Shaping Network Society

legitimation moves through time

Yesterday, while I was giving my lecture at the Latin American E-Gov Summit, I noticed that the legitimation-question needs to be worked out more explicitly.

I was arguing that in network society the move from institutional legitimation to results-oriented legitimation changes our conception of our social worlds as much as the 16^th Century move from transcendental to immanent-institutional legitimation. And these macro-historical changes in the argumentative patterns explaining collectivity allow us to adapt our policy recommendations and political strategies.

That is quite a mouthful and needs to be disentangled. The following chart might help to clarify, what I was arguing:

It is important to realize that even though the concepts are exclusive in their thrust, they are not exclusive in our social worlds. Echos of transcendental legitimation still are part of our legitimation cultures (political families, cancer of society, heads of state), institutional legitimation explains most of our governance structure and our passports. However, in government, public administration, the private sector, and civil society we can observe the move to results-oriented legitimation.

03. October 2006 by Philipp
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Las políticas del código abierto: la revolución de la producción colectiva

Traducido por: Lic. Fernando Rojas Andrews

El concepto de software de código abierto puede ser definido de forma inocente como practicas de producción y desarrollo que promueven el acceso a los códigos fuentes de un producto. Sin embargo, este concepto tiene un radical y revolucionario potencial. Cuando enfrentamos este fenómeno, necesitamos preguntar de qué manera este se contrapone a nuestros paradigmas tradicionales de producción y como es que pueden ser utilizados por los actores interesados en la creación de valor público.

La forma tradicional de pensar en la creatividad es ver el concepto a través del lente de la propiedad intelectual. La metáfora de la propiedad para la producción intelectual nos permite asignar dueño a la ideas, para ingresar al vocabulario de la exclusión (territorial), y usar las imágenes de robo y piratería para describir cuando alguien ilegítimamente accede a los bit y bytes creados por otros. Esta forma de pensar nos limita con marcos conceptuales que en términos legales, políticos y sociales son discutidos actualmente. El código abierto es una reacción a estos marcos, utilizando esta perspectiva para transgredir la institución jurídica del derecho de copia con el “izquierdo de copia” “cualquiera que redistribuye el software, con o sin cambios, debe dar la libertad de copiarlo y modificarlo más. Copyleft [izquierdo de copia] garantiza que cada usuario tiene libertad” (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/copyleft.es.html).

La creatividad como una metáfora de la propiedad tiene ciertas incongruencias con aspectos de la producción intelectual, especialmente con los estándares. Los estándares son importantes porque permiten asignar signos arbitrarios (como lenguaje, sistema métrico o USB). Los estándares derivan de la efectividad de ser aceptado por una comunidad de usuarios y no de la creatividad del momento de un creativo (piense en las vías de tren que fueron creadas en base a la medida de una carreta jalada por burros de Newcastle en los principios del siglo XIX). Es por tanto que el valor de lo creado por un acuerdo colectivo se revierte en signos arbitrarios.

Y con esto la pregunta se vuelve meramente política. No estamos conformes con el reconocimiento a la propiedad intelectual de los políticos – ¿deberían Iturbide y Guerrero recibir los derechos de propiedad intelectual por establecer México? El reconocimiento a ciertos actos creativos como sujetos de propiedad basados en criterios arbitrarios presenta estándares que ahora se cuestionan.

En la nueva interrogante económica de establecer estándares se observa un movimiento hacia una idea centralista. Corporaciones y actores gubernamentales son presionados para abrir los estándares y así asegurar interoperabilidad, versatilidad de datos, y competitividad en los mercados de software. El código abierto una forma de producción que abre estándares y asegura que estos permanecerán abiertos, llevando la propiedad intelectual a las manos de la colectividad.

Pero el código abierto es más que abrir estándares. Es tan radical hasta el momento que describe un proceso de producción alternativo al mercado basado en la producción propietaria: los procesos de producción colectiva.

