Here are most of the cited links & resources (the commentary is from my email to Greg):

1. Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody. The examples in the book are a little dated but the overall observations holds. And we’re only at the beginning…

2. Dan Pink’s Free Agent Nation. I swear I thought we’d have a hundred examples of the Freelancer’s Union by now…

3. Derek Sievers’ How to Start a Movement in Three Minutes. Where I’d quibble with him is on the idea that leadership is overrated. I think it’s just the idea of leader at the top that’s overrated – leadership is a role, not a person, it’s important but can be shared. And the more, the merrier.

4. Charlene Li’s Open Leadership. I reviewed it on my Cisco blog here.

5. Jim Kouzes & Barry Posner’s The Truth about Leadership. I also did a blog post on that one.

6. UsNow – how do I love this?!?! It’s a little dated but continues to inspire! Here’s the clip that gives me chills every single time (at this point, I could narrate this film – click on part 1).

7. Social Innovation Exchange

8. June Holley’s blog is a great intro to Social Network Analysis

9. Here’s my presentation on Crowdfunding from REVV 2011.

10. Learning platforms – here’s a good summary of potential disruptors. Here’s a list of learning platforms.

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An Exploration of Leadership

There was a moment this spring, mid-way through a a project about the changing nature of leadership in the field of policy concerned with work and learning (we call it “workforce”), where we began to feel a renewed sense of excitement and promise.

The last several years have been tough for leaders working to help their communities achieve greater prosperity, especially in those parts of a Europe and the US where the rise of unemployment and corresponding social ills has been fast and severe. The housing crisis, unemployment, the escalating costs of health care and education, and a public sector in fiscal crisis—it can feel like an onslaught.

For policy and community leaders, the relentless push for efficiencies, cost-cutting strategies, and evidence-based practices—each important in its own way—can inhibit deeper thinking about the most critical contributions these leaders and their organizations make to the well being of their communities.

What We Learned

But we found leaders who were thinking deeply about their communities’ most significant challenges and what they could do about them—in partnership with government and non-profit organizations, and with businesses and citizens themselves.

The goal of our project was to explore the changing nature of workforce leadership—what leaders do, in what context, and toward what end, and how these have shifted over the past decade (a more complete explanation is here).

We engaged 519 leaders from public, private, and nonprofit sectors at the federal, state and local levels, documenting our activities on the project’s website along the way. We identified a framework and set of six practices sufficiently different from a decade ago to constitute a new model of leadership—we call it WEadership, a nod to its collaborative nature.

Three Insights Worth Thinking About

Three ideas that emerged during the project that strike us as posing fundamental challenges to the way we organize, manage, and assess investments in workforce.

1. Conversation Matters.

Repeatedly, workforce leaders told us that convening conversation with partners, stakeholders, program providers, local elected officials and citizens is the most important work they do. Not just important work, the most important work.

This will not be surprising to those experienced in the art and science of innovation as it is a social process. The source of much innovation is the blending and mixing of new ideas, technologies, and methods from one sector with those of another. Workforce leaders have long been hosting (both formally and informally) conversations about how to solve the jobs, skills, and economic development challenges in their communities. These conversations inform the actions of not just policy makers and workforce leaders, but everyone around the proverbial table that employs or develops people or supports a business. Such conversations have never been more important.

The problem is that the effects of this kind of work are difficult to evidence, especially in the short term.

As one a respondent in rural Iowa put it:

“When you use networks to move an agenda, it’s influence and momentum thatmatter. Changes can be small, but they are also cumulative—one day you look up and a lot of things are really different. But we don’t always have the ability to say “A led to B.’”

This fuzziness makes some leaders uncomfortable. As a result, we do not acknowledge convening as legitimate work. This means we do not invest in our capacity to do it successfully, and we do not talk about it when we are successful for fear it will be seen as lacking in rigor. But such convening is an essential ingredient in good policy and a necessary one for implementing better solutions to our most intractable problems.

2. Connectivity is a game changer.

The second insight has to do with social technologies. The fact that hundreds of millions of people are connected to one another using technology creates whole new possibilities for engaging in work, learning, and entrepreneurship in very different ways:

The explosion of peer-learning communities in the workplace and web-based platforms like Skillshare, P2PU, and Khan Academy are challenging our ideas about the very nature of educational institutions—is Skillshare school? Workforce leaders are asking themselves how these platforms can play a role in addressing skills gaps or simply engaging people in productive activity.

