Science Library Pad

LinkedIn maps my connections - I analyse the meaning

A surprisingly stark clustering into three very thinly linked groups, as generated by LinkedIn Labs Maps:

See the source of this image at LinkedIn Labs.

While LinkedIn can tell you the interconnectedness of my connections, it doesn't (yet) tell you how strong the connections are - although presumably this could be derived at least for online by analysing Twitter traffic, blog links etc. to see how often you @ message people, retweet them, link to their blog posts, comment on their blog posts... Then thicker lines could indicate stronger online connections (an interesting research project).  And you might want to use brightness to indicate a fading over time of connections, if they are not maintained.

(I should mention before I launch into the rest of this that I am fairly stingy with my LinkedIn connections - in general it's limited to people I have worked with or communicated with extensively.  I know some people use LinkedIn as an online rolodex of everyone they encounter in a work context, but I don't use it that way.)

In the absence of LinkedIn explaining the connections for me, here's my analysis: the story this tells is that I have three groups of LinkedIn connections: people from my workplace where I hold my substantive position, NRC-CISTI (green, lower left); people from elsewhere in the Government of Canada (blue, upper right); and a library / science / scholarly communication group (various orangey-purple colours, upper left).  Most of the last group are not in Ottawa, and many are not even in Canada, instead being in the US, the UK and elsewhere.

What I think is interesting is the online and offline story this tells.  In terms of maintaining social connections, when I'm working at CISTI, the green connections are maintained by face-to-face contact daily.  The government contacts I see face-to-face weekly, mostly at after-hours events related to social media, collaboration and public service renewal.  And the scholarly comms / library connections I see usually at most once or twice a year, at conferences.

So in an interpersonal sense, the lines to workplace colleagues would be very thick.  But if you were to be able to apply an "awareness of work activities and interests" filter, the picture actually changes dramatically.  In that case, the connections are strongest, the amount of information transferred largest, for people with a sustained online presence.  Communication within an organisation is a classic problem.  But it's interesting that it now is possible in some cases for me to have a much better understanding of what is happening outside my organisation, what people are working on and investigating, than to understand what's happening internally. 

Twitter in this case can be thought of as a vibration of the connection, a continuous thrumming of quick notes of activity - a thought shared, a link retweeted.  In network terms we would call this a "keep alive", a ping.  "I'm here, I'm working on things," Twitter says.  But for real information density, you need to have blog posts - a blog post is a thick solid line, a rich informational link, particularly if it has a lot of out-links and comments.  And of course, this starts to look like synapses - frequently used connections get stronger.

This can lead to an odd dichotomy, where your social connections at work, which traditionally would have been the richest sources of information about what's going on, may actually serve only a tribal purpose, whereas "virtual" connections link you much more strongly into the information you need to do you work, and provide a sense of ambient awareness about important developments in your fields of interest.

The change - the fact that when people narrate their work, regardless of where they are, you can understand better what is going on - this change I think is part of what drives the gap in understanding, between the people who say they must be connected in order to do their work, and the people who see online activities are purely social, the "why do employees need Facebook" question.  This is a result of a confusion between networking for social connections, and networking for information connections.

I also think people apply an odd scepticism to these online connections, as if they're somehow not "real", as if only face-to-face is real interaction.  To which I say, is calling someone to tell them you love them not "real" because you're not both in the same physical space?  Is writing someone a heart-felt handwritten letter of thanks not "real"?  It's a very odd concept of real if that's the case.

All this to say, we have to be careful about analogies from the physical world to the digital world.  People hear the "social" in social media and think employees are going into purely entertaining spaces, to take a break.  Whereas what has actually emerged for some is a professional knowledge network that gives them more information and more context more rapidly from external sources than is available within their own organisation.

So be aware: if your organisation is a tight cluster of interconnections, with few links reaching outside the organisation, and with very thin amounts of information exchanged across the connections, you're going to be outperformed both by employees within your organisation who are better at making professional connections online and contributing to the online ecosystem of information, as well as by organisations that as a whole are able to learn this communications lesson.