Cuando confrontamos una nueva forma de proveer y administrar nuestras vidas sociales, debemos ser escépticos. Recordemos bien el último cambio serio en el mercado base: el socialismo. Por lo que tenemos que preguntarnos que tan viable es el código abierto como modelo de producción y como impacta los modelos de negocios y en la creación del valor publico.

La viabilidad del código abierto depende de dos factores. Primero, ¿hay suficientes personas interesadas en trabajar durante su tiempo libre para resolver los problemas de otros para a su vez aprender a resolver un problema, o estos están inclinados a la producción colectiva? Segundo, ¿existen compañías privadas y actores gubernamentales interesados en aplicaciones de código abierto y en un ambiente de código abierto por razones estratégicas? La respuesta rápida es sí, sobre un X número de personas inmiscuidas que han invertido X numero de horas a los proyectos de código abierto en los últimos 5 años y con compañías como IBM, Sun, Red Hat, etc. que han invertido billones de dólares en proyectos. El debate del porque las personas y las compañías contribuyen sigue abierto, pero al parecer el aprendizaje, status y las razones estratégicas (junto con otros factores) lo explican.

Entonces, ¿deben los gobiernos apoyar activamente el desarrollo del código abierto, a través de regulación y mediante una adaptación de los hábitos, esto como consumidores de software? No hay una respuesta fácil para esto, y depende de que tanto creamos en el éxito de una política estatal de corte industrial. Para los actores gubernamentales la creación de un valor público recae en la creación de ecosistemas de software robustos que contribuyan a la salud económica de los estados.

Con la apertura del código de productos finales se logra un escrutinio público, el código abierto nos permite un acceso a algo ya creado lo que emociona a los pensadores que desean entender, mejorar y crear sobre esta base. Esto permite a quien sea, donde sea y cuando sea, el aprendizaje de las nuevas tecnologías y la participación en la creación de la punta de lanza de la producción colectiva.

La habilidad de copiar, modificar y redistribuir el código fuente sin pagar cambia la estructura del costo de los proyectos de software. Normalmente, costos de licencia forman gran parte del costo total de cualquier proyecto, esto dependiendo del costo de los salarios los que varias según cada país. En México, los costos de licencia tienen mayor representación en el costo total del proyecto que en Estados Unidos, así que el tradicional argumento de que las licencias tienen un costo insignificante no funciona aquí.

¿Y como esta tendencia al código abierto afectara a la industria del software mexicana? Hablando bruscamente las compañías de tecnología de la información que ganen dinero por costos de licencias como Microsoft,
perderán ingresos cuando el ecosistema sea primordialmente de código abierto y al mismo tiempo las compañías que ganan por servicios incrementaran su utilidad (asumiendo que el costo total de los proyectos sea similar).

Mediante un mayor apoyo al software de código abierto en México, las comunidades desarrolladoras que cuentan con acceso total a la tecnología serán adoptadas, el software se compartirá entres oficinas gubernamentales y el acceso a las fuentes de software necesario será asegurado.

¿Esto significa que los gobiernos deben apoyar el código abierto? Esta pregunta no puede ser resuelta en un nivel abstracto porque hay muchos factores a considerar, pero lo que se puede decir que ésta será una de las controversias políticas mas importantes que resolverá la sociedad de la información. Por lo tanto, es de suma importancia para los actores gubernamentales en México ser versados en las políticas (globales) del código abierto.

29. September 2006 by Philipp
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Transparency in Network Society: ¡Que Fashion!

The text reflects the discussion in a workshop called “Transparency in Network Society.” It was co-organized by the National Security Archive, EGAP-Tec de Monterrey, the Catedra Software AG, and the Nuevo Leon Transparency Commission. The idea for this seminar was born in a discussion Emilene Martinez from the National Security Archive and I had over a year ago.

Introduction

Why is the concept of transparency so fashionable today (and not 20, 200, or 2000 years ago)? Is it really democratization that is driving this trend or are there other conceptual transformations that lead us to put such an emphasis on the concept? If technology is part of why our world is transforming today, what is the relationship between technology and transparency and how do they interact as they transform our societies? Does this matter to Mexico or should we concentrate on implementing the most basic foundations of transparency?

