It’s probably fair to say that the mood of the conference was a combination of vague approval – “transparency” is a little like apple pie, you can’t really argue with it as an idea – mingled with worry. Actually, perhaps that was only my mood. But it’s prompted me to think more about the worries.

Mike Martin led a session which I think probably had most attendees a little baffled. Well OK, it left me a little baffled. But what I took from it was one key message (and my apologies to Mike if I misrepresent him at all here).

Technology changes in the promulgation of ideas – from the invention of moveable type to typesetting to web publication – have involved constant renegotiation of the roles that we describe as “author”, “editor” and “publisher”. This negotiation has taken place within the marketplace, the law, and popular understanding, and each time leads to different views of the value those roles contribute (financial, social, etc), of their liabilities and responsibilities, and of their their role in giving authority to content.

So what does it mean when we talk about public bodies “publishing” data? What responsibilities and liabilities are involved? What authority does the name of the body as “publisher” bestow on the data? To whom does the data belong once it is published?

Do these questions matter? Well, I suspect they do, partly because of two thoughts that came up during the day.

The first related to that idea of “authority”. Does the emphasis on publishing data as an end in itself reflect a rather naive belief in the objectivity and authority of data against other kinds of information? Do we really believe the figures for exam passes at a college represent a better way of selecting a college, as against the anecdotal and experience-based views we come across in conversations at the school gates (or on FaceBook)? Do we really think that crime maps give us a better picture of the experience of crime in our area than local gossip and maybe a local news-sheet does? I realise that these questions don’t imply that we shouldn’t have access to*both the data and the anecdotal, of course. But will the weight carried by each of the two words “government data” overpower other voices?

The second point came in a presentation from Pat Ellison of Barnardo’s. Barnardo’s work is frequently paid for under contract to local authorities. Pat explained how voluntary sector organisations like hers work with people who are frequently vulnerable and almost always facing hugely difficult situations. So there needs to be a high level of trust by clients of the voluntary organisation involved, trust which must sometimes be built on precisely the fact that they are not state agents. Pat explained that Barnardo’s and others have no issue with the principle that they must account to the authority for the work which they have funded: this is not completely unproblematic, but can be managed. It’s when that data is to be made public that things change somewhat. It’s not that there’s a threat to individual privacy – at least, one hopes and assumes not. The question is, is this a case where transparency, far from encouraging trust, actually erodes it? Will people have quite the same trustful approach to sharing very sensitive personal information with an organisation when they know that their data (however well anonymised) is to be put in the public domain? Do we have the right to re-use the personal information of people who, by the nature of things, are unlikely themselves to be able to access or take advantage of the neatly-packaged CSV files which document their misery? (Please note that I am paraphrasing Pat’s presentation wildly; don’t blame her if I’m exaggerating for effect.)

Of course, these are edge-cases. I’m not suggesting that they throw the whole transparency project into doubt. But they do suggest to me that we need some kind of classification scheme by which to distinguish different kinds of “public data” and the differing degrees of authority they carry – and that we in the public sector need to recognise our responsibilities as a publisher as we push the data out there.

Which is the idea I’ll explore, I hope, in another blog.

Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude set out the purpose of the exercise: “I want the public to hold us to account for what we do“, and the Government has conjured up an image of a nation of “armchair auditors” who will probe and analyse this data until every story is unearthed and every scrap of waste is excised.

I’m sure that some of said auditors are beavering away. I’m sure that some stories will emerge. So far, all I’ve seen is a few sniggers at the “revelation” of a £26k training bill for training Cabinet Office staff to have “difficult conversations”, and some similar fluff.

Am I alone in being sceptical about the consequences – intended or unintended – of this kind of “transparency”?

