Author of machiavelli.net, proud father of three, interested in shaping network society. Welcome to my blog.Manifesto Writing is an Underappreciated Art
I do not agree with everything Umair Haque says, but on the 10th anniversary of the cluetrain manifesto and the 502nd anniversary of the 95 theses, it does make sense to read-write another manifesto. Manifesto writing, actually, has been an underappreciated text-form for some time, well it had a bad reputation for some time. So here it comes, the “Generation M” Manifesto:
Dear Old People Who Run the World,
My generation would like to break up with you.
Everyday, I see a widening gap in how you and we understand the world — and what we want from it. I think we have irreconcilable differences.
You wanted big, fat, lazy “business.” We want small, responsive, micro-scale commerce.
You turned politics into a dirty word. We want authentic, deep democracy — everywhere.
You wanted financial fundamentalism. We want an economics that makes sense for people — not just banks.
You wanted shareholder value — built by tough-guy CEOs. We want real value, built by people with character, dignity, and courage.
You wanted an invisible hand — it became a digital hand. Today’s markets are those where the majority of trades are done literally robotically. We want a visible handshake: to trust and to be trusted.
You wanted growth — faster. We want to slow down — so we can become better.
You didn’t care which communities were capsized, or which lives were sunk. We want a rising tide that lifts all boats.
You wanted to biggie size life: McMansions, Hummers, and McFood. We want to humanize life.
You wanted exurbs, sprawl, and gated anti-communities. We want a society built on authentic community.
You wanted more money, credit and leverage — to consume ravenously. We want to be great at doing stuff that matters.
You sacrificed the meaningful for the material: you sold out the very things that made us great for trivial gewgaws, trinkets, and gadgets. We’re not for sale: we’re learning to once again do what is meaningful.
There’s a tectonic shift rocking the social, political, and economic landscape. The last two points above are what express it most concisely. I hate labels, but I’m going to employ a flawed, imperfect one: Generation “M.”
What do the “M”s in Generation M stand for? The first is for a movement. It’s a little bit about age — but mostly about a growing number of people who are acting very differently. They are doing meaningful stuff that matters the most. Those are the second, third, and fourth “M”s.
What do you think? But more importantly, have you written your personal manifesto? How will you shape network society?
Structuring Deliberation 2.0
Whenever I have talked to government officials in 2009 (in Cancun, Erfurt, Vienna, Salzburg, or Washington DC), at some point in the conversation they mention that “we need to develop new modes of interacting with citizens.” Implicit in this argument is a frustration with the fairly artificial tool set they have at their disposal.
Government as a Contract Society institution wants to insure the legality of its operations at all times, therefore, it is very careful in its communication: “if you really need an answer, please do not send an email, letters are better integrated into our (electronic) work-flow.” But network society logic (outcome orientation, eternal beta, radical transparency) have a way of sneaking up onto us.
In 2009, there is a clear realization that “things will be messy, but this is necessary (and not as dangerous as we think).” And everybody (and their grandmother) is scrambling to set up platforms to “ideate,” “deliberate,” and “collaborate.” On Wednesday, for example, we will discuss the participatory budgeting platform for the city of Erfurt.
The Obama adminstration has just gone through the first two months of the Open Government Initiative and there are interesting first lessons. And because online interaction is still so new, we are developing our sensitivity for deliberation 2.0. Here are some takeaways from Beth Noveck, in a recent NYTimes article:
- If you don’t frame the debate, if you don’t ask a good question, you don’t get a good answer to the question.
- If people are going to be asked to spend the time on contributing, you want to use the participation they give you.
- If you run a dialog over weeks and weeks, you cannot begin to use the inputs you are given [there will be too many].
- Government must also create a culture that is in some ways more formal than much of the rest of the Web. On sites like Slashdot, she said, the most popular posts are “the funniestor the snarkiest.†But that’s not an appropriate standard when trying to debate policy.
- There is a reason you want people with expertise working in the jobs we have,(..) but the new online tools will nonetheless put pressure on officials to take public opinion into account.
- Even something like having a blog with an open discussion about policy is revolutionary in the way government works.
- In addition to the public brainstorming session, she ran another online discussion for government officials. This was unusual in that it asked for ideas from people at every level of government, speaking on their own. That’s very different from the usual structure in which feedback on ideas posed by one agency is funneled up through the chain of command at other agencies.
As we are preparing for the Erfurt Sessions, what are your takeaways from deliberation projects you have been involved in? What projects worked? Which did not? Why?
Lessons from Information Revolution 1.0
Whenever I teach in Erfurt at our planetary school of public policy, I live at the monastery where Martin Luther lived, before he started his career as a professor in Wittenberg. The Augustine monastery has been transformed into an upscale hostel and the rooms have been named after important church reformers. Last week, I stayed in the Thomas Müntzer room. The story of the two men who lived during the first information revolution (print) can teach us important lessons about our own time.
