Dont stand at the end of the queue of information stand in its flow

October 28th, 2009

Was the advice Howard Rheingold gave recently and I think Lee Bryant gives a very erudite explanation of the issues we face transferring ourselves from a linear world to a networked world. He spoke at the Social Strategy Talk, hosted by Creative Crowds and ViNT. Lee was looking at participation and open data…

We have seen some progress with Data.gov and the UK’s open data project, and extending this to other important data sets, such as mapping data in the UK, is vital work that must continue. We have also seen a number of good participation projects that show the potential for involving people in co-design of services, sense making and decision making. We also have the excellent example of Social Innovation Camp and 4IP that show how people can come together to find innovative solutions to social problems, or just make better public services; and, of course, we have the example of mySociety, who have produced some ground-breaking projects that open up previously invisible data or processes in meaningful ways.

Participation and Open Data

In thinking about participation and open data projects, I suggested there are four key areas of focus in our social business design methodology that provide useful starting points to think about related success factors:

* ecosystem: developer networks to play with open data, distribution networks and critical friends to help shape these projects in the early stages

* co-design: ensuring that the services we build involve users at every stage of their design, which is in itself an empowering outcome for people used to just ‘getting what they are given’

* signals and data flows: how does information and data move around networks, and how do we signal relevance or importance to others

* filters: more data needs better filters to make sense of it

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