There’s something in that term “armchair auditors” that rings alarm bells. Because these spend figures are available to real, professional auditors who regularly expose the (perhaps relatively few) instances of poor judgement, gross inefficiency and downright fraud that goes on in Government. And since they have access to much more than the raw data that is being pumped out, they probably have a better understanding of what value is being delivered by the spend in question. Indeed, I know of no organisation, public or private, in which scrutiny of detailed spend reports by senior managers, still less by shareholders, is held to be a model of good governance. Even at my pretty abject level in the Great Chain of Being,  transaction reports are a small part of the picture that allows me to manage my unit’s work.

So the result is more likely to be the kind of “story” that the press seemed to find in the “difficult conversations” workshop (even the Guardian couldn’t resist, referring to that workshop as “lingering waste”, as though it was something nasty and smelly left in a desk drawer that Gordon Brown should have emptied on his way out). Lacking context, and caring less, the media can focus on anything that looks wacky, creative, “politically-correct”, and most especially on anything that looks even remotely fun, and “hold Ministers’ feet to the fire” until they use those same feet to stamp on any such activity. The most “difficult conversations” Cabinet Office civil servants may be having is trying to explain to Mr Maude why £26k may actually have been pretty good value in the circumstances…

This makes me think of last weekend’s furore over the outing of civil servant Sarah Baskerville (@baskers) for tweeting at and about her work in Whitehall. The twitterati were outraged. Bloggers (there were quite a few) argued that this kind of attack will, and is probably designed to, scare public servants away from revealing themselves to be human beings with feelings and hangovers, and discourage them from using social media for fear of ending up pilloried in the Mail.

Will the release of spend data produce the same kind of self-defensive caution among public servants? A civil service paralysed at the thought that anything but the most rigorous and explicit orthodoxy in their spending habits will leave them exposed and hung out to dry? Yes, almost certainly. After all, civil servants are a pretty cautious lot at the best of times. Will this be good for public services, the public purse, or the public generally? Doubtful.

Don’t get me wrong – I do believe that transparency is important. The point is, though, that transparency can be dangerous without engagement. If the processes, conversations and decisions of our public services are really to become transparent, then public servants need to have the tools (and that means the technical resources, the skills, and the backing) to contextualise, to consult, to explain, and at the end of the day to defend, their own actions. Otherwise the release of post hoc data will only encourage witch-hunts and scare stories which reinforce the view that public servants are, literally, a bunch of wasters.

But perhaps that’s the point?

I don’t agree – at least, not long-term. The paywall approach is trying to protect a brand: a brand that packages a whole lot of disparate content into something called “a newspaper”. But this model simply references the idea of that package of content we called a newspaper – a concept that only makes sense in reference to the physical print world. Hence my view that the paywall approach is trying to protect a brand for the sake of it – and the danger is that the brand becomes in effect an empty one.

The dangers, it seems to me, are twofold. First, that by the operation of Gresham’s Law, the bad coinage of free content drives out the good coinage of quality journalism: that is, that we simply stop paying attention to paid-for content on the grounds that what is free is “good enough”. This is essentially the same view as the argument (which I have spent years opposing!) “Why do we need a library when we’ve all got access to Google?”. And this danger will be the greater if journalistic content, protected behind its paywalls, ceases to engage with the blogosphere. I would have doubts about tweeting or blogging a link that required my reader to pay to view the content I was referencing: and journalists, possibly contractually limited to writing behind the paywall, will themselves effectively be excluded from responding to the untrue with the truth, because the truth will be chargeable content.

Second, there is the danger that the paywall actually doesn’t protect quality in journalism. It is probably a cheap shot to ask whether we should trust the founder of Fox News to defend quality journalism, but it seems to me entirely possible that proprietors will prefer to rely on the brand’s reputation rather than investing in any actual quality standards to stake their claim to truthfulness – a reliance that may work short-term but which will inevitably erode standards over time.

