“How do you think that tweeting your day plans affects your personal safety?” asked Ravneel Chand a short time ago. Overall, I reckon it actually increases my safety. Here’s why.

Background first. Here’s today’s “daily plan” tweet which, like those on pretty much every other day, is tweeted shortly before I settle down to work.

Thu plan: Bump out Waratah Cottage; 1032 train to Sydney; lunch (where?); errand Newtown/Enmore; write something; evening TBA.

Later in the morning I mentioned that I’d be catching a later train. And then, just as I left the house:

Mobile: Cab, shortly, to Wentworth Falls; 1132 train to Sydney Central; train to Town Hall station; 1335 walk to SEKRIT hotel and check in.

Clearly the fear being expressed is that by knowing my movements some bad person could more easily do me harm. But let’s do a proper risk assessment. You start one of those by enumerating the risks, and then you look at how this additional information might change those risks.

As I see it, my “personal safety” risks are someone deliberately wishing to do me harm, accidentally injury by something external to myself, or a medical emergency that isn’t triggered by anything external.

I’ll dispose of the last two first. Whether accident or medical emergency, nothing in my tweets will cause or stoop that happening. But if the world knows where I am then my safety is increased. If I can only fire off a tweet or SMS that says “I’ve been stabbed” of “chest pain” then emergency services have more information to go on. If I fire off no message at all and simply go missing, well again my steps can be retraced and I’m likely to be found more quickly.

The one people fear most is the violent assailant. An assailant will either know me and wish to harm me because of that association, or they’ll be a random.

If the assailant wants to harm me because they know me, then they’ll be motivated and put some effort into it. Given that my work, phone number, email address and plenty of photos are already online, they could easily find me by other means and follow me until I was somewhere alone.

They could even just contact me and arrange a meeting. Heck, I cover information security issues: they could just pretend to be a confidential source and ask to meet me somewhere and “tell no-one”.

Similarly for anyone else, it’s pretty easy to find out where they live or work, and just start a surveillance operation from there.

If this assailant is an amateur, they’ll have likely already drawn attention to themselves through some angry or threatening communication. I’ll already be taking steps to avoid them. If they’re a professional, well I’m screwed no matter what because they’re far better at this game than I am.

At the risk of over-stressing this point, if someone wants to do me harm because I’m me, then that’s unlikely to become more of a risk because they know which train I’m on. “Oh, Stilgherrian’s train arrives not long after mine. I think I’ll stab him then.” No, I don’t think that’s how things work.

If the assailant doesn’t know me, then why would they be wanting to harm me? Well now we’re talking something like mugging me for my wallet or phone, or getting into a fight somewhere. In which case the fact that I’ve told the internet where I am doesn’t change that risk. The risk is about where I am, who else is there — along in a dark alley while drunk is obviously bad here.

Twitter is a remarkably apt name for this social messaging service, because we can use it to maintain a continual ambient awareness of each other’s state of being regardless of location.

Against this negligible or perhaps even zero increase in risk, tweeting my movements provides remarkable utility.

Friends and colleagues can coordinate with me with minimal effort. Far more than once I’ve had someone join me for a meeting or a drink because the chance presented itself. PR minions — if they bother to look! — know when not to call me because I’m on a train. And so on. People have volunteered restaurant recommendations or travel tips.

I should say, though, that the risk profile might not be the same for everyone. These are the choices I’ve made with open eyes.

To understand these issues better, I can thoroughly recommend the work of Bruce Schneier, and in particular his book Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly about Security in an Uncertain World. Indeed, every politician should read that book before opening their mouth about anything related to risk and security.

As usual, this does not include the material I wrote elsewhere, for Crikey, ZDNet Australia, ABC The Drum, Technology Spectator, CSO Online and the rest. That’s all listed on my Media Output page.

1. Right, Google, you stupid cunts, this is simply not on! This was my first critique of the Google+ Real Names Policy, and still the most widely read.
2. LinkedIn’s inadequate response to privacy stupidity, which was when they opened up people’s profiles for use in third-party advertising without asking first.
3. Twitter: a guide for busy paranoids, adapted from a piece I wrote for the NSW Local Government Web Network.
4. Tweeting your way out of Paranoia, a video of the presentation I did for the NSW LGWN conference. Yes, it’s related to the previous item.
5. 50 to 50 #9: The Space Age, and the companion piece…
6. 50 to 50 #9A: The Real Space Age. They’re about my personal experience of the Space Age.
7. Goodbye, Artemis, a very personal experience.

You might also like to check out my personal favourites from 2010, 2009 and 2008.

[Update 27 December 2011: Minor corrections to text and HTML markup.]

Here’s the result.

My argument, such that it is, is that corporations like local governments avoid change because they’re paranoid, so they need to get themselves some mental health. I present an anonymous theory about “The Three Pillars of Mental Health”. Twitter, I then argue, is the perfect low-risk exercise for a government starting to involve itself in social media and social networking to start overcoming that paranoia. I then present some suggestions for how they might tweet.

Tweeting your way out of Paranoia from Stilgherrian on Vimeo.

The articled I mentioned in the video, the one I wrote about using Twitter, is Twitter: a guide for busy paranoids.

The Flip Video delivered fairly shitty footage of me speaking, as you can see, so I decided to keep the slides in screen for most of the time instead. James Purser recorded the audio.

The great thing about growing up on a farm is that there’s about eleventy hundred ways of killing yourself and you get to try them all.

In the photo, there’s a pine tree on the right behind me and my brother. Yes, a brother. He was born in 1963, so there’s a three year gap. I’ll get to the pine tree in a moment.

On the left is the cement-brick milking shed. Immediately to its right, off in the distance so you might want to look on the embiggened photo, is the pumphouse. And then the truck, well, that’s just a truck — although my father built it like Dr Frankenstein from bits of other, dead, trucks.