This text will argue that as we are moving to network society as the mainstream legitimation of governance structures, the role of transparency to ensure accountability of network decision making is increasing. The topic is of utmost importance to Mexico, because even though in many parts the most fundamental principles for a functioning accountability system have not yet been implemented, network society does not wait for us to catch up.

What is network society and why should we take it seriously as a concept guiding social life?

Manuel Castells introduced the term network society to describe a society built around information technologies, time–space compression, post-Fordism, and the advance of finance capital. This society is characterized by networking, globalization, and the flexibility, individuality, and instability of work. Peters and Pierre argue that the dominant feature of the governance model is the argument that networks have come to dominate public policy (Peters and Pierre 1998). Thus, a fundamental change in how we conceptualize and govern social life is taking place. There are several important questions that need to be asked when confronted with such radical transformation in how we think about and participate in social life.

What is transparency? What is its background and possible role in network society?

Transparency is now seen as an essential condition for those participating in any social system, it secures that the rules of the game are fully understood by all participants. Generally, it ensures that the reasons behind the decisions made and any applicable regulations are clear to all, so that all are treated fairly. Normally, the concept is linked to a fully functional democracy; however, if we closely read the literature on democracy, it becomes clear that it is a concept that was introduced very late to the debate.

The first metaphorical or abstract use of transparency in a human context is found in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream almost 2000 years after the start of democratic theorizing: Transparent Helena, nature shewes art, That through thy bosome makes me see thy heart. And it took another 400 years until the concept was used to describe a fundamental principle of how social and political life should be structured. In the new network society, however, it becomes essential: a member might want to understand how a specific decision was reached to assure that the principle of consensus was not violated and why a specific standard was set in the way that it was. That is where transparency (and its little sister documentation) comes in, and explains why it has become so very fashionable in the last few years.

So what does this mean for Mexico?

Anybody concerned with the issue of transparency knows that there is only a limited amount of resources this country can spend on the issue. Anyone concerned with the issue needs to balance the work of building accountability systems and constructing a supportive culture inside the government and in civil society. Therefore, linking the concept to democratization and focusing on a basic level of responsibility and accountability in municipal, state, and federal government seems the most prudent thing to do. However, if we forget the network society roots of the concept and do not focus on building the accountability systems of tomorrow, we will never be able to bridge the digital divide.

Dr. Philipp Mueller (EGAP – Tec de Monterrey) philipp@itesm.mx

11. September 2006 by Philipp
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The Eight Principles of Governance in Network Society

Castells (1993 1–2)introduced the term network society to describe a society built on technologies of information technologies, time–space compression, post-Fordism, and the advance of finance capital, which is characterized by networking, globalization, and the flexibility, individuality, and instability of work. Peters and Pierre argue that the dominant feature of the governance model is the argument that networks have come to dominate public policy (Peters and Pierre 1998). So a fundamental change in how we conceptualize social life is taking place. In order to addres this type of fundamental change we need to focus on the metaphors shaping social life.

Metaphors in the social realm often remain relatively stable over time. For example, the metaphor of society as a body was the foundation of political thought from antiquity to the 17^th century, and still influences our thinking today (Livy 1998). Since then, the social contract metaphor has shaped the debate from Hobbes (1998) to Rawls (1971). With the beginning of the 21^st Century the network metaphor is emerging as an alternative to contract society. However, we are not yet fully immersed in it. To understand how it will structure social life, we can analyze its grammar. This can be done by analyzing its main grammatical principles, guiding how we imagine social and political life.

The Technology Principle:

Network Society is mediated through technology.

The precondition for any network society is technology. Only with technologies (even though they can be as unsophisticated as mail or the telegraph) can we imagine networks that bridge space-and-time. This means that the CIO is moved to center-stage as the manager of the network.

The Choice Principle:

Any network participant chooses to participate or to leave at any point in time.

