Colliberate

Online Contention in China: Deliberation Without Democracy?

    
This post draws some key paragraphs from my writing on online contention in China, which is a topic I have been researching for the better part of the last 6 months. I find that the success of Internet contention to provoke a positive state response depends largely on the forms of contention –that is, its planning, organization, spontaneity, and geo-temporal origins-- as well as on the contents –that is, whether contention is framed as political or apolitical, and whether protest targets state-efficacy or state-legitimacy.

Context 

In a country with a population of over 1.3 billion people, almost anything can be true. According to figures from the China Internet Network Information Center, China had 564 million Internet users in December 2012. In the same year, China had 309 million microbloggers (microblogs are published through services like Twitter, which limit the author to a 140 character count). The Internet pervades all aspects of life in China. Chinese cyberspace is a battlefield of fact and fiction, where netizens and all Chinese institutions –the State, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), business, industry, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs)-- deliberate over available information and, in the process, debate civilizational alternatives. As Yang Guobin, arguably the foremost authority on the impacts of the Internet on Chinese society, points out in The Power of the Internet in China, “social change in China is not understandable without looking at the Internet”.

State Credibility

State credibility and national stability are the dominant issues at hand, tbe former for China's netizenry, the latter for the Chinese government. These two priorities share a very uneasy relationship in contemporary China, where the Internet has become a powerful space for the expression of public opinion.

The State, in trying to maintain "national stability" –although often this equates to self-preservation of the Party-- loses credibility when it blatantly tries to steer the public discourse, and also when it does not respond effectively to public opinion. A the State tries to "guide public opinion", the information-abundance of cyberspace makes this seem at best infeasible or at worst makes the State look foolish.

Voice-Aggregates

When Chinese authorities allow for online contention, it might often be to collect information about public affairs and opinions, to legitimize its own actions (here, the State might wait to “respond” to online contention after it appears), or to keep local authorities in check. The contradiction between the State's approval for Internet-expansion and its approval for official censorship can put the State in a perilous position where it is vulnerable to being challenged.

While civil and political activism tend to be unsuccessful if originating as a divisive idea, as an overtly political idea, or as directly challenging the State, it is extremely powerful when it arises as a secondary result of social, economic, and cultural rights contention. When a decentralized network of netizens spontaneously protest about an issue which originally concerns state-efficacy and not state-legitimacy, those isolated grievances can quickly agglomerate to become system-wide concerns.

Deliberation without Democracy?

    Online contention in China appears to be mutually constitutive with civil society. That is, civil society generates online contention, while online contention also generates civil society. Yang argues that the Internet and civil society in China energize each other in coevolutionary dynamics. This development of civil society through online means in China is showing that democratic deliberation can take place in an environment that is not democratically structured. That is, China exemplifies a type of public opinion agenda-setting in which deliberation takes place without electoral democracy. We see this in the “grand bargain” between citizens and the state in China which is clearly being renegotiated –citizens are no longer content with economic growth as the basis of their government's right to rule. This state-centric model of development is faltering, especially as China's exports are shrinking. The Chinese government and its citizens alike recognize the need for domestic innovation and progress, and see that making these possible requires increased access to information, increased civil liberties, a strengthening of the rule of law, and greater attention paid to the environment and to public health. The less the government addresses these concerns, the more of a crisis it faces in the legality of its rule.

    The development of the Internet as a lattice connecting various elements of society –citizens, businesses, non-profits, academia, and the State-- is an inherent result of the structural nature of the Internet itself. As more and more people are networked online and produce and consume content, so does information play an expanding role in individual and group agency, which, following the example of Laura Ahearn, who writes about the intersection of transforming literary and media practices and interpersonal love, can be defined as the “culturally constrained capacity to act" (in Invitations to Love). The question of whether deliberative and collaborative mechanisms online can effectively shape public discourse and national developmental priorities is being posed the world over –look, for example, at recent efforts to “crowdsource” the latest Icelandic Constitution, or at participatory-budgeting initiatives in New York City and Brazil. In the United States, the “open government” and associated “open data” movements are gaining visibility and popularity, and these initiatives represent a fundamental rethinking of the relationship between citizens and government, moving towards a system of open and collaborative governance in which the role of government shifts from arbitration to partnership. Tim O'Reilly famously describes this as Government 2.0., or as “government as platform”.

    The Internet shapes and transforms our cultural capacity to act, and this is something all governments have to reckon with. In her book, Wiki Government, Beth Noveck describes how a process of targeted citizen participation in the policy-making process, in combination with strategically-framed uses of open data, can ameliorate the bureaucratic serialism of traditional government processes –essentially, she argues for a formalized system of sourcing citizen-led innovations in governance practices. These systems differ from traditional processes of electoral democracy in that the emphasis is not on deliberation as a means to achieve consensus, but on collaboration as a means to achieve the best solution. In China, we see this distinction between government and governance quite clearly. If government cannot be changed, change governance. This idea of developing an iterative, experimental, and collaborative culture of governance by using Internet technologies is not particular to any one place. However, the ways in which this idea will play out depends very much on the structural conditions of the society in question. It is very much up for debate whether citizen-participation in policy-making and in the administration of government-services is more effective in a democratic or authoritarian context and whether such efforts will ultimately democratize a society or, as some have suggested in the case of China, only strengthen the government's rule.

Defining Technology

    As one of the big resounding final questions for the Gov 3.0. class, we asked ourselves: what do we mean by “technology” ?

    When we talk about the intersection of tech and policy, what precisely do we mean by tech? Tech apparently needn't be digital, needn't be electronic at all, really. What are the current contexts and understandings surrounding the use of this word? Steve Midgley, who joined us in class, talked about technology not as enabling policy but as a policy agent –tech as policy. As an example of technology as a policy agent, we can look to Dazza Greenwood, Jim Hendler, and Sir Tim Berners-Lee's work on the semantic web and the "e-citizen suite" or "one-stop-shop for government services", in which the technology itself is really the policy.

    Technology and policy can be the same; they are both forms of system-architecture/applied design, and they co-arise. Consider the intersection between the "one stop shop" for government services (the e-citizen platform) and the big & open data movements. Here, the ways we use the tools available to us are themselves forms of engagement --and forms of technology, and policy. What technology and policy are depends upon the perspectives of the users and the makers.

Technology & Policy?

    Technology is something that comes out of your capacity for applying abstract and practical thought to material and non-material resources and creating value and meaning from those resources. Technology is a manifestation of how we experience the world, and development in technology means development in how we understand and interact with our world. Therefore developments in technology have massive implications on both consciousness and society. The potentiality of society and of humanity from which technology originates is also augmented by those technologies.  

    Policy attempts to arrange and regulate human affairs. Policy must respond to change, and to people. Policy should be widely-researched and approached holistically, with regard to the interconnectedness of all things, and the long-term effects of present causes. Policy is social and societal and should aim to bring out the best in human beings. 

    So technology and policy are approaches to bringing out the best in people by eliciting the capacity and potentiality we share as a species. Through technology as much as through policy we create the worlds we inhabit as we try to expand our consciousness and our potential. Technology and policy are rooted in widely connected systems and "lattices" and, as products of humanity, should aim for long-term sustainability, self-preservation, and the promotion of cosmic love, of course.

Defining Technology in Context

TECHNOLOGY:

from techne (art, skill, craft, or the way, manner, or means by which a thing is gained) and logos (word, the utterance by which inward thought is expressed, a saying, or an expression)

  IS the systematized way to perceive how the material and non-material potentiality of nature and humanity are manifest in a recursive cycle comprising and configured by: "the words or discourse about the way things are gained", the gaining of those things, those things themselves, and how those things augment this "way".

