The freedom to drown in information?

I would have never thought this, but the current president of the USA had some really interesting things to say about information. Barack Obama at his White House ceremony told the world that from today on we are to share information, and not to withhold it. Sharing information is the way to a transparent organization that can be held accountable for its actions.

Just take 2 minutes to look at the video and think about what this will mean for the information age.

In every intranet or knowledge management project I have been involved in over the last years somewhere you have to fight the battle: “share everything but” or “disclose only what”. I have found that winning this battle for sharing information is one of the foundations of a successful intranet project or KM program. Hearing America’s president put is as a touchstone for his presidency gives me hope. This is certainly a big step towards the Information Age.

In the Dutch magazine ‘Technisch Weekblad’ (15 Feb 2009), Hans Stol takes up the challenge put to us by president Obama. He claims that public information systems have the ability to force openness from the government. He starts from the believe that every political decision aims to change reality.

Obama will provide a website, www.recovery.gov, where each and every tax payer will be able to follow what the 825 billion dollar economy rescue money is achieving. Stol has worked for the last years on his thesis around assuring governmental transparency with information systems. And this is exactly what is needed now to avoid that the opportunity Obama is giving us information professionals will lead to a Freedom of (Drowning in) Information Act.

I have ordered Stol’s thesis on the internet. The publisher promised that it would arrive in 3 days. I will keep you posted!

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 15th, 2009 at 14:48 and is filed under information age, information overload, knowledge management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.