If you want a classic example of an organisation failure in this area, there's no better one than the organisation intranet, an inward facing mirror that reflects only your own images and ideas back at you, typically outdated ones frozen in the web of intranet approvals and process.  There's a reason it's called the World Wide Web, not the organisation internal network.  The power came with open worldwide connections, not with organisations talking to themselves.  Open allows serendipitous connections, unanticipated discoveries.  Choose open.

18,000 tweets and counting - three years of Twitter and how it has impacted my blogging

"created_at":"Wed Jun 06 15:35:14 +0000 2007" (extracted from http://api.twitter.com/1/users/show.json?screen_name=scilib)

Closing in on four years on Twitter.  I can't remember exactly, but I think I noticed people were talking about it more and more, on blogs and in person, so I decided to check it out.  It took me about six months to figure out how I could use it, to understand what Twitter was for me.  It has aspects of "social bookmarking that works" (that is, that actually shares bookmarks rather than just keeping them to yourself) as well as a social network maintenance layer - a way to keep in contact with people in your network, during the sometimes-long gaps between in-person conversations.  It's also a way to get some understanding of people you have yet to meet, to discover a bit about their interests and personality.

It is not, exactly, a blog killer.  But it has dramatically reduced the amount of routine news or links that I post.  A bunch of factors led to a dramatic reduction in my blogging.  The main one had nothing to do with Twitter - in June 2009 when I posted the blog is quiet and said it was because of "Reason I can't tell you which will be announced soon" it was because I had planned to move to scienceblogs.com.  I was excited about the move.  But then there was some minor setup... and I started second-guessing what I wanted to post, I was uncertain about what to say, now that I was outside of my own space.  I started a few posts in draft, but I was really hesitant to do a completely new launch, on a new site.  Whereas previously I would have had an idea and immediately fired up my browser, I no longer felt that I should just share anything, anytime.  (This was nothing to do with ScienceBlogs, they were perfectly welcoming.)  And so my momentum drained away, and my energies were all channeled entirely into Twitter.  To the extreme that my posts went June 2009... August 2009... July 2010.

Meanwhile, my tweets are up to 500 or more a month, according to the (probably imperfect) stats gathered by TweetStats for my account.

What have a learned, from this long sejour entirely in Twitterland?  First and foremost, I think one loses a lot by not blogging.  Twitter can to some extent maintain a presence online, but it can't expand it or make substantial impact.  Pretty much all of the opportunities that have come to me from sharing online came from sustained blog posting, from long-form sharing of my own ideas, not from tweeting or retweeting.  If you want to share your ideas in a way that will generate substantial discussion and spark interest in a major way, you have to write in the long form.  It's the content creators who are the top of the Internet pyramid - to have an impact you must be writing your ideas, narrating your work.  Not just for others, but as importantly, to better understand yourself, to have an online archive of your thoughts and work over time. 

Nick Charney puts it nicely

As a knowledge worker myself, I feel that my blog is one of my strongest assets: it helps me contextualize my thinking, forms a narrative, is searchable, can hyperlink to other sources, and allows for comments and debate.

From Briefing Notes to Govblogging - January 28, 2011

When I started a work blog in 2004, it was as simple as wanting to be able to google my own conference notes.  The easiest way for me to make that happen was to just stick them in a blog.  I had no idea it would become more than that, notes to myself.

Our communication channels are evolving continuously.  In 2004 the library blogosphere was evolving rapidly, and my RSS reader was my daily go-to place to find out what was going on.  Later, I found Friendfeed was a valuable addition, allowing additional conversation and sharing around a broader spectrum of material than just blog posts.  I used delicious, but I never found it worked very well even as a personal archive - I was much more likely to find what I was trying to remember by trying some keywords in a search of my blog, than guessing what I might have used for tags in delicious, and it was pretty rare that someone would be monitoring delicious closely enough to pick up a link that I had posted.

