Some thoughts culminating out of the last post about how open standards emerge… a recent post by fellow Londoner Bill Wittur on some open government basics… the latest post on the Google blog defining their notion of openness… and a book I perused a couple days ago by Beth Noveck on open collaborative government.
There’s no way I can avoid doing another post on openness.
First, here’s a strong excerpt from Google’s post on “the meaning of open“:
Open will win. It will win on the Internet and will then cascade across many walks of life: The future of government is transparency. The future of commerce is information symmetry. The future of culture is freedom. The future of science and medicine is collaboration. The future of entertainment is participation. Each of these futures depends on an open Internet.
Let’s get an amen. That’s a key refrain that’s only going to keep getting louder (though, take note, that isn’t to assume that everyone who says it genuinely believes it).
Google has put a kind of surge on this subject lately, especially (and perhaps not coincidentally) after taking flak and subsequently reversing a decision about their purchase of EtherPad. There’s also Google’s Data Liberation team tasked with making it easy for users to get their data & docs out of Google if they want to go elsewhere. They’ve been spreading the word about that lately. Listen to the first part of the Dec 12 episode of This Week in Google for an overview from Brian Fitzpatrick.
Much of that is along the lines of old news. We’re largely familiar with arguments and narratives about net neutrality, creative commons, digital rights, privacy, and the development of open source projects like Linux, Mozilla, Wikipedia, and so on.
But when we approach the area of government there are some important differences that haven’t been fully explored and charted yet. We’re pretty much still at the stage of brainstorming and prototyping. We can be pretty sure we’ll get some useful applications for transit and trash collection in the near future — but what about the actual process of making policy decisions?
In the 90′s, progressive assumptions were that digitization would facilitate a more “direct democracy,” i.e. voting would become more streamlined and maybe more frequent. That hasn’t been the case (or at least it hasn’t been the case that those developments were obvious improvements).
Trying to improve on that lately I’ve been into the notion of “deliberative democracy,” i.e. it’ll make discussion and deliberation on issues more effective.
But a couple of days ago I realized that won’t work out great either.
I was gratefully able to peruse Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, by Beth Noveck (who leads the Obama Administration’s Open Government Initiative; seen here chatting with Tim O’Reilly). Noveck explains how technology doesn’t make government more effective through deliberation, but rather through collaboration:
Deliberation is focused on opinion formation and the general will (or sometimes on achieving consensus). Consensus is desirable as an end unto itself. Collaboration is a means to an end. Hence the emphasis is not on participation for its own sake but on inviting experts, loosely defined as those with expertise about a problem, to engage in information gathering, information evaluation and measurement, and the development of specific solutions for implementation.
Deliberation focuses on self-expression. Collaboration focuses on participation. To conflate deliberative democracy with participatory democracy is to circumscribe participation by boundaries that technology has already razed.
It doesn’t matter what tools we have, if it’s framed as an attempt to persuade, people will continue to disagree — perhaps even more persistently and disruptively, given the new tools.
[Note I don't think this diminishes the value of transparency and engagement by politicians and bureaucrats. I think any government initiative can benefit from a blog, for starters.]
The distinction between deliberation and collaboration really caught me. It changed my thinking almost instantly. But we’ll have to do a lot to adjust our most basic assumptions and habits about government and political discourse.
More from Wiki Government:
Under a collaborative strategy, the bureaucrat establishes the process, then frames and asks the questions that will get targeted information from bridge users (the truck driver, the commuter), from an engineer, and from the informed enthusiast. The public can contribute evidence and data to help inform specific decisions, analyze data once gathered, and share in the work of editing, drafting, and implementing policies. Alternatively, if officials articulate the priority of bridge safety, they might spur private sector businesses, nonprofits and individuals to develop their own strategies, such as organizing a volunteer corps of bridge safety inspectors who log their work on a shared website. Citizens are no longer talking about the process: they are in the process.
Or might we say, “in flow“?
The reason open source projects work is that they engage people’s skills and interests, they present self-selected challenges with clear goals and constant feedback. There’s an objective sense of whether the thing’s working or not — and if not, where it went wrong and what sort of actions might be required to fix it. In turn those are compelling challenges that people are willing to engage in.
With democracy in general we don’t have such a clear, objective sense of structure or accomplishment. We also don’t have the luxury of letting people with fundamentally different viewpoints fork the project and start their own.
So there’s going to have to be a significant high-level shift in mindset, an updated and clarified concept of what government is for, so we have a framework for evaluating its effectiveness.
Before we can even get close to articulating that we’ll probably have to work through multiple decades-worth of heuristics.
But that statement in itself points at an overarching goal and the basic outline for a framework to get us started: the foremost mission of government is to make itself more effective — “effective” implying also more generative and sustainable.
Of course there are a lot of other very important things that government has to achieve along the way, but every step in the process we should be attentive enough to ask, “Does this a) improve or b) inhibit effectiveness going forward? Does this a) ameliorate or b) aggravate partisan tensions?”
Ideally, as a kind of moonshot (maybe more like a Mars-shot), we can work out a system in which party lines become “cross-hatched” and distorted out of existence by dividing and conquering problems into such discrete, practical, accountable questions that people are so absorbed by the tasks they don’t have enough attention left over to imagine abstract ideologies and grievances.
We don’t have to try attaining that right away. We can’t. What we can do is continue to educate ourselves and collaborate on developments, using what we’ve got, from where we are today — openly so we can find each other and get a sense of how our competencies relate — moving in that general direction.
We’ve already changed the way we collaborate on improving operating systems and web browsers etc, we’re improving the distribution and use of information through media channels, and it looks like formal education is due for a similar transition very soon.
As we work through these challenges we’ll move our horizon forward, gradually revealing to us a better picture of what government might become through the 21st century.
If you liked that post please subscribe to the special project feed for Thinking in the 21st Century — a series of ideas that were roughly sketched a few years ago, which are now looking a lot more concrete in relation to the new realities.
[Note: I changed the title slightly from "Collaborating Openly to Make a 21st Century Government," shortly after publishing.]
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