This is certainly the goal of movers and shakers in this space, as explored in FastForward’s recent blog-hosted Webcast with Andrew Rasiej of the Personal Democracy Forum and Beth Simone Noveck, US Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government.  Greater collaborative and social networking services present new opportunities to not only open up government and make it more accessible, but also facilitate greater information sharing for addressing complex issues.

But we still have a way to go, as McKinsey and Company recently spelled out in a report that looked at the state of progress of e-government initiatives. McKinsey found that despite spending enormous amounts on Web-based initiatives, government agencies often fail to meet users’ needs online.

The report’s authors, Jason Baumgarten and Michael Chui, say that to succeed, e-government needs new governance models, smarter Web investment, and greater user participation.

There have been some impressive benefits seen from the early days of e-government in terms of services such as being able to file taxes electronically, responding to RFPs, or managing benefits online. But there has not been notable progress beyond these early efficiencies. “Many new e-government initiatives have neither generated the anticipated interest among users nor enabled clear gains in operational efficiency,” the report states.

Baumgarten and Chui recommend greater efforts in terms of adoption of new tools and methodologies, such as blogs, wikis, and social networking or collaborative platforms. In addition, government agencies need to develop capabilities in critical areas such as marketing, usability, Web analytics, and customer insights. Agencies need to proactively get citizens, businesses, and other agencies involved in contributing or creating applications and content.

Where can a well-governed highly collaborative e-government lead us beyond online drivers’ license registrations?  Opening up innovation to outside sources is a powerful tool. For example, the District of Columbia municipal government staged an “Apps for Democracy” contest to encourage developers to create applications that would give residents access to data such as crime reports and pothole repair schedules. Forty-seven applications were created in 30 days. McKinsey notes that “hiring contract developers would have cost approximately $2.6 million, whereas the cost of running the contest was a mere $50,000.”

The 2010 lists have started early. David Armano recently wrote “Six Social Media Trends for 2010“. I respect David’s contributions to the industry so I was quick to read and respond to his piece, noting first his closing question:

Thanks for filtering out some key items to focus on.

1. “Where do you see social media going next?” Social media doesn’t ‘go’ anywhere. Indeed, as others have said, it will simply become more ubiquitous. The comeback to requests for ROI on social media should be a request to see the ROI for the phone system, so you can use it as a guide for your response. It’s a channel.

2. Business is social. It turns out that the intimacy of the mom&pop era was all of the innuendos of the ‘persistence’ of relationships (the memory of the relationship transactions). Until the content that streams through social media is persisted, the intimacy will still be lacking.

3. Seems that the most common, high value use of social media mechanisms is to bypass bad operating designs (service models). At some point one will have to resolve to the other to relieve the schizophrenia (inconsistent identity).

So what do I mean in the second item by the “‘persistence’ of relationships”? To clarify, my use of the term “persistence” equals the “the continuance of an effect after its cause is removed”. A related term is “memory”. Many of the best recollections of great customer exchanges include some aspect of being remembered. Don Peppers used to give examples of hotels that remembered what your room service preferences were. These are the kinds of things that are part of ‘having’ a relationship. But a hotel doesn’t have a memory, and an international hotel  brand has to know you wherever you go. The only way an individual can have a persistent relationship with a company is for there to be a persistent memory, somewhere.

A common comparison is often made to the mom & pop business, suggesting that business is more personal when you do business directly with the owner. It’s a simple matter of memory. Even salespeople will tell you how important remembering personal details are for impressing customers/clients.

While social media introduces a new channel by which to interact with customers, as I pointed out in #3, these new mechanisms are often used as the ambulance network — helping injured customers, one at a time, just like mom & pop. Only mom & pop would remember who was injured and why. They may have even changed the way they did business to improve. But the distance between the knowledge and the corresponding action was minimal. Not so in modern enterprises. Building connections between the two requires technology.

As enterprises historically embraced information technology, they started first with a focus on the capture of transactions — the things that were directly tied to the flow of money that kept the business alive. In these technical systems, people were appendages to the transactions. This was most classically seen in the telecommunications industry. As a phone customer you weren’t a name or even an address, you were a phone number (BTN = Billing Telephone Number, does it get any more transactive than that?).

MCI brought new pricing pressure to the telecommunications industry by competing against AT&T. In the early 90’s the pressure was increased by a marketing campaign that capitalized on…human relationships: Friends & Family. The discounts provided by the relationships relied on data — making sure that the billing system knew which phone numbers you’d specified to get discounts on. Setting up and changing these numbers was all managed by one-on-one relationships — talking to a call center representative.

