Anthony D. Williams, co-author of the international bestseller Wikinomics, is an internationally-acclaimed speaker and strategic advisor who focuses on technology, innovation and collaboration in business, government and society.
My quote of the day comes straight out of a political science textbook, but it rings so true today:
“The lesson that capitalist countries needed to combine the efficiency of markets with the broader values of community … did not come to them easily. It took the calamitous collapse of the Victorian era of globalization — into worldwide war, followed by extreme left wing revolution in Russia, extreme right wing revolution in Italy and Germany, militarism in Japan, the Great Depression, unprecedented financial volatility and the shriveling up of world trade.”
The quote is from John Gerard Ruggie, Director of the Center for Business and Government at Harvard University. His point, which he originally made in 1982, is nicely summarized in a lecture Ruggie gave at the LSE in 2002 (see transcript). He talked about why a new era of globalization requires a new social contract, suggesting that unregulated free markets could spawn another series of cataclysmic events if adequate social and environmental protections were not somehow embedded in the global economy.
Apart from making the obvious point that history repeats itself, what’s fascinating to me is that if one starts counting from the end of the Cold War our recent spell of global free market capitalism really only survived a couple of decades before crashing down around us. Even more fascinating will be to see what kind of new political orders emerge as a result.
I believe in Ruggie’s general principle that the efficiency of markets must be combined with the values of community to sustain a viable global society. I am no longer convinced that the institutions that established the historic social bargains that underpinned post-WWII prosperity (i.e., national governments, business associations, and organized labour) are the rights ones to help rebuild the global economy and fashion a new form of sustainable governance.
Although society appears to lack serious alternatives (unless you believe that the G20 is a serious alternative), I do believe two things: 1) that markets abhor a vacuum and 2) that governmental inertia will be the mother of invention. In other words, the fumbling efforts on the part of governments and international organizations to impose regulations on unregulated global markets will help stimulate the creation of new governance models and I won’t be surprised if many of the new innovations are driven by political entrepreneurs acting outside of the traditional realm of government. The unfortunate reality may be that things will need to get a whole lot worse before mainstream society recognizes the flaws inherent in our current arrangements and invests in building these new institutions.
Open Forum Europe 2009 is another highlight in a lengthing list of engagements this spring. I will giving a keynote, along with Vint Cerf, at what promises to be a lively dialogue between the open source community and European policy-makers.
Open standards and open source software already enjoy widespread support in Europe, particularly among governments who fear the influence of Microsoft and other proprietary software vendors. So this year’s conference will examine some of the issues that will define the Internet of the future. How will the next 5-10 years of technology innovation transform the Internet, for example, and are today’s regulations sufficient to ensure that the Internet remains open?
My role is to help make a broader case for openness in business and government, with my main point being that greater openness — socially, technologically, politically, and strategically — underpins any hope we have of solving some of the massive challenges that confront humanity. Here’s the description I’ve just finished drafting:
Open standards are fueling a period of unprecedented innovation on the Internet that is reshaping every institution in modern society. In business, smart firms realize that openness can accelerate innovation and unleash the knowledge, ingenuity and skills of a diverse global talent pool. In government, greater openness is generating radically more productive, equitable and transparent services and unlocking new possibilities to crowdsource solutions to global challenges. The Open Internet not only underpins these important transformations, it helps reveal a more general competitive and political imperative for the 21st century. Without greater openness in all institutions, the world will be ill-equipped to confront the complex challenges that face humanity.
I hope to see you at the event if you’re in or near Brussels on on April 24th.
I’ve been invited to give a talk at Georgetown University on April 16th as part of its public policy dialogue series. The talk is open to the public, but space is limited so RRSP soon if you’d like to attend. Here’s a summary:
From its first few weeks in office, the new administration has emphasized the need for innovation in the public sector and called for dramatically more productive, equitable and transparent services. Fortunately, new social technologies and emerging models of mass collaboration provide a rich new set of possibilities for designing and delivering the functions of governments with greater creativity, efficiency and effectiveness than ever before. Drawing on lighthouse examples in the U.S. and abroad, Wikinomics co-author Anthony D. Williams will illustrate how the knowledge, ingenuity and skills of a diverse talent pool can help reshape how governments provide homeland security, health care, education and countless other public services.
The right to make freedom of information requests is in enshrined in most democratic countries (Wikipedia says 70 countries have such legislation). But how often is that right actually invoked? My guess is that it’s vastly underutilized and that most members of the public would be surprised to know what they could find out if only they asked.