Manpower and other firms in the business of connecting people to work (even if not in traditional jobs) have been joined by firms like Taskrabbit that enable people to make a living by aggregating “gigs.” In the absence of sufficient numbers of jobs—even if there were a perfect match between the skills firms need and those job-seekers can supply—workforce leaders are asking themselves how these ‘unjobs’ can offer opportunities for those who need them, and what role policy can play in realizing them.

Peer-lending, microphilanthropy, and crowdfunding are helping us reimagine what it means to launch a venture. While nearly every local workforce leader with whom we spoke indicated that job creation was a workforce issue, the linkage became more tenuous at the state level (except in the seven states that maintain self-employment programs) and almost invisible at the federal level. But social ventures of the kind typically supporting through platforms like Kickstarter are a kind of hybrid. They can enable people to make their own jobs (or ‘gigs’) by aggregating investors (“backers”) who support specific projects or initiatives. Again, workforce leaders are exploring how such platforms might connect people to opportunity in nontraditional ways.

3. Boldness wanted.

Finally, across the board, workforce leaders expressed a desire for bolder experiments. Too often, the theories of change driving what are called “innovation initiatives” are determined at the top (whether by foundations or federal agencies) with little input from the field, and reflect the risk-averse culture of their organizations. As a result, local leaders often feel like they are working very hard to improve existing programs or approaches they know should be wholly reinvented. In addition, where innovation does occur, there are few mechanisms to share it with the field.

And yet, many, many leaders we spoke with persevere, seeking to maximize their impact on the economical health and social well being of their communities. Today, leaders at all levels and across sectors need to find ways to learn together, and to better support each other in solving what are absolutely critical community problems.

We are the leaders we’ve been waiting for.

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Kristin Wolff and Vinz Koller, of Social Policy Research Associates, authored the WEadership Guide (August 2011), the result of a one-year US Department of Labor study of leadership in the field of public policy concerned with work and learning. They were thrilled at the opportunity to link their professional pursuits (public policy) with their personal commitments to positive social change and innovation, and look to increase, accelerate, and intensify these connections within the field of workforce in the coming months. The entire project is documented at EnhancingWorkforceLeadership.org. Follow it at @WFLeadership

Big Changes.

Leaders agree: things are changing. Not just small things, like whether there's a cap on training resources or the timeline for coming board meetings. Big things, like the relationship of citizens to their government and to the institutions they interact with every day: school, work, even family.

Fundamentally, three (interelated) dynamics underlie these changes:

1. Connectivity. As Clay Shirky notes, "More people can say more things to more people than ever before in history." Increasingly, people are moving beyond just talking, they are taking action - action that once required the creation of large organizations and institutions, but no longer does.
2. Innovations in hardware and software. Increased capacity and new devices make it possible to aggregate and manage enormous data sets; better software, much of which sits in "the cloud", makes it easier for people (and not just experts) to organize, understand, use, and share information.
3. Context. We've just experienced the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression - and this one was nearly global. Our shared challenges (as Americans, and as global citizens) now stand in stark relief: we need better ways to work together to meet our needs, responsibly, and within our economic means. It's a daunting challenge made more so with each day's headline - 1 in 7 Americans on Food Stamps or Home Foreclosures Slow (because banks can't keep up); or reports from the latest natural disaster. 

But citizens (and not just US citizens) are stepping up to meet these challenges, collaborating in unprecedented ways. They are:

• Organizing camps, clubs, and other community learning events. This is not just about building individual skills and networks, but making communities stronger by experimenting with new models of "infrastructure" (and "infostructure"), creating new kinds of un-institutions, and even new markets and alternative currencies;
• Redefining businesses and busines models; and
• Partnering with each other and with their governments to improve their communities - all over the world.

What Does This Mean for Workforce Leaders?
Workforce leaders confront many serious challenges - unprecedented levels of unemployment, slow job growth, skills mismatches, etc. Typically, workforce programs seek to remedy these ills by delivering services. But what if leaders sought to create spaces (online ad offline) where people could help each other? Surely the wisdom of a crowd whose members are looking for jobs woud benefit the individuals in that crowd.

