Mike Young, of Decision Workshops, has just released a screencast explaining how to use confrontation analysis to analyze political confrontations. He uses the approach to model the current tensions in Bahrain.

The screencast makes extensive use of Decision Workshops’ proprietary Microsoft Excel-based modeling tool. More information on this tool can be obtained by contacting Decision Workshops directly.

Those interested in modeling their own confrontations may wish to consider our Confronteer iPhone app.

Publishing your data isn’t enough—consumers have to be able to find and use it.

The Open Knowledge Foundation has officially recognized this through its Frictionless Data initiative. They propose:

• simple formats (e.g. CSV, JSON)
• simple tooling—i.e. the ability to get data in and out of standard software packages, such as Excel, R and Hadoop.
• bootstrapping the system with essential data (e.g. countries, postal codes)

It’s early days, but the direction is encouraging.

General Sir David Richards, Britain’s most senior military officer recently published a reading list (of 90 books) for candidates to the UK’s Defence Academy.

I was interested to see books like “Blink” (instinctive decision-making) and “Thinking Fast and Slow” (behavioral decision-making) on the list. Maybe “Nudge” should be there too.

Also of note is General Sir Rupert Smith’s book “The Utility of Force”—Smith is a proponent of confrontation analysis.

However, in general, the list has a bit of an “MBA” feel to it. There’s lots of analysis, but very few original sources. I’d have expected a lot more texts that originate in different (non-Western) cultures. Even if one believes, as suggested in “The Dictator’s Handbook” (another omission), that all leaders are driven by their political survival, arguments are still cloaked in cultural history.

Still, these lists provoke debate. And that’s a good thing.

Another week, another embarrassing spreadsheet error. Two Harvard professors conceded that they made a spreadsheet “coding error” in analysis that formed the basis for their recent book.

James Kwak, in an article where he describes spreadsheet modeling problems at JPMorgan, said (of Excel)

Because it’s so easy to use, the creation of even important spreadsheets is not restricted to people who understand programming and do it in a methodical, well documented way.

For more spreadsheet disasters, have a look at the recent Fortune article titled “Damn Excel! How the ‘most important software application of all time’ is ruining the world”.

We’ve written about this before—and, sadly, probably will again.

Every organisation that’s abusing spreadsheets needs to clean house. Now.

Government open data initiatives, such as the US’ data.gov and the UK’ data.gov.uk are to be applauded, but there are still many challenges to be overcome. I’d like to outline three important ones.

What are the problems?

Open data is a bit like a hammer looking for a nail. There needs to be greater transparency about the problems facing government. Politicians are incentivized to present everything as rosy. This makes it more difficult for citizen developers to focus their resources for the greater good.

So, we need open problems—a list of what governments think is most pressing.

We need the right data

Once we’ve identified the problems, we need the ability to source the data that will help solve them. This isn’t necessarily the data that is already published. There needs to be a feedback loop where governments focus on publishing the data that will have the most impact—not just the data that they feel happy about publishing.

Real-time data feeds are required

Publishing data annually is imposing an archaic model on a new technology. Data could, and should, be published as it is collected. Everyone knows that the rate of change in society is accelerating. Without real-time data we’re, at best, solving last year’s problems.

So, open data is great. Let’s just try and get it right.