Just behind the truck’s engine compartment is dad’s shed, a crumpled heap of corrugated iron that’s no longer there. It was poorly lit and full of tools and wood scraps and junk and half a dozen unfinished projects. I didn’t like going in there, it was creepy. Strange creatures lived in the dark corners and would kill small children, I know that for sure.

Even if they were good children.

Mum and dad were pretty busy most of the time. My brother and I were left to our own devices. The huge open spaces of the farm, the sheds, the random bits of equipment all meant I could invent my own imaginary world.

Every trip out with the dogs — and the dogs went everywhere with us and took care of us, so we couldn’t possibly get into any trouble — became some sort of combat patrol.

But watch out for the snakes!

See the red line on the map? That’s the Snake Line. If you go any further north than this fence WATCH OUT THERE ARE SNAKES YOU’D BETTER BE CAREFUL WATCH OUT THERE ARE SNAKES! That’s my mother’s voice screeching. She was always getting agitated about the risk of snakes. I think we saw a sleepy lizard there once.

Also, I’m not quite sure why there were only WATCH OUT FOR THE SNAKES in that direction, as opposed to anywhere else we might have gone on the farm.

View Stilgherrian’s Life in a larger map

My mother was also worried about us drowning. If we went anywhere near water deeper than an inch, “LOOK OUT DON’T GO NEAR THE WATER YOU’LL FALL IN AND DROWN!” As a result, I too associated water with panic.

To this very day, my two biggest phobias are snakes and water. I can’t even look at a snake through glass without my pulse rate rising. Being in water deeper than my chest can trigger a panic attack. A spa is usually not a relaxing experience.

Actually there were snakes. Red-bellied black snakes and brown snakes. I was never, ever bitten by one.

Nor did I ever break a bone, which is pretty rare on a farm.

There were so many ways we could make our own fun…

There was an old sheet-metal box-on-wheels contraption that used to be the projection booth at a local outdoor cinema. Dad reckoned he’d turn it into… well, something one day. Meanwhile it sat behind some bushes at the back of the garden, and it was my space ship. A metal disc on the floor was the thing you stood on for the transporter beam to go buzz buzz BUZZ and then you’d be on another whole adventure.

Ice-cream came in metal cans in those days, with metal lids. A Frisbee was an expensive luxury — all “bought toys” were expensive luxuries — but the lid of an ice-cream can was just as good. What’s more, you could get a pair of tin-snips and cut the rim into a series of jagged metal blades and then use your brother as a target.

He annoyed me so much one time I hit him on the head with a cricket bat. The bloody little wuss complained to mum and she screeched at me and took away the cricket bat. I never really liked cricket anyway, I preferred going out walking with the dogs.

It wasn’t a proper cricket bat anyway, just a plank that dad had cut into the shape of a cricket bat. And a tennis ball.

Under the pine tree — yeah we’re finally getting to the pine tree — there’s always a rich carpet of brown pine needles, smelling 100% nothing like the “pine-scented air fresheners” in supermarkets but in fact 100% like actual pine trees and their sticky oily sap. If you rake all of the pine needles into a heap you can set fire to it, but it takes ages to get going and there’s heaps of smoke. Maybe you shouldn’t start the fire under the actual pine tree branches either but what the heck it’s going now. You want to get the flames going properly too ‘cos the smoke is annoying. But even though you want this, my professional recommendation is not to throw half a bucket of petrol onto the fire.

I know how to set rabbit traps. Do you?

See what happens when you don’t curate your links for ten days, during which time there’s a conference which generates a bazillion things to link to? Sigh.

This is such a huge batch of links that I’ll start them over the fold. They’re not all about Media140 Sydney, trust me.

