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Over the last week US media has been buzzing with the story of Canadian musician Dave Carroll, whose US$3,500 Taylor guitar was broken on a flight on United Airlines.
Carroll reported that people on the plane had watched with horror as United baggage handlers had roughly handled and thrown his and other guitars while putting them onto the plane.
However, despite nine months of discussion with United, following all the instructions they gave him, the airline finally disavowed any responsibility and refused to pay the US$1,200 required to repair the guitar.
Carroll told the United airlines representative who finally said 'No' that he would write and produce three songs about his experience and publish them to Youtube.
On Monday 6 July the first of these songs was released, soaring to over 1.6 million views in under a week. The story has received coverage on CNN, across major daily papers and across regional and local TV and radio in the US and Canada.
Within a day of the song going live United was on the phone to Carroll, promising to 'make right' the situation. Carroll has directed United to give the money to a charity of their choice and will release the next two songs in the series aimed at United.
How would a government department react if a similar event occurred to them?
Citizens today have many avenues for raising public awareness of perceived mistakes or incompetence, bypassing the traditional government complaints and resolution processes.
All it takes is a single citizen to take their complaint in an engaging manner to an online channel such as YouTube and an issue can become very public very quickly.
Do government departments have a plan for handling these types of events?
Here's the video clip for those who have not yet seen it.
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Citizen 2.0 - how would a government department address this marketing nightmare? | Tweet |
Friday, July 10, 2009
Does Australia need Safer Social Networking Principles? | Tweet |
Around the world governments are struggling to understand and address some of the age-old issues that have been accelerated by the intranet.
One attracting particularly high attention is the protection of young people from illegal and inappropriate material, cyberstalking, cyberbullying and, sometimes, themselves.
Various governments are attempting different approaches to address these issues, with the European Union using a balance of approaches including new law enforcement initiatives, legislative change, parent and carer education, young people education and industry self-regulation in consultation with government.
I have been reviewing the Safer Social Networking Principles for the EU (PDF), released in February this year, which clearly defines the unacceptable range of practices,
As with many products and services, the misuse of these technologies can present an element of potential risk to children and young people. SNS [CT: Social Network Service] providers must assess if and how these potential risks apply to their own services. Potential online risks to children and young people fall into four categories:
- ‘Illegal content’, such as images of child abuse and unlawful hate speech
- ‘Age-inappropriate content’, such as pornography or sexual content, violence, or other content with adult themes which may be inappropriate for young people.
- ‘Contact’, which relates to inappropriate contact from adults with a sexual interest in children or by young people who solicit other young people.
With the interactivity that web 2.0 technologies enable, it is also important to remember that in addition to being victims young people can also initiate or participate in anti-social or criminal activities.
- ‘Conduct’, which relates to how young people behave online. This includes bullying or victimisation (behaviours such as spreading rumours, excluding peers from one’s social group, and withdrawing friendship or acceptance) and potentially risky behaviours (which may include for example, divulging personal information, posting sexually provocative photographs, lying about real age or arranging to meet face-to-face with people only ever previously met online).
Government 2.0 personality types | Tweet |
Steve Radick has published an insightful post regarding different Government 2.0 personality types.
Can you recognise yourself in one (or more) of these type?
The amended post is at What’s Your Government 2.0 Personality Type? and a copy with other comments is visible at Govloop.
Thursday, July 09, 2009
Social media now more popular than personal email - Neilsen | Tweet |
In their Global Faces and Networked Places report (PDF), Neilsen has found that social networks and blogs (Member Communities) are now the 4th most popular online category - ahead of personal email.
Neilsen said that the Social Media Communities area is growing at more than twice the rate of the other top 4 categories.
Wednesday, July 08, 2009
The benefits of crowdsourcing - US$1,000,000 prize from Netflix | Tweet |
I highlighted the online Netflix prize quite some time ago as an example of how an organisation could work with its community to drive innovation.
Netflix has a longstanding prize of US$1,000,000 on offer for the group who could improve their online movie/TV recommendations engine by at least 10%. The goal is to substantially improve the accuracy of predictions about how much someone is going to love a movie based on their movie preferences.
Over 40,900 teams from around the world (49,000 people) have been involved over the last few years, striving for the recognition and the prize money.
Now a group of four of the leading teams from the U.S., Canada, Austria and Israel have formed a successful collaborative team (BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos) which has achieved a 10.05% improvement in movie rankings, making them the potential winners of the prize.
Firstly this achievement demonstrates the power of collaboration. Each of the four teams could only get so far on their own. By working together (across the world) they have successfully achieved what none of the teams could have achieved alone.
Secondly it demonstrates the power of crowd sourcing. Few organisations could have afforded to employ an extra 49,000 people for several years in the hope of achieving a 10% improvement in operations. However by opening up their information and inviting the public to compete to solve this data manipulation problem, Netflix has managed to improve its product and attract massive positive press at the same time for a relatively small investment.
If 49,000 people are willing to work on a 10% improvement to a movie ratings engine, think of the potential if we provided an incentive for people to develop innovative applications or solutions for public data and policy issues.
This is being tapped into in the US, with their Apps for America competition and smaller but similar events at state levels.
The approach is also being adopted in the UK.
Will it be much longer before we see it used in Australia?
Perhaps the Government 2 Taskforce will lead the way.