Everything was fine if nothing changed. But life happens. If you moved, your phone number would change and so did your history…it was gone, you started over.

Relationships are expensive to maintain. We can all relate to what we invest in personal relationships. The types of relationships we have or want to have with a business varies based on a variety of factors. Oddly, most of what we really want is to be able to get through a business transaction or receive the services we believe we contracted for with minimal inconvenience. And most of the problems businesses face is when this basic need is not met.

Companies engage in social media to increase the intimacy of their conversations. We have to ask ourselves, is it the channel that makes the difference or the rules that are applied via the channel? Why can’t the same thing happen via the existing channels? At what point does the pattern of exchanges across all channels come together to serve as evidence for change in the business?

Would the delight of getting help via social media channels be as meaningful if as a customer you didn’t have any problems to be resolved?

Shouldn’t the real question for 2010 be more focused on how businesses changed/improved as a result of all of their channels of interaction, social media being just one of them?

E-government can mean much, much more than mere online service delivery. For example, look at the impact on internal operations. Citizens and taxpayers aren’t the only ones that get frustrated with government. More often than not, government employees themselves feel stymied in their attempts to serve constituents and share information within one of the world’s largest and most complex organizations.

As Andrew Rasiej, co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, put it: “I’m sure many government employees and administrators are frustrated by their own systems that are built on 20th century models, and would love to see a better bird’s eye view of what the agencies are working on, where the budget is, how decisions are made as well as finding people within their own agencies that might have a solution that could work faster and better.”

Rasiej was recently joined in the FASTforward blog-hosted Webcast with Beth Simone Noveck, US Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government, moderated by Renee Hopkins of Strategy and Innovation.

Noveck says she is seeing examples of government employees becoming more engaged as collaborative and innovation opportunities arise. For example, she relates:

“The [Veterans Administration] launched a competition a couple of weeks ago to ask 19,000 employees how to reduce the backlog of veterans’ benefits claims. They are running an employee idea generation platform, essentially. And of those 19,000 eligible employees, 12,000 have already used the platform.  So the notion that central management sitting in Washington is going to know best how to solve a problem that’s occurring out across the country in dealing with people on a day-to-day basis is just ludicrous. It’s the people who are actually in the front lines of dealing with those problems who will know.”

Technology — particularly collaborative and social networking services — present new opportunities to not only open up government and make it more accessible, but also facilitate greater information sharing, Rasiej points out. “If we can get our agencies – let’s call them bureaucracies, our systems of government — to recognize a new collaborative era, we may actually find ways to save money, reduce waste and, most importantly, create transparency that provides for a very important byproduct which is citizen engagement and the dissolution of apathy.”

Then there’s the even broader implications for democracy and open society. We’ve come a long way in a short time, Noveck says. But the government is still only dipping its toes in the waters of collaboration and social networking. “The first generation of e-government was already a sort of Herculean step in itself,” she says. “The ability to deliver some basic things like forms to citizens, the ability then to transact with those forms so that you could, for instance, pay your taxes online.”

The potential impact of e-government extends well beyond simply delivering services online, she says. It will represent “a shift in how we conceive of government itself and, I think, fundamentally how we think about our democracy” — from a client-customer model to a forum in which important decisions are undertaken collaboratively.

Rasiej envisions a day when collaborative multi-stakeholder scenario planning will be available or created with the public to deal with complex public policy issues such as water management or adaptation to climate change. While he admits that theories around collaborative government and collaborative democracy are still “out of the box and not yet been fully understood,” there is potential for greater innovation in problem-solving:

“As more and more networks are built, and more and more data is available and the public itself gets used to be asking for input – which includes digging into data, tapping into personal or professional expertise, collaborating with others of similar interests – to solving long-standing problems, we’re going to see some very unique solutions, some efficiencies and, conceivably, a better governance system, that eliminates waste, creates more transparency and increases civic participation.”

What hit me as I watched was the attitude of the young people in the film – do you ever imagine that they will feel comfortable in an organization that does not allow access to social media?

So if you don’t allow this – what’s your plan?

In a new post, ReadWriteWeb’s Jolie O’Dell describes how US Navy CIO Rob Carey wants to use social media is a resource for the US military to build trust and collaboration across all four branches.

