John Connell: The Blog

For the past two Decem­bers I have been given the priv­i­lege of attend­ing the Cisco Pub­lic Ser­vices Sum­mit in Stock­holm and Oslo — this brings together pub­lic ser­vice lead­ers, both politi­cians and offi­cials, from every area of the pub­lic sec­tor and from every part of the world. It is a sim­ply tremen­dous and hugely stim­u­lat­ing event, an opin­ion I came to long before I had any notion of ever work­ing for Cisco.

The Sum­mit is held to coin­cide with the award of the Nobel Peace Prize and cul­mi­nates with all the del­e­gates trav­el­ling by char­tered train from Stock­holm, through won­der­ful Scan­di­na­vian win­ter land­scapes, to attend the Peace Prize Con­cert in Oslo. For var­i­ous rea­sons I was not able to attend this year. The upside of not being able to go was that I did not have to lis­ten to Kylie Minogue try­ing to sing in tune with the help of dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy; but the down­side was that I missed the chance to meet and to lis­ten to David Wein­berger again — nor, unfor­tu­nately, did I get to hear Al Gore’s speech at the Peace Con­cert, nor did I hear Scot­tish singer and song­writer KT Tun­stall play (with­out dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy to keep her­self in tune).

An inter­view with Mr Mis­cel­la­neous has already been uploaded to YouTube, a link I got cour­tesy of the Con­nected Repub­lic 2.0 site. In the inter­view, David is asked whether the pub­lic sec­tor can learn any­thing from con­sumer trends involv­ing Web 2.0 at the present time. A thought­ful answer as ever from him:

“We are get­ting trained as cit­i­zens by our expe­ri­ences as cus­tomers on the Web — we have come on the web to expect a great deal of trans­parency and frank­ness and a low­er­ing of the rhetor­i­cal bar­rage from com­pa­nies — cer­tainly we want that from Gov­ern­ment as well.

The frank­ness of the dis­cus­sion amongst cus­tomers as we talk about the prod­ucts we have bought are not only gen­er­ally more truth­ful, they are also more fun!

We engage in these con­ver­sa­tions because these are things we care about. We also care a lot about not just the things we buy but about who we are as cit­i­zens, the rights that we have, the oblig­a­tions that we expect — those are objects of great inter­est and pas­sion as well.”

I won­der how many politi­cians would under­stand the mean­ing of ‘rhetor­i­cal baggage’?

David has inter­est­ing views too on polit­i­cal cam­paign­ing, based on his expe­ri­ences as an adviser to the Howard Dean nom­i­na­tion cam­paign in 2003/04. It’s all about ‘lat­eral con­nec­tions’ and not about ‘sell­ing soap’.…..

Tech­no­rati Tags: cisco, pub­lic ser­vices sum­mit, david wein­berger, kylie minogue, kt tun­stall, nobel peace prize