• Home
• Subjects
• Blog Roll
• Blindside
• Kable
• Advanced Search

• 

03 Nov 2008

Free people are more valuable to society than captives

Hurrah! Doc Searls is in town, spreading the love and wisdom about VRM. He offers the key insight that

“A free customer is more valuable than a captive one”

And he muses, in all innocence, whether this is a helpful insight for government.

Well, not half. It’s the mother of all Wibbies. It’s far easier to keep society safe and secure if everyone is willing to help. Populations’ willingness to keep themselves healthy is what public health is mostly about. We cant be bullied and coerced into playing a constructive role in society; we have to want it.

But so far in the online e-commerce/e-government world one side is trying to capture and enslave the other side. DirectGov is built on absurd talk of creating a “sticky site” to capture eyeballs.

We need to be independent of organsations, Doc says, yet better able to engage with them.

Doc reckons we’re two years into a five-year change here. The contempory Internet has already transformed conversations, and it’s in the process of transforming relationships with social networking. Very shortly it will transform transactions.

CRM promised much but has been a big disappointment. VRM (a term coined by Mark Lizar) holds a lot of promise and is now spoken of as “inevitable”. But to get Transformational Government 2 right we need to get our heads around GRM - managing our relationships with government. What will that look like, and how will it work?

This is about identity, respect, choice, engagement. It’s about sustainable security, DIY personal engagement. It’s an incredibly cost-effective notion, which creates new categories of value.

• Posted by William Heath on 03/11/08 at 2:12pm
• Categories · "What do we want?" · Foundation of Trust · Identity · "Transformational Government"
• Comments (1)  Permalink

Ideal Government

Let's say what we want from e-enabled government. Let's observe government first-hand. Let's say "Wouldn't It Be Better If" (WIBBI). Become an ethnographer of bureaucracy today! It beats getting frustrated with public services.

Categories

• "What do we want?"
  • Wibbipedia/MindtheGap
  • Design: Co-creation
    • Online Maps
  • Design: user-oriented
  • Foundation of Trust
    • Identity
    • Data nitwittery
    • Official fibbing/bad stats
  • Save Time and Money
• Greener government IT
• Pertinent Art
• Power of Information
• Political engagement
• "Transformational Government"
• Government Procurement
• Across the Board
• Ideal Goverment - project

Comment

Anyone is free to comment. Or mail with an article if you want to be an author. I'll post it up and send you a password. This whole thing is supported by Kable.

Authors

Sign up for new articles

Copyright

Designed by...

Statistics

This page has been viewed 1633674 times

Entries: 1716 | Comments: 2789 | Trackbacks: 206
Most Recent Entry: 01/07/2009 10:59 am
Most Recent Comment: 01/07/2009 07:18 pm

Members: 185 | Logged in: 0 | Guests: 30
Most recent visitor: 01/07/2009 08:05 pm
Most visitors ever: 443 on 10/12/2005 02:21 pm