Similarly, what if workforce leaders made space for people to help each other learn? Basic skills, job skills, even vocational skills - sometime individuals don't need a "credential", mastery of a set of skills will suffice. This is particularly true in emerging industries whose jobs are more difficult to define and describe. What if workforce leaders saw independently-organized unconferences (e.g., jobcamps) and similar events as part of a broader community response to workforce challenges - and promoted and participated in them, too?

And what if workforce leaders thought seriously about how to help people find not just jobs, but "gigs?" With unemployment a stubbornly high 9%, and as many as eight times as many job-seekers as jobs, there are simply too few jobs. While many workforce leaders are engaged on the long-term job creation agenda, far fewer are advancing entrepreneurship, self-employment, or other initiatives that can help people sustain themselves while they build new careers. Only seven states offer a Self-Employment Assistance program that allows individuals to start their own businesses with their unemployment insurance.

And the Video?
The video above is from a recent TransparencyCamp convened in our nation's capital earlier this month. It's a good example of many of these trends coming together. It's a camp-style event in which participants organize and share content with the aim of partnering with government(s) to solve problems. And while it's about open government, it might just say something about what it looks like to lead on workforce issues in the future.

While public officials from President Obama to Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal continue to emphasize BP's responsibility for the disaster - and the cost of cleaning it up - Americans expect the US Government to respond. And it does, naming Coast Guard commandant Admiral Thad W. Allen to oversee the federal response, including the efforts of Environmental Protection Agency Admininistrator (and New Orleans native) Lisa Jackson; Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano; Department of the Interior Secretary Ken Salazar; and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Science Administrator Jane Lubchenco, among dozens of state and local agencies and emergency services.

While this event is extraordinary, Government faces many challenges like it - so-called "wicked problems" characterized by their complexity, scope, scale, and resistance to narrow solutions. Unemployment, the credit crisis, climate change, food safety, economic revitalization, the competitiveness agenda - these are difficult issues that citizens expect their Governments to address, even as Government options for managing them are limited.

Why the expectations gap?

Donald Kettl, author of The Next Government of the United States, argues that in the US, this gap stems from the "vending machine" view of Government most citizens hold: the idea that we pay-in (through taxes) and in return, we expect specific solutions (legislation, resources, agencies, regulations, programs, etc.) for which we can hold Government accountable.

This (mechanistic) approach is highly efficient (and appropriate) for simple, predictable, work - processing passports or unemployment claims, for example. When it doesn't work, we 'bang it around' (like the vending machine) by complaining, protesting, or calling our Congressional representatives. But for most of what Government does, this model is not only inappropriate, it's an inaccurate reflection of how actually Government functions.

First, Government services are often aimed at wicked problems and increasingly provided through vast networks of contractors (private for- and not-for-profit organizations) as well through cost-sharing agreements with state and local agencies. This makes many Government services hard to discern on the ground, providing a possible explanation for protest signs like this one:

Second, Government typically sets standards and then relies on the participation of citizens, residents, firms, and communities to meet them, and to report exceptions. The US Food and Drug Administration's approach to food safety is a good example of this. The Government  does not test every vegetable for bacteria before it is shipped to  grocery stores or restaurants (nor could it). But when hazardous bacteria are found and reported, Government establishes bans, announces recalls, and exercises its power to prevent further damage and expose the causal chain.

Third, and increasingly, Government coordinates, even collaborates, with citizens directly to generate ideas and partner on solutions to shared challenges. While new and experimental, social technologies are beginning to reconnect people to Government in ways that set the stage for new models of Government - more transparent, more participatory, more accountable, and sometimes, unexpected, as in this suggested grassroots approach to cleaning up the Gulf oil slick:

This meme, the evolution of Gov2.0 and the remaking Government and public policy, will be a regular topic here at Networked Publics.

Wikipedia identifies 20 different varieties. A Google search returns over 180M results. The word, derived from the 16th century French platte-forme meaning map, first made itself known to me in the form of a pair of (tall) shoes, and later, as a technology environment in which to learn and experiment.