The most radical departure from our understanding of collectivities as naturally given or contracted before the beginning of time is the paradigm of choice. Network members choose to become members, to contribute, and to leave at any time. Think of instantiations of network society on the internet and beyond, such as the Smallworld, OpenBC, MSN-Messenger, Skype, the Linux-Kernel-Team, to imagine the future of political life. The governmental CIO will have to guide policy on what type of social software to offer to potential network-participants.

The Consensus Principle:

Decisions in choice-communities are made by consensus.

Because of the ability of network participants to leave at any time, decisions need to be made by consensus. This does not mean that there is no hierarchy. Consensus is not Unanimity. Unanimity means that everybody agrees, consensus means that no-one disagrees. The distinction is not merely semantic, and in practical life it makes a huge difference: a decision is taken without a vote, but giving every participant the right to disagree (consensus), is fundamentally different from a world where everybody must explicitly agree to everything (unanimity). Consensus also does not mean equality between the participants. It just means that a project is pushed forward and participants are not disgruntled enough to leave (known as forking in Linux terms). This type of decision-making comes natural to CIOs, however,

The Scale and Network Effects Principle:

Network effects are the glue of network society.

One might question, however, how a community based on choice and consensus might scale up to real political communities. This is where network effects as the glue of network society come in. The network effect causes a community to value a potential member dependent on the number of members already participating. Metcalfe’s law states that the total value of a community possessing a network effect is roughly proportional to the square of the number of existing community members. Therefore, joining a network benefits others who have joined before – the classic example is that by purchasing a telephone a person makes other telephones more useful. This type of effect in a transaction is known as an externality in economics, and externalities arising from network effects are known as network externalities. Network effects make it very difficult for members to leave, because the community value lies in the interconnections to the other members. However, that is not the only glue holding networks together.

The Path Dependency Principle:

Path dependency makes it costly for us to exercise choice and leave any given network.

Path dependency is the simple but important concept that change in a society depends on its own past. Think of the impact of the Mexican revolution on policy-making today or the QWERTY keyboard, which would not be in use now except it happened to be chosen a hundred years ago. Once we invest in technologies (or practices), moving to something completely different becomes very expensive.

The Transparency Principle:

Transparency takes the role of democracy as the standard against which any governance situation is evaluated.

In network society, a member might want to understand how a specific decision was reached to assure that the principle of consensus was not violated and why a specific standard was set in the way that it was. That is where transparency (and its little sister documentation) comes in, and explains why it has become so very fashionable in the last few years. We often link transparency to democracy, however, if we look closely at academic writing through time, nobody really talked about transparency before network society.

The Reflexive Governance Principle:

The term governance assumes that the right of any participant in any decision-making situation needs to be reflected at all times.

The first documented use of the term governance was by Wyclif in 1386, “ is stiward..faili in governaunce of e Chirche.” (Sel. Wks. III. 346). His usage of governance as the action or manner of governing introduces the concept as a fairly neutral critical instrument to compare and evaluate different forms of governing.

It is interesting to see how this concept has not played an important role outside of the Anglo-Saxon world until the end of the 20^th Century. For 600 years languages like Spanish or German happily ignored it. In Spanish, the word most commonly used to describe questions of how we can govern in the transforming world is gobernabilidad and in German it is Steuerung or steering. These terms are not grammatical or conceptual equivalents to the English term governance. In 2000, finally the Real Academia (2005) included governance [gobernanza] into the Spanish language, with both the old English meaning and the second meaning which describes the move from government to governance, including alternative political actors, like this:

Arte o manera de gobernar que se propone como objetivo el logro de un desarrollo económico, social e institucional duradero, promoviendo un sano equilibrio entre el Estado, la sociedad civil y el mercado de la economía

This definition exemplifies the move from Governing to Governance in network society (Peters and Pierre 2000, Castells 1999). The concept of governance automatically foregrounds the question of how an aspect of social life should be governed, superseding the modern idea that the state is solely responsible for the administration of the public. It forces us to reflect on how social life can or should be organized.