However, the mainly unregulated, Wild West aspect to social media has put off a super security-conscious and disciplined operation such as the military. That’s doesn’t mean social media — with its powerful collaboration capabilities — doesn’t have a place in the military, Carey says. O’Dell cites a recent podcast in which Carey observed that “most social networking tools come with no rules of the road. As the Internet moves towards user-generated content, we thought there was a void we could fill… to mitigate some of the security risks associated with social media.”

Carey urges the military to engage social media full force:

“Social media is an inherent part of the toolbox for members of the millennial workforce, while baby boomers are just adopting it. Social media tools should become the standard by which we can share and collaborate on information inside and outside the network boundaries.”

Carey’s comments com eon the heels of last month’s release, by the federal CIO Council, of the Guidelines for Secure Use of Social Media by Federal Departments and Agencies. (PDF download)

The Guidelines address the information security risk head on:

“The decision to embrace social media technology is a risk-based decision, not a technology-based decision. It must be made based on a strong business case, supported at the appropriate level for each department or agency, considering its mission space, threats, technical capabilities, and potential benefits. The goal of the IT organization should not be to say “No” to social media websites and block them completely, but to say “Yes, following security guidance,” with effective and appropriate information assurance security and privacy controls. The decision to authorize access to social media websites is a business decision, and comes from a risk management process made by the management team with inputs from all players, including the CIO, CISO, Office of General Counsel(OGC), privacy official and the mission owner.”

The government breaks social media usage into four categories: Inward Sharing, Outward Sharing, Inbound Sharing, and Outbound Sharing:

Inward Sharing: “The sharing of internal organizational documents through internal collaboration sites such as SharePoint portals and internal wikis.”

Outward Sharing: “Also known as inter-institutional sharing, enables Federal Government information to be shared with external groups, such as state and local governments, law enforcement, large corporations, and individuals.”

Inbound Sharing: “Also known as “crowdsourcing,” is similar to conducting a large online collaborative poll.”

Outbound Sharing: “Federal engagement on public commercial social media Websites.”

The report makes the following recommendations for secure social media adoption by federal agencies:

Policy control: “The senior technology official at each federal agency should develop a social media communications strategy, with the support of their communication office, that accurately addresses the guidelines in this document in conjunction with government-wide policy.”

Acquisition controls: “Federal agencies should require enhanced security and privacy controls through contracted social media services, such as… supporting support stronger authentication mechanisms for federal employee and agency user profiles, including multi-factor authentication…. Ensuring social media websites consider basic security best practices, such as input validation, code security reviews, and strong cookie management.”

Training controls: “Often the best solution is to provide periodic awareness and training of policy, guidance, and best practices. The proper use of social media in the Federal Government should be part of annual security awareness training…  [such as providing] “specialized training to educate users about what information to share, with whom they can share it, and what not to share…. Providing guidance and training based on updated agency social media policies and guidelines, including an updated Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) specific to social media websites…. Providing guidance to employees to be mindful of blurring their personal and professional life. Don’t establish relationships with working groups or affiliations that may reveal sensitive information about their job responsibilities.”

Network controls: “The Federal Trusted Internet Connection (TIC) program provides a series of inspection, monitoring, detection, and blocking technologies that ensure additional security and visibility to defend against a wide array of attacks, including those discussed from a social media perspective…. Current technologies allow for increasingly granular control of web applications, data, and protocols, in accordance with departmental policy. Web content filtering technologies for all Internet traffic should be located in the department TIC or provided as an add-on for offices granted access to social media websites.”

Host controls: “The establishment of a hardened Common Operating Environment (COE) will ensure consistent and comprehensive host configuration and hardening policies across the Federal Government. Hosts may be configured using the Federal Desktop Core Configuration (FDCC), and validated through a Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) compatible scanner….  Two-factor authentication reduces the likelihood an attacker will gain unauthorized access to an information system through a username and password…. Federal agencies should ensure they have strong patching for operating system and application vulnerabilities, and that updating anti-virus signature files and system logging is enabled to report to the SOC on workstations in real time.”

What you might ask is “Emergence”. Here is an example of how each of us as humans acquire the scale free use of language:

Let me explain – I have a one year old grand daughter now so I am re living all of this. At around 9 -12 months, the child starts to make sounds – it is training the muscles. At about 12 – 18 months, it starts to use single words – Dada is usually first – so unfair but easier to say than Mama. It starts to use simple connectors such as “It” “a” “. 18 months – 24, the child adds a few direct verbs and qualifiers such as “more”. Then, as if by magic Emergence!. The child starts speaking in whole sentences – the full acquisition of the structure of language has been achieved. In some cases children are all but silent until this point and one day they can speak full sentences.

