I’m in JP Rangaswarmi’s session on platform based innovation. Keep refreshing for updates to this session.

14:35 Most important thing we need to consider is Gibson’s vision: the future is here it’s just not well distributed yet. Alan Kay once said that the best way to predict the future is to invent it. 30 years later he revised that to ‘the best way to predict the future is to prevent it. Challenge is how to prevent the problems arising from rules.

14:37 When people think about using open platforms they don’t necessarily articulate it well. If you take an airport of what an open multi-platform approach to articulate the concept, it becomes clear. Airports have a main function of allowing planes to land and take off. And the building allows protection from extreme weather. Even the smallest airports have this. But as more planes arrive and more services emerge - luggage handling, check-in desks, security, shopping, etc - suddenly you have a range of new requirements that need to be met. Scaling means you need to consider these elements.

14:41 One of the 1st things that happens in airports is personalisation of information. Identity has different behaviours on road, air or sea. Have more rigorous checks in accordance with these ranges of access, so that security and common values are protected.

14:44 Been at airports where it’s a complete melee to get luggage from the tarmac. Need a carousel to reduce this mess. Carousels acts as a standard for taking luggage/content/data out to participants. Also need tool sets to ensure that values and principles - a priority system for luggage - are sustained in the way it is handled. Expressing the standards of how you handle the data shared, then ensuring that the data is not locked in to a proprietary system will prevent a situation where the data has to be either repackaged (repacked into different luggage) or recollected (buy new clothes/stuff) to keep moving through the system (airport).

14:51 Data is important generally. For the civil service it’s crucial, because it represents public investment and it is essential to democratic practice. Open, transparent, accountable content is an expectation of citizens. Value of online auction sites, or in Amazon is not in the platform itself, but in the data that is contributed to those systems. What the civil service has - across all departments is access to data, and the capacity to value-add data. What we need to do is open up the data so that value can be added.

14:58 What Facebook does is make its platform available so that developers can create applications and users can contribute content. What civil service, you have the capacity to make an open platform available which would enable others to mash together different data sources to generate new value. Using Google Maps to map complainst about barking dogs may seem a trivial example but the act of mapping that data created new knowledge: it provided an easy means of checking up the seriousness of the issue and enabled better response to dog owners. It made this clear, and easier to check up on dynamically. This outcome isn’t trivial.

15:03 If you really want to keep something a secret then you don’t tell anyone the secret. It’s not that Facebook and other platforms are at fault, it’s that the users are not discreet. Thus private information may not necessarily be appropriate to be made open to all. But with privileged access to private data then only the people with the right to proceed will be able to access that content.

15:08 Open platforms provide civil service a greater way to share and communicate data and to enable it to adapt to changes of the technology. We can collect metadata more effectively and we can devise identity tokens that will be used appropriately to ensure privileged access to private data is not able to be compromised.

[JJ's notes: Great stories and analogies, JP! Must move on but a good session on the issues with open platforms.]