WRITTEN ON December 16th, 2005 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Design: Co-creation, Transformational Government, What do we want?
Diderot would have loved this. BBC reports that Nature’s peer review shows the no-nonsense four-year-old Wikipedia to be pretty much as accurate as that 240-year old institution Encyclopedia Britannica (whose web site is shrilly commercial by comparison).
More evidence of the power of co-creation. Is Transformational Government sufficiently aware of this and sufficiently open to it? The inertia is all on the government side, which is being – as David Osborne put it – wrapped up in red tape and ordered to change. But the energy and desire is all with the consumer-citizens who most urgently want to benefit from the outcomes. And with Web 2.0 they have a whole new tool set with which to do stuff.
Do government CIOs understand this, I wonder?
All in favour of co-creation. However, did anyone pick up on the Radio 4 PM report on the guy who was libelled on Wikipedia and has forced a change in its process.
It just reminds me of say 95 or 96. Recall the first UK Web libel case. A teacher sued someone for denegrating comments on their site.
Wikipedia and co-creation will enter a ‘slough of desponde’ to use the Gartner Hype cycle term. However, keep the eyes on the prize. Co-creation provides user insight in a SUSTAINED manner that drives the force of improvement. Not lip service consultation before service design, or service launch ‘n’ champagne after the design is hard coded