Post in Social media & local gov event 29th October

Sep 02 09:24 UTC

Hi Mick,

On Mon, 1 Sep 2008, Mick Phythian wrote:

> By the way, I was reading up on the history of SOA (service oriented
> architecture), which was posited by a Gartner consultant and there is a
> recent Gartner paper suggesting that Web 2.0 is distracting from SOA,
> which should be the real concern.
>
> For the public sector, to confuse metters, I'm trying to develop a
> Citizen Oriented Architecture which is a mix of front office and
> performance tools that could then meet with the back-office SOA.

I'm not really sure exactly what SOA or Web 2.0 are (not that that seems
to stop me from using them ;) but doesn't thinking of politics in terms of
technology just distract from thinking of it in terms of ... politics?
IOW, is it better to think of it in terms of technology, or to look at the
underlying social/political cultures and attitudes that lead to the
development of those technologies?

I guess the above could sound quite academic, but I think without it, you
can end up going round in technology circles, or ending up in coding
cul-de-sacs. One of the main questions I can see is: how much do we want
to fragment our politics by fragmenting technological efforts? Is it
really a case now that a bunch of people get together and code whatever
form of democracy they want for their self-assembled group?

Having said that, from what I've seen, 90% of Web 2.0 *and* SOA appears to
be marketing and novelty hype... ;)

- graham