Part of the issue is that few people are aware of the appropriate process for filing a freedom of information request and probably assume that effort and time required would outweigh the ultimate benefits. That’s why I really like WhatDoTheyKnow, a MySociety project that strips away all of the hassles and uncertainties of filing an FOI request. Visitors to the site simply pick a department, type a request, and mysociety handles the rest!
Residents of Edinburgh in the UK, for example, have used WhatDoTheyKnow to successfully request information about things like:
Answers to these queries remain on the site so that future visitors needn’t burden the Edinburgh council with redundant requests for information. If you see a topic of interest you can always set up an RSS alert so that you get notified when something of interest comes in.
I love this example of participatory regulation. Marc Bohlen, an “artist-engineer” at the University of Zurich, has designed a floating public robot that makes assessing recreational water quality a transparent and participatory experience. The Glass Bottom Float, as he calls it, cruises along a beach shore, and offers itself as a resting spot in places it deems clean enough for swimming. Over time, writes Bohlen, the GBF maps paths of least contamination and highest relative pleasure for fish and people. Real-time water quality updates from Bohlen’s Woodlawn Beach pilot project are available on twitter or on your mobile phone (you’ll have to wait until summer time to see it in action though).
What else could “civic robots” do? I’m sure there’s a potentially endless list of civic chores: Monitoring and reporting local air quality, collecting and compacting street trash, issuing electronic fines for idling your car on hot summer day, cleaning up toxic sites, and who knows what else.
Here’s one of the more bizarre prosumer stories that I’ve seen of late. Upon releasing his second solo album, drummer Josh Freese (of Nine Inch Nails and Devo fame) has offered his fans a sliding scale of “limited edition” offers. For $7 you get a conventional digital download, including three videos. But check out the $75,000 package:
T-shirt
Go on tour with Josh for a few days.
Have Josh write, record and release a 5 song EP about you and your life story.
Take home any of his drumsets (only one but you can choose which one.)
Take shrooms and cruise Hollywood in Danny from TOOL’s Lamborgini OR play quarters and then hop on the Ouija board for a while.
Josh will join your band for a month…play shows, record, party with groupies, etc….
If you don’t have a band he’ll be your personal assistant for a month (4 day work weeks, 10 am to 4 pm)
Take a limo down to Tijuana and he’ll show you how it’s done (what that means exactly we can’t legally get into here)
If you don’t live in Southern California (but are a US resident) he’ll come to you and be your personal assistant/cabana boy for 2 weeks.
Here’s one for my co-author Don and the Net Generation team to chew on or chew up. Baronness Susan Greenfield, a professor of Synaptic Pharmacology at Lincoln College, Oxford, and Director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, has warned that the experience of growing up immersed in hyper-stimulating digital technologies will result in human minds characterized by “short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity.”
The remarks were made to the House of Lords and written up by the Guardian as Greenfield criticized regulators for not taking into account the broad cultural and psychological effects of social networking.
Like others in the field, Greenfield asserts that exposure to digital technologies impacts brain development. “It is hard to see how living this way on a daily basis will not result in brains, or rather minds, different from those of previous generations. We know that the human brain is exquisitely sensitive to the outside world, ” she said.
But Greenfield draws decidedly less optimistic conclusions than those in Grown Up Digital.
“If the young brain is exposed from the outset to a world of fast action and reaction, of instant new screen images flashing up with the press of a key, such rapid interchange might accustom the brain to operate over such timescales. Perhaps when in the real world such responses are not immediately forthcoming, we will see such behaviours and call them attention-deficit disorder.
“It might be helpful to investigate whether the near total submersion of our culture in screen technologies over the last decade might in some way be linked to the threefold increase over this period in prescriptions for methylphenidate, the drug prescribed for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.”
Excessive exposure to video games is also fostering a culture of instant gratification, says Greenfield:
“[with] a much more marked preference for the here-and-now, where the immediacy of an experience trumps any regard for the consequences. . . The sheer compulsion of reliable and almost immediate reward is being linked to similar chemical systems in the brain that may also play a part in drug addiction. So we should not underestimate the ‘pleasure’ of interacting with a screen when we puzzle over why it seems so appealing to young people.”
Finally, Greenfield worries that social networking sites may erode our sense of identity and even our ability to communicate through face-to-face conversation:
“real conversation in real time may eventually give way to these sanitised and easier screen dialogues, in much the same way as killing, skinning and butchering an animal to eat has been replaced by the convenience of packages of meat on the supermarket shelf. Perhaps future generations will recoil with similar horror at the messiness, unpredictability and immediate personal involvement of a three-dimensional, real-time interaction.”
