Author of machiavelli.net, proud father of three, interested in shaping network society. Welcome to my blog.…and then Machiavelli suggested opengov and radical transparency
Alex Schellong and I wrote down a longer conversation we have been having over the years and published it in the Harvard International Review:
The evolution of modern society is marked by continuous rise of government size, obligations and market interactions. According to Juergen Habermas, the expansion of the state into more and more private affairs led to a slow demise of the public debates over ideas and conflicts—the expression varying with context, history, and technology. Citizen-government interaction is reduced to election periods, interest groups and media-spin.
However, there was opposition to this development. Henry David Thoreau argued in his essay “Civil Disobedience” in the late 18th century, “government is best which governs least.” It implies a government reduced to the minimum in size accountable to its people. Because American government in the 18th century was already on its way to assemble the contrary, Thoreau suggested that if as many people as possible join peaceful protests, their actions would “clog the machinery of the state”, eventually leading to change. However, he did not succeed. And over the next 200 years, the state developed as the most successful organization form, an “imagined community” that structured the lives of most people on this planet. Today, however, with the advent of new network-based social platforms, Thoreau might have been more successful with his attempt to let his voice be heard and activate others for his cause.
In the 21st Century the ‘network’ has transcended the academic context and entered the wider field of the political discourse. Policy networks, networked governance, peer production, massive collaboration, open government, and radical transparency have become part of our political vocabulary that we rely on to legitimize why and how we act collectively. With web technologies and social media, such as interchangeable data-formats, wikis, transparency, and social networking, network society has become part of the mainstream global public policy discourse.
The early 21st Century evoke a Machiavellian time—a time when new technologies and new forms of thinking and governance emerged. So, if we are living in times of transformative change, where Internet technologies and an understanding of society as a network of inclusive, some-how like-minded, outcome-oriented, collaborators emerges we need to ask, what the logic of network society is, to be able to explain our world and predict future developments. Dave Clark, one of the original architects of the Internet, argued in 1971: We reject: kings, presidents and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code…
Read more on Macchiavelli 2.0 – Fundamentals of Network Society at the Harvard International Review.
When in doubt, move to the meta level
Martin Reeves and his team at the Boston Consulting Group Strategy Institute have been working hard to regain BCG’s position as the world’s foremost strategic thinkers. A tough nut to crack in a time of uncertainty (world economic crisis) and a time of radical transformation (moving from contract to network society).
If strategy is about optimizing choice in situations of strategic interdependence, how do you strategize in and against constantly changing environments? In New Bases of Competitive Advantage, they came up with the concept of adaptive advantage which addresses the challenge by taking strategy to the meta level:
We believe that companies can renew and sharpen their quest for sustainable competitive advantage by pursuing adaptive advantage. Organizations with adaptive advantage recognize the unpredictability of today’s environment and the limits of deductive analysis. They seek to develop the most favorable organizational context in which new approaches to new problems can continually emerge. Adaptive advantage thus enables them to unite reflection with execution and to balance deduction with experimentation.
The meta strategies they outline are: Signal Advantage (detect, capture, and exploit pattern advantage), Systems Advantage (Shape and manage business systems for advantage), People Advantage (leverage human resources beyond the firms boundaries), Social Advantage (leverage new social and ecological expectations for advantage), and Simulation Advantage (simulate for advantage). Read up on their ideas and reflect and discuss what they might mean for your business, brand, and lifeworld.
Whither the Book?
over the last 20 years, we have internalized Marshall McLuhan’s insight “the medium is the message:” whenever somebody comes up with something, we jump on the bandwagon and reduce our thinking to 140-character-aphorisms, even as, cultural critics are lamenting the demise of traditional media such the newspaper or the pop album, and the demise of the occident more generally.
The media-realists in us know that function follows form and that the media industries need to adapt. It has become conventional wisdom that if new media allow for disruptive modes of production, discovery, search, or distribution and existing media will wither away. Friedrich Kittler developed the framework to reflect this interrelationship between modes of production and text in his seminal work, Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900 (Discourse Networks1800/1900). In later texts he predicts that in network society all forms of texting will converge into a general repository of knowledge. But will that happen?
