Monday, May 6, 2013

Police-Media Virtual Platform


“Where is necessity, there is will”

Police and media, the two most recognized public service communities are playing conflicting role between each other since the beginning.  Police in one hand is protecting the data for the protection of people and ensuring data security, on the other hand media is revealing them for to the people to ensure their information right. A strategic alliance between these information giants could be the best fit by ensuring their mutual benefit and serving the public.

Intention: why integration



It is known from the long time that police and journalists are working for the same purpose but focusing on two opposite direction. Both the parties use their own sources to collect information or sometimes in some countries they sale information to each other violating their own institutional rule. Both the parties are employing a large amount of people and money in collecting and sourcing such information and both of them are conflicting with each other to get an early hand on this. The only way to eradicate this conflict is by developing trust (Handy, 1995) among them and sharing information among each other (Liu & Chetal, 2005). Therefore as representative of police we have decided to develop a mutual collaborative platform with media industry by developing a virtual information center (Strader, Lin & Shaw, 1998) to have more control and simultaneous supply of information and ensure a win-win for both the parties. So our mission is to develop 




The Negotiated terms: what is the plan 

When building a virtual collaborative platform for Police and Media, it is obvious that the main issue you might face is about the direction of the project. Which goals the project is intended to serve? Which direction shall we go towards? Which rules should we define in order to shape the concept? We strongly focused on these issues and questions when negotiating virtually with the Media team.

We eventually came to the conclusion that considering the amount of requirements that each part had, but also considering the complexity of the project itself, we needed to develop a comprehensive list of rules that would ensure the functioning of the platform, and fix the possibilities and duties for both Police and Media.

After several weeks of negotiation online, each part brought a significant amount of requirements that he wanted to insert in the rules list and that would potentially better serve its own interests: there was 15 demands from police and 10 demands from Media. Through an intense and complicated bargaining process, we combine, amend and gather all these demands in order to come up with a list of 19 negotiated terms: a summary of the rules that are critical to the efficiency of the project and that would be considered as the backbone of the virtual platform.

Even though it is a very formal to state in our blog this exhaustive and detailed list, we believe that it is essential to go through and explain these majors points in order to get a precise understanding of the Police and Media collaborative platform. We consider the following points as the most important details of the platform:

Point 1: The cost Sharing System

During the installation period (creation of the server and technical set up), Police will take in charge 70% of the costs, while Media will only pay 30% of these costs. However, we believe that the Police costs will be reduced by the government rebates and advantages, and will decrease real cost from 70% to 45%. During the operation period, costs will be equally split between the two parts (50%-50%).

Point 2: The 10 years Track record

For each case, Police wants to make sure the reporters or the Media employees that will be involved are clean and safe. For that matter, any Media person will have to provide a 10 years tax file records and a statement of his criminal background, in order to assess whether the person has a link with Mafia or criminal organization.

Point 3: Use of Media source

Police will have the right to use any Media source at any moment during the operations.

Point 4: Police Information update

Since it is very important to achieve a high level of efficiency in this project, we agreed on the fact that Police will have to update information immediately after reception.

Point 5: Permission Layer and Permission Rapidity

Police has a strong position in this project. It supervises the permission levels and decides whether or not Media can cover a case. Media should get the permission of Police before covering any news from High Layers. However, Police must guarantee a fast decision for the permission.

Point 6: Single case Access permission

Since every case is different, permission for the Media coverage is only valid for one single case. Each new case will require a new permission.

Point 7: Server Location

For safety reasons, we decided that the Information center Server will be host in the Police headquarter. The back-up server will be located in the Media association office.

Point 8: Server maintenance

Each part will take in charge the cost of maintenance for its own system. Police will finance the Information System server maintenance, while Media will take in charge the Back-up system costs.

Point 9: Importance of the Information level

As we previously said, Police has a leading power in this project. We designed a 5 levels system to assess the importance of each case, and Police will decide the importance of each case, according to its information and its understanding of the case.

Point 10: Low Levels coverage

Any case that is considered as a « Low level case » will be freely covered by Media. With this rule, we aim at providing strong coverage efficiency for cases that are less risky.

Point 11: Information access and modification

Both Police and Media have the right to access and input data on the system, but only Police can modify information and data. However, for data modification, Police should have one level up verification and provide reasonable reason to Media.