Greenfield seems eminently distinguished in her field and her warnings remind us that the psychological impacts of the digital revolution on children require more study. But Greenfield is also the author of Tomorrow’s People: How 21st Century technology is changing the way we think and feel (Penguin 2003), a dystopian novel about how everything we take for granted about human nature – imagination, individuality, memory, love, free will – could soon become lost forever as genetic modification, nanotechnology and cybernetics conspire to leave us in a ‘passive, sensory-laden state’. Makes me think that Greenfield has over-reached in her analysis of how digital technologies will influence society, culture and human nature.
Unfortunately, Greenfield’s dystopian pronouncements are likely to fall upon welcoming ears in the House Of Lords where ignorance about social networking technologies and the emerging youth culture could result in unwelcome new regulations.
There’s something else missing from recovery.gov altogether (see below): the ability for citizens to have input into which projects get funded in their jurisdictions.
Stimuluswatch.org, evidently a work in progress, provides an interesting (albeit imperfect) example of how this might work. Launched by team led by Jerry Brito at George Mason University, the site encourages citizens around the country with local knowledge about the proposed “shovel-ready” projects in their city to find, discuss and rate those projects. The list of shovel-ready projects was developed by a coalition of US Mayors as a response to the stimulus package. The mayor’s have had their say, now stimulus-watch allows citizens to register their opinions on which projects they believe are critical and which are not.
Despite being sympathetic with the site’s aims, I can’t get past the problem that there is absolutely no way to determine whether the input on forums like stimuluswatch.org is in any way representative of the majority views in a given jurisdiction. This is a general problem with citizen engagement online and one reason why online consultations will remain marginal until at least two big issues are solved:
The ability to authenticate the citizens who participate (i.e., are they who they say they are and are they in fact resident of a given jurisdiction) and,
The ability to determine whether the opinions expressed by the online population are representative of the general population (particularly the population of people who are unlikely to participate in online engagement exercises).
Unfortunately, without these elements I struggle to see how projects like stimuluswatch.org can claim any democratic legitimacy. That doesn’t mean that they are not a useful source of input. But it does mean that local elected officials would be hard-pressed to justify using this input to determine how they allocate public funds.
Although recovery.gov was launched on the same day Obama signed the stimulus bill, I’ve been holding back on posting until there was a bit more substance to report on. There’s still no meat unfortunately (the graphic below is about as detailed as the information currently gets), but I’ll provide my 2 cents anyways.
Obama has promised that the spending authorized by the stimulus bill will be subject to unprecedented transparency and accountability. Although there is little substance yet, recovery.gov — the centerpiece of the transparency strategy — promises to be a rich source of detailed charts, maps and graphics that display where the money is being spent (including which districts and which federal contractors), how it is being spent (the specific projects being funded and their performance targets), and to what effect (including the ability to track individual project developments and assess any measurable improvements in economic performance using broad economic indicators). For a partial example of what this might look like see OMBWatch’s fedspending.org and the government’s own USAspending.gov.
The first two aspects of the proposed transparency strategy (detailing where and how money is being spent) are already routine practice. Whether they can provide that info in a timely and useful manner is another matter. As Ellen Miller at the Sunlight Foundation rightly points out:
Recovery.gov must make the raw data available and it must be housed in system so that data can flow in and out easily. There should be open programming interfaces that allow developers to share and analyze data.
We also need details such as:
What data is getting collected and how often? Who has to report? How often will the data be updated and how often will it made available to the public? What’s the database going to look like what’s the relationship to USASpending.gov? What kinds of content will Recovery.gov produce around the data? (Will there be regular emails when new information is available, blogging with analysis, etc.)?
In my view, the third element (the ability to track projects in real-time and to evaluate their impacts) holds both the greatest promise and also the greatest challenge. Releasing official project-level data and providing metrics and tools for analysis (e.g, jobs created per dollar spent) would be a good first step. Open-sourcing this process as much as possible would be even better.
One opportunity is to gather more local intelligence about which projects are positively impacting citizens and the economy and which ones are wasting money. Naturally, these assessments would be more subjective, but not necessarily less reliable than the official data, which we know can be manipulated to hide any signs of poor performance.
I would expect see considerable resistance to this idea all the way down the spending chain, from the federal agencies that distribute the funds to the state and local agencies that spend it to the contractors that ultimately perform the work. Which is likely why we won’t see this kind of capability hosted on recovery.gov, but rather on a third party site like stimuluswatch.org (see my next post).