• “I have never used Twitter” — Are Politicians ill-advised to let their Advisors do the Tweeting? | media140.org: Paul Farrell looks at politicians and their tweets following Malcolm Turnbull’s revelation at Media Sydney that his staffer Thomas Tudehope sometimes tweeted on his behalf, and Barack Obama’s admission that he’s never used Twitter at all.
• Samasource: How African refugees are scoring Silicon Valley Internet jobs | Boing Boing: If you have working knowledge of English, basic computer skills and an Internet connection, then you can get a job anywhere in the world.
• cufón — fonts for the people: A JavaScript-based tool for using any typeface you like in web pages. I haven’t explored it myself, but I do know Crikey‘s website uses it.
• The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted Because Only 0.027% of Iranians Are on Twitter | Gawker: Some reality-check commentary on the “Twitter revolutionised Iran” meme.
• Sources of subsidy in the production of news: a list | Quote and Comment: How can we pay for journalism? Here’s Jay Rosen’s list of possibilities, assembled for the conference “Journalism & The New Media Ecology: Who Will Pay The Messenger?”
• Someday You’ll Remember I Said This | Daily Patricia: Entrepreneur Patricia Handschiegel says Twitter isn’t microblogging. She differentiates between “publishing” and “person-to-person communications” and reckons Twitter’s in the second category, not the first. That, she reckons, is leading people to over-value Twitter monetarily.
• How to play piano like Philip Glass | YouTube: Torley explains in just 10 minutes how to compose and play music like Philip Glass.
• The Naked Truth About Social v Broadcast Media | newmatilda.com: Jason Wilson, lecturer in Digital Communications at the University of Wollongong, looks at the #PwnedNudieRun interaction between ABC TV’s Media Watch and folks on Twitter. I particularly like his “lesson for the low-rent McLuhans who see social media succeeding broadcast media in some simple transition”. Many insights.
• Declassified Blog | Newsweek.com: A new blog by investigative correspondents Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball with contributions from other Newsweek journalists. It will focus on national security, intelligence and law enforcement issues.
• Judge Bans Twitter From Court | CBS News: While in some jurisdictions journalists have been permitted to tweet form courtrooms, US District Judge Clay Land in Georgia has ruled that Rule 53 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure prohibit “broadcasting” and that Twitter is a broadcast medium. This decision will doubtless annoy som of the social media evangelists who see “broadcast” as a swear word.
• Journalists are the audience formerly known as the media | bronwen clune: Bronwen Clune’s presentation from Media140 Sydney.
• The Future Of Journalism Needs Journalists | newmatilda.com: Marni Cordell, editor of newmatilda.com, expresses some concerns about the ABC’s vision of community-based media, as outlined by managing director Mark Scott at Media140 Sydney.
• Media140 Sydney: Future Of Journalism In The Social Media Age | jjprojects: John Johnston’s take on Media140 Sydney.
• Twitter as a Journalistic Tool: Drilling Beneath the Rhetoric | J-scribe: The second half of Julie Posetti’s presentation to Media140 Sydney.
• It’s a Revolution, Not a War | J-scribe: The first half of Julie Posetti’s presentation to Media140 Sydney.
• Al Jazeera Creative Commons Repository: Al Jazeera has put all their raw camera footage from the War on Gaza online under a Creative Commons license, “Attribution”, which allows for commercial and non-commercial use. “This means that news outlets, filmmakers and bloggers will be able to easily share, remix, subtitle or reuse our footage.” They so get it.
• Sky News – Interview with Rupert Murdoch | YouTube: The full 37-minute interview with Rupert Murdoch, in which he suggests he’ll block Google from indexing News Corporation news sites.
• Media140 Sydney | Public Opinion: Gary Sauer-Thompson’s take on Media140 Sydney.
• No Strings Attached: Public Broadcaster Seeks Relationships for Collaboration, Conversation and New Ideas: The Media140 Sydney keynote speech from ABC managing director Mark Scott. This is the PDF of his slides with his speaking notes. It includes a look at some of the ABC’s plans for pro-am media creation.
• Claiming to be unbiased is a patronising fairytale, so let’s just own up to our agendas | mUmBRELLA: In this guest post about Media140 Sydney, Cathie McGinn argues there’s no such thing as total objectivity, so better to disclose your agenda.
• My Two Francs Worth: Media 140 | LinenSuave: A parable of sorts about Media140 Sydney, and the pointlessness of the whole bloggers versus journalists debate.
• Journalism and blogging at Media140 | Barry Saunders: “Investigative journalism — while a very valuable form of journalism, and one we need more of — is a very minor part of journalism as it exists, and an over-focus on investigative journalism as the dominant form of journalism obscures vast bodies of journalistic output.”
• Media140 handouts | Claire’s posterous: The BBC’s Claire Wardle presents a beginners guide to using Twitter (including links to other good introductions to Twitter sites), and a general basic handout which covers some of the other social media tools she discussed in her Media140 Sydney workshop.
• Media140 | Flickr: Wolf Cocklin’s photos from Media140 Sydney.
• Call Recorder for Skype | Ecamm Network: This is the OS X tool I mentioned at Media140 Sydney for recording your Skype conversations, both audio and video. Cheap and extremely useful.
• Too tired to tweet | ABC News: ABC political correspondent Lyndal Curtis has been following Media140 Sydney but doesn’t know where people get the time to participate. I really should write a response to this, as I reckon there’s a very clear counter-argument.
• Journalists on Twitter need to ‘be human’ | Renai LeMay: The Media140 Sydney presentation from Renai LeMay, News Editor at ZDNet Australia.
• Congratulations to the ABC | Telstra Exchange: A post on Telstra’s new Exchange corporate blog about the ABC’s new social media policy from Telstra’s Group Managing Director, Public Policy & Communications, David Quilty. Includes links to Telstra’s own social media policies.
• The ABC of social media use | ABC News: The ABC News story that includes the announcement of the ABC’s new social media policy for staff, presented at Media140 Sydney by Managing Director Mark Scott.
• Alex Hawke Liberal Party Downfall | YouTube: The video which supposedly caused Thomas Tudehope to resign from Malcolm Turnbull’s staff.
• YouTube video sinks Turnbull minder | ABC News: Malcolm Turnbull’s staffer Thomas Tudehope has been forced to resign after reports of his involvement in the distribution of a satirical video about the Liberal Party’s factional battles.
• “How would history have recorded the holocaust if there had been I-phones in the concentration camps?” | Paul Farrell: SBS’s head of news and current affairs Paul Cutler asked this provocative question at Media140 Sydney, pointing out that despite the supposed breakthroughs of social media, the genocide in Sri Lanka is failing to get much media coverage.
• Riyaad Minty: Sydney’s Speaker Pash (International Social Media Case Studies) | Media140: Paul Farrell’s commentary on the Media140 Sydney presentation by Al Jazeera’s head of social media, Riyaad Minty. Minty was one of the event’s highlights, in my opinion.
