“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 His point, which he originally made in 1982, is nicely summarized in a lecture Ruggie gave at the LSE in 2002 (see transcript).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 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.

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.

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:

• How much did it cost to repair the road surface in New Street on the 26th and 27th November 2008?
• How many council houses have been sold under Right to buy in the city centre since May 2006?
• How many CCTV cameras operated by the various councils are there in Scotland?
• How many street traders licences are currently in operation within the City Centre?

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.

What else could “civic robots” do? I’m sure there’s a potentially endless list of civic chores: Mointoring 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.

There’s an interview with Marc Bohlen here and if you’re in the San Jose region next week you can see him live at O’Reilly’s Emerging Tech Conference.

• 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.

Thanks to Phil Hood for the tip.

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.

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:

1. 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,
2. 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.

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).

My five-week-old son has had over 1,400 individual visitors to his website. Within two hours of his birth, he was Twittered because a friend got a text message announcing his birth. In a matter of days his name was indexed in Google. A friend’s five-month-old already has a Facebook page. Anecdotally, I find that a favourite pastime of many new dads in my peer group is electronic communication involving their newborns. Maybe it’s a way to connect both to the newborn and to the outside world during what is a cocooning and potentially isolating time. Maybe it helps dads become involved. Whatever the reason, most new babies these days are “born digital,” to borrow a phrase. What it will mean when they grow up, I’m not sure, but it changes something fundamental about who your little one is in the world. He has a public persona often before he can hold up his own head.

The author notes that when friends and families live far apart, the immediacy of online communication is a powerful way to share in the birth. But will these “born digital” children grow up to regret their parents enthusiasm to chronicle the early stages of their lives online? Or, will this level of personal transparency be seen as completely natural by the time they are old enough to voice an opinion? Perhaps it already is.

Well, a colleague of mine just told me about a new Pacific Coast collaborative (called the Pacific Green Energy Initiative) that was set up to build, test and rapidly deploy clean and renewable energy systems. The collaborative consists of renewable energy industry leaders who hope to convince a coalition of state and provincial governments on the Pacific Coast (including California, Oregon, Washington State, Alaska and British Columbia) to develop a common market for green energy that would stretch from San Diego, California up to Anchorage, Alaska.

Reading through some of its literature helped reinforce for me the sheer magnitude of the challenge:

The present complex web of businesses, institutions and regulations evolved to manage an energy economy based on oil and large scale electricity generation from coal and hydro power. These organizations are not designed or organized to effectively manage the emerging, new energy economy.

That’s challenge number one for Obama, and for all political leaders confronting the challenge of making their 20th century infrastructures fit for a new era of renewable energy. It’s not simply a matter of swapping out old technology for new while keeping the existing industry and regulatory structure intact:

This new energy economy is shaping to be a patchwork of regional supply portfolios with distributed energy systems (e.g. solar powered homes, geo-exchange systems, and district scale energy supply systems) playing a very large role. It involves a shift to electric transportation and creating huge new demands for green / clean electricity at competitive prices. It involves “smart” grid technologies and more efficient prime movers and appliances across the board.

The challenges get deeper as one considers the political and leadership challenges inherent in the need to break down organizational silos and align the agendas and activities of so many disparate players:

Although many organizations (public, private and non-profit) are engaged in a wide variety of activities relating to Climate Change and Sustainability that impinge on energy technology commercialization, they are also advancing their own independent agendas. These silo agendas have little to do with the acceleration of deployment of energy technologies and everything to do with existing corporate cultures and established ways of doing things. Too often this results in activities that are isolated and ineffective, in conflict or compromised, or diluted by duplication of effort.

The fragmentation of knowledge, capability and effort is an issue I encounter frequently. You could say that it characterizes many domains (international aid, disaster relief and poverty alleviation come to mind), but it is particularly true of climate change where the solutions entail so many deep changes across so many sectors and in so many aspects of our lives.

The Western States and BC have demonstrated leadership in setting ambitious Co2 reduction targets (much more ambitious than Canada or the US as a whole). But the renewable energy industry claims (evidently with some self-interest) that the scale of investment to accomplish the State/Province targets is orders of magnitude greater than current trends within the region would achieve.

