I am pleased to announce that the book, State of the eUnion: Government 2.0 and Onwards, is now in production and will be available for ordering in your favorite bookshop very soon.

But wait, there’s more: On 18 November, the free, online version will be available from 21gov.net.

Read the press release.

Follow the book @gov20book on Twitter. The book’s twitter hashtag is #gov20book. Also, follow the list of contributors.

Now the Coherency Management book is out, my next book project has ben launched. With the working title “State of the eUnion – Government 2.0 and Onwards”, the book will be published in min-November this year (reason), so it needs to be written in a rush. I have already invited a number of contributors, but now take the Call for Participation open for a couple of days for anyone to submit an abstract.

We will accept legitimate and relevant remixes and reuses of stuff that deserves to be in a book. But we have pretty high standards, so do not be offended if we reject your proposal. In general, we want thoughtful, wellwritten contributions, shorter or longer, that discuss new business models for government and democracy. Contributions about technical matters are not likely to make it into the book, unless they are really wellwritten and ‘important’. I realise I personally will even have to struggle to build bridges over to, say, Coherency Management, but you just wait and see

As co-editor, I have teamed up with Christian Bering Pedersen, a young professional and digital native, who I supervised in his Master thesis project a few years ago. Christian has a sharp eye and tongue, and will be great to work with.

Confirmed contributors to the book are:

• Don Tapscott, Canada
• Mark Drapeau, USA
• Alexandra Samuel, USA
• Olov Östberg, Sweden
• Tommy Dejbjerg Pedersen, Denmark
• Tim O’Reilly, USA
• David Weinberger, USA
• Chris Potts, UK
• and several others, whose names will be published in the near future.

The book will not be a heavyweight like the coherency managment book (540 pages). It will probably have nearly as many collaborators and contributors though, but typically with shorter chapters (essays).

Follow the book project via its infopage/website.

Ah, what an age it is
When to speak of trees is almost a crime

Bertolt Brecht
To Posterity (1938)
(German: An die Nachgeborenen; Danish: Til Efterkommerne)

The Council of Europe invited me to participate in Forum for the Future of Democracy held in Sigtuna in Sweden this week. The general theme was Power and empowerment: the interdependence of democracy and human rights.

I was invited to make a contribution in a break-out session about eDemocracy – key role in facilitating and strengthening democratic processes? There were, appropriately I think, many other – and bigger – themes than eDemocracy brought up during the three forum days, as the overall conclusions show, but let me nevertheless emphasize these two conclusions:

27. Information and communication technologies can be a powerful tool for the promotion and protection of human rights and democracy. They have the potential to create more transparent and responsive government and to facilitate participatory democracy. Human rights should be respected in a digital as well as in a non-digital environment and should not be subject to restrictions other than those provided for in the European Convention on Human Rights and the case law of the European Court of Human Rights simply because communication is carried in digital form. E-governance policies, embedded in an appropriate regulatory framework, should enhance democracy and respect human rights with a view to empowering all individuals, in particular those in vulnerable situations.

28. At the same time, it must be acknowledged that increased participation will not be brought about simply as a consequence of progress in information and communication technologies. The growing feeling of political discontent and disaffection among people must be addressed, if such technologies are to facilitate the empowerment and participation of individuals.

The next forum, to be held in Madrid in October 2008, should examine the issue of e-governance and e-democracy.

Just prior to the forum, I was in Florida at IBMs RSDC2007, which I was sad to have to leave already Tuesday morning. But then I got stuck in both Orlando and Newark airports (and learned that Continental Airlines has the worst customer service in the world), so I actually didn’t make it to the forum until Thursday mid-afternoon.

I’ll return to the forum and the RSDC-conference shortly, but want to relate to the travel experience itself first, because it really accentuated one of the points I wanted to make on the forum.

What I wanted was to pick up on Hannah Arendt, who talked about the well-founded wrath that makes the voice grow hoarse, towards a system that does not listen.

With apologies to Arendt, who talked about far bigger issues than customer service in airports, Continental Airlines certainly didn’t listen, and I and the 5000 other passengers were given no voice whatsoever, and were not only forced to queue up for countless hours and eaten off with a pillow and a $14 voucher, but also lied to and deliberatedly misinformed (interestingly, but off topic, I see that Continental’s website’s flight info system can be used to track flight info further back than the immediate user interface allows, on just have to know a bit of REST (or, URL-design): I can see that the connecting flight I was supposed to be on was delayed less than a hour. They said otherwise.)

Back to Hannah Arendt and the more important stuff. She sees the public sphere as the place where light comes from, namely the light thrown on things when they take place in public. In Men in Dark Times from 1968, she argued that modernity has created a darkening or obscuring of the light from the public sphere, and caused the withdrawal of the general public (citizens) from the public world.