How does this happen? The child needs a few simple but essential environmental factors to be in place. I will come to these at the end of this post becuase they are directly related to what may be needed to have Social Media offer us this opportunity for Emergence as well.

One more example.

An oak tree produces many acorns. Only a very small number grow to become a tree. All the potential of the tree is inside this tiny thing. To have Emergence so that it can become a tree, there has to be a number of environmental factors that offer the acorn, the best shot at reaching this potential. You can imagine with me as to what some of these might be. Not get eaten by a squirrel – falling far enough away from the parent or being dropped by a squirrel – the right soil/moisture – not being eaten by a deer – not being mowed by me etc. If enough of the factors are in place, then the acorn will become a tree.

Now here is a vital insight, once it gets to a certain size, it gets very robust and only man cutting it down with a saw or a big fire will prevent it from growing further and living a long time. It is vulnerable only for a relatively short time at the front end.

There is more. An acorn has more potential than a tree alone.

Under the right environmental circumstances, one tree will lead to another until there is a small wood. With a small wood in place, more Emergence! The wood bursts into a complex forest that not only has more trees but a huge supporting other ecosystem that itself depends on and supports the oak first. Such a forest is tremendously complex and long lasting and offers all its normal inhabitants the optimal environment for more scale and less risk.

So Emergence leads to more complexity and to more resiliency.  The resiliency is the reinforcement of the environmental factors that support the inhabitants of the system in reaching their full potential.

I am not clear about the ideal factors for Oak Trees. But the ideal factors for allowing children to reach their full potential are now known. My bet is that what works for infants works for all people. If we can be clear about what these few factors are, then we can see how Social Media might be used by us to go way beyond where are are right now.

An irony is that this little boy’s name is Acorn.

The link will take you to the research that has captured what Acorn and all of us need as human babies to set off on the pathway to our full potential or not. For if we don’t get the key factors we stall – stall for life.

Here are the key factors for our optimal development in simple form – as I list them, think of how your work place lines up or not to them. For this is what we all need all the time to be at our best as primates and humans.

• Culture is the most important environmental factor - The family culture has to offer the child a mix of clear boundaries of what is not allowed and yet also the child must be allowed a lot of room to explore inside these boundaries. It is Boundaries and Freedom. The child must be listened to and must have “conversations” with her parents. Very authoritarian parenting – all orders and all rules and all about the use of power over – is a huge shut down. All permissive – you choose baby is very unsafe and also leads to trouble in development.

• Touch Is the main pathway to getting the neurons to line up the right way. Recall – we are Primates. For all Primates Grooming is the essential social bond that not only mediates stress and but mediates power differences. Touch is the first step. Tone of Voice is related to Touch. For humans, gossip has replaced touch in adults. The key to gossip is being listened too! We know from the Romanian orphanages, that babies that are only tidied up and not touched in a loving way not only cannot thrive but often die! Transactional relationships are really really bad for us.

• Emergence is all about Patterns connecting to scale free – so how many words a child years by 2 is the last factor - Kids whose development cannot be stopped have heard up to 50 million words by 2. Kids who will  never develop fully will only have heard 10 million by the same age. They can never catch up

What we do know about Emergence is that it is Fractal. The key factors that support “Growth” do not change for scale. And also, that the chances of the key factors being in place, rise when there is a critical mass. An Oak forest offers the best shot for all who rely on its factors versus an acorn, a squirrel, a hawk, a truffle and a pig on their own.

When I saw the first slide in this post the other day – a light bulb went off for me. If this is how we acquire language and the optimal path for our own growth as a human, then the power of these connections inside the right social container could lead to something really special. The Netflix Prize story got me even more excited – for this showed how groups of people being connected had a major result as a consequence of the properties of Emergence.

If I am right, then we surely stand on the edge of a great awakening? Something like this happened 60,000 years ago, when humans acquired complex language itself. What might this mean for us? I can’t know. But we do know what happened 60,000 years ago. Human development exploded as did our ability to manipulate our world. Until then we were simply one of the species.

Now I fear that our reductive mindset based I think on our reliance on engineering rather than on Growth as the main process for getting more is putting us at risk as a species. Our only chance I think is to work with nature. If we as humans can find the best social container, we may have a chance.

So what container and how might social software help?

In the next post, I will get more specific about how we might translate these factors and Social Software into ideas about what the opportunity is. In the 3rd post in the series, I will share with you some brilliant supporting work that reveals how we might make better connections between us as a very diverse population. How we might solve the challenge of how to connect the geeks to the bureaucrats and to the business people – all of who have a very different world view.

