Recently Hamish Nicklin of Google presented at the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London. The presentation was requested in order to explain these tools and more importantly how they could be useful in the world of Foreign Affairs and Service.

One of his main themes is rather than creating something and then figuring out how do we make this digital, instead think digital first and you may come up with an entirely different process and approach. Extending this thought further, because of the growing ubiquity of phones and now smartphones we should begin by thinking mobile digital first!

It’s a rather long video but I think quite useful in getting the point home that because of the combination of digital, social and mobile, the digital genie is now fully out of the bottle and being integrated today as just one more part of our everyday environment and society. And by thinking first of mobile and digital when developing processes and projects we will be much more likely to deliver better solutions and services to those we serve.

Please share this post with your colleagues and do comment below and even share your own ideas on other valuable uses across all aspects of public service.

Jeff Ashcroft

George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs hosted the Gov 2.0 Startup Lab on Friday, November 19, 2010. The free event was built around stimulating innovation and ideas around Gov 2.0, described by organizer Peter Corbett of iStrategyLabs as “a new methodology for governance and civic engagement based on transparency, open data, and citizen-driven innovation.”

After Corbett’s opening remarks came two Ignite-style presentations on competitions aimed at increasing development for open data:

The World Bank’s Gail Davenport discussed the Apps for Development competition, which challenges the public to create new software applications to help solve some of the world’s most pressing issues, as defined by the Millennium Development Goals.

John Rollins presented The George Washington University Business Plan Competition, that will award students a total of $50,000 in cash prizes. The competition is open to business plans of all types, though part of the stated goal of Gov 2.0 Startup Lab was to inspire business plans around citizen engagement goals. Link to full post on GovWin site.

At this point there seems to be few parts of traditional organizations and the functions within them that will not be touched or even perhaps radically altered by the forces of social media connectivity and communications. But there are still many naysayers out there asking

Why do we need social media?

Some typical responses from those who still don’t get it:

To share inane updates with random persons only hungering for us to follow them back?

To expose ourselves to just one more medium where avid advertisers can spam us into submission?

No if there wasn’t more than this, I would set the Twitter Fail Whale as my screensaver and never turn the application on again! (exercising maximum restraint to avoid mentioning obvious parallel to recent Twitter service uptime issues; oops I guess I just did, sorry @biz =)

Fortunately there’s more, much more to social media that can and will make a difference. A difference in one to one communications, one to many communications and most importantly to all manner of human organizations.

I’m not sure exactly when it happened, but somewhere over the last 50 years the majority of people in the world lost their mojo when it came to fighting for change. Didn’t matter whether the issue was big or small, even bad customer service and poor quality flourished because of the divide and conquer realities of slow one to one and the high cost of mass communication.

People grew tired and weak from being browbeaten into submission to the point where apathy set in when it came to believing in, mobilizing and exercising their power as an individual within society.

The ability for people to communicate, organize and take action around an issue or idea had become very slow, difficult and costly. Even more significantly, the poor results often seen by those who actually made the effort led many to accept “Is it really worth the bother?”

Our world is made up of silos.

People seem to instinctively create barriers around what they feel is their territory and so a silo is formed. Many people also feel the need to classify everyone and everything mentally tossing it into the bucket or silo where they think the person, thing or idea belongs.

Whether due to demonstrating personal power or simply for mental convenience, our instinctive urge to build a silo, or pop everything and everyone into one, inhibits both communication and performance.

And both of these actions divide us.