Twitter does a much better job of "ambient awareness" in a few senses - it lets me know generally what major events are happening (such as the ongoing events in Egypt),  amd it is also a good way for me to find links of interest in specific topic areas (for me: open data, government 2.0, library technology, scholarly publishing).  But it's important to understand, this is my unique window on to Twitter.  I have very carefully selected whom I want to follow (once I hoped to keep it to 200 people or less, now I am vowing to keep it under 500); I also go through my followers daily and block both blatant spammers and people that I think are coming from keyword searches that don't match my main content.  Twitter for me is very much a curated experience - both from me in curating the information I want to see by selecting whom I follow, and in turn from that group, in the content they write and retweet.

There is a major problem though, which is a dramatic loss in findability.  Twitter is designed as an ephemeral stream.  And once you're following a substantial number of people, the river flows very quickly.  I can retweet and favourite a lot faster than I can read.  And once tweeted or favourited, Twitter doesn't make it easy to search, even to record for a long time what you have highlighted.  I use Friendfeed to consume both my tweets and my favourites but it's not a great solution - its search is imperfect and it is in danger of disappearing entirely at any time (it was bought by Facebook and is no longer actively supported).

There are some dedicated tools, such as T-keeper and Archivist, I tend to use those specifically for recording event hashtag traffic though, rather than to capture all of my tweets.  There are also services that will bookmark any link you tweet, but often these want read/write access to your Twitter stream, and I am very reluctant to grant write access to any app.

I would be interested in hearing what workflows people are using to keep track of their tweets and favourites so that they can go back and read things later - I imagine a lot of people are using Instapaper, but I haven't managed to integrate this into my workflow yet.

Another factor driving Twitter use is the fact that it is easily read/write on mobile.  There are lots of good Twitter clients for mobile devices.  On the iPhone I use Echofon, and on Blackberry the official Twitter app, which has some nice notification integration.  As I use my iPhone a lot on transit, Twitter has provided an easy way to monitor what's going on, and to provide feedback.

Specifically in the Ottawa context, Twitter has been a powerful tool for keeping up with local events, reporting from those events, and connecting to attendees before and after.  For example, the recent Third Tuesday about the NCC's use of social media was announced on Twitter, microblogged on Twitter using hashtag #3tyow, and has also been a catalyst for further conversations with Daniel Feeny (@feeny_d) who was the presenter.  I actually worry about a digital divide in Ottawa, as those who are still using only mailing lists and blogs are missing out on a lot of the events and discussion that now are solely on Twitter.

Also, it's important to understand there are three quite different Twitter experiences: the web site, the mobile apps, and the desktop tools. 

Twitter through the website itself is a somewhat limited experience - although more features are now easier to use and better exposed in the new user interface.  It still won't let you post a retweet with a comment, or shorten your URLs for you, or help you post images.  A Twitter web toolkit thus includes not only an open Twitter window, but e.g. bit.ly for URL shortening and e.g. Twitpic for picture posting - a rather awkward, manual integration.  It's actually easier for me to post a link or a picture using Echofon, as there is a Safari "post to Echofon" bookmarklet, and built-in picture posting support.

Echofon (and other iPhone apps) also give visual indication of new @-messages and direct messages (DMs), unlike the web app.  I probably use Echofon more than any other single iPhone app.

That being said, you only get the full power of Twitter with a desktop application like TweetDeck.  Twitter is not just you and the network of followers and followees you have, it is global conversations.  You can track these using Twitter searches that provide RSS feeds, but it is much easier to monitor them at a glance in a tool like TweetDeck (or the web-based HootSuite).  For example, while I get information in my feed about open data from the people I follow, I also monitor the #opendata hashtag in TweetDeck, along with many others.  Selecting hashtags of interest and monitoring them can be a great way to learn about a new topic and keep abreast of new developments.  Don't forget you can use booleans, so you can e.g. monitor information about the three GC 2.0 core tools by using the search "gcpedia OR gcconnex OR gcforums".