Part 2 follows here

“We (Forrester) just published our third annual Social Technographics Profile in a document called “The Broad Reach of Social Technologies” . The author is Sean Corcoran, with help from out data expert Cynthia Pflaum. The data across North America, Europe, and Asia will be available later today.is now available.

Starting with the book “Groundswell” and continuing now for three years running, we’ve analyzed consumers’ participation in social technologies around the world with a tool called the “Social Technographics Profile.” The profile puts online people into overlapping groups based on their participation (at least once a month) in the behaviors shown in the ladder. We’ve kept the ladder categories consistent to allow us to make comparisons year-to-year, across ages and genders, and across geographies. This provides something that’s often sorely lacking in analysis of online social phenomena: perspective.

The headline: in 2009, more than four out of five online Americans are active in either creating, participating in, or reading some form of social content at least once a month.”

The rest of the post is here

It also works on Blackberry – Here is the NPR Download page.

Staci Kramer’s article is very comprehensive and will show you the direction of the strategy in detail.

National Public Radio is already a leader in podcasting. But a free NPR News iPhone app that launched Saturday night opens up a new dimension for the network and its member stations with live and on-demand mobile streaming. It’s also the first app to make reading the news and listening to it equally important, providing full-text coverage along with audio. In addition to NPR’s own programs and those it distributes, the app includes direct access to local shows from more than 600 member stations live and on demand.

Here is Scott Simon with a tour

Here is more on this by Ben Parr for Atlanta Internet Marketing

NPR News [iTunes link], which just became available for download, offers the same core features of other news apps like AP Mobile [iTunes link], primarily that you can browse the day’s big stories and read news articles in multiple categories. However, no other news app is linked to 1000+ NPR radio stations, news programs, and live streams, meaning you can listen to your news anywhere, anytime.

The App adds a strong audio layer to the news reading experience. While it’s simple enough to read the day’s top stories, you can also listen to most of the day’s top stories as well. A speaker icon next to most articles allows you to listen in on stories, and the playlist feature lets you queue up the stories you want to listen to if you’re busy, on-the-go, or just need to keep occupied.

The other key aspect of NPR News is that you can listen to any NPR program and any NPR station, including both live radio and past shows and podcasts. There has to be thousands upon thousands of hours of archived content available, not including the live radio. You can even pick out your station with GPS.

While many news organizations are floundering in the era of social media and even struggling to survive, NPR has thrived. Its innovative social strategies have served it well, and the NPR News iPhone app is just the latest solid innovation from the non-profit news organization.

The study, published by Nielsen Norman Group, concludes that “social software technologies are exposing the holes in corporate communication and collaboration and at times filling them before the enterprise can fully grasp and control the flow.”

It’s clear the tide has turned in favor of social media in the enterprise. My colleague Bill Ives just posted details of a study conducted by Prescient Digital Media, based on 561 organizations, which finds rapid adoption of social media on the corporate intranet in the past year.

The Nielsen Norman Group study was more qualitative than quantitative, based on interviews and analyses of the experiences of 14 companies, including Agilent Technologies, Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research and Development, IBM, Telecom New Zealand Limited and Sun Microsystems.

What’s especially notable about these companies is that they are perhaps among the tech-savviest anywhere. Yet, social media adoption still emerged from the ranks in an informal fashion — not as an enterprise initiative.

Key findings in the study include the following:

Underground efforts yield big results: “Companies are turning a blind eye to underground social software efforts until they prove their worth, after which they integrate them more thoroughly.”

Front-line employees are driving the vision: “Many senior managers still consider social tools something their teenagers use. Young workers, who do not need to be taught or convinced to use these tools, expect them in the workplace.”

The business need is the big driver: “Social software is not about the tools, it is about what the tools enable the users to do and about the business problems the tools address.”

Communities are self-policing: “When left to their own devices, communities within enterprise intranets police themselves. Workers tend to retain their professional identities, leaving little need for the organization to institute controls.”

Organizations must cede power: “As companies have been learning from using Web 2.0 technologies to communicate with their customers, they can no longer fully control their message. This is true, too, when Web 2.0 tools are used in internal communications.”

The last point, that organizations must give up control of their communications and messaging, is going to be the hardest pill to swallow. Perhaps that may help to explain why social media tends not to be “officially” sanctioned so quickly, even among the tech-savviest of the tech-savviest.