Even as the google books settlement is making its way through the courts and the Ipad is seen as the savior technology for media industries in general there is a certain discursive silence about the withering away of the book, our all-time favorite medium:
Book writing and reading is special. Even bloggers admit to writing just to get the potential book deal. So we need to think the book not as a physical thing, but as a an event. Our respect of the “platonic” idea of a book forces to slow down our thinking to a level where we actually reflect on what we write, when we write. And reading a book is about as close to experiencing flying in second life.
Therefore, it is time to re-brand books as experiences not hold on to the idea of books as products of the “Gutenberg Galaxy.” This change of perspective will allow us to think in terms of unconventional business models. And Ludwig Wittgenstein’s idea of family resemblance (there is not one attribute that you find in all games or metaphorically speaking, the rope that holds the boat is not connected by one very long fiber) reminds us that these business models will be different for different books. What does the book mean to you? How do we frame it beyond its material instantiation? What are viable business models for the book of the future?
A Revolution in 140 Characters? The Interplay of Social Networking, Mass Media, and Revolutionary Politics
By: Florian Buhl, Sophie van Huellen, Philipp Müller
Two hours after the polls had closed on June 12, 2009 the re-election of the incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was officially announced. Soon thereafter the supporters of Iran’s opposition, especially those of Ahmadinejad’s rival candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, initiated a protest movement in order to get to an inquiry of the election results.
The protests soon were labelled Iran’s “Twitter Revolution” by Western commentators because the demonstrators made use of web technologies, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube, in a twofold manner: On the one hand, the online social media, functioned as a tool to organize and coordinate protests. On the other hand, the web technologies played a decisive role in rising awareness for the demonstrations in the international public sphere. Foreign traditional news media had to rely on the information, pictures and videos posted by Iranian protesters on platforms of the social web, because news correspondents and journalists in Iran were deterred to produce their own content by the Iranian regime. Clearly the interplay of web technologies, the global mass media, and politics in the Iranian case are of great interest, therefore, one needs to ask, how can we analyze the interplay between social networking technologies, traditional mass media, and politics? […read on]
Please follow the link to our draft paper, based on our research project on the interplay of social networking technologies, traditional mass media, and revolutionary politics. We are looking forward to your feedback!
Culture, Politics, and our Networked Lifeworlds
By: Philipp Mueller and Violetta Pleshakova
In 2010, it has become a truism that culture, lifeworlds, and our political economies are transforming. It is obvious that the Web is impacting society, bringing in new lifestyles, attitudes, values, work patterns and relationships – it is now even officially (unofficially) nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. As the Internet for Peace Manifesto states,
We have finally realized that the internet is much more than a network of computers. It is an endless web of people. Men and women from every corner of the globe are connecting to one another, thanks to the biggest social interface ever known to humanity.Digital culture has laid the foundations for a new kind of society. And this society is advancing dialogue, debate and consensus through communication. Because democracy has always flourished where there is openness, acceptance, discussion and participation. And contact with others has always been the most effective antidote against hatred and conflict.That’s why the internet is a tool for peace. That’s why anyone who uses it can sow the seeds of nonviolence. And that’s why the next Nobel Peace Prize should go to the net. A Nobel for each and every one of us.
Wide-ranging opportunities for peer production, low transaction costs of participation and prominence of non-instrumental and non-material motivations can potentially transform the social world into more creative, collaborative and active (see Lessig 2008, Shirky 2009, Benkler 2006). Due to this interplay of factors the social reality is transformed from a Read-Only world to Read-Write world. In the latter, people shift from being passive consumers to acting as enthusiastic creators. As argued by Shirky, “revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new technologies – it happens when society adopts new behaviors” (2009, p. 160). Technology, however powerful it might be, cannot master the change alone. Technology has to be adopted and used by people, only then it can become ubiquitous and embedded in the everyday reality of society.
