Class 3 - Privacy, Read ID and Identity

We kicked off the evening with a little warmup by looking at electronic government in India and a review of how Korea is approaching electronic government:

http://egov-india.blogspot.com/2007/09/road-to-e-government-korean-way.html

In contrast, we also looked at You Tube video clips of the suppression of a democracy protest in Myanmar and discussed how not all parts of the world are accepting of Democracy. Our role as public servants and guardians of the public trust is made more challenging by the survey data that indicates that public is less trusting of government than previous generations.

Mishandling of public data or data loss, even if accidental or by malicious outside hackers, damages public trust in the ability of government to manage personal data. Cases studies we looked at were the data breach at the University of California - San Diego: http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/general/securitybreach.asp.

Can government be trusted with personal information? This was the question asked during the discussion of RealID, a controversy that is see in national ID card debates. In the following link, it was observed that in Asia and South America, such identification papers are required to be carried at all times. However, in New Zealand and Australia, such practices are shunned. http://www.news.com/National-ID-cards-on-the-way/2100-1028_3-5573414.html
So how much freedom and personal information should citizens be expected to give up?

From the book Leadership by Rudolph Giuliani, we read about the Compstat crime fighting system. This was not so much a technology as it was a process. The Leavitt Diamond framework from previous classes highlighted the interaction between the technology (in this case a Geographic Information System (GIS) which is a map attached to a database), people skills to use data and technology, organizational structure of how Compstat was accepted, and department structure such as the weekly "Crime Strategy Meetings". It is again important to note that 3 of the 4 elements of the Leavitt Diamond relate to people and how they interact or change.

This week we turned to Chapter 3 - Content of American Government Websites in our class text Digital Government. What web content does the public value? How do we measure successful performance and what works on public websites?

Building on the Personal Strengths Strength Deployment Inventory (SDI) that we took to learn how to "build productive working relationships" (http://www.personalstrengths.com), we learned about our own Motivational Value System or "color". We broke into groups to learn how each color viewed the world. It was interesting to note how Mother Theresa was viewed as tough by our Red MVS group but as compassionate by our Blue MVS group, a living example of how our filters determine how we view the world. The class ended with a practice of "borrowing" or communicating in a way that resonates with the other person in a way they need to hear it.