The Outcome Legitimacy Principle:

The legitimacy of a policy that aims to create public value is derived from the public value created (as defined by its stakeholders)

In contract society the legitimacy of any policy was derived by the institutional legitimation of the actor that was pursuing it. In order to question the legitimacy of any act, one asked, is actor x endowed with the legal right to pursue the policy y? In network society, this becomes irrelevant. The question is transformed into, did policy y have an actual public value creating impact? Which of course leads to the meta-question of, who gets to decide that a public value has been created? This is not trivial and the network society term of stakeholder hides more than it enlightens.

These eight principles describe the grammar of network society and outline the framework in which policy-making is and will be taking place.

11. September 2006 by Philipp
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today in Mexico City we were thinking about the future…(here my memo, uncut, uncensored)

From: Dr. Philipp Mueller (EGAP – Tec de Monterrey, Catedra Software AG)[1]

To: Participants of the Workshop “Prospectiva del Gobierno Electrónico” of Función Publica

Digital Era Governance: Policy Making in Network Society

The world is changing radically. We are moving from modern contract society (1700-2000) to network society (2100s). Digital-Era Governance is becoming the most important policy field, necessary for all other policy areas (development, security, welfare). The new president will have the chance to shape digital-era governance policy. What are the main opportunities and challenges for the next Mexican President?

Four radical challenges (and opportunities)

1. Implementing Citizen-Focused Government. Taking Citizen Relationship Management (CiRM) seriously will lead to the reengineering of almost all governmental processes that affect the citizens, will break down governmental silos to make cross-agency cooperation possible, will lead to a massive deployment of CRM-software, and will change how we think of the state. At the avant-garde are cities like NYC, Chicago, with the implementation of 311-numbers and citizen contact centers. No Federal government worldwide has implemented a pure CiRM-approach.

à Federal government should foster municipal and state initiatives and develop its own approaches.

2. Fostering a robust and diverse software development ecosystem. Government as a major buyer of IT-products and services can impact the IT-industry structure and (best) practices. There are many issues where governments might want to push for open source solutions for security, cost, or industrial policy reasons.

à It will be necessary to develop an explicit open source policy.

3. Developing an explicit federal policy on public internet access projects such as municipal wireless or the MIT one-laptop-per-child project. In the next years WiMax deployment, other access technologies, and hardware developments will radically change the internet provision landscape and new ways to bridge the digital divide will become possible.

à Develop explicit public internet access policy and think about joining the OLPC-Initiative.

4. Move the Mexican Nation online. I am referring to the nation not the state. With the Web 2.0 revolution social software (online communities such as myspace, secondlife, linkedin, etc.) are becoming mainstream. Most of us spend most of our lifes online even today. Mexico is already a network society with more than 10% of the population living outside of Mexico.

à Find a way of developing or using online platforms that will be taken up by the Mexican nation.

For more information and to discuss the points, please send me an email: philipp@itesm.mx!

31. August 2006 by Philipp
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Do you speak Good Governance?

At the dinner table last night, in a beautiful house overlooking the grand Mexican Flag on Cerro del Opispado, I sensed a sadness that I had not felt since discussions with Central and Eastern European policy makers around our very similar dinner table in Munich, Germany in the early 1990s. Our hosts here in Monterrey were arguing that for more than 20 years, they had hoped that if the vote would matter, if democracy would arrive, everything would change. And now six years later, they were still fighting their battles for integrity and honesty, and they did not feel that the country was moving forward, as they voiced their frustration that the country was not governed well.

When I ask my students at the Graduate School for Public Administration and Public Policy what governance means in Spanish, most answer with gobernabilidad. When I tell them that I prefer to say gobernanza, they laugh out loud at my Spanish.

Gobernanza (Governance) as a concept is not commonly employed in Spanish. It was first used in England in 1380 by John Wycliff, the reformer and bible translator, as a concept that allows us to compare different ways of governing.

For 600 years languages like Spanish or German could happily ignore this concept. However, in the last years word has become fashionable, mainly for three reasons. Governments are loosing the capability to take decisions for their populations as alternative actors (business, civil society) are taking up governmental functions, are “doing governance”, globalization has led to us to call for global governance (not global government), and the move towards a customer orientation in public administration has empowered the voices calling for good governance.