Although we witness a plethora of new digital phenomena on a daily basis, we are still lacking an overarching framework to think how these new technologies will transform our cultures, politics, our lives, and even personalities. This understanding and reflection occurs “on the go”, as we are forced to react to change and as we try to craft it. We face numerous questions along the way as technologies shape our lifeworlds and our lifeworlds shape our cultures and politics.
Culture, Lifeworlds, and Politics
Culture is a set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution, organization or group. Georg Simmel defined the concept as “the cultivation of individuals through the agency of external forms which have been objectified in the course of history.” Lifeworld is the social scientific term that reminds us of the incommensurability between academic description and the human experience social life. It is a term that asks us to think culture not only through the systemic perspective of the outside observer, but to hermeneutically engage with the subjects of our objects of analysis. As Habermas (1984: 117) conceptualizes it,
society is conceived from the perspective of acting subjects as the lifeworld of a social group. In contrast, from the observer’s perspective of someone not involved, society can be conceived only as a system of actions such that each action has a functional significance according to its contribution to the maintenance of the system.
Politics is the concept that deals with questions that are described as questions of choice for collectivities (Bartelson 2001; Anderson 1983). It can be circumscribed by the terms community and authority that can be ostensibly related to the questions “Who is member?” (the question of community or identity) and “who gets to decide?” (the question of authority).
From Read-Write to Read-Only and to Read-Write Reloaded
The concept of Read-Only (RO) and Read-Write (RW) was proposed by Larry Lessig in his book “Remix” (2008). As he suggested, human culture has for many centuries existed in Read-Write format, where one would not only perceive, but also create and change the culture. Culture was read-write ever since homo sapiens discovered her ability to paint, play music, and sculpt figurines such as the Venus of Schelklingen in the Swabian Alb 40.000 years ago. As stated in Wikipedia, the ultimate collaborative project:
The Swabian Alb region has a number of caves that have yielded mammoth ivory artifacts of the Upper Paleolithic period, totalling about twenty-five items to date. These include the lion-headed figure of Hohlenstein-Stadel and an ivory flute found at Geißenklösterle, dated to 36,000 years ago.[1] This concentration of evidence of full behavioral modernity in the period of 40 to 30 thousand years ago, including figurative art and instrumental music, is unique worldwide and Conard speculates that the bearers of the Aurignacian culture in the Swabian Alb may be credited with the invention, not just of figurative art and music, but possibly, early religion as well.[2][3] In a distance of 70cm to the Venus figurine Conard’s team found a flute made from a vulture bone.[4]
It was only the 20th century that has shifted the paradigm of cultural development to Read Only – a culture, where individuals are only consumers.
There are some technological reasons for the shift to RO that took place in the 20th century. Such inventions as phonograph, TV, radio, CD, VHS, DVD enabled wide distribution of culture products and established the principle of delivering culture to people packed in copies. A TV provides a copy of a talk-show. A CD provides a copy of a song. A DVD provides a copy of a film. If in the previous centuries culture was distributed freely and cultural products were easily built upon (like fairytales, told by people to each other without being written down and with possibility to add or change details; like folklore music, sang by people in private circles and on holidays, composed by nobody in particular and by everyone in general), the 20th century technologies have emphasized and boosted up the growth of copyrighted culture, provided in fixed and unchangeable form.
Now, in the 21st century, the world has the chance to go back to RW culture and creativity (Lessig 2008, p. 252), but on steroids. Read-Write combined with the power of a global broadcasting platform. The logic of active participation renders obsolete the image of an individual, nurtured by the pop culture of the 20th century: the image of a consumer. The tools for this shift are provided by the new Web, which favors free creation, voluntary project commitment and collaborative effort; where simple users can become active netizens (Zittrain 2008, p. 161). Through its participatory effects, the new Web fosters the reality of active creation, not passive consuming. Today people “are gratified in significant ways by the ability to play an active role in generating content, rather than only passively consuming that which is created for them by others (Harrison and Barthel 2009, p. 157). There is “substantially less dependence on the commercial mass media of the twentieth century” (Benkler 2006, p. 9). As the costs for participation in the new Web fall and as the complexity of handling technologies decreases, more and more individuals are empowered to become co-creators of our cultures and can have their voice heard. This, however, necessitates also a new way of critical listening.
