Friday, September 5, 2003

Lesson: Don't screw with a connected customer

Seems Joe Gregorio at BitWorking had a bad experience with a TI semiconductor development product, and a worse one with tech support from the company. That's why he wrote about it in that last link there.

Later he got a telephone call from the Director of WorldWide Tech Support for the Semiconductor Division. Wonder why?

Check what comes up first in a search for TI Tech Support.

I don't know how Customer Management folks can look at something like this still think they can "manage" any of it.

E-democracy e-Xplained

In a new article at Publicus.net, Steven Clift has a thoughtful explanation of why networked citizens are moving to the center of working govenance. One sample:

Ultimately, the main challenge for governance in the information age will be accommodating the will of the people in many small and large ways online. The great unknown is whether citizen and political institutional use of this new medium will lead to more responsive government or whether the noise generated by competing interests online will make governance more difficult.  It is possible that current use of ICTs in government and politics, which are often not formulated with democratic intent, will actually make governance less responsive.

He includes a copious list of links that should (but doesn't yet) include Joi Ito's provocative Emergent Democracy paper.

One thing I like about Steven's approach is that it's not limited to the U.S. at all. Check out his excellent Top Ten E-Democracy 'To Do List' for Goverments Around the World. And there seems to be quite a market for Steven as a speaker and consultant. So he and his wife get around quite a bit. TravelScoops is their mo'blog.

To keep up with the Clifts (and the whole networked democracy subject), pick up on DoWire, the Democracies Online Newswire, which is an email list. Here are the most recent archives, which work very much like a blog. Steven's most recent entry (today's) covers the VoxPolitics blogging event in London.

Bonus Link: VoxPolitics' Manifesto. It's a corollary to Cluetrain, and damn good (partly because it mercifully keeps its numbered points to 26 instead of 96). I like #12: If you lie, deceive or dissemble, we’ll tell everyone. That takes even less time.