It is:

1) THE SET of means created by applying abstract and practical thought to actualize value/meaning from nature (incl. humankind)

2) THE PROCESS by which the use of and discourse around those means create the world-views from which those means in turn originate

 

 Dictionary Definitions of Technology:

	1	2	3
Websters	a : the practical application of knowledge especially in a particular area : engineering 2 <medical technology> b : a capability given by the practical application of knowledge <a car's fuel-saving technology>	A manner of accomplishing a task especially using technical processes, methods, or knowledge <new technologies for information storage>	The specialized aspects of a particular field of endeavor<educational technology>
New Oxford American Dictionary	The application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, especially in industry:advances in computer technology [count noun]:recycling technologies	Machinery and devices developed from scientific knowledge:it will reduce the industry’s ability to spend money on new technology	The branch of knowledge dealing with engineering or applied sciences.
American Heritage Dictionary	a. The application of science, especially to industrial or commercial objectives. b. The scientific method and material used to achieve a commercial or industrial objective.	Electronic or digital products and systems considered as a group: a store specializing in office technology	Anthropology: The body of knowledge available to a society that is of use in fashioning implements, practicing manual arts and skills, and extracting or collecting materials.
Encyclopedia Britannica	The application of scientific knowledge to the practical aims of human life or, as it is sometimes phrased, to the change and manipulation of the human environment.
Collins Dictionary	The application of practical sciences to industry or commerce	The methods, theory, and practices governing such application -> "a highly developed technology"	The total knowledge and skills available to any human society for industry, art, science, etc

    We shouldn't limit our defininition of technology as being an application of ourselves to “industry or commerce”. Of course, our big technology paradigm changes in the last century have had to do with electricity, industry, commerce, war, and eventually the Internet and the World Wide Web. But the Internet is showing that the relationship between technology and human flourishing can express itself in markedly non-tech-based ways, offline, and also that technology --again thinking about e-citizen platforms and semantic web-- can be synonymous with policy or governance.

    I most enjoy Part 3 of Collins' definition: “The total knowledge and skills available to any human society for industry, art, science, etc”. I do think there is an importance in recognizing this added dimension: the total knowledge and skills which make the total knowledge and skills available to any human society for any human endeavor. There is this enormous element of recursion –chicken-and-egg-- in what technology is and where it comes from. I's important to express that technology expresses and creates (and yet is derived from) a social context, worldview, or paradigm, because this understanding inculcates social/cosmic responsibility in the whoever is dealing with/talking/thinking about technology.

How Do We Get Decentralized Groups of People to Collaborate to the End of Improving Lives?

The following is an excerpt from the “Smart Cities” session of NYU Wagner's Governance Lab Experiment: 

“The city will only become truly smart when its people are both its sensory and analytic capacity. In the smart city, groups form around common urban interests and common information sources. This is the smart city adage: know yourself, know your city.

It's more about civic infrastructure at large than about one tool in particular. Creating smarter cities from the bottom up requires a layer of “middle-ware”, which should be composed of activists, intermediaries, small businesses, etc. They can aggregate and give voice to broader and more distributed communities that might not otherwise be motivated to join the political process. They can advocate for individual interests, and they can communicate these preferences to audiences like government. They can collect, translate, and communicate information coming from disaggregated or non-traditional sources in an effort to make open data more useful to the public.

We want to help the city listen better. We want cities to look to this “middle-layer” as a legitimate platform between citizens and governments. We want them to value the information. We want government to collect information that isn't Tweetable –from people who aren't connected online. They don't have to think of how to make open data useful to the public, but they should think of how to make it useful for this middle layer of experts.”

Phillip Colligan of Nesta in writes in People Helping People:

“FIRST, we need to get better at harnessing voluntary effort to augment public services. That means public service institutions being more open and making better asks of people.

SECOND, public services need to consciously engage with people's networks and communities.

THIRD, public services need to focus on equipping ordinary people with the skills and knowledge to help each other out.

FINALLY, public services need to create opportunities for peer to peer support.”

In the White House Open Government Initiative blog, Beth Noveck, former Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government in the Office of Science and Technology Policy writes that we should celebrate “open and collaborative ways of making hometowns more efficient and responsive to the needs of their citizens.”

Alexis De Tocqueville observed about 19th century America that: “In towns it is impossible to prevent men from assembling, getting excited together and forming sudden passionate resolves. Towns are like great meeting houses with all the inhabitants as members. In them the people wield immense influence over their magistrates and often carry their desires into execution without intermediaries.”

If we are going to truly build we-government, we have to build it from the bottom-up. Below are links to projects and programs which act as the “middle-ware” to give voice to individuals who want to make a positive difference in their own and others' lives in the ways that they can; to link those voices across networks, cities, and communities; and to fund civic initiatives –that is, projects that create opportunities for peer-to-peer support and innovation. 

EXAMPLES of peer-to-peer civic innovation: 

See, Click, Fix is a free customer service platform that enables citizens to improve their neighborhoods by reporting pot holes, downed trees, and traffic lights in need of repair.

Spigit is an innovation platform through which invites citizens to come up with ideas for running the town better and allows organizations to submit projects that need expertise and skills from the crowd

Code for America Commons is a marketplace for open innovation in government, that tracks cities-based civic apps.

Ushahidi is a non-profit tech company that specializes in developing free and open source software for information collection, visualization and interactive mapping.

The Cities Pilot the Future program is an initiative in which companies, social entrepreneurs and research centers that have invested in technologies that change our cities are matched directly with cities searching for these solutions, creating tangible market opportunities.

EXAMPLES of local governments linking up through peer-to-peer networks: 

BetaCities is an online community for local government employees and strategic partners, whose mission is to establish action-based starting points for local government agencies wanting to be cities of continuous self-improvement.

World e-Governments Organization of Cities and Local Governments (WeGO) is an international cooperative body which pursues sustainable city development, fosters collaborations among e-governing cities, helps bridge the digital-divide among social strata within and among cities of the world, promotes mutual cooperation and solidarity among cities. 

EXAMPLES of crowdfunding civic or public initiatives: 

Citizinvestor is a project in which municipalities submit projects online, citizens invest in the projects they care about most, and once a project is funded, it is built.

Brickstarter is a Finland-based civic crowdfunding website that focuses on sourcing investment for urban renewal and architectural and public art projects.

Neighbor.ly is a crowdfunding website that lets people invest in places and civic projects.

KickstarterNYC is New York City Council's Kickstarter page that highlights projects in participating low-income neighborhoods.

Collaboratively Defining Challenges of/for Open-Government

    Midway through the semester, we were joined in the NYU Wagner Gov 3.0. class by more members of the GovLab team  --Stefaan Verhulst, the GovLab's Chief Research and Development Officer, and Aaron Cohen, Internet history professor at NYU and GovLab co-founder -- as well as Rick Matasar (VP for NYU's University Enterprise Initiatives), Prof. Dazza Greenwood from MIT's MediaLab, and our Prof., Beth Noveck.

    The class centered around the questions: What skills should our next public-policy makers have? And how will we inoculate people with those skills? 