An Attack on Professionalism
This results in the rise of an amateur culture. In the new Web it is not necessary to pay professors and experts to start an encyclopedia – instead, it is easier to harness the potential of individual knowledge, as Wikipedia did. It is not necessary to pay professional photographers to obtain pictures of a certain event – pictures of nearly everything are available for free and are easily searchable in folksonomies on free photosharing websites like Flickr. It is not necessary to buy expensive machines and spend money on marketing campaigns and personnel to create a newspaper – everyone can be a press outlet of his own with the use of blogging platforms since today “the mass amateurization of publishing undoes the limitations inherent in having a small number of traditional press outlets” (Shirky 2009, p. 65). It is not even necessary to turn on TV to get updates on burning news – livestream of first-hand information is available on Twitter and blogging websites. Similar limitations are destroyed in other spheres.
As a result, professional culture is challenged. A professional is a member of a vocation founded upon specialized educational training, who does not need supervision. Think of doctors or lawyers as classical examples. As a patient, you need to trust your lawyer or doctor, because there can be no absolute proof of her quality, therefore, she needs to convince through secondary attributes (being well-dressed, a fancy office) and/or professional codes of honor. Being member of a profession of course is always exclusive and normally connected to better-than-average incomes. With the democratization of tools of the trade professionalism is under attack.
Firstly, it is not needed in the amount it was needed earlier. As statistics shows, traditional media are suffering losses, laying down the personnel and generally loosing the competition to online media, including the ones run by amateurs (see Keen 2008). Secondly, professionals are not considered as reliable as before. If information, cultural products and meaningful content can be provided in the same (if not bigger) amount, faster and easier than before, there remains little ground for professional culture to preserve its monopoly.The result is the formation of more diverse, more vibrant, more active social universe. Remix culture of improving, changing, sampling, mixing derivative works aspires to replace the culture of permission, that existed before.
Learning to Trust
The new Web stimulates active engagement of people, impacts their lifeworlds and leads to “the rise of effective, large-scale cooperative efforts – peer production of information, knowledge, and culture” (Benkler 2006, p. 5). This active engagement expands the limits of our experience of culture and politics – it changes individuals that participate. Most of us remember the night when we moved from Read-Only to Read-Write, for some it is an experience similar to a first date or to first driving a car – it might be writing for Wikipedia, posting photos on Flickr or rating links on Digg, with each and every click a person does in the modern Web, he or she is adding value to the community. Voluntary entries in Wikipedia have helped to build the world’s most consulted encyclopedia within a very short time span. Ratings of goods on Amazon.com help other consumers to select products and learn about items in categories they are interested in. Tagging photos on Flickr or music on Last.fm helps other people to find what they are looking for.
Distributed Leadership
It has to be acknowledged that this type of production is not dramatically new, since people were getting together to produce collectively since primordial times. However, only Internet technologies have made the work flow of this type of collective action easily manageable and allow cooperation across both space and time. It means we need different leadership skills, leaders that have the ability of “convincing people who care a little to care more” (Shirky 2009, p. 181), leaders who can design open processes and engage distributed collaborators to contribute little pieces to bigger projects. Web technologies enable the decrease of transaction costs of production and participation. Humans make them happen.
State of the eUnion: Government 2.0 and Onwards
Just in time for the EU minsterial conference in Malmö, John Gotze brought together some of the most prominent thought leaders, including Don Tapscott, Tim O’Reilly and Lawrence Lessig, in the emerging field of Government 2.0 (“thinking government as a platform”) in the book State of the eUnion: Government 2.0 and Onwards, which is available for free download.
In my chapter (p. 275-282), Open Value Creation as a Strategic Management Approach, I argue that
[…] The idea of government (or business) as a platform necessitates an open value creation process. Open Value Creation consists of Open Policy Making (participation) and an Open Value Chain (collaboration). The distinction is slightly arbitrary but useful. It allows us to differentiate between coming up with a value generating process (policy) and repeatedly creating the value (value chain).