In 1517, Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on his personal blog, the church door in Wittenberg. The printing presses, the blogging platform of the time (there was no blogger, moveabletype, or wordpress) rapidly distributed his entry in Europe. The rather arcane and academic text started probably the biggest transformation of the European world of the last 500 years. Even though his ideas radically changed our world, Luther himself was not perceived as a radical by his contemporaries, however, Thomas Müntzer was. The theological differences between the two seem trivial from a 21st Century perspective,
Müntzer believed and taught of the “living word of God” (i.e., continued revelation and prophecy), the banning of infant baptism, and that the wine and bread of the Eucharist were only emblems of Jesus Christ’s sacrifice [wikipedia].
But politically, they were far apart. While Martin Luther played the game of politics conservative and sucessful, Thomas Müntzer did not. He was tortured, beheaded for his participation in the peasant revolutions of 1524/1525, and forgotten by mainstream history:
In studies of the Reformation, Müntzer has often been ignored. To Protestant historians, he was a short-lived radical. Müntzer was then adopted by socialists as a symbol of early class struggle due to his promotion of a new egalitarian society which would practice the sharing of goods. Müntzer’s movement and the peasants’ revolt formed an important topic in Friedrich Engels‘ book The Peasant War in Germany, a classic defense of historical materialism. Engels describes Müntzer as a revolutionary leader who chose to use biblical language—the language the peasants would best understand. He then became a symbolic hero for the East German state (German Democratic Republic, GDR) in the 20th century, appearing from 1975 on their five mark banknote. On the Frankenhausen battlefield, the GDR built a huge memorial containing the world’s largest painting by Werner Tuebke, with Müntzer as central figure.
More recent studies, however, have been more sensitive to the context of Müntzer’s life. He stands as a symbol of one of the many theological directions which could have been taken by the Reformation movement in its earliest stages [wikipedia].
In hindsight, it was not so much the doctrinal differences between the two men that mattered in the long run, it was the general idea of empowerment that worked itself as a algorithm through history. It took around 150 years until 1648 when the balance of power in Europe had been re-established and took almost 400 more years until democracy was mainstreamed on the European continent. Was that necessary? Do we need more Martin Luthers or Thomas Müntzers of network society? What are strategies to move the emancipatory spirit forward? How long will it take until a new balance of power is established? What type of society can we create? By when?
Reflecting the Rise of the Ideation Platform
The following entry was written by Justus Lenz with Philipp Mueller:
———————————————————-
One of the “Web 2.0-type” concepts for a (semi-)structured citizen e-participation are ideation platforms. The aim of these platforms is to tap into the wisdom of crowds to discover and develop ideas. The first big ideation platform was Dell’s Ideastorm. It was launched in February 2007 as part of a new strategy to engage consumers in conversations after a public relations disaster concerning Dell’s after-sales service. Other companies using such platforms are Starbucks and in Germany, Tchibo. Typically these ideation platforms allow users to:
1. Propose ideas
2. To comment on other ideas
3. To vote ideas up or down
The public sector also implemented e-participation platforms including elements of ideation, like Baltimore’s Citistat, the e-Petition system UK’s number10, or Peer-to-Patent, the US patent offices pilot program for distributed patent review. In May of 2009, the Obama administration introduced the Open Government Initiative, the biggest governmental ideation experiment yet. So in less than a year, ideation platforms have become fairly main stream projects of governments on all levels. However, they are not yet well understood both from an operational and from a democratic theory perspective. There are several questions that we need to ask:
What problems are amenable to ideation platform types of projects? In what contexts?
How do ideation platforms interlock with other forms of online collaboration (peer production, data-mining, implicit voting)?
What population of self-selected (expert) participants do we need in order to assure success?
What population of participants will satisfy our democracy requirements? How do we distinguish between context where we care (e.g. participatory budgeting) and where we assume that the quality of the outcome itself legitimizes the process?
What else? What do you think?
Pulling the Rug From Under Classical Strategy
The following guest blog was written by Sofia Elizondo from the BCG Strategy Institute. She is a long term member of the Shaping-Network-Society community and is looking forward to your comments. She has outlined several future entries, so there is more to come!
—————————————————-
Classical business strategy was about the ability to predict, plan accordingly, and orchestrate flawless execution. The goal was to be bigger, differentiated from the rest, and therefore more profitable.
Not anymore. This game is over.
Today, we see that the largest companies are no longer the most profitable and size can become a hindrance for change. Industry leaders cannot maintain their positions as long as they used to. Everyone has access to the information that used to provide competitive advantage. New social behaviors – like peer production, mobility, and firm disloyalty – are shaking rigid organizational structures. New value propositions – like sustainability, authenticity, or public value – are redefining wealth.