As we are expecting a new administration in office in December, the following seven principles can be used to hold any politician, public administrator, and other actors involved in public life accountable.

Rule of law: A society needs to implement the rule of law. This means that the law is above any individual actor or group, even the most powerful. The law must be equally valid for all members of the society. The legal system must provide justice and equal treatment for all groups and individuals of the society. This includes the observation of human rights.

Functions of the state: The state must have a monopoly over the legitimate use of force in society and guarantee the enforcement of its laws. The state must also offer a political process that guarantees the participation of all members of its society through some type of representative process, and ensure that its checks and balances work properly. Beyond these functions, the state is an institution that must work to maximize the benefits of all of its members.

Securing fair competition: In order to make market economies work efficiently, an effective economic framework is required. The state has to assure that contracts are enforced (which requires an efficient legal and juridical system), a stable currency (which requires consistent monetary policy and well-regulated financial markets), and that fair competition is guaranteed (which requires antitrust legislation, consumer protection legislation, intellectual property legislation).

Internalization of external effects: The state is responsible for minimizing the negative side effects of production. If a producer is able to shift the costs of environmental pollution to the public, this externalization has the effect of an (undesired) subsidy to the producer and regulatory intervention is necessary.

Public goods: Good governance requires the state to provide public goods which, by definition, are not provided by a market, such as internal and external security (police/military), a basic infrastructure for transportation and communication, the preservation of the society’s cultural heritage, basic education, and a social policy that guarantees residents a minimum income and health care. Although the quality and quantity of public goods depends on the economic wealth and foundational philosophy of a society, without these goods a successful society cannot exist.

Education: The state has the responsibility to make optimal use of the intellectual resources of its society. This includes giving all children access to affordable education according to their abilities and protecting them from exploitation for short term gains, thereby securing a society’s longer term investment in adequate education.

Regional integration and global compatibility: In a globalizing world, economies and societies cannot exist self-sufficiently. Therefore, they need to make themselves more compatible to other societies by adhering to global economic and social standards and integrating into larger markets. This requires a state structure that can guarantee fair domestic competition even against powerful external investors. Regional integration is not merely about issues such as reduction of custom rates; it should focus on the harmonization of legal rules and standards in order to create viable markets and on accords with neighbors centering on the provision of regional public goods (security, water, environment, etc.).

Implementing good governance will have a greater impact on the success or failure of Mexico than any Mexican President or party. And it is time that Mexico’s citizens hold all political leaders, all public administrators, and private sector actors that impact public life accountable to the seven principles of good governance. With Central and Eastern Europeans from countries that have adhered to these principles, we have had much happier conversations around the dinner table in 2006 than in 1993 – let us hope for the same in Mexico in 2007.

—————————————-

gobernanza

1. f. Arte o manera de gobernar que se propone como objetivo el logro de un desarrollo económico, social e institucional duradero, promoviendo un sano equilibrio entre el Estado, la sociedad civil y el mercado de la economía.

2. f. ant. Acción y efecto de gobernar o gobernarse.

Real Academia Española © Todos los derechos reservados

25. August 2006 by Philipp
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The Radical Potential of Open Source

Open source can be innocently defined as practices in production and development that promote access to the end product’s sources. However, this concept has radical and disruptive potential. This potential comes from freeing the access to the production process. If production in the modern sense was done in-house, based on a proprietary perspective, with the advent of customer relationship management, we have moved to co-production, still under the control of the firm. But with open sourcing we are moving to peer production, the opening of the process to anyone, anywhere, anytime. Open Source Software has become an interesting object of analysis for scholars interested in governance for the following reasons:

1. It is conceptually challenging to understand how communities of code producers, service providers, and end users sustain open source software eco-systems (political theory of open source).
2. It is interesting to see how activists and governments criticizing main stream politico-economic thinking have been utilizing open source as examples for alternative modes of social life (the Brazilian Model).
3. It is interesting how main stream thinking is adapting the logic of open source software. Several Fortune 500 companies are building their business model around the open source method (the IBM Approach).It is interesting to analyze how entities threatened by the approach react to open source software (Microsoft).
4. It is interesting to see how open source fights into specific governance requirements such as democratic accountability and transparency (transparency and open source).