Open policy making aims to open all aspects of the policy process (initiation, formulation, implementation, evaluation) to outside inputs and scrutiny. It assumes that this allows better informed policy making that is more legitimate and less costly.
The open value chain opens the implementation process (inputs, process, outputs, impact, outcome) to outside contributions under the assumption that a co‐produced public value is less costly and more effective. […]
Enjoy the book and let us start the discussion!
The Soundtrack of German Reunification
Guest-Blog by Ralf Leiteritz (now an international relations professor at the Universidad de los Andes).
…on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall I’ve come to think about my old country again. Seeing a short compilation of songs about the wall or more precisely its fall in 89, I thought about compiling my personal top 10/11 list of songs from/about East Germany. Not that my generation really listened a lot to East German bands – we were much more in tune with Western (West German, US and UK) music during the late 1980s. However, a few songs still stuck in my mind, mostly from around the time of the Wende (1989/90).
So here goes: 11 songs that bring me back to the GDR (actually Nr. 7 was from a West German artist), accompanied by some comments, plus a bonus track from….New York of all places. Hope you enjoy it!
1. Sandow: Born in the GDR (1990)
(makes – not so friendly – references to the sport star Nr. 1 in East Germany – ice skater Katarina Witt and the concert that Bruce Spingsteen gave 1988 in East Berlin in front of ….160,000 people)
2. City: Am Fenster (1978)
(with an awesome violin solo at the beginning)
3. Karat: Ueber sieben Bruecken musst Du geh’n (?),
(the song was made somewhat more famous in West Germany in a cover version by Peter Maffay)
4. Feeling B: Wir wollen immer artig sein (1990),
(half of today’s Rammstein come from this Nr.1 punk band in East Germany)
5. Electric Beat Crew: Here we come (1989),
(Hip Hop from East Germany!!! Only song from an East German band I know in English)
6. Karusell: Als ich fortging (1988),
(wonderful melody and lyrics written by a local poet – Gisela Steineckert)
7. Udo Lindenberg: Sonderzug nach Pankow (1983),
(in fact, Udo Lindenberg finally did manage to sing in the “Palace of the Republic” in East Berlin in 1987)
8. Nina Hagen: Du hast den Farbfilm vergessen (1978),
(who would have had thought that – Nina Hagen grew up in East Berlin; she must have been 18 years old or so when she recorded this song…)
9. Herbst in Peking: Bakschischrepublik (1990),
(the hymn of alternative East German rock during the Wende)
10. Die Skeptiker: Strahlende Zukunft (1990),
(a band labelled the East German “Dead Kennedys” – I think for the (political) quality of their lyrics they’d probably better be described as the equivalent of “The Clash”)
Bonus track:
11. Grandmaster Melle Mel: Beat Street Theme (1986),
(the movie “Beat Street” about life, rap and hip hop music in New York was shown in GDR film theaters in 1986 or 87 and revolutionized the local, unofficial music scene – lots of breakdance groups imitating the moves from the movie sprung up like mushrooms)
What do Political Theorists think about Sequoia publishing the Source Code of its Voting System?
As history unfolds it is often hard to distinguish the truly historical from the incidental. As someone who has lived through German reunification 20 years ago these days, I can attest to that. But the absence of political theorists following the debate about open source in general and open voting systems in specific seems reckless. On Tuesday Sequoia, one of the major providers of electronic voting systems, announced the publication of the source code of its forthcoming e-voting product. This potentially can be a turning point in a battle fought almost single-handedly by Ed Felten:
As members of network societies, we need to become attuned to the politics of such technical arcana and wrap our minds around these issues. We need to have positions on what we expect from a voting system and we need to reflect on what our general stance is towards the openness principle. And that needs our (and our political theorists) attention.