Her critique of modern (as in 20^th Century) culture is related to the decline of community, of human solidarity, of plurality. Arendt develops the theme through her analysis of modernity’s collapse of worldliness and the accompanying erosion of individual and collective memory. Modernity, she says, is freedom from politics rather than freedom to take part and make praxis; Homo Faber instead of Vita Activa.

For Arendt, political freedom is “the right to be a participator in government”, and “no one could be called either happy or free without participating, and having a share, in public power”, as she wrote in The Human Condition (1958).

The Council of Europe’s press announcement after the Swedish forum fittingly said that the forum “ended with a call for action to counteract a growing apathy among citizens for political participation”.

The challenges we face are manyfold. First, the dominant trend in neoliberalism is that freedom from politics for the many is held as a good thing (that is of course also a foundation for representational democracy in general). Second, when citizens do get their act together and attempt to participate, all “the system” allows for is some sort of pseudoparticipation (Pateman 1970). Third, especially in the view of globalisation and emerging democracies, the exercise of “politics” can be very dangerous to be around. Fourth, we register small pieces from which we reconstruct our perception of the whole and have it make sense. But sense is not necessarily accurate, as Kujala & Weinmann (2005) points out: Just think of the point made in “I’ve had Alzheimer’s as long as I can remember”. Firth, sense “may be in the eye of the beholder, but beholders vote and the majority rules” (Weick, 1995).

A couple of weeks ago, the Danish Prime Minister announced that he and other Cabinet ministers will supervise a group of experts in the making of a democracy canon. It takes only a simple exercise of political canonicalization (c14n) to realise that the group is heavy on people of neoliberal observations, and very light on other observations, so I suppose people like Arendt are ruled out of being canonised.

In my talk at the CoE forum, my main message was that there is no such thing as eDemocracy, only democracy. Similar to what we’ve been saying about eGovernment for a while, the “e” is becoming more and more useless, not because we don’t digitise, but because digitalisation is the norm, the way we do business, or at least a very integral part of the overall government transformation.

On the “e” in eDemocracy, I returned to Coleman’s and mine Bowling Together (2001) and noted that I did see some new developments occuring, but also that the main recommendations are very valid still today, IMHO.

To signify that what we talk about today is not just Plain Old Democracy, some call it “Democracy 2.0″, that is, a “next-generation” democracy. In fact one where democracy meets Web 2.0: With Tim O’Reilly’s The Architecture of Participation, and Mitch Kapor’s Architecture is Politics (and Politics is Architecture). With Cluetrain Manifesto we learned that markets are conversations, and at RSDC2007, I heard IBMs CTO proclaim that business value and social value go hand in hand, and that SecondLife is an important “public” sphere. I am not geeky enough to call Second Life a new foundation for execution of democracy, but am indeed geeky enough to claim that ”the internet” (well, “the network”) is the new foundation for execution of democracy, but should never be the only platform for usage.

Technolgies such as blogs, wikis, social/P2P networks, mobile devices and probably soon Second Life and all that hold lots of promises for a more participatory, inclusive democracy. But at the same time, these same technologies (“the network”) can be, and is, used in very undemocratic ways, and basically redefines important freedoms and rights, for example in terms of privacy and identity.

Also, there is an increasing amount of critique of Web 2.0, for example Michael Gorman’s (2007) Web 2.0: The Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters. Also:

“Web 2.0 is a cultural and intellectual catastrophe that will provoke mass media illiteracy in America. The challenge now is political. It’s to build a coalition of people philosophically opposed to the corrosive ideas in Web 2.0. This is a sales and marketing job. We’ve got to reach leaders in education, business, politics, media and the arts who care about the future of our culture. The only way to efficaciously fight back against the radical democratizers is by exposing Web 2.0 to serious public scutiny. People outside Silicon Valley get it when they are exposed to the Web 2.0 nonsense.” Andrew Keen (2007).

In his Old Revolutions Good, New Revolutions Bad: A Response to Gorman, Clay Shirky (2007) picks Gorman’s and Keen’s arguments to pieces. Others do the same.

Over in Sweden, Anders R Olsson raises some critical issues about blogging in two recent articles, Bloggar har inget med demokrati att göra and Bloggarnas makt är bara dumheter. His argument is that blogging undoubtfully has some function for some people, but that that function has nothing to do with societal enlightenment or journalistic quality. Surely, Anders has a point here. Even Gorman has a point.

Yet, they are missing the main point, I think. Blogging and the Web 2.0 trend is serendipitous, ambiguous and heterogeneous. For example, Malene Charlotte Larsen offers 25, no, 35, perspectives on online social networking. And that’s just for youngsters.

