A Fire Under Embers

Some people are goofy about police/fire scanners. I never have been, but I’m intrigued by LA Fire Department’s “push” of LA fire updates to its Google group subscribers (or anyone else).  You can get LAFD’s updates by your channel of choice: RSS feed, email, or Twitter (click “follow” LAFD on Twitter, and you’re in). For its part, LAFD pushes its “tweets” via Twittermail - using a web app to send its information to Twitter, which turns around and pushes it to LAFD’s Twitter “followers.”

So, this is important for a couple of reasons. First, LAFD looks like it’s among the only big city public safety agencies making these notifications via Twitter. It’s pathbreaking. Second, 311 and 911 systems are all crunched and looking for ways to divert inbound traffic: Twitter notifications reverse the flow and push updates without using operators.  Third, it’s a pathway — albeit for emergency notification — for government-citizen communication.   But build a channel, and they will come.  Gov Schwartzenegger of CA is already tweeting his “followers” with a flurry of “watch me” updates. He won’t be lonely here for long  – and if you install Twitter as a Facebook application, your own Tweets will keep your Facebook friends company long into the night.

Looks like we’re in the early stages of uptake and adoption, with some mix of goofy kid stuff and industrial-strength applications ricochetting. No one is telling anyone to do it, but in LAFD’s case there’s a bottom-up business driver, it’s low cost,  there’s an enabler, and there’s no org culture blocking the way. That sounds ripe for fast uptake and adoption.

This doesn’t answer the question that Tom Davenport has raised whether this stuff will “transform” government. But emergency notifications, like political campaigns, are important “canaries in a cage” vectors for new-fangled techno entering government. We’re sure to see political leaders and agency heads quickly push this stuff further, faster and more  broadly.

Watching (me and) my age cohort figure out Facebook, Twitter and the like is a little like watching my mother figure out ATM cards (”What is it? Why do you need one?”) Harvard Business School’s Andy McAfee is now first encountering his Twitter angels and demons here, for example, trying to make sense of it all. The whole social networking thing for us older dudes veers to the mortifying , can get downright embarrassing, and remains a bunch incomprehensible, except when you see some breakthrough applications. Well, breakthrough for us, anyway. Then the light goes on, kinda.

US Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen’s Facebook page is that — it straddles the goofy stoopid kid stuff of Facebook with a corporate leadership play in eye-popping ways.  Admiral Allen is now chronicling his trip north to Alaska — with pictures and text detailing his voyage. The public sees him here; the entire USCG community sees him right next to the troops, on station, seeing what they see. It’s updated every day with his personal comments. So it extends his visibility through the channel they live on, and shows him “in theatre” — no one can say Thad Allen is stuck behind a desk. It makes transparent and democratizes all at once without diluting the Commandant’s rank, stature, or status — actually, one suspects, boosting all. It does wonders, also, for DHS Secretary Mike Cherthoff — visible in the Admiral’s pix in a US Coast Guard uniform!

Yesterday I received a fascinating email to my corporate email address. It was — as far as I can tell– a phishing attack launched as an invitation to (the aptly-named) Snapfish photosharing site. The content of the message is baldly flim-flam — “Computer Central has identified you as …Your name appeared among the beneficiaries who will receive part-payment of US $5.5 million…[etc etc]” But the invitation to click through is decidedly Web 2.0 — “you’re invited to view James’s photos – plus, get 20 FREE prints when you upload your photos to Snapfish.” — all in lovely Snapfish web 2.0 graphics and colors. 

I love the play in “lemming-space.”  The web 2.0 world/wisdom of crowds embraces the unknown user. Yet the unknown user is also the unauthorized user, and the great risk of the websphere.  Gosh, it’s well done — except for the decidely East European cant to the English invitation, it rides the Web 2.0 wave beautifully.

As we ready ourselves at HKS for a late August session with the nation’s food security executives, I have brushed off and posted up a case I wrote eight (8?!) years ago, telling the story of William von Raab, Reagan’s Customs Commissioner. WvR led the charge to consolidate the entire US import/export chain onto a single information platform/knowledge market– the Automated Commercial Environment (hat tips: Tom Eisenmann and Tom Davenport!) As the nation’s produce industry tackles the current salmonella outbreak, it finds itself struggling similarly to gain a clear view of the entire farm-to-fork supply chain when it needs it most… See “‘Automate or Perish’: William von Raab and the US Customs Service,” here .