Here's what I'm monitoring right now:

• gcpedia OR gcconnex OR gcforum OR gcforums
• #w2p - an Ottawa networking / information event mostly for GC employees - "Web 2.0 Practitioners"
• #goc3 - GC collaboration community
• #goc - Government of Canada in general
• #opendataottawa or #apps4ottawa - the Ottawa open data community and the just-completed contest
• #smbottawa - Social Media Breakfast Ottawa
• datacite - The data DOI service, provided by CISTI in Canada
• #opendata
• #gov2au - very active hashtag of Australian Gov 2.0 developments
• #gc20 - Government of Canada 2.0 and also the hashtag my group, the GC 2.0 Program Office uses, when appropriate
• #ottcafesci - The Cafe Scientifique that the Science & Technology Museum does (unfortunately not used by the other organisations in Ottawa that also do Cafe Scientifique events)
• #psi_policy - Public Sector Information Policy - another view on open data, mostly from a European perspective
• #SC2011 - the hashtag for the upcoming Ontario Library SuperConference
• #3TYOW - Third Tuesday Ottawa
• #resd - a just-completed Resource Discovery Day at Library and Archives Canada
• #mobileappsottawa - a recent mobile apps event in Ottawa
• #ottawahackathon - yesterday's Ottawa Google User Group hackathon

Like I said, a river of information.  But you don't have to try to drink everything from the firehose.  A good start is just to find the people and hashtags that are useful to you and start monitoring them, when you can - maybe even just check in once a day to get a sense of what's going on.  How you use Twitter, and how often, can evolve from there.  For myself, I was happy to have my deep immersion in Twitter for over a year, but I'm happy to be back blogging now as well.

Internet access as a fundamental freedom

We call on the Government of Egypt to ensure that freedom of expression is respected by, among other measures, unblocking Internet sites.

Statement by Minister Cannon on Situation in Egypt - Jan 27, 2011

Nous faisons appel au gouvernement égyptien pour assurer le respect de la liberté d’expression, notamment en cessant de bloquer l’accès à des sites Internet.

Déclaration du ministre Cannon sur la situation en Égypte - 27 jan 2011

Via Twitter, where the Foreign Affairs account is @DFAIT_MAECI / @MAECI_DFAIT (linked from the news release).

Déclaration du ministre #Cannon sur la situation en #Égypte http://ow.ly/3LUbZless than a minute ago via HootSuiteMAECI
MAECI_DFAIT

Statement by Minister #Cannon on situation in #Egypt http://ow.ly/3LU91less than a minute ago via HootSuiteDFAIT
DFAIT_MAECI

In the US, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs (@PressSec)

Very concerned about violence in Egypt - government must respect the rights of the Egyptian people & turn on social networking and internetless than a minute ago via webRobert Gibbs (EOP)
PressSec

And a statement by President Obama

I also call upon the Egyptian government to reverse the actions that they’ve taken to interfere with access to the Internet, to cell phone service and to social networks that do so much to connect people in the 21st century.

In a press briefing, Robert Gibbs frames these as universal human rights

it is our strong belief that inside of the framework of basic individual rights are the rights of those to have access to the Internet and to sites for open communication and social networking.

The US State Department has also been calling for restoration of Internet and social networking access.  Philip J. Crowley, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, tweeted

We are concerned that communication services, including the Internet, social media and even this #tweet, are being blocked in #Egypt.less than a minute ago via webPhilip J. Crowley
PJCrowley

Widely reported, e.g. Washington Post - U.S. warns against blocking social media, elevates Internet freedom policies.

In case you're wondering what happened, here's what Internet traffic to and from Egypt looked like, from Thursday to Friday from New York Times article Egypt Cuts Off Most Internet and Cell Service.

It's reported that with broadband Internet completely blocked, but telephones still partially working, people have turned to dial-up to ISPs outside of Egypt, using old modems: Pour contourner le blocage du Web, les modems 56K.