The rhetoric coming out of both this initiative and inter-governmental collaboration is interesting. I will be more interested to see what they do in practice and how they set out to enable the cross-sectoral collaborations they envision. It is one thing to hold an annual conference as the inter-governmental coalition intends to do, starting this March. It is quite another to build-up and sustain the multi-dimensional collaborations required to underpin a common market for green energy. I wish them luck.

In the original Galaxy Zoo nearly 150,000 citizen scientists helped astronomers at Oxford and Yale classify roughly 1 million galaxies imaged by the robotic telescope of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. With so many galaxies, the researchers anticipated that it might take at least two years to complete the project. But within 24 hours of launch, the site was receiving 70,000 classifications an hour, and more than 50 million classifications were submitted during the first year.

In Galaxy Zoo 2 contributors have been equipped with more powerful classification tools and assigned more complex tasks than before, giving the researchers an even richer data set to work with. Project leads are hoping Zoo 2 will produce as much science – and as many surprises – as the original Galaxy Zoo did. My hunch is that it will likely generate much more.

For examples of the what the citizen scientists are up to see the results of their beta tests here. You can also follow the project on twitter.

Hardly typical behavior for a pharmaceutical company. After all, pinpointing their precise genetic origins of diabetes could unlock a treasure trove of new medicines and result in a major windfall for Novartis’s shareholders. But its perfectly rational from a wikinomics point of view. In fact, researchers claim there are far more leads hidden in the genome than any one lab could possibly follow-up on alone. So by placing its data in the public domain Novartis intends to leverage the talents of a global research community to dramatically scale and speed up its early-stage R&D activities.

Now it seems GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) is the latest pharmaceutical company to undertake a major course-correction, this time with pledges to provide cheaper medicines in the developing world and to start a patent pool for research on neglected disease. As reported in the Guardian, GSK will:

1. Cut its prices for all drugs in the 50 least developed countries to no more than 25% of the levels in the UK and US – and less if possible – and make drugs more affordable in middle- income countries such as Brazil and India.
2. Put any chemicals or processes over which it has intellectual property rights that are relevant to finding drugs for neglected diseases into a “patent pool”, so they can be explored by other researchers.
3. Reinvest 20% of any profits it makes in the least developed countries in hospitals, clinics and staff.
4. Invite scientists from other companies, NGOs or governments to join the hunt for tropical disease treatments at its dedicated institute at Tres Cantos, Spain.

It’s an intgriguing announcement from my point of view, not least because they have adopted startegies I wrote about in Wikinomics (see “the New Alexandrians”) and in my own work on intellectual property.

While the discounted prices for medicines will likely steal headlines, GSK’s pledge to back a patent pool is arguably more significant. While never very popular in the IP-intensive pharma industry, patent pools have been around for some time in industries such as aircraft manufacturing, radio and telecommunications. More recently, intellectual property theorists such as Carl Shapiro, Robert Merges and Josh Lerner have each suggested that the pooling intellectual property rights could help address an array of issues in industries characeterized by cumulative innovation, particularly software and biotechnology. Even the USPTO recommended patent pools as a potential solution to problems of access and excessive patenting and litigation in the biotechnology industry.

If other companies were to follow suit, a patent pool would provide a significant boost to researchers who have been working on treatments for neglected diseases such as TB, malaria, and river blindness. It could also help give new momentum to open source biology movement.

While I congratulate GSK, I do wonder what took them so long and I find myself agreeing with Oxfam and Médecins Sans Frontières, both of whom argued that the patent pool should be extended HIV.

Today, at least three forces are opening up the regulatory process to a much broader global audience.

1. Satellite imagery coupled with a plethora of intelligent micro-sensors allows us to cull staggering quantities from our natural and built environments (see the California Institute for Technology and Carnegie Mellon experiments where low-power intelligent wireless sensors measure everything from temperature to movement to chemical composition and report that information back in real-time). And thanks to tools like Google Earth, much of this information is now freely available on the Internet, which gives considerable ammunition to conservationists (see here and here, for example).

2. There is growing recognition that at least some resource stocks should be considered global public goods, due to the ecological services they provide to the broader global biosphere (the Amazon being one example). Citizens around the globe have taken an increasing interest in the protection of those public goods and in doing so they call into question traditional notions of national sovereignty when it comes to planetary stewardship.

3. As a result, there are well organized and increasingly agile networks of conservations and environmental groups that reach across national borders and wield considerable influence in key policy debates. They have also become increasingly adept at exposing instances of abuse and pressuring either the culprits directly or the regulatory authorities, or both.