I’ll be visiting HP Labs in Bristol, UK, tomorrow wearing my Version2-hat. The theme is adaptive infrastructure, but they also promise we’ll experience the advanced video collaboration system, Halo, which sounds like fun. I love enterprisey gadgets.

I’d love to hear from users of advanced video collaboration systems.

That was easy. First, I claimed it, then checked it, then mapped it and then checked it again, and now I guess I can claim my identity is gotze.eu. My public persona is currently at gotze.myopenid.com. I’m playing with my own IdP, but that’s not ready yet.

OpenID is cool. To show you just how cool it is, try this: Using your own OpenID, try making a comment to this entry. You should be able to identify yourself with OpenID on this blog. Thanks to this great plugin.

I wonder if anyone can recommend Perl libraries for OpenID? I notice there’s also a MT-plugin which I guess use Perl-libraries. Got to try that out. But in general, if anyone could explain what kind of work will be needed to OpenID-enable a web application, please holler!

My old friend Steven Clift made a short stop here in Copenhagen this week, and we had a good talk about the status of e-democracy. I had arranged for Steve to make an interview on DR (national radio) – the interview was on the air twice this weekend, and is now online at  Harddisken: Net-demokrati der rykker.

Steve was recently inducted as an Ashoka Fellow. This will enable him to intensify his important work with local online Issues Forums through an expanded E-Democracy.Org.

Amir Hadziahmetovic has published his MSc in IT thesis, which he made under my supervision. It is in English and is called Digital Identity Management – Challenges and Benefits (Download PDF). Besides giving a nice introduction to and analysis of Identity Management, Amir makes some interesting observations about the identity management situation in Denmark. I recommend everyone to read this good thesis.

I’ve extracted a few central paragraphs introducing the project:

The main research problem is how to find the optimal model that will solve Digital Identity (DI) management and the data interchange for electronic business in new network economy. The problem lies in unknown path of how to make choices for interoperable DI, and how to find the optimal strategy to implement chosen model. The research will commence with exploring the area of general Digital Identity Management, continue with analyzing platform for interoperable management and exchange of DIs, including implementation challenges, and end with listing the benefits of having such a platform implemented.

Imagine the sewerage management of a bigger city where each building block has a container for waste waters instead of a city-wide sewerage system. Without drain-pipes connecting the containers, every now and then a container would fill up, and for emptying a pump-trucks would be needed. They would pump out the content from a container, and spill it out at some depot outside the town. This would be very complex system of containers and trucks, difficult to control and manage. Some of the containers would certainly get overfilled, causing flooding and bad smell. With the growth of the city, the system would get even more unreliable. Therefore the majority of today’s cities have outspread sewerage system, which connects the depots, automating the spill of waste waters.

The similar problem modern business has with today’s DI management: Identity data in containers, filling up quickly; the system unable to exchange data with other systems; difficult to maintain and automate the spill of data. To enable development of electronic business, more reliable system for DI management is required.

Business trends today push organizations toward strengthening of cooperation and linking of business processes between them. Many companies and governments are tending to expand their activities by integrating online services and systems, and letting external users access internal data. Individual users want comfortable Web experience, and minimal effort in getting tailor-made products and services. Inability of today’s IT systems to match these trends is choking present development of business. Strengthening of cooperation and linking of business processes is putting pressure on IT systems and belonging infrastructure, requiring that Digital Identity data is created in unified fashion, and safely exchanged between organizations.

Digital Identity Management (IM) is a fundamental part of integrated company systems and online services. It defines who has access to what in some cases, and identifies customers and users of the services in other cases. IM architecture of today has to evolve from predominantly silo to common, interoperable architecture, based on open standards. This kind of architecture is a fundament for Federated IM, where identities are safely exchanged.

This project will try to look at Digital Identity Management, technology and architecture in relation to business goals and strategies. The main concepts of Digital Identity Management will be addressed i.a. concepts like Federated Identity, Single Sign-On (SSO), and Open Standards. The report will present a study of business and technical implications of Federating Identity, where Identity management is the central issue.

An analysis of the practical as well as architectural aspects of Federated Identity will be covered. An analysis of open standards for interoperability will be covered, especially those advised by Danish National IT and Telecom Agency and their Reference Model for Identity. The report will focus on standards from the Model such as Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) and Public certificates for electronic services – OCES Digital Signature, but also will discuss alternatives. Finally privacy issues will be considered.

The fundamental objective of any enterprise IT system must be full support to business flexibility and agility in ever-changing business environment. The ultimate goal of this project is to perceive the challenges of the IM evolution path, and to show how Identity Management supports connection between the systems and the processes, providing users with better web experience.

Method: The project will list general theoretical issues, comparing different views on these issues, and presenting own reasoning.

The obstacles in relation to acceptance of Reference Model for Identity will be analyzed. The analysis will be based on empirical research including feedback from involved organizations, interviews with individuals from selected organizations, conferences, and forums.