    Some themes are pressing, others ascendant. Technology will only increase in importance. Data --open data, big data (see the entry titled Collaborative Governance Through Big Data), linked data, plays a bigger and bigger role in identifying and understanding policy issues, and also in how we measure progress. Tools for collaboration are evermore creative and our capacity to collaborative endeavor are transforming governance (see the entry titled Making Use of Collaborative Expertise). That social issues are both "global" and "local" is a more and more immediate reality as our networked-ness expands and embeds. 

    The GovLab is just one "node" of research and experimentation in answering those questions. Go to http://ifonlyweknew.wordpress.com/ to share your statements and questions that "if answered could help accelerate the transformation of how we solve public problems and provide public goods".

    The following is a list of places to participate in the knowledge-creation that is going into answering the question: "How we will govern ourselves tomorrow?"

The White House's 2nd National Action Plan for Open Government is to be released this year. Opportunities for engagement will be posted at whitehouse.gov/open and you can submit ideas for the next plan to @OpenGov.

Policy Exchange is looking for ideas on the future of digital government and opportunities to make better use of technology in the public sector through their submissions form.

The Trans-European Research and Education Networking Association, along with Cisco and the Internet Society, is calling for student "poster" submissions on, among other things, virtual organizations and collaboration. 

Submissions for the Knight Foundation News Challenge are closed, but you can comment on the entries, and, what is more, many of the 40 finalists are calling for further idea submissions themselves.

Challenge.gov is an online challenge platform administered by the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) in partnership with ChallengePost that empowers the U.S. Government and the public to bring the best ideas and top talent to bear on pressing social and policy issues.

    Finally, you can always use the #gov30 hashtag to submit ideas to the Gov 3.0 class, and, of course, you can submit ideas right here to Colliberate via the comment box below.

 

Collaborative Governance Through Big Data

WHAT IS BIG DATA?

    While the idea of “big data” is well-entrenched in places like phone companies and stock exchanges, it is only beginning to gain traction in other sectors –especially the public and non-profit sectors. Where data comes from (sensors, social media, transaction records, etc.), what forms it takes (text, audio, video, sensor data, etc.), and how it is used (predictive analytics, data management, real-time data, etc.) all contribute to different understandings and uses of “big data”. What is sure is that technology plays an enormous role in collecting and analyzing the data, and as technologies develop, so will the definitions of “big data”.

    IBM's Institute for Business Value issued a report about the real-world uses of big data in 2012 which points out that companies tend to use big data as a predictive tool for improving a customer's experience. This could mean Facebook ads, or product improvements in car-manufacturing, where driving data can be analyzed for insights. But the use of big data to target specifically the end-consumers needn't be –in fact, shouldn't be-- solely a private endeavor. The citizen is an end-consumer too, and big data can produce profound benefits in the public sector. There are many avenues for the civic application of big data, and so Tom Lee, director of Sunlight Labs, points out in his article for the Skoll World Forum debate about the social impacts of big data that: “participation in digital culture.. means volunteering as an experimental subject”.

 WHY USE BIG DATA?

    Ideally, big data makes it possible to take a “screenshot” of the things we know, either over time or at a given time, in one place or in many. As we get more data, and it becomes more varied, so too will that screenshot contain more information. In a networked world, this means we can quickly get a picture of what Derrick Harris of GigaOM calls “a latent stream of broad societal efficiencies”. And inefficiencies –this way, we can spot where effort is lacking, or where effort is needlessly duplicated.

    With sensors in smartphones, computers, cars, homes, and even toothbrushes, we are quantifying more and more aspects of our lives. The collected data can then be subject to a host of treatments, such as remixing, mashing, layering, or linking. Sensor data from individual cars might be layered with city traffic data to show drivers where best to park, which route to take, or where to get gas. What is more, sensor data from cars can be relayed to manufacturers so that car troubles might be prevented before they happen. By combining and recombining different kinds of data, we might begin to see correlations between things we weren't once aware of. Big data showed, for example, that the stabilization of vital signs in prematurely born babies tends to be followed by infections. But this is a correlation, and not a causation –this is a particularity of big data analytics, where the “why” is not always obvious, but the “what” is there.

    By using context, and by creating links and layers between data sets, we can ask meaningful questions of big data. Now, these links often have to be made by real people, but links between disparate data sets are also increasingly computerized through algorithms. This kind of work is what is building the semantic web, which uses meta-data describing the data, enabling computers to comprehend what data is about and its relationships to other data. Computerized or not, big data has revolutionary potential in how we make decisions in general, and, in turn, in how we deal with various policy-issues, especially as we move towards more collaborative systems of governance.

BIG DATA AND GOVERNANCE

    Government is central to the collection and application of big data, first and foremost because governments hold massive archives of public data, but also because government can frame the social or economic policy-issues to which big data can be applied. The Obama administration, through new tools such as data.gov, the Federal IT Dashboard, and with initiatives like the Open Government Directive, has made clear the importance of collaborative governance –inviting citizens to use open information and data to solve problems for themselves and for each other. Last year, the administration announced the National Big Data Research and Development Initiative, which coordinates data across various federal agencies and departments. And this year, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the National Science Foundation will host an event to highlight high-impact collaborations using big data (submit your own projects to BIGDATA@nsf.gov by April 22^nd).

    Big data collaborations between the public and private sectors can spur innovation in all sorts of areas, such as healthcare, public safety, job creation, education, transportation, environment, energy, etc. Speaking at the Government 2.0. Summit in 2009, Tim O'Reilly pointed out open data and collaborative platforms could revolutionize governance. He argued that government should act as a platform, partner, or launching pad for creating collective value through collaborative processes. For example, the U.S. Department of Defense's investment in GPS systems spurred countless other applications using that technology. In the same vein, government should now make efforts to open as much public data as is possible, where data itself is the utility to be harnessed by innovators. Proprietary data ownership policies should be re-worked for openness, reflecting the progression from government 1.0. to 2.0., and data itself should be released for the purpose of collaborative analysis and work –moving to government 3.0. In Information for Impact: Liberating Nonprofit Sector Data, Prof. Beth Noveck describes the “liberation” of Internal Revenue Service data on non-profits through the conversion of Form 990 tax data (detailing the financial, governance and organizational structure of America’s tax-exempt institutions) into machine-readable and easily sharable formats. Making this data free, open, and analyzable invites innovation into the non-profit sector. In his blog post on Wikinomics.com, Nick Vitalari argues that thinking about “less” or “more” government is now outdated, and suggests that collaboration around big data implies a governance structure in which citizens play a greater role in the development of policy.

USING BIG DATA

    In Big Data as Society's Watchdog, Tom Lee makes the point that complicated mathematics, statistics, and computation may be dazzling, but the insights they deliver may be extremely subtle. On the other hand, basic human input when looking at disparate data sets may take little time, but lead to enormous discoveries of previously unrecognized connections. Big data analysis is relatively difficult in the public sector, where data tends to be “messier” than that which comes from the private sector, and this is why real people linking data is so important. For example, disparate data sets from social media, NGOs, universities, the UN, and commercial satellites are being layered by people to gain a better understanding of the humanitarian crisis happening between Sudan and South Sudan.

    Sandy Pentland, MIT's “big data guy”, has a vision of a big data-world which he says is far more creative than the world Orwell painted in 1984. Big data, he argues in Reinventing Society in the Wake of Big Data, is information about real behavior, not about beliefs. This is the kind of granular information that you “leave behind like breadcrumbs” --transaction records, phone sensor data, location data, etc. With this kind of data researchers can find connections between how people behave and how the world works, and portray these relationships accurately. Pentland goes on: “Adam Smith and Karl Marx were wrong, or at least had only half the answers. Why? Because they talked about markets and classes, but those are aggregates”. With big data, a researcher can find the micro-patterns and individual records which cause things like political revolution and financial bubbles. This kind of fine-grain information allows us to really understand how our society operates, and, with those understandings, build better systems.