• Malcolm Turnbull | Twitter: The tweet when Australia’s opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull announced that he’d start identifying whether it was he tweeting personally, or a staffer. This came less than three hours after he was asked at Media140 whether there wasn’t an ethical issue with lack of disclosure, especially since Prime MInister Kevin Rudd made the distinction clear in his own tweets.
• The Spin Fails Here: Day One At #Media140 Sydney | The Inquisitr: The Inquisitor‘s editor Duncan Riley wasn’t happy with what he heard at Media140 Sydney, especially that Problogger creator Darren Rowse is the only Australian making money online. There is much bitterness here.
• Initial Thoughts on Media140: Memories of blogging | Woolly Days: Thoughts on Media140 Sydney from Brisbane-based journalist, blogger and QUT researcher Derek Barry.
• Why the future of African journalism lies in mobile social networks | Slideshare: More solid support for the idea that the future of the African internet is mobile. Plenty of stats and some important observations from Jude Mathurine, who heads up the New Media lab at South Africa’s Rhodes University.
• Apparently editors nurture their journalists by telling them it’s okay to get stuff wrong | mUmBRELLA: One section of Laurel Papworth’s presentation at Media140 Sydney didn’t go down so well at mUmBRELLA…
• Media140 today | Visible Procrastinations: A collection of links to commentary about Media140 Sydney’s first day. I have yet to go though them, but when I do I’ll add the relevant ones to my own Delicious feed.
• Media140 Sydney: Social Media Twitter & Journalism | Laurel Papworth: Laurel Papworth’s presentation to Media140 Sydney, in which she positions social media as the people taking back control and ownership of their stories. Word and video available.
• Media140 Sydney 2009 | Flickr: Neerav Bhatt’s photos of Media140 Sydney. He seems to have captured every speaker.
• Malcolm Turnbull on the (social) media. With Fran Kelly | SlowTV: Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull is interviews by the ABC’s Fran Kelly about his use of social media in the political context, including a little bit of point-scoring.
• How social media is changing political reporting | SlowTV: The full Media140 Sydney session “How Social Media is Changing Political Reporting” with Annabel Crabb, Bernard Keane (Crikey), Chris Uhlmann (ABC), John Kerrison (Nine) and Caroline Overington (The Australian).
• Caroline Overington takes on Mark Scott and the free digital news proponents | YouTube: A 4-minute extract from Overington’s presentation to Media140 Sydney, which turned into a massive anti-ABC pro-Murdoch rant.
• Conceptual Confusion and Journalistic Process — My Highlights and Lowlights of Media 140 | The Content Makers: “The low lights came from conceptual confusions, it seemed to me. Namely the several highly respected and competent journalists who, quite apart from being clearly terrified by the arrival of the audience in the news making process, also can’t tell the difference between… a platform, and a process… [and] objectivity and integrity.”
• So what’s the “cool new toy”? | The Content Makers: Speculation about News Corporation’s plans for some digital news device. Is Apple involved? An iRupert? A RuPod? The SunKindle?
• Caroline Overington Gives Some Hints on Rupert’s Plans (and tangles with Annabel Crabb) | The Content Makers: Margaret Simons’ original report on the rather strange Media140 Sydney presentation by News Limited journalist Caroline Overington and her stoush with Annabel Crabb, who’s moving from Fairfax to the ABC.
• The ABC Springs Leaks in the Porous Digital Age. Mark Scott AGAIN. | The Content Makers: Meta-journalist Margaret Simons covers some of the announcements made my Mark Scott, Managing Director of the ABC, at Media140 Sydney.
• Can Social Media Save Iran? | newmatilda.com: A Media140 presentation by Dr Jason Wilson, lecturer in Digital Communications at the University of Wollongong. A nice debunking of some of the social media over-hype.
• John Bergin’s Media 140 Speech | The Content Makers: John runs “digital online stuff” for Sky News Australia, on the pay TV networks. This is his presentation from Media140 Sydney. Some good points about listening as well as speaking.
• Off Air: Iran, Twitter and the new media world. | Off Air: The presentation to Media140 Sydney by the highly-respected journalist Mark Colvin, presenter of ABC Radio National’s PM program.
• Rebooting the News System in the Age of Social Media | Quote and Comment: Jay Rosen’s presentation at Media140 covered 10 key sound-bites and what they mean for the future of journalism. Here are those ten points, with links to further material on each one.
• freesound: “The Freesound Project is a collaborative database of Creative Commons licensed sounds. Freesound focusses only on sound, not songs.” I’ve used this to source sound effects myself, and it’s wonderful.
• “I Can’t Believe We Still Have to Protest This Crap.” | Flickr: A photo taken in Washington, DC during the 27 January 2007 anti-war march. This was used by Barry Saunders in his Media140 presentation.
• Journalism — a defence | Corporate Engagement: Trevor Cook took exception to my Media140 presentation and spend a few hundred words saying so. I added a little to the discussion, and will add more later when I get time.
• Ushahidi :: Crowdsourcing Crisis Information (FOSS): This is the software which Al Jazeera and friends developed for that “War on Gaza” experiment in crowdsourced crisis information mapping. Yes, it’s free open-source software.
• War on Gaza – Experimental Beta | Al Jazeera Labs: An intriguing experiment from Al Jazeera. Anyone can post reports such as casualty counts directly to the site. all of them are then mapped categorised.
• Media140: I am the bastard child of old & new media…| The Digital Wing: The Media140 presentation from Valerio Veo, who’s been in charge of SBS News& Current Affairs Online since 2006.
• Bleating innocents or matted satans: the goat in art | guardian.co.uk: “Jonathan Jones shepherds us through goat art,” it says. Maybe that should be “goatherds us”.
• Sunday Thoughts about Journalism | Stilgherrian: Another long essay from me in September 2008 which is perhaps a prelude to my Media140 Sydney presentation.
• “Trouble at t’paper” | Stilgherrian: My essay from September 2008 which formed some of the background to my Media140 Sydney presentation.
• Changing spaces in media | Aide-Memoire: Kate Carruthers’ observations form Media140 Sydney. “The first thing that struck me was the level of fear and fear-mongering by some of the print journalists on day one… There seemed to be little idea amongst these panellists that changing media platforms might reinvigorate media and create new revenue or career opportunities.”
• Get with the times, Jay Rosen tells journos | ABC News: A report on Jay Rosen’s keynote from Media140 Sydney. “He says journalists should stop expecting ‘open’ platforms like blogging and Twitter to behave like traditional production systems. Instead, he emphasised the value of listening to the public and being transparent about journalistic processes.”
• Sydney Media140 sessions: The program for Media140 Sydney, held 5 to 6 November 2009, with brief speaker bios, photos and links to their Twitter profiles.

