Showing posts with label Quora. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Quora. Show all posts

November 5, 2011

Dilbert Shows The Way to User-Centric Government

Scott Adams the talent behind Dilbert comics and numerous books wrote a fascinating column in the Wall Street Journal (5-6 Oct. 2011) called "What if Government Were More Like an iPod."
Adams has some great ideas and here's a few:
1) Leverage Group Intelligence--"group intelligence is more important than individual genius...thanks to the Internet we can summon the collective intelligence of millions." While certainly in government, we are using social media and crowd sourcing to leverage group intelligence by making information available to the public (e.g. Data.gov), engaging the public in innovating new applications (e.g. Apps for Democracy), getting feedback and comments on regulations (e.g. Regulations.gov), soliciting policy ideas and petitions from citizens (e.g. We The People) and more, this is only a start. We can continue to advance engagement with people on everyday issues to come up with solutions for our biggest and toughest challenges. One example for doing this is utilizing more tools like Quora to put out questions to subject matter experts, from every spectrum of our great nation, to come up with the best solutions, rather than just rely on the few, the loud, or the connected.
2) Voting With Understanding--"Voting [the way we currently do] is such a crude tool that half of the time, you can't tell if you're voting against your own interests. Change can take years...and elected officials routinely ignore their own campaign promises." Adams proposes a website to see the "best arguments for and against every issue, with links to support or refute every factual claim. And imagine the professional arbiters would score each argument." I can empathize with what Adams is saying. Think of the healthcare act in 2010 that was over 2,500 pages or the 72,000 page tax code--there is a reason people are overwhelmed, confused, and calling for plain language in government communications such as the Plain Language Act. There is obviously more to be done here using user-centric communications and citizen engagement, so that the average citizen with bills to pay and a family to care for, can still participate, contribute, and vote with understanding unmarred by gobbledygook, "the weight test", and politicking.
3) Campaigning More Virtually--Make it "easy for voters to see video clips, interviews, debates, and useful comparisons of the candidates positions. In the modern era, it does't make sense for a candidate to trek all over the country on a bus." Too much of the political process is the shaking hands and kissing babies--the showmanship of who looks better and talks more sleekly versus focusing on the policy issues. While it is important to present favorably, lead and influence and bring people together, it is also critical to get the policy issues out there clearly and without flip-flopping (which should be reserved for burgers only). The media plays a role in keeping the political candidates on their toes and honest, but the process itself should vet the issues in written commitments by candidates and not reversible sound bites on TV.
4) Quicken The Innovation Cycle--"I'm fairly certain Ben Franklin wouldn't be impressed by our pace of innovation. He invented the post office and showed us electricity and it still took us nearly 200 years to come up with email. We're not good at connecting the dots." This is an interesting point, but it sort of misses the mark. There are lots of good--even great--ideas out there, but from my perspective on organizations, execution is usually the stumbling block. In fact, according to Wikipedia, the Patent Office has a backlog of over 700,000 patent applications as of October 2010, so new ideas are plentiful, but how we work those ideas and make them come to fruition is a project management and human capital challenge. While email seems like just a dot or few dots away from the post office and electricity, there is obviously a lot of groundwork that needs to be laid to send an email from DC to Jerusalem in split seconds.
In short, Adams summarizes his convictions for government change in advocating a form of User-Centric Government (my term). Adams actually proposes a 4th branch of government (I think he really mean a new agency) to manage "user-interface" or what I understand him to mean as citizen engagement. Adams describes this new agency as "smallish and economical, operating independently, with a mission to build and maintain friendly user-interface for citizens to manage their government." Adams would advance the achievement of his ideas and hopes for leveraging group intelligence, voting with understanding, campaigning virtually, and quickening innovation. I believe Adams idea builds on the concept of a Federal agency for innovation that has been proposed previously over the years by The Industry Advisory Council and others to be modeled after the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA).
While there are arguments for and against creating another government agency for driving user-centric government, creating more and better user engagement through understanding and participation is fundamental and aligns with our core principles of democracy and as a global competitive advantage.
While Government is not Apple, learning from some of the best and brightest like Steve Jobs on how to reach people intuitively and deeply is a great way to go!
(Source Photo: here)

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July 17, 2011

Wolfram| Alpha Reviewed

Here is an impressive video (actually part 1 of 2) introduction to Wolfram | Alpha by Stephen Wolfram.

It is an "computational knowledge engine" ( or answers engine) that was released 2 years ago on May 15, 2009 and was named the greatest innovation of 2009 by Popular Science.

