Author of machiavelli.net, proud father of three, interested in shaping network society. Welcome to my blog.The Power of WordPress
I am starting to understand, how people felt, when they first were confronted with the Model T, the word processor, desktop publishing, or the world-wide-web as I am starting to look under the hood of my blogging software. At the moment we are preparing the site for the Center of Public Management and Governance (www.cpmg.eu) and figuring out how possible it is to create a “Boing-Boing” for the community of people who care about the transformations that public value creation is undergoing at the moment, is mind-blowing. Now WordPress (integrated with twitter, facebook, xing, etc.) offers only the condition of possibility to do it, but if you join us, we can create a platform that will make a difference in global public policy.
The Vocabulary of Open Government
Our understanding of open government and transparency is slowly becoming more sophisticated. And whoever learns first, will have an advantage, so take Ed Felten’s latest advice by heart: Outreach is not transparency.
Here’s the difference: outreach means government telling us what it wants us to hear; transparency means giving us the information that we, the citizens, want to get. An ideal government provides both outreach and transparency. Outreach lets officials share their knowledge about what is happening, and it lets them argue for particular policy choices — both of which are good. Transparency keeps government honest and responsive by helping us know what government is doing.
Twitter, with its one-way transmission of 140-character messages, may be useful for outreach, but it won’t give us transparency. So, Congressmembers: Thanks for Twittering, but please don’t forget about transparency.
A New Kind of Search
No matter the merits of the announcement, the argument is sufficiently interesting to be re-stated. Stephan Wolfram of Mathematica fame has just announced another contender to how we organize human knowledge. His approach is based on his thinking in A New Kind of Knowledge (2002) and Mathematica.He argues:
(a) all/most knowledge today is digitally available, however, we are not able to question and do stuff with it [compute it].
[
(b) there is hope that by semantically tagging it, this could be achieved. Stephan Wolfram does not believe so [think anything from delic.io.us to twitter].
(c) A new kind of science reminds us that instead of reverse engineering our theories from observation, we should simply enumerate systems and then try to match them to the behaviors we observe [build the world from simple automata].
(d) This means we can model the data relationships that we have available to create knowledge.
(e) However, data is not data, therefore, it is necessary to curate the data [have experts decide on what matters].
(f) Assuming this works, we have created an intelligent system, but how do we interact with it?
(g) Humans use natural languages, so we would need to get the system to answer “real questions.”
Clearly, an amazing project – we will see in May how well it does on all seven points. And there is more than just epistemology involved, this is about political theory too… :) Let us see how google responds..
Ed Felten’s Invisible Hand
…just in case you have not yet read it, but are interested in the relationship between transparency, technology, and public policy do read Government Data and the Invisible Hand by Ed Felten and friends (Yale Journal of Law & Technology, Vol. 11, p. 160, 2009).The full text is available at the Social Science Research Network.
If the next Presidential administration really wants to embrace the potential of Internet-enabled government transparency, it should follow a counter-intuitive but ultimately compelling strategy: reduce the federal role in presenting important government information to citizens. Today, government bodies consider their own websites to be a higher priority than technical infrastructures that open up their data for others to use. We argue that this understanding is a mistake. It would be preferable for government to understand providing reusable data, rather than providing websites, as the core of its online publishing responsibility.
Rather than struggling, as it currently does, to design sites that meet each end-user need, we argue that the executive branch should focus on creating a simple, reliable and publicly accessible infrastructure that exposes the underlying data. Private actors, either nonprofit or commercial, are better suited to deliver government information to citizens and can constantly create and reshape the tools individuals use to find and leverage public data. The best way to ensure that the government allows private parties to compete on equal terms in the provision of government data is to require that federal websites themselves use the same open systems for accessing the underlying data as they make available to the public at large.
Vivek Kundra does no Evil
Vivek Kundra, the new CIO (not CTO) of the Obama adminstration is a big fan of SaaS (Software as a Service), Web 2.0, etc. He is famous for having moved the DC Government to Gmail. Maybe it is time to more closely look at the political theory of google…
I report, you report, CNN reports
watching CNN in my hotel rooms in Mexico and at airports worldwide, I was confronted again and again with I-Report, a website for user generated reporting where the ultimate price is being presented on CNN. It took 9 years since the launching of Indymedia, but now the first reflex when a news breaks is to corroborate it on Twitter, and CNN has become comfortable with these feeds and sees its role in vetting and managing information across platforms.
A Divine Comedy
I am sitting in Atlanta’s Airport on my way to Cancun, for an infrastructure/network industries event, coming from the three most amazing days of skiing in Chamonix (Max learned to ski and Helena became a pro) and am in technological limbo: I cannot access my email and my cellphone is not working. Not sure which terrace of purgatory corresponds to this feeling (it does allow me to blog and to twitter).
Search, Discovery, and Mining the Global Thought Stream (Real-Time Mindreading)
For the longest time, there has been a debate, about what is the next big challenge on the way to “augmented reality” after search. Logically, it should be discovery, but somehow sites like Stumbleupon have not hit the main stream. Over the last year the buzz around twitter has grown stronger and Erick Schonfeld argues on Techcrunch that we are moving into a world, where we can mine the “thought stream” of the world:
What if you could peer into the thoughts of millions of people as they were thinking those thoughts or shortly thereafter? And what if all of these thoughts were immediately available in a database that could be mined easily to tell you what people both individually and in aggregate are thinking right nowabout any imaginable subject or event? Well, then you’d have a different kind of search engine altogether. A real-time search engine. A what’s-happening-right-now search engine.