In fact, these issues aren’t entirely new. The concept of “a newspaper” – a package of content bundled together under a single masthead – is determined by the means of production and distribution in a paper world rather than by its inherent logic. People have always taken what they want from that bundle, according to taste and leaning. There was a time when a surprising number of people outside the financial world took the Financial Times simply because, if I remember right, it had a well-regarded racing tipster. Personally, I rather resent paying for a Sports Supplement with every paper I buy. In other words, we already have preferences about what content we are willing to take from within the package called a “newspaper”. The brand itself is not enough to guarantee quality or interest, and if the brand, through its paywall, locks me out of finding the content that might interest me then why should I bother with it at all?

The second point about the newspaper as a package of content is that cover prices have never covered the cost of quality journalism. Print newspapers adapted to this fact in a number of ways – some by dumbing down content, or by seeking new advertising streams, or by fostering reader loyalty, or usually by some combination of these approaches. They worked, more or less, because there was a (physical) product that readers and advertisers could buy into, knowing exactly what they were going to get. But with a paywall in place, I don’t know what I’m going to get – or at least I won’t once the memory of the print product fades. And because I will lose connection to the brand, so the advertisers will lose interest in it as a space.

So no: it’s not an idealistic belief that content must be free that makes me think Murdoch’s strategy is wrong. It’s that I think in the longer-term (and perhaps not too much longer-term), it’s self-defeating: and more important (to me, though not perhaps to the Murdochs) it threatens to weaken, not strengthen, the voice of professional quality journalists among the cacophony of the blogosphere. Iain is right that I don’t have a ready answer. I’m sure the answer lies in redefining what it is to be “a newspaper”, rather than clinging to an identity that is defined by print production methods – but that’s about as far as I’m able to go. It’s a fascinating discussion to be involved in, though!

(Late note: On the “idealism” of free content, see the lovely, down-to-earth and spot-on post by @Danossira – “Get over yourselves”!)

The first result of taking this perspective is that it shifts the focus. KM projects spend, or historically have spent, a lot of time trying to answer questions like “What do we mean by “knowledge”". But the primary question is: what do we mean by “management”? That isn’t necessarily a simpler question to answer, but it is one that gives context. Management is a role that can be analysed and defined in an organisation – what kinds of things do we expect managers to do? – and hence what kind of knowledge management activities might be appropriate in a particular organisation at a particular time.

Second, rather obviously, you can only manage the things you can manage. That means having the means to measure or at least monitor what effect your KM activities are having. And only managers can answer the question as to what knowledge contributes value to their business.

So what I’m concluding is that “knowledge management” is a particular aspect of management (like “financial management” or “staff management”). And what the KM discipline does is to provide managers with tools that enable them to manage the knowledge activities and processes in their business. That means:

1. KM practice operates at whatever level is sensible – team, business unit, corporate – accordingly to where the need is;
2. KM may be and usually should be entirely focussed on particular business problems, not on general issues like “how do we retain expertise?”;
3. KM isn’t a new thing that an organisation should “do” or “not do”; it’s something all organisations (all managers) do – they just do it well or badly.

This has some implications for what KM isn’t, or rather what KM practitioners don’t need to do. First off, they don’t need to patronise people who know how to do their jobs by calling them “knowledge workers” and telling them that they don’t know how to do their jobs. Second, they don’t need to repeat mantras like “knowledge sharing is good”: it may be, but sometimes it may not be that important – and it’s up to the business to know whether it is or not. Third, they don’t need to pursue the fatuous aim of turning all “tacit” knowledge into “explicit” – which is a little like an accountant arguing that come what may all the company funds should be turned into gold bars as quickly as possible – admittedly pretty, but quite often utterly useless.

I became aware of my forgetfulness when Capital One’s callcentre staff phoned me on Friday morning. The conversation went as usual with these companies: “Can I speak to Mr Ben Pl…Pleuvy [or something similarly vague]?”. “Speaking.” “This is Capital One here, I need to speak to you on an urgent personal banking matter. For security, could you please confirm your date of birth.”

Hang on, whose security are we talking about here?