In today's public policy environments, "platform" is the new black. Platforms connect voters and candidates (John Kitzhaber for Governor), government agencies and citizens (US Department of Labor on Facebook), community based organizations and volunteers (VolunteerMatch), neighbors and neighbors (PortlandNeighborhoods), and so on, with the Web serving as the underlying operating system for new modes of interacting. (Incidentally, if you are reading this, you are arguably sharing a platform with me and the Smart + Connected Communities initiative right now).

The Nature of Platforms

In January, JP Rangaswami named four dimensions of platforms at the DGREE 2010 Summit.

1. Purpose. Whether an airport, the stock exchange, or Facebook, platforms maintain a clear purpose that attracts people with an interest in that purpose.
2. Standards. Because a platform brings people together, it employs  standards so that activities performed by the crowd work better for everyone. In an airport, we all have to pass through security with our  appropriately-sized carry-on bags. In a social network, we share  information about ourselves in order to access people and information important to us.
3. Participation of different kinds of entities (with different business models). A platform enables a range of activities in which different  kinds of organizations and entities participate. A conference is a kind  of platform, for example, where some people attend as individuals, while  others attend on behalf of firms - probably paying different rates based on when they registered, whether they are sponsoring, or what they  plan to do during the conference.
4. Action enabled by but independent of platform itself. Social networking  platforms that encourage community-level action demonstrate the power of this kind of leverage everyday.

At its core, a platform is a foundation upon which we build or do other things. It's an enabling system for people to not only interact with their governments, and participate in the delivery of government services, but to actually "[reconstitute] what is a government."

Increasingly, platforms connect people (from across agencies, sectors, and geographies who might not otherwise meet), data (from anywhere or anything), services (that help people share, learn, act and measure, collaboratively), and possibility.

And that makes platform a perfect (if evolving) metaphor for the kind of foundation we need to tackle our most critical challenges and find ways to realize sustainable prosperity in communities all over the world.

Reinventing Our Government

Sadly, we were not able to attend last month’s Gov2.0 Summit in Washington, DC. I did contribute the to “What does Gov2.0 mean to you?” video contest, with this, but I really liked Andrew’s (@Krazykriz), which I embedded above. However, thanks to social media, the community that did attend let us in on some of the action.

• News coverage and links to presentation files
• Summit videos (blip.tv)
• TwitterStream

Other Gov2.0 Resources

• GovLoop (Ning network, just purchased by GovDelivery)
• Sunlight Foundation
• GovFresh
• You2Gov

Gov2.0 Expo May 2010

Next up? Gov2.0 Expo, May 25-27, 2010 (DC). Sign-up for information here. Word on the street is that the May event will offer more relevant content for state and local government folks.

Share/Save

What’s Community Agility?

Two years ago – when we launched the Community Initiatives Team – agility was on ours minds. Pre-recession, we were hearing flat, but seeing spiky. Our team members live and work in regions as diverse as Portland (OR), Tucson (AZ), Charlotte (NC), and all over Michigan. So while the U.S. economy at the time was widely perceived as booming, our communities were still smarting from the steep downturn a few year before. Yet, we were also bearing witnesses to infinitely creative responses to new challenges, and the beginnings of new kind of economy.

In our work, we were confronting significant structural challenges:

• Decreasing overall economic security for families despite job growth
• Industry-wide transitions changing job and skill requirements for large numbers of workers
• Lack of access to investment capital where entrepreneurs seemed to need it most
• Chronic budget shortfalls compromising basic public services in our communities, and
• Institutions, agencies, and organizations with clearly shared missions acting in isolation.

At the same time, we saw opportunities for collaboration (on and offline) and reinvention everywhere. We focused on building agility.