Again: Download Amir’s thesis (PDF).

The 2005 e-readiness rankings (press release) from The IBM Institute for Business Value and The Economist Intelligence Unit has been published. Using a secret set of metrics, 65 countries are assessed on their ability to promote and support digital business and ICT services.

Denmark is again ranked number one in this ‘measure of the complete e-picture’, with an overall score of 8.74 (of 10) based on nearly 100 criteria in various areas. These areas are (with Denmark’s scores):

• Connectivity (8.20)
• Business enviroment (8.58)
• Consumer and business adoption (8.85)
• Legal and policy environment (8.65)
• Social and cultural environment (9.60)
• Supporting e-services (9.25)

Last year, Denmark scored an overall of 8.28. The improvement in scores is general among the surveyed countries. If we assume a continued growth, Denmark has to improve at several fronts to stay in front of the pack. A linear projection says we have to score an overall of 9.25 next year. Hence, we need to do something serious about connectivity and the business, consumer and policy environments. Our social and cultural environment is our strenght, and our supporting e-services are also good (here we just have to challenge the US with their perfect 10 there).

The metrics used in the survey deserves a few words. The weights is one thing; for example, I don’t understand why the supporting e-services only weighs 5%. Also, some of the criteria are questionable; for example, the penetration of SSL encrypted servers as a measure of security, which might be a measurable criteria, but does not come across as a reliable measure of anything (but the penetration of SSL). Another point: why is it possible to score a perfect 10? Can’t the US improve on the supporting e-services now??

What does Douglas Bowman, Jason Calacanis, Cory Doctorow, Jason Fried, Robert Scoble, Doc Searls, Jimbo Wales and David Weinberger have in common?

They’re all coming to reboot7 on 10-11 June 2005 here in Copenhagen.

reboot is the european meetup for the practical visionaries who are building tomorrow one little step at a time using new models for creation and organization – in a world where the only entry barrier is passion.

Thanks for the invitation, Thomas. I look forward to being rebooted.

Everyone is talking and tagging about Folksonomy these days. All my tagging experiments show that I too have jumped the bandwagon.

So, we have taxonomies and controlled vocabularies, lots of them (and soon even more of them), but we also have folks, who can’t be bothered to use them, but actually do want some order in the chaos, and then we get folksonomies.

A folksonomy represents simultaneously some of the best and worst in the organization of information. Its uncontrolled nature is fundamentally chaotic, suffers from problems of imprecision and ambiguity that well developed controlled vocabularies and name authorities effectively ameliorate. Adam Mathes (2004) Folksonomies – Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata

I am close to getting to a state where I am satisfied, for now, with my GotzeTagged, in which I make use of folksonomies (fetches del.icio.us content etc.). As I worked on GotzeTagged, and tried to describe it as something more exciting than a link index, it just cried out being called a personomy. I have no idea where that came from, but I like it
Google shows that someone has registred the domain name, but also that nobody has written about personomy. Until now.

A personomy is “my folksonomy”: Here’s my del.icio.us personomy (‘all tags’). I guess there can be big and small personomies. I also guess that the Zeitgeist has a huge influence not only on the folksonomies, but also on our personomies.

Why personomy?
So when
Tim Bray asks:

What am I doing categories for? What is anybody doing categories for? What is everybody doing categories for?

The answer is: It’s all about our personomies.

Liz Lawley notes that Clay argues that detractors from wikipedia and folksonomy are ignoring the compelling economic argument in favor of their widespread use and adoption, and concludes:

Perhaps. But I’m arguing that it’s just as problematic to ignore the compelling social, cultural, and academic arguments against lowest-common-denominator classification. I don’t want to toss out folksonomies. But I also don’t want to toss out controlled vocabularies, or expert assignment of categories. I just don’t believe that all expertise can be replicated through repeated and amplified non-expert input.

I agree.

Louis Rosenfeld describes folksonomies as metadata ecologies, and rightly advises not to take an either/or perspective on folksonomies and taxonomies (more controlled metadata vocabularies):

Please don’t; they are simply two of the many useful approaches to helping users find information.

I now sit here and wonder how much the concept of personomy can be seen as a useful approach to helping users find what they are after.

The architecture astronauts tend to be very much “either/or” when relating to folksonomy-taxonomy.

Personomies and personas
We have long known that architects can get a kick out of thinking in terms of Personas and Use Cases. Architects talk about persona-influenced design perspectives, the customer decision-making process, and prescriptive user engineering. Important stuff. But is it enough? Well, enough for what?

Use cases are like chocolate: They’re delicious, but probably not enough to live of.

Personomy is about using a empathetic focus on personas.

Personomy is like a box of chocolates – you never know what you’re going to get.
–Forrest Gotze