“I’m not giving you my date of birth. It’s personal information. I don’t even know who you are.”

Rather impatiently, I was told that if I doubted their identity I could phone them: “You’ve got the number, it’s on our bill.” Gee thanks. I did phone them – even though it cost me 7p plus 2p per minute. Their system told me to key in my credit card number. I did. It told me to key in my date of birth. I didn’t. The system put me through to one of their callcentre folk. He asked me for my date of birth.

“No.”

Pause.

“Sorry?”

“I said no. I’m not giving you my date of birth. It’s my personal information.”

“But if you don’t pass validation, I can’t talk to you. The system won’t let me see your account until you give me your date of birth.”

“So you want my date of birth because your system requires it?”

“Yes.”

“But it’s my personal information.”

“But I need it for security.”

“Then you’ll just have to write to me, won’t you? Goodbye.”

After that second call, I had a think about why I wasn’t playing – until then, I’d been reacting out of sheer irritation, partly at my own stupidity in forgetting the payment, partly at the mere fact of being called from a callcentre. My date of birth is my personal information. If it is so valuable a piece of information that it can validate my identity, then I don’t want to give it to someone I know almost nothing about – even if I’m sure they are indeed working in Capital One’s callcentre, I still know nothing about their personal integrity. If, on the other hand, it isn’t a valuable piece on information (because actually it would take very  little effort for anyone else to find out my date of birth), then the charade of giving it “for security” as though it is some kind of meaningful token is merely demeaning.

Call number three was pretty similar. Call number four came on Saturday morning. By that time, of course, I’d actually paid the bill, but Capital One’s systems apparently didn’t know that.

“Can I have your date of birth?”

“No.”

Sigh. “You have to pass validation or I can’t talk to you about your account.”

“So don’t talk to me about it.”

Sigh. “We aren’t going anywhere.” You got it. “You’ll have to put up with the calls.” She hung up.

Call four tried reasoning with me. “Why won’t you pass validation? You can ring us so that you know we’re Capital One.”

“I have rung you – and was asked for my date of birth.”

“Well, you have to pass security.”

“Not if it means giving you my date of birth.”

“We’re complying with the Data Protection Act.”

Well, no you’re not. You’re just trying to limit your risk under the Data Protection Act. Different thing altogether.

“You can ring us if you don’t believe we’re Capital One.”

“I don’t have any doubt that you’re Capital One – I’ve spoken to enough of you over the past 24 hours. My date of birth is my personal information. I’m not going to give it to you. In fact, I don’t even know what you think my date of birth is.”

“We aren’t going anywhere. You’ll just have to put up with the calls.”

“So you’re telling me you’ll keep ringing until I give you my date of birth? That sounds like harassment.”

“It’s important that we speak to you about your account.”

Not to me it’s not. At least, not if I have to bend to your will to enable you to do so.

But she’d rung off.

There was a call five, and may even have been a call six before Capital One’s systems obviously twigged that they’d actually had their money. The later callers were bad-tempered from the outset – their system may not allow them to see my account details until I’ve “passed security”, but it sure as hell let them see a note reading “This One Is Trouble” or words to that effect. The words “we’re going nowhere” were repeated. The threat to keep phoning was repeated.

This is a mess. I’m not precious about my date of birth. In fact, I am happy to give £10 to your favourite charity if you (so long as you’re not someone I know well) are the first person to email or DM me my date of birth any time before the end of April – but only £10, because I don’t believe it will be particularly difficult. So while I can think of lots of scenarios in which my supplying my date of birth provides some evidence of my identity, I can also think of lots of scenarios in which it proves nothing of the kind. I can also think of scenarios where a callcentre worker quietly harvests personal information to use for their own illicit purposes. Why should their systems pander to their paranoias rather than to mine? Capital One have never explained to me the systems they have in place – if any – to prevent their callcentre workers (overseas) from misusing my personal information.