Developing Methods for Change

With the aim of helping communities find opportunities to thrive while also managing through downturns, and with partners including the U.S. Department of Labor, the Council on Competitiveness, and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, we developed methods and approaches for cultivating agility:

• Developing shared intelligence, by collecting and making meaning out of data that matters to multiple community organizations and agencies.
• Promoting network weaving, based on the theory that a whole host of benefits derived from well-networked communities (we had been studying networks for some time, but found Sean Safford’s early work at MIT – subsequently published in book form – very compelling). Later we partnered with June Holley to learn techniques for social network analysis.
• Facilitating collaboration across “silos”, so that people from across disciplines, departments, agencies, programs, organizations, and institutions find common ground and begin to share ideas, talent, and resources in ways that maximize wider community benefits.
• Encouraging public engagement, since real change happens in firms, schools, and neighborhoods, not just boardrooms.
• Advancing an entrepreneurship agenda that emphasizes not just new ventures, but entrepreneurial culture itself.

These methods emphasize the building of capacity—to collaborate and to innovate—so that communities can reinvent themselves over and over, not just build the next new thing. We worked with (and learned from) community leaders and project partners from five U.S. Department of Labor WIRED regions (Southeast MI, Mid MI, Southern AZ, Kansas City, and the Piedmont Triad NC partnership) and two BRAC regions (Ft. Bragg NC and Southwest OK), and a host of other communities in transition.

Checking In

Last week, our team met in person to review progress, and take a look at the current (and growing) ecosystem around community agility (now increasingly called resilience.)

New Trends

While we’d been paying attention to the emergence of new conversations and community innovation spaces individually, sharing this information helped all of us see that we are now in the company of more (and more diverse) people advancing some of the same goals. Here are a few we’re pretty excited about.

Social Innovation

The people who identify with “social innovation” are a wildly diverse, eclectic and exciting bunch, ranging from the academically-inclined Stanford Social Innovation Review crowd to the entrepreneurial community that is Social Edge (Skoll Foundation) to the activists, organizers, and media mavens who see new ways to make change through the social web. The new White House Office of Social Innovation will certainly accelerate interest in the field, which is now beginning to map itself. And interest in social innovation is appropriately global. The Young Foundation, SIX, and the Skoll World Forum, together with institutions like Ashoka and the Aspen Institute have nurtured social innovation networks around the globe for years. More recently, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has sponsored a host of initiatives designed to help innovators of all ages and stations leverage the power of social media and the web.

Video and Twitter have helped make much of this activity accessible and transparent. Last week, 900 people gathered at SoCap09 in San Francisco to figure out how to fund it.

Gov2.0

Government (at all levels) is also beginning to reimagine itself. The Obama campaign demonstrated the power of technology to enable self-organization in a campaign context, now we’re working through the implications of this kind of mass connectivity on governing itself. Catalyzed by Tim O’Reilly’s advocacy of “Government as Platform,” gov2.0 has become a rallying cry for transparency, participation, and just better, smarter, government  – among people inside government and out. This week’s Gov2.0 Summit brings together public servants and technologists and advocates and organizers, many of whom are already working together to build the next generation of public intelligence systems and platforms for participation.

The Resilience Movement

The resilient communities movement stems from two different though related sets of ideas: one relating to security, and the other to sustainability more broadly.

• The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is exploring Community Preparedness and Resilience in a variety of ways – the Community and Regional Resilience Initiative (CARRI), for example, reflects a partnership between DHS, the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Lab, and a handful of communities in the Southestern U.S.
• The Institute of Urban and Regional Development at the University of California Berkeley (supported by the MacArthur Foundation) has established a Building Regional Resilience Network , which has published a variety of papers on different dimensions of resilience (environmental, social, economic).
• The Council on Competitiveness made the materials used in its Risk and Resilience workshop available to the public.

People are helping communities become more resilient outside the U.S. as well – parallel efforts exists in Australia, and a more locally-driven approach launched in England.

Smart Communities

Firms like Cisco are promoting smart cities from a data-connectivity point of view, and IBM is advancing its “internet of things” agenda. But people and processes matter just as much. The stakes are high, the promise, great, and the need, urgent. Brookings is tracking the impact of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA) on cities and regions seeking to advance innovation or leverage structural change. Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Stanley Litow offer a manifesto for smarter, more connected communities.  John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison’s Big Shift focuses on change dynamics in firms, but their analysis offers insight relevant to communities, too.

Going Forward?

We’re taking a good look at this context in an effort to learn from others, and focus our efforts in ways that maximize impact.

We believe in the power of not just tinkering, but “…unbundling and reconstituting…”
– Don Tapscott