagement, social media and the leveraging of latent data that we might otherwise ignore, it was an amazing conference. This isn’t to say that my old and well worn ID hat didn’t get pulled out – it did on several occasions in the halls and when chatting with fellow volunteers, but by far, the meat of the conference was in this use of tools to collect and understand data that is generated by either the civic population or the municipal government. So if there was a weak spot, is was that this was a bit tool heavy, and not looking too much at the process. I caught myself thinking every now and again, I wish someone would bring up what I’m thinking about for my PhD… but it never came up. This tells me that, either I’m onto something totally unique… or that I’m crazy… and likely it’s a bit of both.
The presentation, that for me was the most useful in framing my experience was Dr. Z (Greg Zeschuk)’s keynote. He talked about what they did at Bioware to establish and maintain a culture that is built on open discussion where reasonable concerns are addressed openly and publicly. This was polished/book ended by comments from mastermaq (Mack Male) who reiterated that the key to open “stuff” and a culture that is open as well is people and their relationships – without good relationships, you are really not going to have any hope of any type of productive environment. It is not now, nor will it ever be the technology that makes these connections really tick (ie social media is not about the technology).
In between, there were a number of presentations on open government. These open government systems made use of tools like ODGI and others to allow the government to share its data with its citizens and the rest of the world. There was also a few examples of government mining the citizenry to get information that could be used to direct interaction as well.
So in terms of what this means in relation to my PhD ideas, well it means that there are tools out there to harvest the data and there are systems that are delivering “value added” information from raw data. So the technical elements are not going to be an issue at all. The issue is the finding a way to get the tools to deliver aggregated data to the executive by parsing social media streams and is secondary to creating an environment that encourages/enables (perhaps even empowers) participation.
Through the conference I also discovered that there is a unit within the city that is already looking to make use of social tools to “flatten” the idea/concern space of the organization. So if I could sample this group as tot their experiences through this transition, together with Bioware, who should have had their open/flat culture would make a good comparison and provide guides as to how to enable the open organization (open org). These two could then be used to inform best practice to develop a plan for the University.
So hopefully this helps others and myself out later as the conference is well over a day old in my head right now.
Leave a Reply