Point 12: the « National Security » rule

Police has the right to reject or to block the coverage of any case at any level under one special condition: a National security matter. If the rejection is not a national security matter, Media will have the right to publish the news.

Point 13: Responsibility of media

If Media provides any wrong data or information, Media will be fully responsible for the mistake.

Point 14: Media data Security Responsibility

Media will be responsible for the security of data they provide.

Point 15: Control of Information access

Police will be informed every time someone is accessing the data. This information will be sent to the Responsible officer at police department.

Point 16: Use of Instant Messenger

We created an Instant Messenger system that will be aimed at improving the efficiency of the Police/Media collaboration. Each media person will install this IM application on his mobile phone and must not switch off the IM without the permission of the Police Department. The idea is to make Media reporters accessible anytime and to enhance the exchange of information.

Point 17: Future issues

There will be a different unit to share open information. Where media can share information about any probable future issues. If Police finds out that the media person had the information of a future incident beforehand but did not share it on the special platform, he will be accused for that and fully responsible.

Point 18: Referral to supervisor

Police will assign a supervisor to each Media team, and Media will have to refer to him about any issue or problem.

Point 19: Case- based team

We know that each case is different. For that reason, we decided that teams will be changed and designed according to the specificity of each case, its location and its level of importance.
Also, we discussed a lot another rule proposed by Police and that Media rejected. This rule was asking that « a reporter should not leave a job in the middle of a case ». For practical reasons, Media asked us to remove this rule: since the mobility of journalists and reporters is important, it is difficult for them to guarantee such a thing. However we reached the agreement that every time a reporter would leave his job in the middle of a case, Media association should deal with the handover in advance and make sure that the reporter will not share any information about this case with the public. If there is any leak, reporter will be accused for that.

This list of rules has shaped our project but above all, our collaborative experience. Reaching agreements on each requirement, accepting to remove some demands, and narrow our requirements is a quite tricky process. In the last part of our blog, we will tackle the conflicts that we faced during this collaboration, and also the Knowledge management that we tried to implement in our project.

Process: how to perform

Knowledge Management



Knowledge Management can enable effective design and emergence of virtual organizations, virtual teams and virtual communities (Malhotra, 2000). We know that A process to enable people to develop a set of practices to create, capture, share & use knowledge to advance organizational goals and here we are focused on developing explicit organizational knowledge. We have differentiated our knowledge management policy in three segments:

<!--[if !supportLists]-->Ø  <!--[endif]-->Level of usage
<!--[if !supportLists]-->Ø  <!--[endif]-->External and open source usage
<!--[if !supportLists]-->Ø  <!--[endif]-->Archiving

Level of usage


Here the information is organized in five levels to ensure the usage and control. Moving to each level up in the ladder will increase the control over the information and reduce the restriction on media. In the green level the information is open to share without any permission. Light green level requires permission from one step senior of the reporting journalist. Yellow level information is published with mutual decision of the journalist and respective police officer based on importance and intensity of the information against the need for publication. Orange level is the publishable top priority information what is decided by both media and police head together. The red level of information is the top priority that cannot be revealed because national security issue or other topmost important issue for solving case.

External and open source usage:

This section is open for open information sharing and collecting. This section also has three parts. In the first past, there is an open portal for sharing information about probable future cases what should come into the consideration. Second section is for sharing information from the mass people and anyone can provide any information keeping their identity secret. Third portal is the link of all news media where people can log in and get the updated news.

Information archiving:


Last part of the knowledge management is focused on proper storage of the information.  The traditional record keeping should be replaced with digitalization and being a click away to retrieve it. As mentioned earlier there will be a main server in police headquarter to capture all the information entering into the system and that will be backed up by another server from media association office. It is important for knowledge management because one of the most important parts of knowledge management is to store and control the secure use of information.

Legal Obligation


While implementing the data center we have to consider the relative international law and law of land and make sure that such laws are not violated. There is no international data protection law implied but different country has developed their own law for self-protection, for example:  Britain has their Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA) to ensure the control over personal data. On the other hand, media in the most of the country follow the acts of human rights where Universal Declaration of Human Rights defines the media rights in article 15-19.

