Here are the videos released by O’Reilly from their Strata 2011 conference. Some interesting talks about data management and representation.
Strata is a new conference focusing on the people, tools, and technologies putting data to work, providing data-driven insight to understand customer behavior, create better products, and gain true competitive advantage in the marketplace. Strata brings together decision makers, managers, and data practitioners for three days of training, sessions, discussions, events, and exhibits showcasing the new data ecosystem.
This hands-on workshop (by Nicholas Lamphere) will provide an introduction to the social web and current, popular tools and topics. Social Media has great applications for the public sector agencies.
I found this interesting article at govinthelab.com, on how Gov 2.0 technologies could be used to fight political corruption. If we had the data sets available to us in South Africa would we build something similar?
“Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts… perhaps the fear of a loss of power.” – John Steinbeck
I recently came across a post stating that the House and Senate Ethics Committees Protecting the Most Corrupt Members of Congress. While no one is surprised to read about corruption in government my question is how can we use government 2.0 technologies to add more transparency to government, making the fear of losing power greater than the gains made possible by corrupt behavior.
Congressional Monitoring Applications. If you are curious to see what your lawmakers in Congress are doing check out the Congress Application created by Sunlight Labs. I have it installed on my Android mobile and can monitor how each person is voting, new laws as they happen, and much more.
Pork Finder. Many time complex pieces of legislation contain unrelated items in order to get others to vote for the bill. If you’re interested in finding these anomalies without spending hours reading these bills check out the IBM Many Bills application created by IBM Research.
What about local level government? This is where the push for publishing data in open formats becomes critical. The upfront cost to publish open data may, in some cases, be high. However, cost reduction is generally seen as fewer people need to visit town/city halls to request documents.
How does it reduce potential corruption? Take a look at Washington, DC where the local budgets,and up to date spending information, is published for everyone to see. If your expenses are showing up on a public facing web site are you more likely, or less likely, to make responsible choices?
We have a long way to go and corruption will never be eliminated. However, we live in a world where corruption can more easily be made visible.
Being a consultancy that specializes in providing our clients with answers to problems required that we very early on had to adopt a Knowledge Management approach. We review, generate and process literally thousands of documents a year, which are relevant to the work we do. We think that we have struck upon an approach that works well for a distributed team of people working on a variety of differing projects in different sectors.
We store most our documents in the “cloud”, we have made our email and calendaring available via remote devices and have integrated our document management into our groupware so we are able to track documents across consulting processes e.g. conception, billing, pitching and so forth. We have also tied together RSS feeds and video streams into the landing pages of our Knowledge Management System, thereby allowing out team to not only look at proprietary information but also public domain information that is related to the project at hand.
We’ve noticed that many of our clients have struggled with conceiving their own knowledge management approaches. Sometimes their approaches seem to be driven by a fascination with new technology and other times the approach seems to be driven without consideration of the real cultural changes that need to take place within the organistion and its network; surprising organisations struggle to formalize the informal process of knowledge sharing.
This three-part slide excellently represents what knowledge management is, how it benefits the organization and what is needed to get knowledge management to work.
