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.

Is liberalism contagious?

The NYT says it’s not.

Professors will be happy (or maybe sad) to know that they actually exert little to no influence on their students, when it comes to shaping their political ideology (and maybe everything else).

Apparently our political views are shaped by the time we’re 15! It’s a bit ironic that by the time we’re old enough to understand the implications of our political ideology, we’ve likely already been indoctrinated one way or another. I’m sure parents must exert the most influence- but I’d be curious to see where the rest of it comes from. Your friends (i.e. your friend’s parents)? What we read? Who we see on TV? I’d also be interested in seeing this same study done at the elementary school level and with more than just political ideology (morality, religion, etc). Apparently, kids really are sponges…

Obama’s not-so-secret weapon

Wired presents a nice summary of Obama’s revolutionary use of technology and social media in his campaign. I think we’ll be seeing a lot more of these ideas in the future. Although it couldn’t hurt to have one of Facebook’s founders advising him, apparently Obama’s online campaign is modeled after some Harvard research commissioned by the Sierra Club:

In 2003, the Sierra Club realized that its local grassroots volunteer programs weren’t effective. In late 2005, it commissioned the Harvard scholars to undertake a two-year research project to figure out why, and how to fix it. The researchers discovered that the kind of volunteers that the Sierra Club attracted were “lone ranger” types who focused on accomplishing goals on their own, rather than effectively working with others with “shared purpose.”The danger of this approach, Ganz says, is that individuals burn out easily. They try to do everything themselves rather than breaking the goals out into specific tasks that members of interdependent teams can accomplish in pieces. That’s why relationships are so important, they found.

Another great example of Internet collaboration… this is how I justify having Facebook.

Needless to say, the Canadian political scene is fairly behind on the use of social media. None of the major parties had anything remotely resembling creativity/interactivity in its use of technology. That might help explain the record low turn-out by youth in the last election. The Liberal party (and its new leader) should take heed of these new techniques, given it desperately needs to revamp its fundraising model.

Wiki-Government

Here’s an interesting article in Democracy Magazine (put out by the Roosevelt Institute, a US-based student think-tank) that discusses possible applications of the network effect in the world of public policy. [For a quick background on some of this stuff, see my earlier post titled "the Power of Networks: a Primer."]

In a representative democracy, we entrust elected and appointed officials to make informed decisions on our behalf. Of course, the system is imperfect and other than the occasional “town-hall” meeting, opportunities for real public consultation are few and far between.

Thus, applying the collaborative power of networks to public policy is an intriguing prospect. At its essence, the Internet’s strengths lie in its ability to decrease information asymmetries and connect disparate people together by giving them a platform to collaborate. Thus, the Internet and public policy are intuitive bedfellows- technology can strengthen public institutions, by lowering the cost of access to both specialized knowledge and public opinion. The article describes a great example of this type of project:

On June 15, 2007, the USPTO [United States Patent Office- a public institution] launched an experiment, the “Peer-to-Patent: Community Patent Review,” which could become a model for precisely this sort of collaborative governance. The program solicits public participation in the patent examination process via the Web. This system (the design and implementation of which I direct in cooperation with the USPTO) allows the public to research and upload publications–known in patent law as “prior art”–that will inform the patent examiner about the novelty and obviousness of the invention and enable her to decide whether it deserves a patent. This is truly revolutionary: In the 200 years since Thomas Jefferson founded the patent office, there has been no direct communication between the patent examiner and the public.

How can patent officers be expected to judge the merit of applications on topics that they know nothing about? This project allows patent officers access to the public’s wealth of specialized information. Results show significant progress in reducing the back-log in patent offices.

I think there is exciting potential for these types of projects to improve public institutions. What better way to strengthen our democracy, than by applying the very democratizer of information itself.

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.”)