When confronted with such a new phenomenon, we need to ask the critical questions of how it confronts our traditional understandings of production and how it can be utilized to create public value. In the new information economy the question of establishing standards moves to the center. Corporate and governmental actors are calling for open standards to ensure interoperability, data integrity, and competitive software markets. Open source is but one way of producing such open standards and assuring that they will remain open, by placing the intellectual property into the hands of a collectivity. But open source is more than open standards. It is radical insofar that it describes an alternative production process to market-based proprietary production: the process of peer production. Whenever we are confronted with a new way of providing for and managing our social lives, we should be skeptical. We remember well the last serious challenge to market based proprietary production: socialism. So we need to ask how viable open source is as a mode of production, how it impacts business models, and how it impacts public value creation.

The viability of the open source model depends on two factors. First, are there enough people interested in working to solve challenging problems in their free time because they want to learn from each other, need to solve a problem, or are ideologically inclined to peer production? Second, are there private companies and governmental actors that are interested in open source applications and an open source ecosystem for strategic reasons? The quick answer to both questions is yes – over X persons have contributed X hours to open source projects in the last 5 years and companies such as IBM, Sun, Red Hat, etc. have invested billions of dollars into open source projects. The debate about why people and companies contribute is still open, but it seems that learning, status, challenge, and strategic reasons (among other factors) seem to explain it.

So should governments actively support the development of open source, through regulation and through adapting their habits as buyers of software? There is no easy answer to that, and it depends on whether we generally believe that industrial policy can be successful. For governmental actors, creation of public value lies in creating robust software ecosystems that contribute to the economic health of their countries.

By opening the source of an end product to scrutiny, open source allows us access to how something is built, which is exciting to the tinkerers that want to understand, improve, and build on something. This allows anybody, anywhere, and anytime to learn about the newest technologies and to participate in cutting-edge peer production of software.

The ability to copy, modify, and redistribute the source code without paying royalties or fees changes the cost structure of software projects. Currently, licensing costs make up a substantial cost of any project, depending on the costs of service which are correlated to labor costs of a country. In Mexico, license costs make up a larger part of software projects than in the United States, so the traditional counter-argument that licensing costs are a negligible cost of a software project is not applicable here.

And how would a bias towards open source impact Mexico’s software industry? Roughly speaking, IT companies that earn their money from licensing fees, such as Microsoft, will lose revenues when the software ecosystem goes open source and software companies that earn their money from services, such as IBM, will gain (assuming that total costs of the projects will be similar).

By supporting open source a bigger proportion of software spending is kept in Mexico, communities of developers that have full access to technologies are fostered, software can be shared across governmental agencies, and access to the sources of mission-critical software for governments is assured.

Does this mean the government should go open source? This question cannot be answered on this abstract level because there are too many factors to consider, but what can be said is that this will be one of the most important political questions faced by the information society. Thus, it is of utmost importance for governmental actors in Mexico to be well-versed in the (global) politics of open sourc

08. August 2006 by Philipp
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Citizen Relationship Management (CiRM)

Next week, we will be organizing a workshop on Citizen Relationship Management (CiRM) together with CIAPEM, the Catedra Software AG, and MAP-EGAP. I think it will be an exciting event, because it combines tough questions of political theory, “how can we best organize social life?” with questions of public management, “how can we organize governmental processes around the citizen?” and technology, “how can we integrate CRM-software, legacy systems, etc. to make CiRM possible?” It will be a good mix of participants from government, business, and academia. If you are interested – send me an email.

07. August 2006 by Philipp
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Digital-Era Governance

Patrick Dunleavy (LSE), Helen Margetts (Oxford Internet Insitute), and Simon Bastow/Jane Tinker (LSE) have written a seminal piece in J-PART: New Public Management is Dead — Long Live Digital-Era Governance describing the developments in “leading-edge” countries (UK, US, Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Japan).