(Note that Blackbird Pie, which I used to embed tweets, always says "less than a minute ago"; it loses date information.)

open government in Canada - submit your thoughts to Parliament

From a news release on January 27, 2011:

The House of Commons Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics is undertaking a study on open government. ...

The Committee believes that it is important to hear from Canadians on this topic. Submissions and briefs on the subject of open government in Canada can be submitted to the Committee’s mailbox at [email protected]  A brief which is longer than 10 pages should be accompanied by a 1 page executive summary.

The Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics (ETHI) is composed of 11 parliamentarians representing four political parties.

There's information about past and upcoming meetings available, including written transcripts and audio ("webcast", Windows Media format).  David Eaves will be presenting on January 31, 2011 and the site indicates the presentation will be televised.  On February 2, 2011 David Hume @dbhume, David Wallace @CIODave and Vincent Gogolek will be presenting.

UPDATE 2011-01-31: David Eaves' statement and Q&A audio and video in both languages are available from ParlVU (Windows Media format).  There was a limited use of the hashtag #ETHI for the meeting.  ENDUPDATE

UPDATE 2011-02-02: Kady O'Malley (@kady) liveblogged David Eaves' presentation and has also separately liveblogged the February 2 session.  Also, the discussion with David Hume, David Wallace and Vincent Gogolek is now available from ParlVU.  ENDUPDATE

UPDATE 2011-02-03: Speakers at the February 7, 2011 session will be Guy Michaud, CIO of the City of Ottawa; Brian Beamish, Assistant Commissioner, Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario; and Penny Ballem, City Manager, Vancouver.  It will be televised and a live webcast should be available from ParlVU (with archive available at the same location afterwards).

Guy Michaud has been key to the City of Ottawa's open data initiatives, including the data catalogue site and the recently closed $50,000 Apps4Ottawa contest.  ENDUPDATE

UPDATE 2011-02-04: More meeting information posted

MEETING On February 9, 2011 at 3:30pm Eastern

• Corinne Charette, CIO of Canada and Stephen Walker, Senior Director, Information Management Decision from Treasury Board Secretariat
• From NRCan: Brian Gray, Assistant Deputy Minister, Earth Sciences Sector; Bill Merklinger, Assistant Deputy Minister and Chief Financial Officer, Corporate Management and Services Sector; Prashant Shukle, Director General, Mapping Information Branch
• Chuck Shawcross, Assistant Deputy Minister and Chief Information Officer of Environment Canada

Event will be televised, and webcast on ParlVU with archive available afterwards (Windows Media).

On February 14, 2011

Visible Government has announced

On February 14, Visible Government has been invited to testify at the The Federal Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics Studies Open Government. We're preparing and will continue to develop a briefing document, which will be the basis of ten minutes worth of speaking notes with a follow-up Q&A.

Visible Government was looking for input to be provided through their wiki http://www.visiblegovernment.ca/w/Ethics_Standing_Committee by February 7, 2011 at noon.

The ParlVU info for the 14th hasn't been posted yet.

ENDUPDATE

UPDATE 2011-02-10:

MEETING Monday February 14, 2011

* Jennifer Stoddart, Privacy Commissioner of Canada

* Tracey Lauriault (@TraceyLauriault)

* David Mason (@nostriluu), Exec Director, Visible Government

Will be televised, also ParlVU webcast (with archive available almost immediately afterwards).

ENDUPDATE

UPDATE 2011-02-14:

* Chantal Bernier, Assistant Privacy Commissioner of Canada, speaking instead of Jennifer Stoddart

ENDUPDATE

UPDATE 2011-02-24:

MEETING Feburary 28, 2011, 3:30 pm Eastern

Diane Mercier, PhD

Daniel J. Caron, Librarian and Archivist of Canada

Jean-Stéphen Piché, Acting ADM, Acquisitions Sector, Library and Archives Canada

Mark Perlman, Acting ADM; Consulting, Information and Shared Services Branch (PWGSC)

Christine Leduc, Director, Publishing and Depository Services, Consulting, Information and Shared Services Branch (PWGSC)

Audio and video available on ParlVU.

