Stap isi

19 January 2010

Creating the taste

I’m reading The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes. It provides an elegant analogy for where we are with the web and concepts like sharing, open source and open data.

Discussing Charles Babbage’s prototype computer – “one of the legends of Victorian science, and a parable about the failure of government research funding” – the author posts this note (emphasis mine):

Unlike Harrison’s chronometer, Herschel’s telescope or Davy’s voltaic battery, Babbage’s ‘computer’ had no immediate application that officialdom could see or even imagine, though Babbage claimed correctly that it would transform the calculations for logarithms, astronomical tables, engineering construction models, map-making and marine data. Coleridge once said that radically new poetry ‘must create the taste whereby it is appreciated.’

Sharing technologies are similarly misunderstood by officialdom. Ask your colleagues what they think of Twitter.

The only way to demonstrate value is to implement. That’s why Fix My Street gets a guernsey at every gov 2.0 conference. And why it’s incumbent on agencies and public servants to publish the results of their experiences with online engagement.

To create the taste.

At the risk of over-extending the analogy, the early ‘scientists’ were also mad for self-organised meet-ups, and ‘educating’ the public on the importance of their work.

Sound familiar?

— b3rn   engagement, the persuader   Jan 19, 08:17 PM   #

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