McFilter

Less Command and Control, More Network Thinking

I was reading this announcement about a green partnership to make Liverpool more sustainable, and this sentence jarred as I read it:

I don't mean to pick on this particular initiative, it just happens to be the one I was reading that prompted this blog post. You get it all the time with pronouncements on smart cities or the Internet of Things. The idea that once everyone has just sat down and worked out the one true protocol/plan/project... then we'll reach utopia.

It's bollocks.

It's all a recipe for lots of stuff that looks like progress and hard work but in fact is just endless meetings and talking. Forming groups to commit to action is a great idea, but rather than then suck all the life out of it through bureaucracy, wouldn't it be better if the commitment was to move towards one goal in whatever way made most sense for the organisations involved?

What is more important: that we have one solution to climate-change/an-open-Internet-of-Things/social-issue-du-jour that everyone agrees upon; or that most people have coalesced around a more-sustainable-lifestyle/using-a-mixture-of-open-protocols-for-IoT/a-good-enough-solution-du-jour?

Maybe we should modify the old Internet axiom "we believe in rough consensus and running code" to "we believe in rough consensus and concrete actions".