mark-elliott.net

Last week was pretty intense, here was my schedule:

Sunday 26 Apr - New York

After a very cramped 24hr flight I arrived at JFK in New York and while I was tired, I was buzzing with excitement…

Monday 27 Apr - New York

The view out of my hotel window when I woke up (Madison Square Gardens on the right side of the street one block up):

That evening I appeared on Doug Rushkoff’s radio show, Media Squat on WFMU in Jersey City. Here’s a link to a podcast of the show - I appeared in the first half hour or so just before Joanna Harcourt-Smith.

It was fantastic to meet Doug, he is an amazing guy with a good deal of achievements to his name, and on top of that, he’s a very friendly, genuine, passionate and intelligent guy. Unfortunately things moved so fast in the studio that I forgot to get a picture, but I did get a shot of this odd if not tragic sculpture in Jersey City near the studio (NYC in the background).

Tuesday 28 Apr - New York

I had the great fortune to be asked to present at the OpenGovNYC meetup in DUMBO, Brooklyn, and to facilitate a workshop exploring the idea of ‘policy sprint’. It was a really great group and notes were taken in the Sunlightlabs wiki here (thanks Matt and Marquina for scribing!).

Me in action (my presentation on left screen, and Twitter backchannel on right):

Enraptured audience I’m sure :-):

Workshop underway:

My wonderful hosts (Matt Cooper-Rider, Marquina Iliev, Britt Blazer and some other strange guy):

Thanks to Noneck for the tech help!:

Wednesday 29 Apr - Washington DC

This day was fairly stressful, that is until I arrived at the Sunlight Foundation. I caught a train from Penn Station in NYC to Princeton NJ where I rented a car and drove to Washington DC, and due to cockups/delays with picking up the car, I arrived in DC just in time for rush hour with my presentation being at 5:30pm. After finally finding a parking place and bolting headlong up to the offices, I was greeted by a beer, pretzels and a very interested and warm bunch of folks - thanks to Conor Kenny (senior editor for OpenCongress.org) for organising!!!

We explored many of the challenging and subtle nuances of Web-based collaborative consultation and policy generation and once again due to the frenetic pace, I didn’t get any pictures :-(…

Thursday 30 Apr - Princeton University

Thursday I hightailed it back up to Princeton for the conference start in my very comfy rental car:

And I arrived at last:

The conference, City Planning, Civic Participation the Internet at Princeton University launched with a dinner, then a screening of Us Now a good primer documentary about how Web 2.0 is opening up opportunities for the public to self organise and engage with government and governance issues in general.

Friday 1 May - Princeton University

My presentation was first up for the day with a panel discussion following. It was great to get it over with so I could focus all my attention on the many fantastic presentations and folks amassed at what turned out to be a fantastic conference.

Here’s a picture of the panel discussion I sat on with John Geracy from DIYcities and Nick Grossman from The Open Planning Project who also gave fantastic presentations.

Here’s a few highlights from the conference - not all of them, just one’s I happen to get pictures of!

Edward Andersson from Involve that provides:

Adrian Holovaty, founder of EveryBlock and a lead developer of the Django web framework:

Bill Schrier, Chief Technology Officer, Seattle who gave an inspired presentation and made me hopeful for the future of the adoption of innovative technologies for city infrastructure. Robert Davis, siting in the picture, also gave a focused presentation on Toronto’s experience as leaders in social media adoption:

John Wonderlich, Policy Director for the Sunlight Foundation lead a great discussion on and around their many inspiring projects:

Saturday 2 May - Princeton University

Saturday consisted of a few workshops, the first presented a $200 (if I remember correctly) desktop touch screen solution made by bolting a Wii remote control onto a data projector - very cool!

Then Christian Madera the conference organiser led a session on Web tools for planning (well done for putting together such a successful conference Christian!!!):

And then we wrapped things up with a lunch. Here Wansoo Im from Verticles Interactive Maps is showing off his great community history and mapping projects:

Sunday 3 May - Princeton University

Before heading back to Melbourne I even got a chance to do some sight seeing around Princeton University - a beautiful campus indeed! Here’s a few of my ‘moving stills’ inspired by having high definition video on my camera:

Even the student admin building is grand!

I’ve met a lot of amazing people and learned about an equal amount of amazing projects and programs going on in the US. I think this next year with the Personal Democracy Forum and O’Reily’s Gov2.0 conference coming up, 2009 will have set the pace for the open gov race…

As part of One Web Day (a global event to celebrate and take stock of the value the web provides humanity) Future Melbourne took part, with Melbourne’s Lord Mayor John So as the 55th One Web Day ambassador, as well as hosting a event to communicate our experiences to those who are in positions to effect change in our local government towards participatory governance. It was my honour to be the keynote speaker for this event, talking about the wiki-base collaborative environment designed and built by my outfit Collabforge, as well as the experience of taking part in one of the world’s first large-scale collaborative endeavours for local governance. Here’s a video of my presentation:

It’s been a busy few months for me and have taken on a few new projects which I hope to talk about soon. Till then, peace out.

Alas, the end must come to all good things… I will begin a bit of a reflection upon the Future Melbourne project, framed as an investigation into the future of democracy, because, that’s what I believe it is.

One month later and today is the final day of public consultation for the Future Melbourne wiki. I applaud all who contributed - and note, I do consider simply browsing the site a form of contribution. In fact, it is often helpful to compare the wiki to a town hall meeting to get a better understanding of the forms of engagement that comprise the full spectrum of contribution.

For instance, those who actually turn up to a town hall meeting is a subset of everyone who had heard and possibly discussed the topic up for review. Then, those members of the attendees who ask a question are a yet another smaller subset. Similarly, those who browse the site are kind of like the group that turns up to the meeting, while the folks that take the time to register and edit the ones who ask questions.

Both sets are important and even necessary for each other’s existence. The dynamic where a majority of the input comes from a minority of the participants is referred to as the Pareto Principle (or the 80/20 Rule). I’ve found this rule to apply in almost every f-2-f social setting where the group is larger than those who can manage a single sustained conversation (usually about three people) and where all participants are engaging in a single endeavour.

While some people argue the Pareto Principle as failing of human activity (the majority is always represented by the minority), I don’t think this is the case. In my mind, this would be like arguing that since an engine always requires fuel, engines are a failure since they can never run without it. Engines are very useful to humanity, and while some fuels are better than others, there’s a lot of ways to engineer and engine (however you’ll never escape the need for some form of fuel).

So in collective activity, the fuel is the ‘masses’ who build ignite the sparks of the minority. The rising of such a minority may be due to the dynamics of collective psychology, or, perhaps those individuals would always participate without the support of the majority. Nevertheless, the two seem always to be tied and therefore it makes sense to see the two as interdependent.

UPDATE (thanks Dale ;-):
During the period of consultation between 17 May and 14 June we received approximately 9300 visits to the site from 6500 people. In total, these visitors viewed over 48000 pages on the site.

During this period, approximately 200 individual edits were made to both the plan and its discussion pages. These ranged from new ideas to extensive well-researched contributions on the future of our city. The contributions will now be reviewed by the Future Melbourne team to organise, refine and incorporate the range of ideas into the Future Melbourne plan in the best possible way.

With regard to the Pareto Principle, this means that of the total number of folks who engaged the site (6500), 3.1% made edts (200)…