It differs from Google or a traditional search engine in that it does not deliver a list of links to documents or web pages, but rather it delivers computed answers from structured data.

As there are so many web sites that profess to answer our questions--whether Q&A sites like Answers.com and Quora or online encyclopedias like Wikipedia, I am intrigued by Wolfram Alpha's computational knowledge niche.

While the site is useful for getting everything from the GDP of France to the height of Mt. Hermont, I found the Wolfram Alpha site struggling to answer a set of basic test questions:

1) Total amount (also tried "size") of federal deficit -- No, don't want a definition of a deficit.

2) Number of U.S. embassies around the world -- No, don't want the U.S. population, density, language, etc.

3) How many employees at the Department of State -- No, don't want a list of U.S. states.

4) Air craft carriers in U.S. Navy - 11 (okay, yay!, but no list of what these are and no hyperlink, boo!)

5) (let's try this) What are the names of U.S. aircraft carriers - No, don't want the number of passengers and goods transported in 2009.

6) Planned number of F-35 to be produced -- No, don't want the function line F-35.

7) Members of House of Representatives - Yes, 435.

8) Time in Alaska - 3:46 am, thanks.

9) Age of International Space Station - launch November 20, 1998 (12.7 years ago) - informative.

10) Depth of Earth's crust - 0-22 miles - not bad.

11) Volume of Pacific Ocean - big number provided - good enough for me.

12) Largest lottery winnings - No, not the movie, "The Lottery."

While Wolfram Alpha is impressive in mathematical and scientific prowess, too often, the answers just did not compute for the everyday questions posed.

As busy people juggling many different roles in life, it's nice to actually get an answer back when you have a question, rather than have to start searching through thousands or links from the traditional search engine page.

But when instead of getting answers, you see messages that the search engine is "computing" and then coming back with null or void responses, we are left worse off then when we started.

We shouldn't have to think long and hard about what we can ask or how we to ask it; the search engine should be user-centric and we should be able to be ourselves.

As search engine users, I think we have the right to expect that our focus should be on how to apply the answers rather than on the engine itself or else something is wrong.

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April 29, 2011

A Place for Answers


First there was Wikipedia and now there is Quora.

On January 15, 2011, Wikipedia celebrated it's 10 year birthday, and according to Bloomberg Businessweek, it now has more than 17 million entries (compared with only 120,000 for Encyclopedia Britannica) in 250 languages and is one of the most visited sites on the Internet. Moreover, the accuracy of the crowd-sourced Wikipedia has generally been found as good as traditional encyclopedias.

But despite the phenomenal growth of Wikipedia, a new site, Quora is finding a place for itself in online knowledge management, as one of the key question and answer (Q&A) destinations of the web (others being Answers.com, Yahoo Answers, and more--which were apparently found lacking by the founders of Quora).

According to Wired (May 2011), Quora is only 2 years old and already has about 200,000 people visiting the site each month. The approach of Quora is to create a searchable knowledge market based on merging verifiable facts with people's personal experiences and observations or what Wired calls "the large expanse between...the purely objective [e.g. Wikipedia] and the purely subjective [e.g. Facebook, Twitter, etc.]."

Quora is looking to capture what it believes is the "Ninety percent of information people have [that] is still in their heads and not on the web."

The site is also creating a community of people who participate in asking and answering questions, and can select to follow topics and people of interest, and vote on whether answers are helpful ("voted up") or not to push answers up or down the page.

Similar to Wikipedia, answers can be "trimmed, corrected, or otherwise massaged by one of the rigorous volunteers" (of which their are now more than 100--Quora only has 18 employees). Answers are "written for the world, and for anyone who has that same question for the rest of time." And even questions can get "extensively reworded."

Wired asks is this just another popularity contest on the web or self-promotion for the self-proclaimed experts? One of the volunteers responds that "This isn't about job searching. It's not about raising money. Most of us who are heavy users can already do that without help. It's a sense of sharing what we now, and it's being part of a community."

Of course, while critics may call them pedantic or petty, the Quora participants are on a mission to build a vital and timeless knowledge repository--"the modern-day equivalent to the Library of Alexandria", so perhaps the people chic has to be balanced with information usability.

On January 21, 2011, Tech Crunch awarded Quora "best new startup for 2010."

It will be interesting to see where this goes...the funny thing for me was that I ended looking up Quora up in Wikipedia. :-)

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