    If the healthcare sector in the United States were to leverage big data, it could create $300 billion in value each year, two-thirds of which comes from reducing healthcare expenditure by 8 percent, writes James Mayika for the McKinsey Global Institute in Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity. This is the result of information transparency, information accuracy, preciseness in tailoring healthcare to individual patients, computerized analytics, and proactive preventative maintenance. But big data initiatives do not happen on their own, nor do they intrinsically benefit society. People must frame the issues and questions and draw connections between the data for big data to be meaningful. The data itself must be open, free, and analyzable. We must incentivize the opening of data, which could be done by offering subsidies or tax breaks to companies and NGOs which release their data. We must also incentivize the analysis of that data for the public good, and can do so through, for example, prize-backed challenges.

 COLLIBERATION OF AND THROUGH BIG DATA

    The potential of big data can be harnessed for enormous public good, but we will have to actively apply ourselves to this pursuit. On its own, technology guarantees nothing, only people do. This means, for example, that data protection laws which vary from State to State should be consolidated so that data from various places can be analyzed together –the whole point of big data. Connections have to be made. By collecting evidence, we can design accurate and effective policies. Big data allows for a fundamental paradigm-shift in policy-making: moving from what is best for a population, to what is best for a specific individual. In healthcare, for example, medication and treatment can be tailored for specific patients (see The Creative Destruction of Medicine by Eric Topol). In education, people might be able to better choose where best to go and learn (see, for example, the US Dept. of Education's College Affordability and Transparency Center). People can pick phone-plans better suited to their actual calling behaviors (see studies by the Citizens Utility Board). And entire communities can make use of big data for improvement –data collected from libraries, schools, businesses, people, etc., which, when made open, provides the utility for citizens to self-improve, or even compete with other cities (see The Quantified Community, by Esther Dyson, for the former point, and for the latter see the Smaller Cities Unite! project which partners Providence, R.I., and Copenhagen in an ongoing ideas-exchange).

    Big data is still emerging, especially in the public and non-profit sectors. And yet already we see its implications –government policies which decentralize information; expanded opportunities for collaboration, where citizens can fix not only their own problems but also others' using evidence; increased intermixing between public and private data; streamlining public vs private capabilities for maximum effectiveness in serving the common good. Big data is a key feature of our technologically networked society, and makes collaborative governance not only possible but necessary, because, as the old adage goes, with great power comes great responsibility.

Hawai'i Open Government by Lindsea K. Wilbur

    LINDSEA K. WILBUR is a student in the Futures Studies department of the University of Hawai'i, Manoa. She is a writer interested in the Internet, networks, human-computer interaction, system sciences, narrative inquiry, consciousness, and the culture and history of Hawai'i. As the chair of the recently re-activated Internet Society-Hawai'i Chapter, she is dedicated to advocating for Hawai'i Open Data, Open Government and Digital Government initiatives, promoting open Internet and technical development, stimulating recruitment and job market development in local technology industries, supporting forums for skill and knowledge sharing; and advancing the local culture of Hawai'i by forwarding visual, performing, culinary and literary arts through use of the Internet and technology. She also collaborates with the Planetary Collective.

What is a successful open government? In the federal Open Government Directive back in 2009, Peter R. Orszag, director, emphasizes what have become the pillars for the movement— "transparency, participation, and collaboration." Although he is describing a style of governance, these words take their meaning from a culture and a mindset that have been growing since the beginning of the Internet. From the methods of Internet governance to the distributed, decentralized p2p networks which thrive in communities online, how will this culture, heralded by the Information Age, alter our governance systems? 

Tim O'Reilly in his book Government 2.0 writes about this "update." He asks, "How do you design a system in which all of the outcomes aren't specified beforehand, but instead evolve through interactions between government and its citizens, as a service provider enabling its user community?" How do you design government as a platform made of the people, by the people, for the people?

There are 1.4 million residents of Hawai'i that daily depend on the hardware architecture and software framework that is the state government, not including our economically vialable "visitors." According to our Chief Information Officer, Sanjeev "Sonny" Bhagowalia, who outlined our current status in the Digital Government Summit, there are 41,000 state employees, and 750 people in IT. There are 18 departments, 108 attached agencies, 162 boards and commissions, all with decentralized IT. Across the 18 departments, there are 35 lines of business, 220 business functions and services, and "hundreds of complex, manual, silo, paper based processes," as described by Sonny. Less than 5% of our services are online. 

In terms of updating our government, we are "starting almost literally from scratch," explained Governor Neil Abercrombie at the Hawai'i Digital Government Summit.

Our technology is up to 30 years old, and in 740 fragmented systems, with weak interoperability/information linkage across databases. What is the first step in opening government? Transparency. What does it mean? From the Latin trans- + parēre, to show oneself, says Merriam-Webster, to be readily understood.  

Consolidating the infrastructure and creating a network in the cloud will improve services and insure information security. With our data centers are a few miles from the ocean and below sea level, it is a necessary step for Hawai'i's disaster recovery. Our government will enterprise shared services, with email, a directory service, and security services provided like a unified utility.

While Sonny works on our state, the grassroots technology movement is pushing forward the Hawai'i Open Data bill. Just like the open standards and unrestrictive International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs) that produced the Internet, open data policies begin to lay foundation for the future. 

Getting rid of the isolated information silos, we can begin to connect the digital dots, gain new understandings. How could data from a large integrated system of our large local government be visualized? Through this we will gain access to new information that can help the state govern more efficiently, and better train and educate both public servants and citizens alike through the MyHawaii.gov portal.

With the Open Data bill passed in the Committee for Technology and the Arts, and the Committee on Judiciary and Labor, we are in the foundational stage of the Open Government Initiative of Hawai'i. An eye on the ever improving technology, it is the hope, as more and more data becomes available to our growing entrepreneur and start-up community, that this will invite ingenuity and creativity in public/private partnership, this civic participation based in transparency and trust.

 The Hawai'i Open Data Bill (House Bill 632 and Senate Bill 448) defines open data as "data that is already deemed public and made available electronically, such as on a website; it could include department, agency, and legislative data." 

If the bill gets passed, this data will be released in data sets and APIs on data.Hawaii.gov and data.Honolulu.gov. Passed in the House with amendments in the Consumer Protection Committee, and with tweaking on the language in the Judiciary Committee, the bill is currently in the Senate to be heard on March 21st.

Hawai'i Open Data, Inc, founded by Burt Lum, Ryan Ozawa, and Jared I. Kuroiwa in 2012, is a charitable organization "dedicated to advancing the adoption of open data/API standards and the development of solutions capitalizing on open data in Hawaii". A large force in organizing the grassroots open government movement, Hawai'i Open Data, Inc uses marketing, outreach, education, event planning, and community building to support the culture of open government. Successful accomplishments include planning, promoting, and executing CityCamp Honolulu, Unconference, and Hackathon for the City & County of Honolulu.

Alongside the Hawai'i Open Data bill, Governor Abercrombie's HI Growth Initiative gains speed. In his State of the State address, the governor announced this initiative, a State investment program "focused on building an innovation ecosystem that supports entrepreneurial high growth businesses and creates high wage jobs for our people." Unanimously passed in the Senate and House, the next steps are the House Economic Development Board and the Senate Economic Development, Government Operations and Housing Committee.