Then there’s also that whole callcentre thing. The significant pause after you answer the phone, which means that a machine has dialled your number, not a person. The ridiculous “How are you today?” greeting. The utter failure to accommodate – the failure to have a Plan B for dealing with the maverick client – because “The system requires it”. This is not customer service – it’s (attempted) customer management.

I wouldn’t object to sharing a secret with Capital One – a password, a question and answer, some facts about my account. I wouldn’t mind if their callcentre staff were free to negotiate around establishing identity and to make a judgement on the basis of a conversation. But date of birth has become the standard mechanism for authentication, in spite of the obvious nonsense it is. And of course Capital One isn’t the only company to act like this – it seems to be pretty universal. It’s “what the system requires”. Well, not from me. Sorry.

Characteristics of Enterprise 2.0

Sustaining valuable conversations

• The digital world is bitty and subject to firestorms
• Commitment to continuity is crucial – even when followers are fickle
• We do not have a privileged voice: we gain authority and audience through skills and knowledge, not because we are “the Government”.

Blurring of boundaries (real/virtual; private/public; official/unofficial; internal/external)

• We have to operate consistently and authentically (and avoid being a “creepy treehouse”)
• We must learn to plan all activity across the boundaries of real and virtual
• Managing and deploying knowledge must happen transparently across the boundary between “internal” and “external”

Concept mapping

• Concepts connect, and we no longer control the connections or the changes in them
• Sharing, testing and challenging our understanding and our vocabulary is essential

Developing communities

• Proactively seeking engagement, not passively waiting for it
• We’re in competition for eyeball time: don’t assume people will engage with us rather than with other centres of power or authority
• There are no hierarchies in a web: no-one represents or stands in for others
• Developing partners’ capabilities is as important as developing our own (and can only be done jointly)

Capturing good exemplars

• Small-scale experimentation works better than large schemes in complex situations
• Lessons learned = good examples – and not = “best practice”
• Experimentation means being tolerant of failure, and being comfortable with talking about failures

Building “Enterprise 2.0”

1. Enterprise 2.0 can be built by command and control (CISCO is an example), but it is generally built by removing barriers rather than by corralling staff.
2. Different organisations have different levels of capability (and indeed capability may differ within an organisation). These different levels will affect how “naturally” staff take to Enterprise 2.0 behaviours (and we should not assume that the differences are generational).
3. Resistance or reluctance can come from a variety of causes: a fear of not having permission; a fear of getting out of your depth; a fear of looking ridiculous; a simple fear of technology.

Building skills for “Enterprise 2.0”

Some new skills areas become crucial, especially:

• facilitation skills – leading a collaborative effort in such a way as to maintain the wider engagement;
• visual skills – presenting and understanding knowledge and information in ways that can be read rapidly and effectively;
• engagement skills – understanding and working to an agenda which is not necessarily ours;
• identity skills – managing and maintaining authentic, valued and secure identities.

Some older skills may also need updating, particularly:

• writing for the web – particularly the ability to write punchy, engaging text and make issues real to people through clear illustration and examples;
• collaboration skills – the ability to work effectively with a range of stakeholders, internal and external, in an open and almost real-time way;
• searching skills – being able to locate and monitor relevant information, conversations and issues as they arise “out there”.

I don’t say these concepts are not useful. I would understand being “literate” in something as meaning that you not only have the skills to master that whatever-it-is, but that you can be reflective about and adaptive of those skills: you have moved beyond learning by rote or acting mechanically, and can build on techniques you have learned.

We have started recently trying to map the relationship between three “literacies” in order to understand better what we should be doing to design a skills framework for civil servants entering the digital world. “IT literacy”, “information literacy” and “digital literacy” all clearly overlap and interrelate. You can only – these days – have information or digital skills with at least some IT skills under your belt. And you can only practise effectively as a policy maker or analyst if you understand both how to gain and use information and how to engage with stakeholders and others using the web.