Stilgherrian – Risk vs paranoia from Penny Sharpe on Vimeo.

Penny Sharpe MLC asked me to say something controversial at her NSW Sphere event back on 4 September. Here it is. The full video and transcript (below) of my somewhat rambling discussion of the challenges facing the Government 2.0 revolution.

Hi. I’m Stilgherrian, and I’m avoiding the whole projection thing today.

My presentation, the long name was “Risk, Fear and Paranoia: Perspective, People!”, and I just want to spend a few minutes throwing in some ideas which might trigger some discussion point around those, those words.

Now I’ve done a lot of things, including work for the ABC, worked in a government department, been a freelancer, work a lot with small business in their IT needs and getting on the Internet. And one of the things I’ve found in all of those environments is that I’ve had to tell people that change means that things will change. And that change means that things will be different at the end of that change.

And this is actually — I mean you laugh — but it’s actually like the core thing that people have a lot of trouble getting their heads around.

They really have to face up to the fact, and everyone has to face up to the fact, that once we go through and experience the changes that are being wrought by the digital networked society, some things that we used to have will no longer be there. Some job descriptions we used to have will no longer be there. Some institutions will be gone. They will be gone forever. And they’ll be replaced by newer, better things — and that’s a good thing.

But in the meantime, there’s going to be quite a bit of destruction and quite a bit of discomfort, and that’s why everyone has a natural fear of change. And that’s why this process of bootstrapping Government 2.0 — and I promise not to use that term again because it’s awful — is actually really difficult, because we are going to people in politics and in government and are asking them to actively engage in a process in which there is a chance that they will lose their job.

So how do you deal with that?

Here’s a few ideas, and these are kind of random.

A psychologist once told me that there’s three key pillars to mental health, and by the measure of these pillars I would say that our governments are currently paranoid psychotics. Here’s why.

These are the three pillars, and you have to take these on board to be a healthy human being, and I say as a healthy institution.

One, you can’t control everything. There are other actors in the world and they also get to control bits of the world. Plus there is Chaos, God, whatever you want to call it, which is completely beyond your control.

The second one is that you will make mistakes. I usually express that a little more forcefully. But you will screw up. You cannot be perfect. You have to face the fact that no matter how good you are, that some of the time you will fail.

And the third one is that in all of that process there will inevitably be people who don’t like you, for whatever reason. It’s their psychosis, perhaps, not yours. But all of these things will happen, and it’s not within your control.

Now if you are forever obsessing about these things, you will forever live in a paranoid psychotic state and will not ever get anything done. So you have to somehow take all that on board.

Now the gentlemen to my right know a bit more than me about formal risk management and things and actually assessing that, but I’ll pick up on that because there is a lot of fear within traditional public servants and governments and politicians about what’s going on here, and naturally so. We’re trying to get rid of them. So they will come up with “Oh, this could go wrong, that could go wrong.”

Nicholas Gruen who heads the federal Government 2.0 Taskforce has a response to that. It’s “So what?” So what if that goes wrong? Stop and think about it. What is the worst that could happen?

Someone doesn’t like you? Well, they don’t like you. Someone says something bad about you in the media? Well, you might have to issue a correcting statement or whatever. But you can’t stop that happening initially and it might not be your fault — particularly as the media, as we all know, loves to find mistakes, controversy, make governments look fools. That’s great. So just don’t talk to them. Just talk directly to the people through your own channels.

Now I just want to ask the room here today to put your hands up — now I’ll ask people on Twitter to do this as well, so this is “hands1″. Tweet “hands1″ or put your hand up if you consider yourself a geek or others tell you that they consider that you’re a geek. Oh, no space, sorry, for the Twitter users. OK, that’s about half the room.

Keep your hands up and add to that if you consider yourself someone who’s an early adopter or in some other realm. OK, we’re seeing pretty much half the people.

So keep your hand up if you’ve at any point criticised either privately or publicly a politician or government for being stupid because they don’t get — I’m seeing even more hands go up now than those who admitted to geeks.

OK, you’re part of the problem. Because you are creating a combative attitude, which just from a normal human psychology point of view… A politician, if you start telling them they’re stupid they’re going to get their back up and they’re not going to pay you any attention. They’re going to think you’re a wanker. And by and large you probably are.

But this is the thing. There has to be… you know, these are the people who you want to work with. These are the people who can help you make change.

Now we heard before that there’s about 95% of the people in the room have Twitter accounts. This is perhaps not the best room to ask this is in, but how many of you have, for example, written a formal submission to the Government 2.0 Taskforce or an equivalent organisation? I’m seeing one, two, three, four, five… OK, that’s not bad, there’s about 12 or 15 hands there. But we’ve got, you know, well over a hundred people in the room, in and out. So that’s what it is.

The tools that we have now, that already have legal and political power, are the tools we have to first pick up, to then use those tools to create the next batch of tools and move on from there.

Now another thing is that there’s traditionally two kinds of work, process work and project work, and government and public service by and large has been process work.

The difference between these two?

Process work chugs along. At the end of a unit of work, the universe is pretty much the same as it was as when you started. You’ve done your process thing, that payroll’s been done, everyone’s paid, and you go around the cycle.

With project work, at the end of the project something’s different. It’s a limited period, you’ve changed something, you’ve built something — but whatever it is, the world is different and the project team finishes and you all get paid and go away.

I would like to suggest that we are now moving into a world where those two things merge. That the rate of change is such that we no longer have these separate categories, that we are in a continual state of projectness. I won’t coin some sort of stupid word to describe that, but I think it does mean that getting used to the idea of continual change is something we’ll have to accept. And then we’ll have to take that on board and and not go back to that paranoid state of fearing the change.

