Green Tea Ice Cream

At some point, I’ll figure out what the change that Tara Hunt writes so passionately about on the fascinating and frustrating Horse Pig Cow is actually about. This post gives me hope that I might actually agree with it, especially when she talks about:

…real, crucial examples of how we should apply the idea of open data to the lives of our citizens:

1. healthcare records being openly accessible and wikified for the patient

 2. communication and information exchange in regards to our childrens’ education to be a fully accountable (parent-teacher-student-administration) open dialogue

3. the government as an open, extensible, secure platform for local business.

And via this post, I found my way to Building Blocks for Independents, a wiki put together (I think) by Tanek Celik. I especially liked his definition of an ‘independent’ worker.

Someone that dares to think or do something on their own, often outside, or against established conventions.

Being independent requires two things:

1. The conscious decision and desire to be independent

2. The tools and resources to be independent

This, along with the core requirement of a building block to be a tool built by experts to be usable by non-experts (think WordPress or Del.icio.us) resonates with me quite deeply.

Firstly because anyone working to change the way things are normally done within a large or even a small but very established organization faces two problems – the oil tanker effect (work it out!) and lack of access to the resources that are devoted to the maintaining the norm. And remember that the norm may well be working perfectly well for most people, as far as they can see.

This is generally for perfectly good reasons – as a manager, I’m not about to order everyone to stop what they’re doing and head off in fifty sorts of opposing directions. That would only result in the most unproductive type of chaos; wall-to-wall resistance to any kind of change and a bunch of exciting, glamorous new bells and whistles that no-one would use for the perfectly good reason that they’d been told to…Meanwhile, students and employers who are accustomed to getting a particular level of service from us would suddenly find it had vanished with nothing coherent left in its place. In other words, I can’t sign off on putting substantial resources into change that I simply can’t, in the terms of the everyday work of our organization, spare.

On the other hand, I don’t want things to stay the way they are.

Because I don’t believe in static, disconnected, controlled information.

I don’t believe in customer service as a one-way conversation.

I don’t believe that people need to be spoon-fed solutions to their problems – they need tools to help them solve those for problems themselves (“teach them to fish”).

I do believe that our users are far more able to develop our services than we are

I do believe that the potential to simply do useful stuff, stuff that helps people, stuff that takes us way beyond where we currently are is just sitting in waiting to be tapped.

I do believe that the kinds of technology described in Building Blocks and deployed by hundreds of millions of people already to document, communicate and integrate their lives and work can achieve the same impact for us as a group of people with a mission to help the students we work for take control of their working lives (no, that isn’t our official mission statement but it’s what, every now and then, gets me up in the morning).

So in discussion with the most senior (and the least hierarchical and most wonderful) of our library folks yesterday, we talked about how our new policy for the new tools we want to provide needed to be deployed and developed by non-techies, owned by our community as an organization as a whole and with the ambition that we extended that control to our community of users as far as we could. Our technologists need to focus on providing supportive frameworks for integration rather than Grand Narratives of totalising development (that’s another post) – not “We’ll build you a blog” but “Here’s a server to put your blog. Give us a shout if you run into a problem.” As an organization, we have to nurture our own independents and provide them with building blocks. We need to empower each other, as in

This is possibly a slightly confused post, but then mine is a confused perspective – someone who tries to think like an independent but works as a senior/middle manager. It’s all a muddle, I’m afraid. Still, muddling is a great English tradition – muddling through has a certain kind of optimism that by improvising hopefully everything will somehow fall into place. The Tao of Muddle, if you like.