The diagram illustrates the idea. Bear in mind that this is focused on the needs of an organisation – that is, the skills the corporate body needs us to have. A similar, but not identical, diagram could be drawn to describe these literacies at a more general level – the level, perhaps, required to be a “digital citizen”.

Skills and literacies in the digital age

The fundamental skill set is in IT literacy – from basic skills like keyboarding, up through being able to create designed documents, the manipulation of data, to understanding the concepts and benefits of IT in the business.

IT literacy shades into information literacy at the point at which you can select tools effectively to do the job you want to do – that’s the point at which you move from manipulating content to understanding it. It shades into digital literacy at the point at which you start using tools not only to present but to share. And the activity that stands at the centre of all three skill sets is search.

Information literacy runs from knowing at the basic level what you must do with information – keeping it safe, creating records, acknowledging copyright, etc – through being able to analyse your needs for information, to working out how to retrieve and classify information, to exploiting it for business value. Finally, information literacy shades into policy-making as you turn information into evidence through interpretation.

Similarly, digital literacy ascends from basic online skills – internet banking, say – to being able to put information into a content management system. From there, we move to people being able to manage their digital identity (or identities) – to create a persona that reflects how they want or need to appear in the digital world; and finally, using those skills, to be able to build fully-functioning networks and ranges of interventions and conversations in the digital world that allow you to be authoritative, trusted and respected. This is the point at which digital skills support the traditional policy-makers skill of influencing people’s attitudes and opinions.

Digital and information literacy overlap at the point where you have to be able to assess and manage information risk: the risks, especially, of releasing information you shouldn’t or using information which is not reliable. They also overlap with the policy skills sphere where they are about managing your own networks of resources – people and information sources – which you can nurture and grow as you go through your professional career. A key point to notice is that in future we are likely to be recruiting people who have already – indeed because they have already – built some of these networks as part of their educational progress.

This diagram has only started to be tested within our organisation. Our idea is to use it to support a major shift within the organisation towards digital engagement and effective, sustained internet presence (as opposed to a presence that is patchy and not always effective). To do so, we aim to use the diagram to allow us to map out training and development interventions that will equip civil servants fully to do their job in a digital age. I’ll try and follow the story in this blog: but in the meanwhile, any comments or questions on the diagram or the explanation of it above would be very gratefully received.

Tricky one, this: my boss is a woman, and as Chief Information Officer she probably is “in technology”. And obviously I admire her deeply! But I’m not going to blog about her.

The women I want to celebrate are two of the early pioneers of electronic music: Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire. In referring to these two, it is of course compulsory to refer to the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and to the Doctor Who theme. There, I’ve referred to them. It must also be said that it seems clear that the Workshop would not have existed without Oram, nor the Ron Grainger tune have survived so long without Derbyshire. But that’s not the point here.

No, my admiration for these two stems from their immense practicality. That may sound strange when referring to two women whose primary interest was in musique concrète and the outer edges of tonality. But the point is that to Oram and Derbyshire, the technology had purpose.

I like the story about Oram that one of her early jobs was ensuring that concert transmissions were not interrupted by bombing. Essentially, she followed a feed from the Royal Albert Hall and ran a recording of the same work in synch in the studio: if the RAH went down, she switched over to the recording, ideally so smoothly that the listeners wouldn’t even notice. Fakery? Possibly: but also an immensely practical way of helping to make bearable the experience of wartime Britain.

Yes, both women clearly loved technology – the feel of it, the joy of it, the heft of it in their hands (and often in those days the technology had real, physical weight). But they don’t seem to have loved it for its own sake, but because by using it they could explore and expand the frontiers of their art.

So here’s to all women (and men of course – although I’m tempted to say that women are better at this than men) who can keep their eyes firmly focused on the reasons for doing technology even while recognising and celebrating the unexpected, the unexpected, and of course the downright cool that technology itself introduces us to. Two women I would have loved to meet: Delia and Daphne.