MEETING March 2, 2011 3:30 PM

David Ferriero (@dferriero), National Archivist, US National Archives and Records Administration

Melanie Ann Pustay, Director, Office of Information Policy, US Department of Justice (or USDOJ OIP, as they say)

Beth Simone Noveck (@bethnoveck), Professor of Law, former US Deputy CTO for open government, author of Wiki Government

Audio and video available on ParlVU.

ENDUPDATE

Although there is no Twitter hashtag specific to this Committee's meetings, There is limited use of #ETHI as the hashtag for these meetings (it's the abbreviation for the committee). The most common one for the topic of open government is #opengov

For some background about what Canadian federal parties and officials have put forward as policies on the topic, see Wikipedia - Open Government in Canada - Overview.

syndication of status to and from Twitter

As long as you don't have a private Twitter feed, apps can consume your Twitter via RSS or the API, and either republish the entire thing, or extract selected tagged tweets.

Twitter to Yammer

For Yammer, simply enter your Twitter username into your account preferences, and then any tweet hashtagged #yam will be copied to your Yammer status.  Yammer Integrates with Twitter gives some information.  In the latest version of Yammer, the setting is under Account->Profile...Twitter Username.

Twitter to LinkedIn

In LinkedIn, Edit Profile->Twitter... lets you pull in all tweets, or only tweets hashtagged #in.

LinkedIn to Twitter

You can also push status updates from LinkedIn to Twitter.  See LinkedIn Learning Center - Twitter for more info.

To share updates from LinkedIn to Twitter, check the box next to the Twitter icon on the LinkedIn home page. The first time you do this, Twitter will verify your account name and password. Whenever the Twitter box is checked, that update will publish to your Twitter feed.

Twitter to Facebook

You can add an application (with all the associated security and privacy risks of Facebook apps) called Selective Tweets, once configured you simply use hashtag #fb to get tweets into Facebook.  Another option is http://twitter.com/about/resources/widgets/facebook - The Twitter app for Facebook.

Facebook to Twitter

If you want to send postings from Facebook TO Twitter, use http://www.facebook.com/twitter/ - you can choose which types of content you want to be posted.

Twitter to blog/website

If you want to display tweets in a window on a site or a blog, you can use http://twitter.com/about/resources/widgets

Blog to Twitter

There are lots of different ways, one is Feedburner Socialize.  See Feedburner Socialize and stats.

Twitter Apps

Be mindful that if you want to send status messages TO Twitter, you have to give the source application write access to your tweet stream.  That means if the source application is compromised, it can be used to post malicious information (e.g. malware links) to Twitter. 

You can see what applications you have added, and what permissions they have, at http://twitter.com/settings/connections - note that Twitter permissions are all-or-nothing, in the sense that you don't get to choose what permissions a connected application has - if it requests read and write, you can only permit it entirely or deny it completely, you can't choose to grant it just read permissions.

Desktop Tools

There are also various desktop tools, such as TweetDeck, that support viewing and posting to multiple different types of status feeds simultaneously.

Previously

This topic is related to the issue of moving content around in an enterprise and consolidating notifications. 

Jan 14, 2011  RSS and enterprise notification architecture

consultation on Review of Federal Support to Research and Development

The Review of Federal Support to Research and Development has released its consultation paper (PDF).  You have until Feburary 18, 2011 to send a submission in response.

To give some background context:

To ensure that federal funding is yielding maximum benefits for Canadians, Budget 2010 set out a commitment to conduct a review of federal support for R&D, aimed at improving its contribution to innovation and to economic opportunities for businesses.

authentication architecture in a federated enterprise

One of the challenges for authenticated services provided across your entire enterprise is identifying the appropriate credentials to use, for both ease-of-use for users as well as for sustainable manageability.

For organisations with a single central user directory, such as an enterprise-wide ActiveDirectory, this can be relatively straightforward.  In other organisations, there may be separate divisional authentication systems, without a single global user directory.

