Author of machiavelli.net, proud father of three, interested in shaping network society. Welcome to my blog.‘Shaping’ Shaping-Network-Society
Thanks to all of your inputs (both online and offline), Shaping Network Society is evolving into an exciting conversation on public policy of-and-in network society. As you have seen in the last days, we are working on the interface in order to break up the uni-linearity of the conversation. Our aim is to increase interaction in the comments, offer more space for guest bloggers, and find a way to continue the conversation once a posting is not on the front page anymore. Please comment below on what you like and dislike and we promise to learn from you.
Apps for the World
If you are graduating in these times of crisis, think of the amazing opportunities that the combination of web technologies, collaborative production, and the idea of open access offer. Consider starting something like mySociety for your country.
Hello! We are mySociety – we run most of the UK’s best known democracy websites.
Using our services, 200,000 people have written to their MP for the first time, over 8,000 potholes and other broken things have been fixed, nearly 9,000,000 signatures have been left on petitions to the Prime Minister, and at least 77 tiny hats have been knitted for charity.
They created apps like, theworkforyou, fixmystreet, hearfromyourmp, or groupsnearyou. The code is open source, join them, or start your own projects. It is time for planetary public policy. RT @schellong #gov20 UK activities (Fixmystreet, etc.) http://www.mysociety.org/
Thinking Governmental Data as Infrastructure
Vivek Kundra posted on the White House blog his idea about why we want to bring governmental data online in machine-readable format:
Government data permeates our lives. The atomic clock at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) standardizes our time, dictating when we arrive at meetings and take our children to soccer practice. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) provides our doctors and media outlets with information about how to keep our families healthy when there is a new public health concern, such as the H1N1 (swine flu) virus.Data is powerful. It informs and it creates opportunities. It promotes transparency and it helps to ensure accountability. Yet, it is a challenge to collect, organize, and communicate the vast stores of data maintained across the government.
- Our goal is to improve collection, storage, and dissemination of data government-wide. We’d appreciate your feedback on how to improve and grow Data.gov over time: How should we ask agencies to contribute data sets to Data.gov? Should we have them inventory and prioritize all their data? Or set a fixed number of data sets that must be published each year? Or set a voluntary target?
- While our focus here is on developing government-wide policy for data transparency, we are also interested in hearing what new data you’d like to see on Data.gov and why. We’d also like to encourage you to make suggestions directly to Data.gov here.
- Finally, tell us what types of applications you’d like to see built to leverage all this data. Share with us a little about why you think those applications might be compelling. Better yet, if you are a software developer, we encourage you to start using Data.gov to build applications useful to businesses, government, and the American people!
Radical Transparency as “the” Management Approach
In business, government, and civil society, radical transparency has become the management flavor of the day. This has happened so swiftly that the theory has not caught up with the practice. Fundamental texts we point to are Wired Magazine from April 2007, maybe Chris Anderson’s blog from November/December 2006. But is that enough for such a transformative doctrine?
Radical transparency is a management approach in which (ideally) all decision making is carried out publicly. Draft documents, arguments for and against a proposal, the decisions about the decision making process itself, and final decisions are all publicly accessible and remain publicly archived (Wikipedia).
Why was the concept mainstreamed so quickly? How big will its impact be on our worlds (think Vivek Kundra’s Open Government Initiative, etc.)? How are radical transparency strategies implemented? What is the short, medium, and long-term payoff of implementing radical transparency strategies? How can we quantify the increased legitimacy derived from being radically transparent?
I asked in this blog in September 2006,
Why is the concept of transparency so fashionable today (and not 20, 200, or 2,000 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?
I argued that in (post-democratic) network society, where anybody can join or leave at any time, transparency and consensual decision making (rough consensus and running code) takes the role of democratic governance as we have come to know it.
The first metaphorical or abstract use of transparency in a human context is found in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream almost 2,000 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 radical transparency is really a “second-best” solution in a world where we miss democratic accountability?
Imagined [Network] Communities
In the last days there has been a debate between Larry Lessig and Kevin Kelly about how to “name” the governance of network societies. Kevin Kelly proposed “new socialism” which Larry Lessig found irresponsible. Everyone and their grandmother (incl. me) chipped in with alternative names ranging from anarchy to participatory democracy. It might make sense to step back and take the macro-historical view.
It was Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983) that gave us the toolkit to think about the “historical” phenomenon of nationalism:
Nationality, nation-ness, and nationalism are cultural artifacts whose creation toward the end of the 18th C was the spontaneous distillation of a complex ”crossing” of discrete historical forces; but that, once created, they became ”modular,” capable of being transplanted to a great variety of social terrains, to merge and be merged with a variety of political and ideological constellations.
He then went on to define nationalism as an imagined political community, imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.
It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow- members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. […] In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to- face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined. The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind. The most messianic nationalists do not dream of a day when all the members of the human race will join their nation in the way that it was possible, in certain epochs, for, say, Christians to dream of a wholly Christian planet. It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm. Coming to maturity at a stage of human history when even the most devout adherents of any universal religion were inescapably confronted with the living pluralism of such religions, and the allomorphism between each faith’s ontological claims and territorial stretch, nations dream of being free, and, if under God, directly so. The gauge and emblem of this freedom is the sovereign state. Finally, it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.