Now, managing continual change. The Internet and IT industries do this all the time, and I’m going to jump around here and talk about a few things.

There’s the buzzwords of “Fail fast and fail cheap”.

OK, you’re going to fail, I’ve said that, well, some of the time you will fail. So make sure that you identify that as quickly as possible. It’s much better to fail after four weeks having spent $10,000 than to string it out for six months and $100,000 when it’s still going to fail.

There’s something in there about making sure everyone leaves their egos at home, and about making sure that no-one will be punished for acknowledging that there’s a failure. And here’s a really hard thing, because if you’re the one who puts your hand up and says, “Hey, this is failing”, you know, you’re suddenly not a team player or whatever.

These are the kind of attitudes within organisations that have to change. Now I don’t know how you do that, but there are organisational psychologists who do.

I reckon what you do is you do things… look, lots of little things. How about to spread the risk, instead of having one big centrally-planned model for how to deliver some particular health service in a community, you just let those communities decide how they’re going to do it, being able to ask the central office for advice, and you let them evolve and let them talk to each other and let them communicate to each other — and then they can work out amongst themselves which works better.

There’s no reason why all of those little community offices run by the Department of Health need to have the Department of Health’s IT department deal with their computers. If it’s just to a standard, and you write down the standard that comes, perhaps, centrally about how secure it has to be, then you just let any local business bid for that work.

[Audience member: "Hear hear."]

Thank you.

I heard at another forum — gee, one of the several I’ve been at so I can’t say which one it was — one of the big problems for getting small business in, though, is the overhead of doing a government tender is just too, too hard. There does need to be a simpler way of having small businesses do stuff.

And let’s remember, the median business in Australia is a sole trader with a part-time bookkeeper. So in a technology field that means a person who might have an assistant or a trainee. You know, a typical, a median small business is a plumber with an apprentice. And that’s the kind of… that’s where innovation can happen because you spread the risk amongst a lot of little individuals.

China over the years has been opening up its economy to Western investment in a lot of ways, but certainly in big industries like coal, petroleum, other mining industry, auto manufacturing and so on. Now they have a model for doing this.

It’s that China is so big you might have thousands of coal mines. So they’ll initially pick eight or ten, and give them each a different model for how they have to work with their local community, how they have to do their documentation, how their tax regime works, and then they see which ones work best. Then they pick that model, try another few variations and roll it out to fifty. And then only at the end of that process do they decide, “We will now open up their entire coal mining industry to Western investment. We’ve trialled it first.”

Again, it’s about doing things in small, easy stages.

But there always seems to be a natural tendency for governments to want to pull it all in and want to make a big thing and wrap it up in a fancy report with a big bow and have the Minister launch it. I think that’s not the way to do it because that then associates the Minister with it, and the Minister will quite naturally not want to be associated with anything that has the slightest change of anything going wrong.

On that, though, there needs to be some media education happening here. Why does the media get such an easy run when something is really just a mistake? We all know the techniques — or at least government media departments should know the techniques — for how to stake out that little post in the sand and say, “No, this is what we’re on about”, to frame the message.

Now after the 1960s in America, when the liberal side of politics made all of its advances through the 60s, the conservatives went into retreat and thought about this for a very long time and created the Neocon movement. Now whatever you may or may not think about the Neocon movement, they were incredibly successful at creating a long-term strategy for regaining power by re-framing the message with powerful frames that were difficult to attack. And the result was that they ended up in power from Reagan through to Bush the Second and were very, very difficult to knock off and only were knocked off by someone who came in again with a completely new set of very, very powerfully-framed ways of looking at the world.

I just throw that in there as a long-term project. This is a long-term project. That’s why we don’t need to be distracted by whatever the fad of the day is, and we’ve heard some of that already about using tools for purpose not fads for the moment. And I probably should drop in words like “open standards” and “extensible standards” and blah blah blah and all that — but that’s all of the geek stuff. This really isn’t about technology. It’s about new ways of people working together with the technology.

Now it will, along the way, as I say, put people out of work. There will be people who need to adapt and to develop new ways of doing things. There will be people who will be unable to do that.

Now one simple answer is to sack them. That probably won’t work, initially, because there will be a body of knowledge there and that will run into resistance. And again, the way to counter that is through absolute transparency of process at every stage.

I had the very great pleasure of working with a man called Adam Salzer off and on over the years. He’s now a Director of PricewaterhouseCoopers in Hong Kong.

He used to have his own business where he would go into China and, say, a Western investor had taken over the coal mine and the coal mine had 20,000 staff, a bad safety record, endemic corruption, run-down equipment and the new company wished to cut that down to a more focussed workforce of 6,000 people, with a better safety record, get rid of the corrupt people — and yet at the same time working with the local communities so that people who were out of work were suitably re-trained etc.

They would put together and work that plan in a totally transparent way in 13 weeks by making absolutely every step of the process involve everyone in the place, so everyone was informed, and the same process applied to everyone.

There are people out there who know how to do massive transformation, they just don’t seemt to be working as much in government at the moment.

I sometimes wonder why that is, and then I look at the kind of salaries offered for government positions. And the government will currently attract risk-averse people because, say, a systems administrator in a government department might get — I haven’t seen the latest numbers — but say $60,000 per annum on a secure-ish job but in the private sector they might get $100,000 per annum on a less-secure job. And so you’re automatically filtering risk-averse people into government and the creative risk-takers out of government.

That somehow needs to be addressed. And I don’t know how you do it and I dont think, though, you do it necessarily with money because if you talk to any of those creative risk-takers by and large they love the money that the private sector gives them but that’s not really what they enjoy. They enjoy having access to the latest tools, or they enjoy their 20% of their time at Google being able to work on their own projects or whatever it might be, and maybe that needs to come in.