The Hawai'i Innovation Alliance (HIA), formed in 2012, aims to support this emerging innovation ecosystem. The organization provides a unified voice for the tech and entrepreneur community to foster innovation, educate lawmakers, and advocate appropriate policy. 

On the Facebook group for HIA, Burt and Jared post frequent open government news, articles and projects. It is also a hub for mobilizing public testimony on bills, recently Hawai'i Open Data and HI Growth. When there's a limited time to submit testimony, this kind of centralized platform is key to implementing quick civic action.

The Hackerspaces, Makerspaces, start up incubators, supporting organizations and community workshops of Honolulu create room for collaboration. Some of these include BoxJelly, Hawai'i's first coworking space and the home to HI Capacity, a Honolulu Hacker- and Makerspace. Blue Startups is Hawai'i's first seed-accelerator. The coffeeshop/bookstore R/D in Kaka'ako hosts Kinetiq Labs' Info Sessions for entrepreneurs, which works with the now massive Startup Weekend Honolulu (hosted twice a year).Camp BizSmart Hawai'i teaches middle and high school students entrepreneurship, while Aloha Movement Project provides group support for university students trying to turn their ideas into NGOs or startups. The entrepreneurs, technologists, and professionals of AlohaStartups chronicle and analyze the burgeoning startup community. 

There is an ever increasing need recognized for diversifying the skills of university students, to provide education through "real world" project based learning and become valued and contributing members of the community. One response to this is HI Capacity's university student Hackathon, in conjunction with the University of Hawai'i. Although programmers are always needed, a successful team and project requires inter-disciplinary thought. The first event to be held just after finals, they are working with the computer science department, art department, local entrepreneurs and developers to get students working on data based projects outside of the traditional classroom project. In addition to the cash prize, it is an opportunity for students normally academically isolated to get real world experience and make professional connections. 

A fundamentally social activity, local organizations create channels for coders to interact with the community. These efforts, largely done from love rather than money, are weaving networks and building the future community, an ohana of makers. The fluid mixture of collaboration and competition turns production into a practice of permanent innovation.

Neil Abercrombie spoke of connection at the Digital Government Summit, "In order to have a citizen centric democracy, which is what the United States is, and certainly what Hawai'i is all about, then we have to have participants, and the capacity of the citizens to participate and feel a connection." 

Is connection forged in activity, in participation? How can we make private/public partnership project based, social, and meaningful? How can we create a certain safety for experimentation with new techniques for civic engagement that might fail? How can we embody a culture of governance which gives social space for this kind of civic dialogue, as well as innovation through collaboration? When the traditional system served us for many years, what will it mean to update it? The fear of failure is in many ways a fear of the unknown alleviated by building trust, connecting, communicating. 

Burt Lum, the grassroots leader of Hawai'i Open Data, told an anecdote about asking the city for the data set of public art at the recent Unconference Hawai'i. "Why do you want that?" they asked him. "To make a map of all the art in Honolulu," he said. The official's response—"But people will steal it." Eventually, he communicated his vision, obtained the data, and created the map of public art at art.honolulu.gov.

What was it that allowed Burt to see this particular context for the raw data of Honolulu's public art, but prevented the government official from the same intuition? Was it Burt's unique background, interests, skill sets, etc, that made the data's usefulness apparent to him? Why didn't the officials understand too? Collaboration contains the "aha!" moments just as it does the complexities and varieties of human communication and perception. In total cohesion, we realize all answers can't be contained in a single, "I."

Taking the historical perspective of governance as a construction social humans, it makes sense to look at government as a platform. To build a platform is to construct a context for the many systems that we move through in our moment to moment experience. Like the stream moving through the riverbed, the flow depends on the context of the platform. The question is, what is the optimal flow?

This platform of open government, as a culture, needs an active community of system creators, makers, problem solvers, and story tellers as well as the education of mindfully intentional end users. For improving the flow of a platform, critical thinking skills, attentive inquiry, and innovative ingenuity have never been more invaluable. It is imagination and innovation, as well as compassion and communication that will help cultivate the culture of open government and uphold the values of "transparency, participation, and collaboration." 

 

Making Use of Collaborative Expertise

 

    This blog is about collaboration –both as a means, and as an end-- in open governance. NYU's GovLab gives the following definition of governance: how institutions analyze information and make decisions to solve collective problems. We can consider openness from the perspective of open-source software, in which the source code (information/data) is free and open, and is freely distributable (sharable). There is, however, no definition of open governance, or open government. It is a project in the making. Collaborative practices may not only be the means to open governance, but may turn out to be the end. This is the reason I use “open governance” and not “open government” --because I believe our new social and technological infrastructures will transform problem-solving into a continuous, collaborative process. In his book, The Wealth of Networks, Yochai Benkler, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, has posited that “the change brought about by the networked information environment is deep. It is structural” (Benkler, 14). This structural change is well expressed by collaborative governance.

 
The need/impetus for collaboration:

    We live now in a networked age in which people are not only passive receivers of information, but also active producers. Information is not simply produced and stored, but also actively disseminated, managed, and analyzed. Information can be turned into knowledge, which can be turned into civic action. In his TED talk on invention in the context of patent law, former Tony Blair advisor Charles Leadbeater points out that the traditional approach to invention –taking information and turning it into something new-- is “based on the idea that the inventor knows what the invention is for”. The traditional approach –what Benkler calls “the industrial information economy of the twentieth century” (Benkler, 15) –to information and to intellectual property is outdated because it denies the active role of enthusiasts and experts alike in re-appropriating information in various contexts. This variegated activity is a key feature of collaborative governance.

    In Deepening Democracy, Archon Fung posits that “institutional forms of liberal democracy developed in the nineteenth century --representative democracy plus techno-bureaucratic administration-- seem increasingly ill suited to the novel problems we face in the twenty-first century” (Fung, 3). This reminds me of what Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist No. 1: “it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force”. We have the means to solve our own problems, and now we have the means to do so together. Collaborative governance simultaneously responds to (overly rigid) insular bureaucratic forms of decision-making and (overly flexible) political jostling which leaves real citizens' concerns by the wayside. A diverse collaborative system with many parts can focus on myriad problems much quicker and more efficiently than bureaucracies with institutional imperatives, as well as promote accountability and incorruptibility by virtue of its diversity.

    In his TED talk titled “Institutions vs. Collaboration”, Clay Shirky describes the costs of coordinating (groups of) individuals, where coordination has traditionally been achieved through institution-building. Now, the costs of communication have fallen dramatically –anyone can get on Skype and make phone calls for free. Designing for collaborative civic action (and, as Shirky says, collaboration in general) requires a move away from how institutions are traditionally designed. Infrastructures of collaboration should do away with institutional imperatives which prevent the fullest engagement of diverse participants.

    Institutions are exclusionary because the institutional method of production or action is one which treats participants as employees –an institution cannot hire everyone, and so it has to make choices. This kind of exclusion is also a feature of traditional governments –government 1.0-- where a reliance on internal experts denies those outside of government the chance to participate, and moreover obfuscates decision-making, so that the public cannot identify areas where more (or different) input could be desirable. In this sense, institutions are inherently unaccountable.