Translated into the frameworks of the venture capitalists, Twitter is an interesting proposition, because it is:
- Open. That makes it easy for others to build on top of Twitter and it also makes it searchable.
- Real time. It is a huge database of what is happening right now.
- Ubiquitous. You can get to it from just about any device.
- Scalable. (Don’t laugh)
- Persistent. It allows for an archive of what is happening and what has happened, which is searchable (see No. 1).
Open Government and the TPC Framework
About 10 days ago, Barak Obama published the following memo. It is a must-read. His TPC Framework (transparency, participation, collaboration) reminds us that the three need to play together if we want to make networked governance work.
MEMORANDUM FOR THE HEADS OF EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENTS AND AGENCIES
SUBJECT:     Transparency and Open GovernmentMy Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.Government should be transparent.  Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing.  Information maintained by the Federal Government is a national asset. My Administration will take appropriate action, consistent with law and policy, to disclose information rapidly in forms that the public can readily find and use. Executive departments and agencies should harness new technologies to put information about their operations and decisions online and readily available to the public. Executive departments and agencies should also solicit public feedback to identify information of greatest use to the public.Government should be participatory. Public engagement enhances the Government’s effectiveness and improves the quality of its decisions. Knowledge is widely dispersed in society, and public officials benefit from having access to that dispersed knowledge. Executive departments and agencies should offer Americans increased opportunities to participate in policymaking and to provide their Government with the benefits of their collective expertise and information. Executive departments and agencies should also solicit public input on how we can increase and improve opportunities for public participation in Government.Government should be collaborative.  Collaboration actively engages Americans in the work of their Government. Executive departments and agencies should use innovative tools, methods, and systems to cooperate among themselves, across all levels of Government, and with nonprofit organizations, businesses, and individuals in the private sector.  Executive departments and agencies should solicit public feedback to assess and improve their level of collaboration and to identify new opportunities for cooperation.I direct the Chief Technology Officer, in coordination with the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Administrator of General Services, to coordinate the development by appropriate executive departments and agencies, within 120 days, of recommendations for an Open Government Directive, to be issued by the Director of OMB, that instructs executive departments and agencies to take specific actions implementing the principles set forth in this memorandum. The independent agencies should comply with the Open Government Directive.This memorandum is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by a party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.This memorandum shall be published in the Federal Register.BARACK OBAMA
Read-Write-Government
In 2009, governmental agencies I am working with are waking up to the power of collaborative public policy making. In Austria, the U.S., Mexico, and Colombia, officials are calling back and actually thinking about implementing specific projects. The sophistication of the debate about www.change.gov and its opinion aggregation mechanisms and self-censorship show that we are moving to the next stage. Political theory, however, is still underdeveloped. Cass Sunstein’s Infotopia is a good place to start. Or Jerry Mechling’s last email (he is the technology governance sage/Cassandra at the Kennedy School):
For years, the largely unspoken but hard part of IT success in government has been building an effective coalition between CEOs and CIOs.
In far too many settings, the CEO:CIO relationship has faced severe problems.
CEOs have typically been suspicious that IT was either not important or not important for them: projects took too long, were risky, and were largely invisible to the public. Governors, Mayors, and Department Heads shied away.
For their part, CIOs have been frustrated that CEOs have either ignored IT or thought it was a “silver bullet.” In both cases the CEOs failed to step up to their role in making change happen.
When success did emerge, it focused most often on Internet-delivered services. In this work the CIOs and vendors were comfortable extending the required network infrastructure. And CEOs found that “anytime, anywhere” service was something very nice to offer — relatively quick, easy, and visible. “Online, not in line” was a good battle cry.
But where do we go next? Economic conditions are awful. And online services are old hat.
True? but we also have powerful new tools and possibilities to explore. The key will be continuing to improve the relationship between government and citizens/clients — moving beyond service delivery to the more interactive and powerful challenges of civic engagement.
On this front the Obama campaign has raised the most visible exemplars and hopes. Where campaigns a few years ago used technology only as a device for mass communication and donor lists, today’s Web 2.0 tools have enabled massive peer-to-peer interactions. Blogs, wikis, social networking, and other tools have dramatically reduced the costs of engagement. Instead of requiring volunteers to devote 3 hours for an evening at headquarters, campaigns can now use networks to support a variety of useful “5 minute” activities to entice people in. With videos, blogs, and other applications serving up-to-the-minute information, campaigns can challenge potential supporters not just to donate funds, but to donate initially small amounts of creativity and energy to, as the Obama campaign has urged:
- Create your own profile
- Find supporters near you
- Plan and attend events
- Network with your friends
- Become a fundraiser
- Write your own blog
The results for the Obama campaign were miraculous.
Our challenge now will be seeing how the new organizational approaches can migrate from campaigns to governance. Can lower barriers to engagement produce dramatically better results? The Obama administration will clearly try to make such a strategy work. Others will be watching and trying to make it work for their own campaigns, political and otherwise.
As argued in a recent blog, the next phase in government may see the rise of the “Goverati” — i.e., those knowledgeable about government and skilled in the social networking needed for a more transparent, participatory, and collaborative politics.
The move to civic engagement won’t be as easy as “online, not in line,” but it could be very interesting indeed.
All the best,
Jerry
P.S. We’ll be exploring civic engagement and other routes forward in our workshop April 14-16 in Cambridge. To join us click here.