Now I’ve roamed all over the place there, and my notes are kind of like this random scribble of topics so that’s hardly surprising. I’ll finish on two quick points.

One is that the captain of a ship does not stand there going, “Oh my God, we’re going up, we’re going up! No, no, no, we’re going down, down, down! No! Up, up, up, up, waves! No!” No. No matter how rough the waves, their eyes are fixed on the horizon, and they’re standing steadily moving towards that. And even if a really big wave comes, they’re comfortable in the direction they’re heading.

Somehow we have to create that kind of vision, or learn how to live in an environment where it’s choppy seas and we’re really not sure, but are at least comfortable with our ship and our crew and our own sense of whatever it is that keeps us stable and not be paranoid psychotics.

Um, and the other… no. How about I leave it at that and just say whatever we’re going here now is a long-term plan and it really goes to the heart of what actually government means and does. But we need to take on that long-term challenge and accept the crazy ride confidently. Thank you.

• How Twitter works in theory | Epeus’ epigone: There is much in this commentary of Twitter which I support, particularly the concepts of flow and the overlapping social networks. Read and learn.
• Industry cooperation looming on filtering? | CommsDay: There have been rumours, from reliable sources, that Senator Conroy is hoping Australia’s Internet industry will come up with its own answer to censorship.
• Dear Associated Press: Come On, Attribution is Not That Hard | Whatever: John Scalzi is annoyed that AP cited him as “another user” on Twitter, when his name is just a click away. This fits with something I hinted at in Crikey this week. More about that another time.
• How journalists and media brands can get the maximum benefit from Twitter | Write, edit, blog: A nice collection of thoughts about… well, what the title says.
• Public Radio Exchange: “An online marketplace for distribution, review, and licensing of public radio programming.” Free registration means you can listen to this stuff yourself. Hours and hours of it.
• Programmatic specificity: what is Rudd talking about? | En Passant: An earlier essay, from July, with another take on Ruddspeak.
• Rudd's robust language is not the problem | Woolly Days: A nice analysis of why Prime Minister Kevin Rudd using the f-word really of little consequence, whereas bureaucratic evasiveness like “detailed programmatic specificity” is.
• Caring for Your Introvert | The Atlantic (March 2003): An oldie but a goodie. Kind of. If you’re an introvert, it might be worth showing this to those extroverts who are pissing you off.
• LIFE photo archive hosted by Google: All of the photos from LIFE magazine from 1936 to 1972 are on Google Images. This isn’t new — the archive was created in 2008 — but I was reminded of it this week.
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• Is the Internet melting our brains? | Salon Books: Despite the provocative headline, this interview with linguist Dennis Baron from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is a sensible debunking of the fears.
• The Interregnum Revisited | Jon Taplin’ Blog: This essay deserves slow and careful reading. It links the themes of the cyclic nature of right-wing fear-mongering and paranoia with longer-term US political history — with some disturbing conclusions.
• Can Sheepdogs Round Up Magpies? | BitingTheDust: A great story from Robbo, currently in the Gibson Desert. And a great photo.
• MacSpeech Dictate 1.5: I’d been meaning to find decent dictation software for OS X, and John Birmingham mentioned this one. Must check it out.
• Average Web Page Size Triples Since 2003 | WebSiteOptimization.com: Web pages now average more than 300KB and 50 objects per page. I know my own attitude has been that everyone now has broadband. But what about mobile devices and the Third World?

Yes, “bad things” happen online, just as “bad things” happen anywhere. But when Clive Hamilton screeches about all the naughty things he’s found online, it looks to me like a deliberate attempt to press our emotional buttons and avoid rational debate. And he does it repeatedly.

The police don’t try to stop drug trafficking by putting a road block in everyone’s street and searching every vehicle. No, they use intelligence — in both senses of the word — to work out where best to deploy their finite resources for maximum results.

They also allocate their resources between conflicting demands so society as a whole is best protected. Their risk assessments tell them to worry more about the suspected rapists, serial killers or violent thugs in their community than some kid with a few grams of weed.

The people who actually understand child protection continually remind us that the greatest threats to children are the same as they always have been — abuse in their own home by family and close family friends, poverty, and bullying by their peers. Why oh why do we have to keep repeating that, Senator Conroy?

• Online Ad Rates Picking Up | The Business Insider: Based on a review of data from 6000 web publishers, it appears that online advertising is up 35% since its low-point of December 2008. Rates climbed 15% between May and June.
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• Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule | Paul Graham: This essay really speaks to me. If you’re a manager, then your schedule consists of those 1-hour blocks to beloved of scheduling software. But it you’re a maker, or someone creative, one hour is barely time to get started. A good discussion of how these two different working styles can be resolved.
• Too much networking? | msnbc.com: A network expert argues that less social networking would produce more radical innovation on the Internet. “An overabundance of connections over which information can travel too cheaply can reduce diversity, foster groupthink, and keep radical ideas from taking hold,” Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, director of the Information + Innovation Policy Research Center at the National University of Singapore, writes in this week’s issue of the journal Science.
• Electropulse weapon fear spreads to UK politicos | The Register: A campaign by US right wingers, designed to raise fears of an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack they allege could cripple Western nations and lead to chaos, is targeting British politicians, with some success.
• God is not your bitch / This just in: It is hugely unlikely God cares much about your sex life | Mark Morford: A glorious rant about politicians and others exploit God to explain how they’re really, really going to change this time — amongst many other things.
• Best RSS feeds for information graphics | nicolasrapp.com: A collection of feeds which represents a nice mix of information graphics and data visualisations. (Is there a difference between those two terms?)
• Rebooting The News: A weekly podcast on news and technology with Jay Rosen and Dave Winer.
• The atmosphere in the control room gets tense … | Twitpic: This photograph is an overview of the control room as ABC TV’s Insiders is about to be broadcast last Sunday. Even with the combination of roles and reduction of control room staffing levels, broadcast TV is still a complicated beast!
• The Great American Bubble Machine | Rolling Stone: An astoundingly harsh critique of the US economy and, in particular, Goldman Sachs. The piece begins: The worlds most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.”
• Why cops should trust the wisdom of the crowds | New Scientist: The “unruly mob” concept is usually taken as read and used as the basis for crowd control measures and evacuation procedures across the world. Yet it is almost entirely a myth.