    But this kind of institutional planning is remedied by collaboration. Rather than dealing with the institutional infrastructure, the collaborative method deals with whatever issues are at hand, because coordination costs are minimal. The institutional obstacle is visualized in the “long tail” model of distribution, where 25 percent of participants create 75 percent of the content, and the remaining 75 percent of the participants only create 25 percent of the content. Rather than excluding that 75 percent of people –the long tail-- which is the institutional response (and, up until government 2.0, the governmental response), collaborative infrastructures capture the value created by those who contribute less (in terms of content or frequency). The issue at hand transforms from the value of the contributor to the value of the contribution. Collaborative governance makes use of networked power to find good ideas, without having to professionally employ people, and liberates civic value by allowing anyone to contribute however they elect to.

    In his book, Cognitive Surplus, Shirky writes about the idea of “human hours” --that is, the amount of total time that humanity possesses. This is an enormous number –7 billion people times 24 hours a day, of which we spend the most time working and sleeping, followed (in the developed world) by time spent watching TV. Collaborative governance takes our free unstructured time and treats it “as a general social asset that can be harnessed for large, communally created projects, rather than as a set of individual minutes to be whiled away one person at a time" (Shirky, 10).

How is collaboration different from deliberation or cooperation?

    Collaboration contains deliberation, cooperation, coordination, and communication, but is more than the sum of them. Collaborative governance likewise contains participation, engagement, transparency, and free expression, but amounts to more than these things.

WHEN people collaborate, they work towards a common goal, outcome, or result. Collaboratives are organized with specific purposes in mind and involve targeted participation.
WHEN people cooperate, they work on their own goals, but in tandem. Cooperatives may organize and exist without guidance, although they do so without a common purpose.

    Cooperation is an important part of the collaborative process because the spontaneity it contains is crucial tofinding what problems should be subject to further collaborative effort. But governance should be collaborative because its civic nature implies some consensus.

    Consensus, though, is not the end-goal of collaborative governance. It is desirable insofar as it organizes participants towards common goals, but consensus does not imply action. In Wiki Government, Prof. Beth Noveck discusses deliberation (as opposed to collaboration) as “a normative, democratic ideal unto itself and a means to the end of enhancing legitimacy in governance” (Noveck, 36) and calls this form of participation “toothless” (Noveck, 37).

WHEN people collaborate, they measure effectiveness through outputs. Collaboration values participation as a means to action, and not simply as an end in and of itself.
WHEN people deliberate, they measure effectiveness through inputs. Deliberation values participation as a normative goal, so that the quality of discussion is more important than what comes out of it.

    Deliberation is an important part of the collaborative process because people have to talk to each other and express themselves to get a sense of what might be commonly actionable. But the focus of collaborative governance is on measurable results and efficacy, and not wanton self-expression. Collaboration –focused on those results-- emphasizes targeted expression, and enhances legitimacy in governance by allowing for self-selection.

Collaborative governance:

    Collaborative governance, though –what this blog is about, again-- is about civic action with or through government, and not about independent civic action. Prof. Noveck has called this the “.gov brand” --”change.org instead of change.gov” (Noveck, 29). How do we apply lessons of collaborative action in general to the act of collaborative governance?

    First, we have to conceive of governance as a process. That process is the sum of many parts –the sum of many smaller processes, which should focus on specific issues or topics. Those smaller processes should have the same character as the whole –like a fractal pattern, where each collaborative process is embedded in larger and larger systems of collaboration.

    The engagement of individuals and groups in targeted ways should be combined with self-selection and volunteerism, such that collaborative governance is truly governance as well as truly collaborative. Innovation can be “unlocked” by combining the strengths of government 1.0 –“central coordination, issue framing, and [the] bully pulpit” (Noveck, 18)-- with the strengths of the networked information environment –web 2.0.

How to collaborate:

    Inspired by (and drawing from) the last chapter of Prof. Noveck's Wiki Government (P. 171-2), the following are some key features of collaborative decision-making, highlighting what the networked-collaborative-governance process might actually entail.

ASK the right questions. In an article titled “You Can't Just Hack Your Way to Social Change”, Jake Porway contends that “any data scientist worth their salary will tell you that you should start with a question, NOT the data”. Collaboration should be targeted, and questions should be designed so that the problem at hand is clearly understandable, so that non-experts and experts alike can give relevant input.

ASK the right people. Target collaboration for the relevant people, whether based on locality or topic. At the same time, create opportunities for self-selection. Enthusiasts are often “the right people”.

DESIGN the process for the desired end. There should be a common understanding across the collaborative network about the goals in mind. Common goals should not be limiting; they simply serve to moderate the process so that the focus remains on measurable results.

DESIGN for groups, not individuals. Collaboration is not wanton self-expression with no common focus. Groups and the work they do should be interrelated and both be scalable in terms of place and topic.

DIVIDE the work into roles and tasks. Skills should be deployed where they are needed, which means experts and enthusiasts should work on what they want to, and what they are good at. Moreover, participants should have a sense of manageability in the work they do, so that they are actually able to do it. Tasks should also be consequential.

USE a common language. This means there must be some agreement on the definitions, norms, and standards from which the collaboration can grow. Moreover participation should not be competitive, but collaborative, working towards a common goal. The point is well-illustrated in the difference between alchemy and chemistry: one relies on esoterica and secrecy, while the other relies on a shared methodological language and peer review.

USE visualizations. Information as visually displayed on a computer screen gives people a better sense of where they are within the network. Visuals can show what progress has been made, give people feedback about what they (and others) are doing, and reveal areas where progress is lacking, or where skills are not being matched to needs.

CREATE a transparent evaluation process. People who participate in collaborative processes should know how their work fits in within the larger project, and should get a sense of the overall progression of the collaboration.

HARNESS the power of reputation. Evaluate and rate contributions and submissions from participants. Up-vote systems as used by Reddit quickly show what are the most innovative or interesting ideas.

PILOT new ideas. Organize challenges and competitions with prizes, to inspire people, to get people to want to contribute, and so that people's good ideas “bubble-up”. Motivate people to collaborate with extrinsic rewards –money, say. Simply showcasing submissions on a website can motivate participation. Draw on people's pleasure in completing tasks, and commend their contributions.

FOCUS on outcomes, not inputs. Make sure you can measure success. Make it clear how a solution would be implemented. Let the collaborative network evaluate its own products, so as to be clear that collaborative governance is not bound by institutional imperatives like oversight.

    We must embrace our collaborative expertise. When we work together to analyze information, make decisions, and solve problems that face us collectively, we are liberated from what we would not be able to do by ourselves. Collaborative governance is a process in which we help each other liberate not just ourselves but our common humanity. By connecting with each other and working together, we unleash inventive, innovative, and creative potential that we do not have alone. This is “COLLIBERATION”. 

Coming Soon: Interview with Bre Pettis

    The preparation and research that went into my next post led to my writing the previous one --”3-D Printing After #SOTU”, which was about some possibilitites and challenges in 3-D printing and its applications. Thinking through these, I think we have a dual imperative: engaging a kind of civic sensibility about practical design and manufacturing, AND engaging a design sensibility in civic action and participation. What I mean to say is, engineers and computer scientist should be better versed in social theory and civic participation, while by the same token civil activists and social theorists should be better versed in computer coding and industrial design.

    The next post will feature an interview with Bre Pettis, co-founder of MakerBot Industries and of ThingiVerse. Mr. Pettis is one of the best known figures in 3-D printing, if not the best known in home 3-D printing. He is a pioneer in the “maker movement”, and saw MakerBot through the Cupcake CNC, the Thing-O-Matic, the Replicator, and now the Replicator 2. He is also one of the founders of NYC Resistor, a hacker-collective in Brooklyn that emphasizes collaborative learning, making, and sharing. He was a TED2012 Fellow, where he argued for the social value of 3-D printing, and emphasized the imperative for a collaborative approach to design.