Volatility across many dimensions is increasing at a dizzying pace and classical strategy cannot keep up. By the time corporate strategic planning centers predict and plan, the real world has changed again.
- Is strategy as we know it doomed to extinction?
- Can strategy adapt to its changing environment?
- How?
“…It is not deliberation!”
In the following video Beth Noveck outlines her vision for a world where public value is created by self-selected experts collaborating on platforms that mirror the collaboration process back to the participants:
This is new political theory, counter-intuitive from a Habermasian deliberative democracy perspective. It shows that it makes sense to “listen carefully” to technology.
The Age of Engineering
Engineering is defined by a focus on the world in the “ends-means” binary: what means allow me to reach the end efficiently? So are we moving into a new age of engineering? Auren Hoffman wrote an interesting article at Techcrunch on why companies should stock up on engineers. He argues that:
Productivity gains in software engineering are powering innovation. Everyone is more productive these days. This has been a consistent trend for at least the past decade, where productivity gains have been particularly strong within the business sector. According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, today’s business industry workers are on average 30% more productive than their 1998 counterparts (productivity growth of roughly 2.6% per year)…
Software engineers today are about 200-400% more productive than software engineers were 10 years ago because of open source software, better programming tools, common libraries, easier access to information, better education, and other factors. This means that one engineer today can do what 3-5 people did in 1999!
He outlines that, however, this has not lead to an increase in remuneration of engineers relative to the rest of employees because of off-shoring and because of a decrease in demand for engineers in a world where less can do more. He then argues that engineers are relatively cheap (and ever more productive), therefore, could define the competitive advantage of a company. The article is interesting in itself, but we might also want to ask what it means for the age of engineering hypothesis. As I have argued elsewhere that engineering culture, which has driven the production revolution of the last centuries has started to permeate governance.
With the rise of functionally organized and technologically mediated networks (the web 2.0 revolution), the conditions of possibility of coordination changed in such a way that a form of governance that is organically linked to the idea of instrumental rationality has become possible. Network society emerged as an engineering society based on a culture of “rough consensus and running code.†Requests for Proposals (RFCs) are the procedural principle on which governance is based. Self-selection is becoming an accepted principle for participation in the policy process, expertise in an an engineering culture is defined by merit (outcome) and not position, and political problems are reduced to the creative acts of RFC-writing, the focused and technologically structured deliberation, and accountability comes from peer review of radically transparent processes.
Several questions come to mind when reading Hoffman’s text: If engineers productivity increases 3 times as fast as baseline productivity does, what does that mean for production/society in 10 years? If engineers are not able to translate productivity gains into higher salary/status/power what does that mean for the age of engineering hypothesis?
The Economics of Abundance
As you are waiting for your Amazon Prime Shipment of Chris Anderson’s Free: The Economics of Abundance and Why Zero Pricing Is Changing the Face of Business, read an excerpt in Wired.
Our brains seem wired to resist waste, but we are relatively unique in nature for this. Mammals have the fewest offspring in the animal kingdom, and as a result we invest enormous time and care in protecting each one so that it can reach adulthood. The death of a single human is a tragedy, one that survivors sometimes never recover from, and we prize the individual life above all.
As a result, we have a very developed sense of the morality of waste. We feel bad about the unloved toy or the uneaten food. Sometimes this is for good reason, because we understand the greater social cost of profligacy, but often it’s just because our mammalian brains are programmed that way.
Or go back to my last blog-entry on the topic.
PS: If in Europe, go for the UK edition because it will be published 5 days before the US edition.
Inventing the Future
As we are trying to understand and predict the impact of social media on our societies, it makes sense to go back to Alan Kay’s remark at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in 1971.
Don’t worry about what anybody else is going to do… The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Really smart people with reasonable funding can do just about anything that doesn’t violate too many of Newton’s Laws!
What does it mean for strategy? And public administration? Government? What are the limits of our imagination and funding? And what are the limits of the ideology of engineering?
Revisiting the Death of New Public Management
In this “breathless” time where new conceptual frameworks emerge by the minute, it makes sense to step back and reflect on our thinking of… last week. In the “revisiting” series, I want to point to some of the older postings of this blog. Some might still be relevant, others off the mark, others again will have the quaint nostalgic sound of 1950s science fiction. The following is from August 6th, 2006.
Patrick Dunleavy (LSE), Helen Margetts (Oxford Internet Institute), 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” re-engineering 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.
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:
- Open source and peer production are the first serious challenge to our monetarized market-based system since socialism.
- 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.
- 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…
How has digital era governance stood up to #gov20? Is the article relevant to what we are discussing now, when we speak about radical transparency? What do you think about my third “utopian” point on municipal wireless?