Since being listed as an “interesting Aussie Twitter user” at NEWS.com.au the other night, I’ve gained 300-ish new followers. Here’s how I’ve been deciding who to follow back.

First, though, I don’t think Twitter starts to make sense unless you have a reasonable number of people in your network. For me, the penny dropped when I had about 50 followers and followees, and you actually interact with them. At that point I started to see the live communication rippling through the hyperconnected mob. It helped that I already knew some well-connected geeks to get the ball rolling.

Once you hit hundreds of followers, though, there’s a phase shift. You simply can’t see everything that happens. It scrolls by too fast. At first that’s stressful — until you realise there’s always more in the world than you can ever experience. So another penny drops, and you detach. Zen. The Twitter-river flows on 24/7, but you don’t stop to watch every fish.

I use Tweetdeck most of the time, not Twitter’s standard web interface, because I can create groups of people. The unfiltered Twitterstream rolls by on the left of my screen, with separate groups for close friends, for media contacts I need to keep an eye on, direct messages and so on. Another panel shows everyone who replies to me or mentions me. So while I can’t see everything on the main stream, just mentioning me will grab my attention.

(I daresay it changes again when you’re like Stephen Fry with more than 88,000 followers. [Update 5 February 2009: It's now more than 122,000.] May the gods forbid I reach that level of fame! He wouldn’t even be able to monitor all his @replies and DMs!)

So, how do I choose who to follow? Here’s what I’ve noticed today.

You’ve got three seconds to start with. Maybe five.

I’ll probably skip over you immediately if…

• You haven’t got a bio (description), or given your location (heck, just give the country if you’re paranoid!), or given a link to your website or an external profile.
• You’ve locked your tweets for “privacy”. Look, you’re either conversing or not. If you don’t want to talk with me, then don’t. But the true value of Twitter is the interaction.
• Your tweets are banal. If you’re going to tweet “Eating breakfast”, at least tell us what you’re having, or what you can see while eating, or whether the café is any good. If you tweet “On the couch”, tell is what you’re doing. If you’re watching TV, express an opinion on the program. If you’re resting, tell us why your day made you tired. If you’re masturbating, then tell us… well, maybe don’t. But do provide some life, some colour, some specific detail that’ll help us form a picture of your world.
• Your profile only lists “SEO” or “network marketer” or “success coach” or is meaningless. (OK, I break that last rule. So sue me.) There’s nothing wrong with wanting to make money, but if that’s all you’re bringing to the table then I’ll move to another table.

Conversely, I will probably follow you back if there’s any spark of interest.

• You’re interested in at least one or two things I am, and you’re talking about them. Doubleplus if you’re in the same industries I am, and you’re publishing interesting thoughts somewhere like a blog or other website.
• Your tweets provide an insight into you, one of the 6+ billion uniquely interesting people on Planet Earth.
• You’re in Sydney and don’t appear to be a complete arsehole.
• You’re cute.

There’s a bazillion other resources about being more human and moar interestinger on Twitter. Maybe I’ll link to them when I have a smaller backlog of new followers to interroga… to, erm, peer at.

[Credit: Cartoon Twitter-bird courtesy of Hugh MacLeod. Like all of Hugh's cartoons published online, it's free to use.]

Despite all the rhetoric about “protecting our children” and “children are the future”, our governments seem determined to prevent them preparing for the real future. Take NSW schools minister Verity Firth…

This morning the Sydney Morning Herald tells us the NSW government will receive $285M for new laptops — which will then be blocked from accessing social media and most everything else.

The Minister for Education, Verity Firth [pictured], said the Government would prevent access to the social networking sites, and other sites, even when the laptops were used at home.

“We don’t want these kids to be using these computers for the not-so-wholesome things that can be on the net. And they won’t be able to because essentially the whole server is coming through the Department of Education.”

So kids will be prevented from using their computers to connect with and understand their peers and the real world because of this continuing paranoia about unspecified “not-so-wholesome things” and parents being too lazy to supervise their own children.

Maybe Ms Firth needs to read Mark Pesce’s Those Wacky Kids, or watch the video. As Pesce quite rightly points out, if the classroom is the only part of these kids’ lives which isn’t hyperconnected, then the classroom will be seen as irrelevant.

Rupert Murdoch is right to say we have a 19th Century education system. Our Minister seems intent on keeping it that way.

A 16-year-old at last week’s forum on Internet censorship said she’d prepared one assignment at home but couldn’t present it at school because all the source material was blocked.

“I have been surfing the web for most of my school life, at school and home, with filters and without, and I have never accidentally stumbled upon pornographic material,” she said.

“We want education, not restriction.”

In another “generous” move…

“[Students] can take it home, back to school, and then after four years, when they leave school, they can take their computer away with them.”

Wow. Already kids tend to be given cheap, underpowered equipment “suitable for students”, as if their research and assignment-preparation was somehow less demanding, their time of less value. I’d be amazed if the laptops actually survive all four years in a kid’s backpack. But if they do, by then they’ll be a year past end of life and way behind current standards.

This isn’t a generous offer, it’s a government either too lazy to collect and recycle the old computers, or too clueless to realise how fast computing changes.

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