Virtual Team Performance

How police and media can work together in the virtual team is been discussed and analyzed in our practical orientation with the virtual team and we have developed three aspects for such virtual team performance:

<!--[if !supportLists]-->v <!--[endif]-->Team development
<!--[if !supportLists]-->v <!--[endif]-->Team creativity
<!--[if !supportLists]-->v <!--[endif]-->Team interaction

Team development




Team development process can be done based on two categories; task related and socio-emotional (Siebdrat, Hoegl & Ernst, 2009) and we are focused on the task related process of team development is our project. Different police officer and journalists from different media company will work is different cases simultaneously. They will develop an intra and intra team culture in the virtual world. For example: If there is five police officer is working in three different cases and six journalists from three media company is covering that news they can formulate a cross teaming culture and such develop better relationship among each other.

Team creativity



Earlier a police officer or more from the similar area tried to solve a case but now the scenario will be different. Now they shall have a bigger team with the support from media and those media people are coving diversified stories and have different additional knowledge.

Those knowledge sharing might not increase creativity of a single person but it will develop creativity and performance outcome of the team as a whole with the support of better and intense communication (Leenders, Engelen & Kratzer, 2003). Study says that when people works from different location together that increases the creativity. Moreover, working with diversified people will increase their creativity as well and having insights from previous different cases from media will help us as police to enhance our vision to solve our case.

Team interaction



Information technology has developed substantively over the last two decades and development growth is remarkable in last few years with more convenient access of mobile communication devices. Writing long email is now replacing with live voice and video chat with the advancement of 4th generation network module. In the bus, train or even on the streets people are moving with 24/7 accessible and traceable communicating devices. For our virtual platform, we also want to develop an intranet among the police stations and media offices for communication. Moreover, we want to develop a separate mobile application for the registered police officers and media staffs to track and communicate with the team members at any time and formulate a group chat among each other.



Conflicts and collaboration

During the process of negotiate with media, we have some task conflicts. From the research of Carsten K. W. De Dreu and Laurie R. Weingart, it showed that examples of task conflict are conflicts about the distribution of resources, procedures and policies, and judgments and interpretation of facts. And every community will focus on their own parts and interests, and want other communities to compromise. Precisely because of this, we have the different views about our common projects. So in order to solve these conflicts, we choose different negotiation styles in different steps to increase our collaboration. In the first step, when we discussed this project, our team-police gave 15 points to support and protect our own interests, and when media saw that they agreed with our these points. In this step, our team competed with media and wined this step, and they showed compromise. But in second step, media had different points and wanted to modify our points, and they gave 10 points to support their own interests. So in third step, we should discuss these 25 points and reach the consensus about our project. During the process of discussing our different points, we chose to collaborate our points. Firstly, we found our common interests, and then we discussed and modified our different points. Finally, we chose 19 points as our common points about this virtual platform to support police and media’s interests. So solving the conflicts should based on different steps.

Virtual organizing


By the research, we can know that virtual organizing has three vectors (customer interaction, asset configuration and knowledge leverage) and three stages. About our team virtual project, it just includes two vectors, so I will focus to introduce these two vectors. Concerning customer interaction, our virtual platform not just bring service to police and media, it also provide information to public. Public is the customer of this platform and have right to know, check and upload the newest information. By this platform, it could provide remote experience of products and services to public, because public could check the information that they want to know and upload the newest information. When the police, media and public upload the information in this platform, they could learn the different thinking models and enhance their creativity, which is their stage three. Concerning knowledge leverage, police and media have different knowledge backgrounds, and when they share their information, which means the knowledge integration and create the new values to these two communities. For the stage one, this platform is the new product and could bring many new information to these two communities, and stage two, this platform could increase the police’s working efficiency and decrease their working time and save costs, which could bring economic values to police, and stage three, it is the information integration, and police and media will increase their own creativity by their discussion and sharing information.

Benefits of all stakeholders


Common benefits

Why the police and media want to build this platform? - Because it could bring several benefits to them. For this platform, it just focuses how to share the information, so the benefits also focus the information. Firstly, it could share the newest and previous information with each other. This platform is the center of information, police and media could upload all information in it. For example, when the country happened a murder case and killed a person, police and media will go to collect the information, but they focus on different points like police would collect some information about how to solve this caseand media would collect the information about the thoughts and feedbacks about the person’s neighbors, friends and families. So when the police and media upload the information to the platform, police could use these feedbacks from the neighbors and know some people have possible to do murder. Secondly, they could check the information anytime. Policemen and journalists could download the related apps about this platform, and when they want to check the information that they want to know, they could check it by their smartphone in anytime and any places. Thirdly, they could grasp the latest data. All the information will upload in the platform, which means police and media could grasp them include the latest information.

