Government 2.0

Here’s some more great stuff on the idea of the using web 2.0 principles (e.g. user generated content and openness) to strengthen democracy and improve public policy.

Mark Surman is the head of the Mozilla Foundation (MoFo) and is really at the forefront of pushing innovative use of Web 2.0 and the principles of openness, in Canada. He recently spoke at the City of Toronto’s 2.0 Web Summit, in front of the mayor and other city councillors, on how we can turn Toronto into a city that engages its citizenry in these types of projects. He even managed to convince the mayor to commit to some of these ideas on the spot!

Check out his slide-show here (with accompanying audio):

Great examples include:

Fix My Street: Individuals go on the website to point out problems around the city. Convenient way for citizens to express their opinions and concerns about certain neighbourhoods. Low cost way for the city officials to find out what needs to be done.

They Work For You: A British site that let’s you see how your MP has voted and what they’ve said in Parliament. Great use of technology to improve transparency and accountability. All this information is publicly available, we just need a platform to access it from. How\’d They Vote is the Canadian equivalent, but it’s not quite as easy to navigate.

Apps for Democracy: This is a really cool project started by some forward thinking government officials in Washington D.C. The city released a bunch of data and challenged individuals and companies to use it, offering $20k in prizes to the best web applications, widgets, Google-mashups, etc. Cool things that came out of this include:

Park-it-DC- a Google Maps mashup that let’s you figure out where to park in the city.

Carpool Mashup- which let’s you live a little bit greener by finding out who’s carpooling where.

Ilive.at-that allows you to enter and address and see everything about a specific neighbourhood- from the location of bars to local crime statistics.

Check out all the winners here.

In ending his speech, Mark challenged the city in three ways:

1. Open our data. transit. library catalogues. community centre schedules. maps. 311. expose it all so the people of Toronto can use it to make a better city. do it now.
2. Crowdsource info gathering that helps the city. somebody would have FixMyStreet.to up and running in a week if the Mayor promised to listen. encourage it.
3. Ask for help creating a city that thinks like the web. copy Washington, DC’s contest strategy. launch it at BarCamp.

Anyways, I think Toronto is on the cusp of becoming one of these cool open cities. There’s already been some movement towards stuff like this, particularly with Transit camp, which collected a group of local “transit enthusiasts” to talk about how to improve the TTC in Toronto. The beauty of all of this is how little effort the city has to put in to receive tangible results. This is public consultation at its finest- passionate users of the system volunteering their time to make things happen.

The important thing here is to realize that the you don’t need to be a tech-whiz to get involved in this stuff. Technology just provides the platform so that everyone can be involved if they want to be. The principles of web 2.0 and openness are pretty transformative when we think about how they might be applied to other areas of our life.

Today’s youth: a society of outlaws

Lawyer Lawrence Lessig is one of the world’s biggest proponents of the “open copyright” movement- something I’m pretty interested in, myself. His TED talk, is a great primer on how copyright law impedes creativity and innovation, by removing our generation’s ability to express ourselves. In the talk, he argues that the advent of the Internet has rendered our current IP laws outdated. Definitely a must-see for anyone interested in the future of user generated content.

His conclusion really brought it home for me:

As we see what this technology can do, we need to recognize you can’t kill the instinct that technology produces, we can only criminalize it. We can’t stop our kids from using it, we can only drive it underground. We can’t make our kids passive again- we can only make them “pirates.” Is that good? We live in this weird time, this age of prohibitions where in many areas of our life, we live life against the law. Ordinary people live life against the law and that’s what we’re doing to our kids. They live life knowing that they live against the law. That realization is extraordinarily corrosive, extraordinarily corrupting. And in a democracy, we ought to be able to do better.

The key in this whole debate is trying to figure out a way to convince businesses that new “open” business models can be profitable. Without this economic lever, I find it difficult to believe there could be “private” solution to the problem. No company is going to give up its right to protect its assets for purely ideological reasons.

What’s really interesting though, is the possibility that these companies could actually be forced by users to adopt new open business models. Perhaps, certain industries will stop trying to prevent this “illegal” activity and make business changes that provide legitimate alternatives. We’ve already seen steps towards this in a number of areas- particularly, the music and TV industry. Record companies have been forced to adapt to the availability of illegal online music by launching legal downloading sites. Broadcasting networks are streaming “official” content online with commercials, to prevent people from watching it on Youtube. Despite this new found openness on the part of some, the vast majority of private actors would rather fight tooth and nail for the protection of their rights and content. What a huge waste of resources.

The Power of Networks: a Brief Primer

Over the summer, I developed a strong interest in examining the impact of technology on our society. The Internet is a particularly poignant example of one such transformative technology. Even to the least tech savvy, its benefits are enormous. Among other things, the Internet gives us unlimited access to information (Google), allows us to communicate over great distances with minimal effort (email) and even provides us with channels to express our many opinions (blogs).

In the Wealth of Networks (full review to come), Benkler explains the internet’s transformative power using economics terms. He asserts that the Internet has empowered individuals by facilitating collaboration and creating a powerful “networked information economy.” Essentially, the magic of the Internet lies in its ability to connect disparate individuals- a collective can create something much larger than any individual could. By providing a medium for collaboration, information technology essentially increases the value of an individual’s output. This is the power of networks.

The net is littered with countless examples of this phenomenon. Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia run by volunteers, has turned its traditional counterparts (e.g. Encyclopedia Britannica) into expensive paper weights. Linux, an open-source operating system designed by programmers in their spare time, is a legitimate alternative to Microsoft’s corporate behemoth, Windows. Obama’s wildly successful presidential fund raising campaign relies on millions of dollars of individual donations rather than corporate or public funding. Political blogs and hundreds of independent online media sources are challenging and revolutionizing traditional journalistic mediums.

In my opinion, the most exciting applications of these ideas are still to come. The ability to harness the power of networks has yet to be fully explored (or exploited) by the private or public sectors. The world of public policy, in particular, is long overdue for some innovation. The Internet is probably one of the best champions of democracy- having essentially democratized the market for information… more on this later

One more thing before I end this post: new developments in the regulatory environment for the Internet (particularly intellectual property law) may threaten the network information economy. These laws restrict the flow of information, which is critical for any network to survive.  The “open everything” movement is the brainchild of proponents of the the freedom of information and its ability to create power innovation. Look no further for a worthy cause…

Interested in reading more? Try:

1) Benkler’s book available for free here. Lawrence Lessig is another authority on the topic worth checking out.

2) Economics of Sharing, Economist, Feb. 3rd 2005. (Short and sweet)

3) James Surowiecki’s Wisdom of Crowds (Explains why a crowd might actually be better than an “expert.”)