My favourite example in this space, Global Forest Watch improves transparency and accountability in forest management decisions by increasing the public’s access to information on forestry developments around the world. They have a cool Data Warehouse where users can download a vast array of geographical data and manipulate it for their own analyses using their interactive map server

Other examples include the Forest Stewardship Council and the Marine Stewardship Council, both of which were set up as joint efforts of industry and conservation groups to impose new eco-labelling regimes that help consumers recognize and reward sustainable practices in forestry and fishing.

For other posts in this series see:
Time for participatory regulation
Participatory regulation for workplace health and safety
Participatory regulation and anti-corruption efforts

Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. The annual Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), first released in 1995, is the best known of Transparency International’s corruption-fighting tools. It has been widely credited with putting TI and the issue of corruption on the international policy agenda. The CPI ranks 180 countries by their perceived levels of corruption, as determined by expert assessments and opinion surveys. TI also has the global corruption barometer, the bribe payer’s index (assesses the supply side of corruption and ranks corruption by source country and industry sector) and the revenue transparency project (working to disclose company payments to resource-rich countries ). Given their clout and reputation I would like to see TI adopt a more participatory approach. At the moment, donating funds to their organization seems to be the main channel for public participation. Although credit to them, they do appear to make their data available for resuse.

The Kimberley Process (KP) is a joint government- industry-civil society initiative to stem the flow of conflict diamonds – rough diamonds used by rebel movements to finance wars against legitimate governments to devastating effect in countries such as Angola, Cote d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sierra Leone. The Kimberley Process established a supply chain monitoring and diamond certification process that is supposed to ensure that conflict diamonds do not reach retail shelves. Although the initiative appears to have made considerable progress, Global Witness, which (along with Partnership Africa Canada (PAC) and other NGOs) had an unusually high level of involvement in developing and building support for the scheme, claims that there is still a flourishing illicit trade in diamonds globally. Global Witness reports that poor controls in some diamond producing countries (e.g., Cote d’Ivoire and Sierra Leone) allow significant volumes of blood diamonds enter the legitimate trade through Ghana and Mali, where they are being certified as conflict free.

The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) is similar in intent to TI’s bribe payer’s index — it also aims to strengthen governance by improving transparency and accountability in the extractives sector. The EITI initiative works directly with participants in the extractive industry (e.g., mining, oil & gas companies and governments) to set a global standard for companies to publish what they pay and for governments to disclose what they receive. The goal is to ensure that the revenues from oil, gas, and mining companies in the form of taxes, royalties, signature bonuses and other payments become an important engine for economic growth and social development rather than simply enriching the ruling elite.

Wikileaks is arguably the most open and participatory anti-corruption efforts in the mix. Its core objective is to provide a platform for people who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their governments and corporations and it does this by hosting a wiki for mass document leaking and analysis. To date, it has received over 1.2 million documents from dissident communities and anonymous sources, focused largely on exposing oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East.

Worker’s Rights Consortium — an independent labor rights monitoring organization, conducting investigations of working conditions in factories around the globe. Its purpose is to combat sweatshops and protect the rights of workers who sew apparel and make other products sold in the United States. Like the FLA below, the WRC emerged after allegations surfaced that Nike and other major brands were sourcing their high-priced items from sweatshops where workers were working in horrendous conditions for as little as 5 cents an hour.

Fair Labor Association. Similar to the WRC, the FLA brings together colleges and universities, civil society organizations, and “socially responsible companies”. Companies that join the FLA commit to establishing internal systems for monitoring workplace conditions and maintaining Code standards, being part of a rigorous system of Independent External Monitoring (IEM), and public reporting on the conditions in their supplier factories.

The Cocoa Initiative emerged after investigations by human rights organizations revealed that child slaves were being forced to farm the cocoa that eventually finds its way into chocolate treats manufactured by companies such as Hershey’s, Nestle and Cadbury. Public scrutiny forced the companies to respond — even though they initially claimed that they bore no responsibility since they purchased their cocoa on the commodity markets and had no direct relationships with the cocoa suppliers. The public didn’t buy this excuse and the result was a unique partnership between NGOs, labour unions, cocoa processors and the major chocolate brands to change the way cocoa is grown.

Other good examples? Leave a comment.

Some of the issues that challenge today’s regulators include the sclerotic pace of rulemaking, increasing international interdependency, the lack of transparency in industry and government, the corrosive influence of “junk science” and money and an insufficient capacity for oversight.