    What I hope to learn from Mr. Pettis is not only hard facts about 3-D printing which he might know because he is an authority in the field. I hope really to have a discussion, whereby Mr. Pettis might help illuminate some of the more nuanced issues in 3-D printing, such as the place of intellectual property, as well as give suggestions for what we might be able to do to get more civic value out of 3-D printing and digital design. 

3-D Printing After #SOTU

    Thanks to the spotlight President Obama shone on 3-D printing in his State of the Union address last week, the technology (also known as additive manufacturing) has been elevated to national prominence in post-SOTU public discourse. 3-D printing has been around for a while –it started with the invention of stereolithography by Charles Hull (co-founder of 3D Systems) in 1984. But the 3-D printing applications being thought up and tried out today are a far throw from the printing of small objects made of various plastic polymers. Right now, additive printing technologies can create living and prosthetic tissues, entire homes, robots, cars, and are increasingly capable of producing electrically conductive parts, which means capable of producing computers and robots. As Yves Behar wrote in the introduction to Wired's October 2012 feature, “Design for All”, “this ever-more-free design is speeding the adoption of new ideas, which in turn disrupt old industries. Designers, coders, and entrepreneurs are challenging notions that sustainability is expensive, that technology is hard to use, that quality is exclusive.”

(A CAD file for solder-free electronics, by CarrytheWhat. Image found here.)

    Additive manufacturing has made a revolution in the production process. To begin with, 3-D printing lowers the costs and risks associated with manufacturing because making one-off models using a 3-D printer is possible to do without spending a huge amount of money on the machine making the product. In traditional manufacturing, there is a trade-off between mass production and customization. As Chris Anderson, ex-editor-in-chief of Wired, points out in his book, Makers: The New Industrial Revolution, in digital fabrication variety is free, complexity is free, and flexibility is free. So the difficulties of traditional manufacturing --customizing, detailing, and changing designs-- become the defining features of ease-of-use in 3-D printing. This has important implications for industry and innovation.

    Without facing huge costs, an entrepreneur can come up with a design idea and then print a sample of the design to see whether it works. Similarly, if an individual or a company needs a part for something, say a machine, it is easy to use a 3-D printer to simply print that one part. 3-D printing encourages a design process focused on parts, because a 3-D printer can print out a replacement part for something without it having to be already stocked in a physical storage space. Now, for example, NASA wants a high-resolution 3-D printer to produce parts during space missions, and the US Army wants 3-D printers in the field producing spare vehicle components as they are needed

    Today, you can go to open-source design-repositories like Thingiverse and Shapeways to find objects and download them as digital files, as you would with digital music. You can take the designs and modify them to suit your own needs or preferences. Because the additive production process doesn't rely on large-scale manufacturing for cost-efficiency, the successful 3-D printing entrepreneur has to rely on the quality of her ideas, and has to constantly think about how to create better designs in a field without the kinds of competitive advantages you find in mass-production.

(An 83 year old woman in Belgium was the first to receive a 3-D printed lower-jaw. Image found here.)

THE INTERNET OF THINGS

    What's most important about 3-D printing is that we're making things together. There exists a massive community of makers, linked into the design and production processes at all levels and functioning largely as an open-source community of sharing. Gary Krysztopik, an electrical engineer, designed the “EZ-EV” --a three-wheeled, 3-D printed electric car that is customizable with modular components –with crowdfunded support from Indiegogo. The CAD (computer aided design) files to build one yourself can be found here. Even more inspiring is the story of the prosthetic hand designed by Richard Van As and Ivan Owen for “Little Liam”. Five year old Liam was born with no fingers on his right hand. Using Liam's measurements, Van As, in South Africa, and Owen, in the U.S., collaborated over the design of a prosthetic hand for Liam by sending CAD files back and forth to each other. Liam now has a functional prosthetic hand, the design for the hand is on Thingiverse, and it can be customized to fit other people. 

    The networked nature of digital manufacturing is where we should look to find the civic potential in 3-D printing. Gadi Ben-Yehuda at the IBM Center for the Business of Government has described this evolution in 3-D printing in terms of “Products-on-Demand” (PonD); the difference being between making Lego block-type plastic models and making functional products, like a “self-propelled housing for a camera phone [attached] to some spare speaker wire to enable live video feeds in previously-inaccessible locations”. Devices like this can be networked into the “Internet of Things” through free services such as Cosm (which connects devices to the Internet and uploads their data) and Arduino (an open-source electronic platform which receives sensor input with programmable hardware and software –more about Arduino here). The civic applications of such technologies are well-illustrated by Leif Percifeld's Dontflush.me use of the Visualight. Crowdfunded through Kickstarter, the Visualight is a Wifi and USB enabled lightbulb that lets you bind any RGB color value to a chosen type of data, like temperature, humidity, high/low tide, etc. With Donflush.me, the point is that the light burns a certain type of color when you shouldn't be using water. With Visualight, the point is that people can create and deploy functional objects that may readily have an impact on their own lives. Moreover, through Cosm I can search for networked devices and find real-time data feeds (say, the concentration of pollutants in the air) to help me make decisions or answer questions I have, even if I am not physically present where the data is collected.

(Leif Percifeld demos the Visualight in our Gov 3.0 Class. Image by Paloma Baytelman, found here.)

LIBERATING CIVIC POTENTIAL IN DESIGN

    As technology blogger/entrepreneur Anil Dash contends in his New York Social Media Week discussion with Dale Dougherty, co-founder of O'Reilly Media (We Are All Makers: Participating in the Design of our Future), “the thing you make a is a social object”. The digital fabrication process restructures how we traditionally interact with products and with production. Instead of being just the customer, or just the consumer, we can also be a part of the “virtual collective studio” where we give input in the design process. Virtual communities will grow around websites like Thingiverse and Shapeways and also around programs like Tinkercad, Autodesk, and Google's SketchUp, which host a growing number of CAD files you can download to pursue your own projects. In the meantime people can also scan physical objects in real life using programs like 123D Catch. If the hobbyist-engineer, the “maker” of the digital manufacturing world, is to evolve anything like the hobbyist-coder has in the software world, we can expect novel and innovative design applications to solve problems we didn't even know we had.

    Government has a critical role to play in the development of the civic potential in 3-D printing. The digital design community can offer civic solutions just like the app community has been doing with apps like Ushahidi and San Ramon Valley's Fire Department CPR-help app. Most importantly, government should create open-source initiatives to empower designers and makers and to spark innovation for civic and certainly economic benefit. Government datasets in respositories like Github should be released such that they can be used by product-designers in open source communities, and this should be done by an office that is intimately tied to, if not a part of, the office of the Chief Technology Officer. When somebody somewhere uses a CAD program to design something and then prints it out, what they print can and should be networked in the Internet of Things. People can create Products on Demand for real-time data collection and contribute these objects through Cosm so that the data they produce are searchable for anyone. If government were to sponsor design challenges like Apps for Democracy or the National Day of Civic Hacking, makers may well present new and useful objects which we would never have gotten from traditional large-scale manufacturers. 