This means there are a few options for providing a global service within the enterprise, all with associated complexity and tradeoffs:

* One can create a new central directory, and either have users create accounts, or pre-populate it from existing stores.  However, if the existing divisional authentication systems continue to exist, this creates both a potential source of confusion (as users now have at least two accounts) as well as a possible synchronisation issue as both divisional and central user accounts now need to be maintained.

* One can federate across the various authentication systems, using e.g. Active Directory Federation Services or various LDAP federation approaches.

* One can use Shibboleth or other distributed authentication systems, where trust relationships allow the individual divisions to continue to maintain the credentials, but act as trusted authentication providers to other parts of the enterprise.

Within the Government of Canada, there are a number of potential approaches that could be taken to solve this problem.  For example, there is a PKI credential that can be created, attached to the globally-unique employee identifer (the PRI).  This is called myKEY... except it seems this branding is also used to describe a variety of legacy PKI systems within the government as well, so the situation is somewhat muddied.

Where this starts to get really complicated is when you want to have different levels of user rights, with e.g. closed groups with administrators, managers and contributors, and when you want to make this work in proprietary systems (which often have robust rights management, but using proprietary internal user account management) or across organisation boundaries, e.g. an extranet site that allows both internal users and external users.

As well, a federated solution means one has to deal with all of the varying privacy, security, and personal information standards of all the different divisions.  In such a situation, "can we use these credentials for X?" can become a difficult question to answer.

Beyond that, ideally we would like federated search to be able to return results for all content that a user has access to (including closed groups that they participate in).  I'm not sure how to manage this, effectively it means the central search service has to be able to act as an authenticated proxy-user for every single user.

For external collaboration, do we need to consider something like the (controversial) Identity Ecosystem proposed by the US government?  How do we allow Canadian citizens to participate in a trusted way in online government consultations, while ensuring that both their privacy is protected (so we probably don't want to share credentials with health or tax systems) and that they actually are Canadians?

Another issue is internal sustainability, for example, tightly binding to myKEY means that there needs to be a clear sustainability and evolution plan for those credentials.  If not, we run a danger of locking ourselves into a particular authentication solution.  To avoid this, one needs to find a way to loosely couple to an authentication service, but this can be difficult if you are seeking very granular user permissions and identification information.

For the moment, we are simply having users create separate accounts for new cross-division (enterprise global) systems but this is not sustainable.  Even attaching accounts to approved government email addresses is not sustainable, as currently the email address changes when users change departments.  I would be interested in hearing how other organisations are managing this (particularly for internal Government 2.0 services, such as government-internal wikis and discussion fora).  Is GovDex using user-created accounts attached to government email addresses?  Are there any best practices?

RSS and enterprise notification architecture

One aspect of Enterprise 2.0 is the ability to monitor, discover and share content from a variety of sources.

We don't have a lot of "glue" to enable this from the user perspective - basically you can search (Google or enterprise search) or follow (email, Twitter, Facebook, Yammer, RSS).

There is a line that breaks this approach, which is the line (actually usually multiple layers of firewalls and policies) between the intranet and the Internet.  In general, many of the rapidly evolving, inexpensive tools for web and mobile "live" on the Internet - they can't see intranet content.  Which means you can't get a search alert about your internal blog, nor can you follow your internal blog's RSS feed on Google Reader, or on Reeder on your external-network iPhone, or on an external-network Blackberry RSS feed reader.

The stiles that will get you over the intranet fence are pretty limited: email or authenticated RSS (if there are other options, I'd be interested to know).  So there are basically three options:

* have two completely separate working environments, one with Internet tools for public content, and one with intranet tools for internal content

* open access so that Internet tools can receive internal content, whether by allowing emails of content e.g. from internal blogs or (preferably) allowing authenticated RSS

* provide an internal feed reader service (website) which can see both internal and external feeds, allow it to be used through e.g. user/pass login from outside the intranet

Unfortunately, this usually breaks down in multiple ways:

1) Internal environments often have multiple levels of silos, rather than a single unified intranet. This means authentication challenges (simply being within an organisation may not provide the credentials needed to access a particular departmental feed) as well as policy challenges, as different sub-organisations may have different access policies.