This way of thinking clearly outlines the types of questions we need to ask of network societies. We first need to look for discrete historical forces that are being distilled and are becoming modular and then we need to develop a definition of the form of collective life. Here are my candidates for historical forces:
Pattern Recognition. XML stands for the separation of form and content that allows us to exchange data between different databases. With automatic data-generation and aggregation (Google search, the Amazon recommendation engine, etc.) we can make relationships visible and create values in ways not possible before. By mashing up automatically generated and aggregated data with collaboratively produced information (geo-mapping like Google Earth), we develop a new depth of understanding our worlds.
Collaboration platforms. The idea of allowing users to simply manipulate content radically changes our conception of production. In order to work, such a platform must be simple enough that contributions can be modular and granular. Wikipedia clearly shows that this can work.
Self-publishing. Tools that allow us to self-publish and have universal access to self-published content changes how we perceive cultural production.
Social networking. Different social networking platforms have different aims (making your social graph actionable, expanding your network, finding expertise, living communal life), but all lead to different conceptions of how we understand society. The contract metaphor that our nation state system relies on is challenged by the network metaphor.
This is a first cut and I am not sure if it is exhaustive, but it delineates the main discrete historical forces behind the phenomena that we often refer to as Web 2.0. The question is what we will want to name a society based on the distillation of these forces and how we can define it. Imagined? Unlimited? Not-Sovereign? …What do you think?
Beyond Competitive Strategy
For 30 years competitive strategy (the five forces, portfolio analysis, learning, new market development, blue oceans) has determined how we think strategy. Competitive strategy was built on the 19th Century Prussian military understanding that business could be described through strategic interaction of rational players in environments that stay relatively stable over time (stasis in Heraclitian terms).
The world has changed. Today’s strategic environments are determined by complexity, post-human intelligence, networks, fuzzy boundaries, communicative rationality: flux, as Heraclitus would say. Web 2.0 is the shortcut for web-technologies (xml, self-publishing, collaboration platforms, social networking) that once intertwined transform economic production, society, and public governance. However, this change did not start in 2006. Over the last 30 years, we can observe a move from production (defining the value chain), to co-production (manging the supply chain), to peer production (enabling user-generated outputs). This means that strategy in business changes from competitive strategy to communicative strategy. This is big. The closest historical analogy, to this radical transformation of collective production is the emergence of print capitalism in the 16th and 17th Century.
What will post-competive strategy look like? What are the core strategic ideas of network society? What does strategy advice look like in such a world? Who will be the strategy gurus of tomorrow?
Peer Distributing Beer
We still live in the infancy of peer production as a mode of collective action, in a sort of 1770s Great Britain. Therefore, we are still easily surprised and have not lost the sense of wonder, when we look at collective outputs like Wikipedia or the twittering global thought stream. We smile gleefully when we notice that journalists are reporting on (or using the vocabulary of) peer production in ways we do not expect: Today, the NYTimes writes about Beer Lao (not as in “free as in beer“).
Lao Brewery is building a network of fans-turned-distributors who import and sell the beer in select markets. Some distributors are former travelers who see potential in a brand with little international exposure. Others just really like the beer.
In Hong Kong, the brand is in the hands of Jerry Cheung, who has a love for lager and an affinity for the laid-back pace in Laos.
Mr. Cheung first tried Beer Lao while living in Cambodia in 2006. “It was the most unique beer I’d ever tasted,†he recalled. He flew to Vientiane, where the beer is made, soon afterward…
Forms of collaboration that seem natural online (think Ubuntu or Trent Reznor) still surprise us in the material world. However, is beer actually material? Is the material-virtual, online-offline dichotomy helpful when we want to frame peer production as a mode of collective action? Or should we call it online collaboration, enhanced collaboration, massive collaboration? Is it just technological? Or a new legitimatory practice (in)dependent of technology?
Planetary Public Policy
We have students from more than 40 countries at the Erfurt School of Public Policy. Sometimes, when asked what is it that differentiates us from other public policy schools, I refer to our planetary perspective. But what does that mean?
Planetary thinking is a term introduced by Martin Heidegger, to reflect the role of philosophy (a Greek/Western concept) in comparison to other systems of thought. Planetary public policy balances different approaches to public policy problems, reminds us that problems come in all sizes (local to global), that we can learn from each other, but that solutions need to be “tropicalized” (adapted to the local context). If public policy is about thinking about having a structural impact, then planetary public policy is about “rocking the planet.” Is that what we need in 2009? How does planetary thinking fit into the project of “shaping network society?” Do you buy into it?
A New Governance Paradigm?
Yesterday, Vivek Kundra launched several open government initiatives, most importantly the site Data.gov. It makes raw governmental data available in machine-readable format and allows users to build applications with the data. This type of governance by opening up (radical transparency as a management model) fully utilizes the power of web technologies and social media. It offers a fundamental shift in how we understand the role of the state: The contractarian/administrative state of the last centuries was integrated through the institution of the state and the secret (arcana imperii, administrative secrets), while governance in network society is integrated through the ability of mashing up machine-readable data into new forms of public value. The site is not finished and open government is a collaborative process, so the White House is asking for public participation on how to develop this new paradigm. The National Academy for Public Administration also put up an ideation platform. What do you think about the launch? The user interface? First applications? And what this will mean for your countries?
PS: To read the testimony of Vivek Kundra at the Subcommittee Hearing on: “The State of Federal Information Security”
