I was merely suggesting that central management may not be needed for every single aspect of running a local brigade. Training, yes. How each individual brigade chooses to do other things, well, maybe it doesn’t need to be centralised. Or maybe the centralisation happens at some other scale than “state”.

I’m not that familiar with fire brigades. Obviously my off-the-cuff comments will easily be challenged, so I’m not particularly interested in pursuing that. I’m more interested in stepping back and looking at bigger-picture issues.

What I am interested in is the assumptions we made when designing the institutions we currently have, and asking whether those assumptions are still valid, or will remain valid.

If so – that was fine in the past. But now we are so specialised in our skills and knowledge that we can’t practically ask people to be sufficiently knowledgeable that they can maintain a high-skill job, engage in the best practice for fire fighting, handle a forensic police investigation, cook solid meals and raise a family.

I would suggest that the layer of management, whilst it may be able to be restructured/refined/improved is necessary to ensure that the training is standardised, is delivered properly and is able to provide the co-ordination necessary.

While it might be good to have, say, standardised training so everyone can work together on large-scale operations, there doesn’t necessarily need to be a layer of management that covers every local brigade from Wollongong to Bourke.

This is old, and I may have mentioned it before but about the time that Cluetrain was influencing much of our thought, Joi Ito wrote a paper on emergent democracy: http://joiwiki.ito.com/joiwiki/index.cgi?emergent_democracy

Dee Hock, the founder of VISA, wrote an email in response: http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2003/03/10/an-email-from-d.html The bit that blew me away then was this:

I wonder if you realize that a dozen or two people like yourself with the right combination of communication, technological and organizational skills could design and implement a global government without the consent of any present form of organization and provide it with the neural network to insure its success.

In 2003 we could see the potential, but it’s taken until now, and the rise of social media, for it to become real.

@martin english: You’ve identified a key problem, one that’s worse here in Australia, a monarchy, than in a republic like the US. Here, the structures are built around the concept of The Crown owning the data, whereas in the US the people own the data so it’s easier to argue that access be provided.

The Australian government’s paper Australia’s Digital Economy: Future Directions paper contains a whole section which supposedly commits the government to opening up data, and it does appear that the Rudd government it serious about this. But there’s so much to be done in terms of changing public servants’ attitudes.

@Woolly Mittens: Indeed. Technology is just a tool. We choose what we do with it. In a democracy, supposedly we get to make that choice. Supposedly.

Take Iran and China as rather extreme examples. Both are countries with a young and sizable educated population. Yet all their web 2.0 skills have gotten them is a brutally violent backlash by those in power.

An example of the former is in New Zealand earlier this month, a private members bill Prohibiting Imports Made by Slave Labour was submitted to the House of representatives. This bill comes from the NZ Progressive Bills Wiki. –
http://progbills.wikidot.com/customs-and-excise-prohibition-of-imports-made-by-child-labo

The problem with the latter is that the very people we are asking nicely to give us access, are controlling the spin – examples are where Senior US Journalists (like Helen Thomas, who is no way a neo con / neo liberal or whatever) are querying the Obama Administration’s manipulation of Press Conferences
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fh5vzOAEQ-A

or where the SMH have identified where the NSW State Premier and Treasurer are colluding to misled the public over figures used in the State Budget, and in government advertising
http://www.smh.com.au/national/premier-overruled-budget-advice-20090719-dpkt.html

Looking back, it’s even more amazing how prescient he was. His doco After the Warming was also the first time I had ever heard of the problems with greenhouse warming and what to do about it…

Vive la Révolution!