2) The internal environment often lacks a notification strategy (e.g. a policy that all sites should provide RSS), as well as lacking tools and training for internal monitoring of RSS (desktop apps, Outlook, browser plugins etc.)  Let alone a set of OPML lists of organisations feeds, or activity aggregators like FriendFeed can do externally, or PlanetPlanet can do internally.  Even when the tool itself has support for RSS (e.g. Outlook) organisations often are running very old versions of the tool, before full RSS support was implemented.

3) Often organisations choose monolithic all-in-one integrated "collaboration suites" rather than many pieces loosely joined using e.g. RSS and JSON.  Visibility into these integrated sites from outside apps or web tools is often limited.

4) Authenticated RSS is very weakly supported (including not being supported at all in Google Reader)

5) Mobile devices are often on external networks and come with only basic tools and support (email reader and web browser) rather than pre-installed RSS readers.

I don't actually know how to solve this problem.  One approach is to gateway everything to email, but that just turns everything into a mailing list, and I hate mailing lists.  Plus which most organisations don't want their internal content flowing out unauthenticated over email.

The short term solution would seem to be to educate organisations about RSS, ensure their internal services provide RSS, and make sure their desktop, mobile and remote (e.g. home VPN) users have RSS readers AND access to internal RSS.   (There are other notification infrastructures e.g. XMPP, but these are not as widespread as RSS, although they could always be supported by gatewaying/converting from RSS.)  You can also consider, rather than providing desktop & mobile clients, providing an internal RSS reader server website, that users can log into from inside and outside the network.

The long term solution I think is for organisations to both think clearly about how much of their content absolutely must sit hidden from public view in the intranet, and to provide widespread RSS authentication support so that users are able to access their work feeds from familiar web and mobile environments.

On a related note, similar issues apply to enterprise search, where you usually need a separate internal search portal in order to discover all internal content, and you have the same issues when e.g. you need to discover enterprise content when you're on your external-network iPhone.

I have focused on integration between systems as done by users reading and searching, but there is of course a similar issue about machine-to-machine integration both internal-internal and external-internal.  We have a bit more mature infrastructure there though, e.g. providing JSON and Web Services.  But it still requires an organisation that understands that its internal services should provide APIs.

Does your organisation have this issue?  How to do you manage alerting on internal content?  Do you provide internal RSS tools?  How are you handling internal search?

Jon Udell blogged about this issue in 2007, and the comments on his Authenticated RSS feeds post provide useful additional information.

open data - who shall catalogue the catalogues?

Open data catalogues are proliferating worldwide, at the municipal, state/province, and national levels, and even beyond national (e.g. OECD, World Bank).

Maintaining and sharing the list of these resources would seem to me to be an area where librarians could provide their expertise.

Just off the top of my head, I know of four five lists, there are probably many more (I'm pretty sure there are a lot of Google Docs spreadsheets out there).  All are incomplete.  I myself maintain a separate list just for Canada on Wikipedia, which is probably also incomplete.

• GovLoop - List of City-wide Data sites (actually covers many levels of government)
• Guardian - Data Store: World Government Data
• Open Government Data - Lists of open government data catalogues
• Sunlight Labs Wiki - Government data catalogs
• UPDATE: Data.gov Community
• Wikipedia - Open Data in Canada

If you want an example of a missing site, only the Wikipedia page lists the URL for Calgary's site.

How should we address this?  Should we build a global list in Wikipedia?  Or a single shared spreadsheet?  Or just use appropriate textual and embedded semantic markup on every data catalogue, so that they can all be identified, crawled and linked programmatically?

Thanks to James Hendler (@jahendler) for sparking this blog posting.

UPDATE 2011-01-20: Another list along with lots of other links at http://wiki.civiccommons.org/