They argue that the main drivers of New Public Management (NPM), disaggregation, competition, and incentivization have not achieved what they promised and that Digital-era Governance (DEG) is described by three trends (p. 480):

a. Reintegration — the key opportunities for exploiting digital-era technology opportunities lie in putting back together many of the elements that NPM separated out into discrete corporate hierarchies, offloading onto citizens and other civil society actors the burden of integrating public services into usable packages.

b. Needs-based holism — In contrast to the narrow, joined-up-governance changes included in the reintegration them, holistic reforms seek to simplify and change the entire relationship between agencies and their clients. The task of creating larger and more encompassing administrative blocs is linked with “end to end” reengineering of processes, stripping out unnecessary steps, compliance costs, checks, and forms.

c. Digitization changes, broadly construed — To realize contemporary productivity gains from IT and related organizational changes requires a far more fundamental take-up of the opportunities opened up by a transition to fully digital operations. Visit sites like https://privacera.com/blog/data-governance-101-what-it-is-and-why-its-critical-to-your-business/ to know more about data governance.

I agree fully with their critique of NPM, however, believe that they underestimate the radical transformative potential of technology on public administration, which they dismiss by referring to such arguments as Sysadmin-utopia or IT-industry driven scenarios. Let me argue three trends that will transform governance more dramatically than anything that NPM or DEG have even conceptualized:

1. Open source and peer production are the first serious challenge to our monetarized market-based system since socialism.
2. The public sector equivalents of Platforms for interaction (think myspace, secondlife, openbc, etc.) will change citizen’s and governmental interactions as radically than the introduction of general voting.
3. Ubiquitous free access (municipal wireless) also has the chance to create new worlds, services, businesses.

When these three trends will have worked their way through public administration, not much will be left of governance as we know of it now. Speaking with Peterlicht…

04. August 2006 by Philipp
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governance in network society

On Monday, I was in Mexico City, invited by Lourdes (the president of CIAPEM) to a workshop on governing by network. Bill Eggers was doing the presentation on his book governing by network, which is a great introduction into the challenges and opportunities of postmodern governance.

It was amazing that more than 100 government officials showed up and that our food was stuck in AMLO-induced traffic (or so they said in the end they fed us BigMacs).

At the event I noticed that whenever we talk about networks in public administration there is a confusion how we use the term. Three different meanings come to mind:

a. Lifeworld Networks: In our lifeworlds the network vocabulary comes very close to what we experience day-to-day. We do have the feeling that with MSN, MySpace, Secondlife, OpenBC, or LinkedIn our social networks are being augmented, but not substantially transformed.

b. Network Society: This concept describes the radical transformation of how societies understand and legitimize themselves as collectivities. Castells speaks about the move from “space of place” (territory) to a “space of flows” (cyberspace), I refer to the move from Hobbesian “contract society” to today’s “network society.”

c. Public Value Networks: This is what Bill Eggers was talking about, the question of (if we assume that a transformation to network society is actually taking place) how can we design networks that allow us to create public value effectively and efficiently and achieve accountability (through transparency).

One of the questions Bill and I were debating in the break, was if a specific prior structure of the society would be necessary to implement public value networks. I think two things are necessary, (a) a broad appreciation of network society as the base metaphor for social and political life, and (b) a shared work culture of creating public value through networks.

Now, what does that mean for Mexico? After talking to many public officials on all levels, it seems that much of the frustration voiced by public officials is a frustration with hierarchies and a missing focus on outcomes. If that is the case, there should be surprising pent-up energy that could be channeled by policy entrepreneurs implementing public value networks.

Where in governements should we expect those policy entrepreneurs to come from? From talking to very few public officials, my hunch is they will come from the IT-departments. Governmental CIOs are taking more public roles today, they are designing the technological infrastructures, network-centric thinking comes natural to them, so expect them to come out of the basement…

04. August 2006 by Philipp
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