For Russia to Understand Open Government

"CITIZENSHIP begins with self-reliance, independent livelihoods and knowledge of and adherence to societal rules. But citizenship is more than that: it is a sense of ownership of social problems and solutions, which entails taking collective responsibility in a way that transcends private interests. Citizenship is something that relates to society; government has no say in it. What government can do, however, is play its own role in a way that gives individuals and civil society organisations more leeway. This demands a different attitude from government: demand-driven rather than supply-driven, not making rules for every contingency but entering into dialogue, sometimes doing nothing at all, acting as a partner instead of always as a lawmaker. Elected officials and public servants at central government, provincial and local level as well as civil society organisations will have to work on transforming their culture. This requires readiness to loosen the reins and trust to the inventiveness of ordinary people."

Dutch Open Government Draft Action Plan

       Not many people are entirely sure about what “open government” is. I think the term is misleading –what we are usually talking about when we discuss "open government" transparency, participation, accountability, representativeness, engagement, collaboration, responsiveness, etc. etc. etc., is really open governance; that is, the process of government --of rule-making and policy-setting, and of organizing social behavior. The end goal here isn't that we should, all together, construct a perfect version of the State as though the State could ever be some flawless externality, removed from us and working outside of us once our preferences are voiced. Rather, (as Clay Shirky discusses in Ch. 5 ("Culture) of his book, Cognitive Surplus we want to construct a process of governance –in effect, a coherent and shared culture of how we order things for ourselves. Open governance is a feature of open source culture in general, and because it is a culture it is dynamic, organic, responsive, and constantly changing. 

    Maybe it shouldn't surprise anyone that Russia's Open Government Partnership (OGP) Action Plan does not discuss open government in these terms. Openness is not (and simply has not been) a signal trait of Russian government. Co-bloggers (@design & @campaigns) in the Government 3.0 Class have already noted the lack of political openness in Russia, as evidenced in fraught elections and the infamous incarceration of the band Pussy Riot. Then why is Russia even bothering with the OGP initiative? Chris Vein, Chief Innovation Officer at the World Bank, suggested in the Gov 3.0 class on February 6^th that being part of the open government “club” of nations might be a point of pride in a country's international standing. So is Russia saying, “look at me! I'm part of the big kids' club!”..?

And, having read Russia's Action Plan and compared it to the plans of several other nations (notably the Netherlands', which is the country ranked second in oppeness by the World Justice Project's Rule of Law Index), it's clear that Russia is saying essentially that. The Russian plan is riddled with vague and ambiguous references to various bodies of authority and immunities and contains, as primary goals, the development of the Russian state-mechanism and economy. I sense one strand of thought pervading the entire document: that of statism. 

    To “involve society in the decision-making process” (Russia's open government priority #1) means, in the context of open governance, that government should establish a two-way flow of information sharing, problem-solving, and decision-making. What this calls for is collaboration, and not just deliberation. As Prof. (Beth) Noveck contends in Wiki Government, deliberation is a “normative, democratic ideal” (Noveck, 36) where “consensus is desirable as an end unto itself” while “collaboration is a means to an end” (Noveck, 39). That end, of course, is better governance –of, by, and for the people. Russia's Action Plan hints over and over that this point has been missed. 

What follows are some examples (taken from the Russian Action Plan) of non-collaborative logics and statist-development plans, with comments:

“TO IMPROVE communication between power and society it is necessary to have feedback when solving key tasks of socio-economic development of the country.”: This should be totally reworded to: “To transform the relationship between government and society is it necessary to have an open dialogue with open information flow” --and then we can decide what the key tasks are.

 "WITHIN THE FRAMEWORK of “Open government” system creation in Russia the development of network structures which provides horizontal movement of information and practically erases the distinction among elected politicians, professional bureaucracy, expert community and institutions of civil society, and also of the use of modern technologies (including technologies of expert involvement and crowdsourcing) to involve the significant number of people who represent the opposite points of view and interests in the process of collecting and analysis of information, discussion and working out of solutions.” : While it's true that democratic deliberation (and the gathering of many various/differing points of view) is important to open government, it is not true that distinctions between various kinds of experts cease to exist. If anything, Russia should develop networked structures which highlight different areas of expertise, both so as to clarify which issues actually need attention (and from where that attention should come), and to empower meaningful (rather than wanton) participation.

“TRANSPARENCY AND OPENNESS in politics will improve quality of decision-making and quality of the state mechanism in general and also will form the new culture for Russia of interaction, searching for compromise and mutually beneficial decisions.” : Open government is not necessarily about compromise, but about best practices. The quality of decision-making will not improve only through transparency but also through the State's active role in engendering participation at the policy-making level. The quality of decision-making will only meaningfully improve through direct collaboration with citizens.

"THE IMPLEMENTATION OF the key measures along the vectors of the Strategy is planned to result in Russia’s ability to rank among the top 20 leading countries of the world in developing information society. Russia is also supposed to rank not below the 10th position in international ratings on the accessibility of national information and telecommunications infrastructure for the parties active in the information medium. The share of national goods and services in the overall domestic market of information and telecommunications technologies is to be no less than 50%." : Russia should not emphasize this nationalist/statist vision of development. Open government is not about international rankings –this perverts the whole idea. It's about true openness –the kind of thing you can foster a global culture for. This kind of rhetoric births distrust in the government because rankings hardly matter to ordinary people who care more about whether or not government policies immediately affect them, at home.

"THE KEY MEASURE of the Strategy is the creation of a public centers system of access to the state information resources." : The state similarly should create a government centers system of access to public information resources, and this system (just like the public one) should promote meaningful uses of data and opinion –like We The People.

"MULTIPURPOSE ELECTRONIC CARDS should be placed in operation in 2012 to facilitate access to state services. It is assumed that citizens will use it to get access to the system and state services, and also to perform legally significant acts in electronic form. In the future these cards may replace passport, medical insurance policy, certificate of pension insurance and bank cards." : Open government is not about being able to better keep track of your citizens, neither is it about consolidating identifying information about citizens. This seems only useful for the state. Open government is about how pensions and banks themselves work. Yes, people want better access to state services –but people also want to talk to the state, and talk to each other.

Conclusions:

    In its Action Plan Russia has not, as the United States administration has (largely through the Freedom of Inforation Act) “established a clear presumption in favor of openness” (U.S. Action Plan to be found here). The Dutch Government makes an adroit point in its Action Plan concerning timing, that it doesn't make sense to “make statements” about open government and then only afterwards consult government and government agencies about what open government actually means. Russia should lead a multi-agency effort in consultation with the public in order to coordinate extant agency/institutional needs and problems, which are then developed into a government-wide initiative, much like Obama's Open Government Memo and subsequent Office of Management and Budget Directive.

    Getting Russian officials to be accountable will require more than releasing their income statements. Sunlight should shine on what policies they adopt, stand for, and vote on; the extent to which they pursue their commitments; and the readiness with and degree to which they respond to public comment. An open government means more than being able to see transparently what is going on within the state –it also means the state should meaningfully be able to see what is going on in the public. That means transparency must be two-way, and productivity comes out of collaborative problem-solving based on that transparency. Online platforms for information sharing and problem-solving should be places where communities form to match skills to needs.

    Russia should develop an open vetting system that allows the public to cross-check against government decisions and initiatives in the creation of infrastructure for public involvement. That means open-sourced metrics for efficacy and success, as well as open-source mechanisms for public feedback (and not necessarily only expert feedback).

    The Dutch Government got it exactly right. Its Action Plan states that, “rather than citizens participating in processes initiated by government, we are headed towards a situation in which processes that government participates in are citizen-powered.”