Benefits of government

Government is the dominant force in our country and our society, so it has rights to obtain all information and know the process of police and media. The first benefit is control the process of case. For example, when the country happened a new robbery case, government could check the detailed information about this case and know the process of solving this case by police, and when the police met a problem like lack of resources, government could bring some supports to police as soon as possible, and help the police. Secondly, government knows how to guide the action. Government is the central of power and authority, so when the country happened a new case, government always should play the important role in it like guiding the police and giving some suggestions to them.

Benefits of public

All communities should service the public and meet their demands, so public also have rights to use this platform. When they use this platform, they could check the basic information that they want to know like they want to know the news about murder case, they could search the key words in this platform and check all the basic information about the murder case. Then this platform ensures the public’s right to know the truth. In China, it has a law regulation that public has the right to know all the information. So this platform could ensure the public right and make them feel respected by the government, police and media. And this platform could make police and media receive the good reputation from public and obtain the public’s support. 

Benefits of police (compare with real platform)

Our team’s role is police, so we should focus the benefits that police could obtain from this virtual platform. And these benefits could not obtain from the real platform. Firstly, it is the quickly information sharing platform. Compared with real platform, virtual platform could quickly upload the newest information in this platform and quickly sharing this information. Secondly, media and police could mutual assistant with each other. By this platform, police and media will upload their information with the new case, which means police could use some useful information from media, and media could know which type of information will helpful to police. So it builds a mutual assistant and makes a good relationship with each other. Thirdly, it could save the police’s cost. Building this platform, police and media will share these costs about build this platform, so it could save the police’s cost compared with just the police build this platform. Fourthly, it could build the harmonious relation with public. Public will check the information that they want to know in this platform, and check some information uploaded by police. And the public could know the police’s detailed work and know the police spare no effort to solve the case. When public know these information, they will trust police and believe they service the public, and then public will support the police’s work. Fifthly, it could increase the cases-solving rate. From this platform, police collects all the useful information to solve the case and it could save their time and energy, and then improve their work efficiency. Sixthly, it could improve the policemen’s creativity. During the process of sharing information, police could know the journalists’ working style and thinking models. And when they discuss the information with media, they will share their own thoughts and learn something from others. Seventhly, it could improve police’s time management. Collecting all information by this platform, policemen could save their time and energy, which means they have more time and energy to arrange their other work and other tasks. And it will improve their ability to manage their own time.

Conclusion

Police forces across the world are hoping to develop a better relationship with media and police chief of NYPD has also tried to say the same thing in his interview with ABC news. We just need a proper platform to come together to find and share our ideas and common interests. A virtual data center is not only medium of information sharing or information protection module, rather it is a medium of collaboration and knowledge sharing using the beauty of technological advancement and above all it is the platform to provide best and most efficient service to mass level people.





References:

Liu, P., and Chetal, A., “Trust-based secure information sharing between federal government agencies”, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Volume 56, Issue 3, pages 283–298, February 2005.

Strader, T. J., Lin, F. R., and Shaw, M. J., “Information infrastructure for electronic virtual organization management”, Decision Support Systems, Volume 23, Issue 1, Pages 75–94, May 1998.

Malhotra, Y., “Knowledge management and virtual organizations”, Idea Group Publishing, 2000.

Siebdrat, F., Hoegl and M., Ernst, H., “How to manage virtual teams”, MITSloan Manahement Review, Volume 50, Number 4, Summer 2009

Handy, C., “Trust and the virtual organization”, Harvard Business Review, May-June 1995

Leenders, R. A. J., Engelen, J. M. L., and Kratzer, J, “Virtuality, communication, and new product team creativity: a social network perspective”, Journal of Engineering and Technology Management, Volume 20, Issues 1–2, Pages 69–92, June 2003

Venkatraman, N. and Henderson, J. C.,  “Real strategies for virtual organizing”, 1998

Carsten K. W. D. and Laurie R. W., “Task Versus Relationship Conflict, Team Performance, and Team Member Satisfaction: A Meta-Analysis”, 2003



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