Adaptive Advantages and Deliverology
The trend in 2009 is to argue that in times of crisis, strategy needs to be more attuned to the changing realities of an organizations environment. As Stefan Stern argues in the FT:
At BCG, Reeves and Deimler has produced a paper, “New bases of competitive advantage”, that looks at something they call “adaptive advantage”. This is strategy, too, but not as we know it.
“Organisations with adaptive advantage recognise the unpredictability of today’s environment and the limits of deductive analysis,” they write. New problems are constantly emerging. Well-run businesses respond effectively to them.
How? First, they process relevant data – “signals” – quickly, and react to them. Google is an obvious master of this, getting closer than anyone else to understanding how online advertising works. Second, they see clearly how their business fits into a wider context. Amazon has made sure its Kindle e-book reader is supported by a network of valuable partners. Third, they are alive to social change and shifting customer preferences. Toyota managed this with its hybrid Prius car. Fourth, they experiment effectively, as Procter & Gamble does when trialling products. Last, they draw on the talents of the best people they can find – whether they employ them or not. Software companies such as Red Hat and TopCoder oversee large networks of programmers, using the best people with great flexibility. Their permanent staff is relatively small. But they have access to many more.
So it becomes clear that in rapidly changing environments we need to control our processes better than ever before, so we can understand the impacts of environmental changes on our processes and react upon them in real-time. In order to cope with potential blindspots, we need to build as much critical reflexivity into our processes right from the start and construct powerful levers that allow us to implement changes with no lag.
An there of course Michael Barber comes to mind, with his take on the delivery unit he headed for Tony Blair from 2001 to 2005 and his approach of deliverology, which is a critical strategic approach asking: What are you trying to do? How are you trying to do it? How do you know you are succeeding? If you’re not succeeding, how will you change things? How can we help you? Do read his Instruction to Deliver, where in chapter three he outlines his approach to deliverology. Here my quick “adaptive advantage” reading of his approach:
– Setting Goals – deliverology allows you to reflect on the goals you really care about – now!
– The Map of Delivery – reflect your boldness and quality dimensions.
– Delivery Chains – outline potential paths to achieve your outcomes (might be through your process or by influencing other processes)
– Trajectories/League tables – compare processes in your portfolio on the medium term trajectory they are on.
– Stocktakes – choreograph the people sessions where you account and control.
Evangelizing Distributed Leadership
Distributed leadership is still a new concept, even though it sometimes seems that most of what we do is
Think new corporate governance strategies, the millenial workplace, enterprise 2.0, collaborative strategizing, municipal participatory budgeting, user-centric design processes, open source software development, UN multi-stakeholder processes, etc.
The first challenge for successful distributed leadership is to see the loss of control over open processes as an opportunity not a threat. “There’s this interesting tension between the value of having contributed information versus a clear loss of control over the process,” says Eric Kansa, executive director of the information and service design program at the University of California, Berkeley. Open processes allow us to leverage not only the wisdom of the crowds, increase our legitimacy by outsourcing accountability to the interested public, but also increase capacity massively. The only comparable historical management reform that comes to mind is Napoleon’s idea of the levee en masse, moving from expensive hired guns (mercenaries) to a citizen army of Frenchmen proud to fight and die for their country.
The second is to ignore the political realities of the hierarchy, specifically, middle management. Middle managers fear whatever flattens the organizational structure and makes them superfluous. A response to one of the top evangelists of the Intellipedia project in the intelligence community by a staff member: “ ‘I don’t need top cover, I need middle cover. I need someone to convince my manager this is something we need to do.’ “
The third challenge is to change organizational culture. There is no way around it: open processes are different and counter-intuitive: Sharing information increases your power, giving up control increases your capacity, giving up the ability to control your image (transparency) increases legitimacy. As the head evangelist of intellipedia says, “There’s a reason this is called disruptive technology. These are counter-cultural concepts, which can be very daunting.”
It is not easy, but it can be done. And the payoffs will be huge – think of the impact Napoleon had on today’s Europe.
The blog-post was inspired by Jill R. Aitoro‘s article in nextgov The Gospel of Government 2.0. All quotes (except the first) are taken from his article (the hyperlinks point to it).