After dismantling or circumscribing centralized regulatory agencies in the 1980s and 1990s, I think many governments will find they are ill equipped to deal with these challenges. In most sectors, deregulation was a cue for regulated industries to start designing and enforcing their own regulations. Decentralized rulemaking was intended to help make regulation more responsive to the needs of industries that were evolving quickly and becoming increasingly global in scope. Governments were to be the “regulators of last resort”—stepping in only after self-regulation was deemed to have failed. But in practice most instances of pure self-regulation have deficiencies and governments (for the most part) have proven unable or unwilling to take swift action when market failures became evident.

The upshot: without transparency, oversight and accountability, self-regulation is clearly inadequate. At the same time, the speed, interdependency and complexity of today’s world makes a return to centralized rulemaking and enforcement increasingly implausible. All this makes me think that the kinds of organizational innovations that make the Linux community, twitter and wikipedia remarkable could help regulators address some their challenges.

The big opportunity initially may be to foster greater citizen or stakeholder participation in monitoring and enforcing regulations that already exist. Naturalists and recreational users could be enlisted to help document abuses on public lands, just as individuals and organizations around the world are able to bring human rights abuses to global attention using new channels like YouTube or Winess’s Hub.

But citizens and other stakeholders could also help design and promulgate new rules, particularly where there are gaps in existing legislation. The consumer advocacy movements that currently police the social and environmental performance of industry are a good example. More governments could eventually sanction initiatives like these, while insisting on mandatory corporate sustainability reporting and other forms of transparency would bolster the efforts of citizen monitors.

The technological foundation – including RFID, satellite imagery, cheap personal video recorders and other Internet-connected devices – already exists to distribute the power and authority for designing and enforcing regulations to a broader network of participants. And I think that in the right niches and within certain communities of interest there is ample desire on the part of citizens to play a role in enforcing the rules they care about. I’m not sure that same enthusiasm exists within government and industry, which is why my preliminary research suggests that most new forms of participatory regulation are emerging completely outside traditional regulatory bodies.

I’ll be following up this post with a series of nascent examples. If participatory regulation is of interest to you or if you know of other examples, I would love to hear about it.

“We prefer to call this [Galaxy Zoo] citizen science because it’s a better description of what you’re doing; you’re a regular citizen but you’re doing science. Crowd sourcing sounds a bit like, well, you’re just a member of the crowd and you’re not; you’re our collaborator. You’re pro-actively involved in the process of science by participating.”

On comparisons between Galaxy Zoo and seti@home, fightaids@home stardust@home, etc., etc., etc.:

“Galaxy Zoo volunteers do real work. They’re not just passively running something on their computer and hoping that they’ll be the first person to find aliens. They have a stake in science that comes out of it, which means that they are now interested in what we do with it, and what we find.”

On the application of wikinomics to astrophysics:

“It’s a new way of doing science. Mass collaboration makes things possible that were impossible before, mostly because of the size of our data sets. You can analyze a data set with hundreds or perhaps thousands of objects by yourself or with a small team. But if the question you want to answer involves millions of images or objects then there is really only one answer to this question: public participation.”

This interview, btw, was in my top five for 2008.

“Having a wiki world, and having an ability to instantaneously set up mass collaboration, you can solve problems on a time scale that’s going to matter. So if we start having a bird flu pandemic, or if global warming continues to accelerate, we may not have the luxury of what I think of today as the slow speed of coming to answers for the challenges confronting the human race. And so the idea of being able to apply all the brains on the planet to a time urgent situation is something that we are going to look back on and be really glad that we figured out how to do because otherwise it’s going to be too late.”

I thought he summed up what this next book is going to be about pretty well.

According to the founder, amuktrade.com’s principal goal is to facilitate quick speculative asset pricing based on user estimates and equally novel quick cashless trading through exchanging of shares of large, illiquid assets like real estate. So assets that are currently hard to price would be priced (virtually) by leveraging the collective wisdom of the site’s users. Users can then exchange their virtual asset shares by join trading communities where they can hedge risks, diversify their portfolios and share investment rewards.  

What problems might this solve? The founder has turned her attention to real estate. A homeowner, for example, could decide to sell fractional ownership interests (i.e., shares) in their home, allowing them to acquire and/or keep their homes without paying the high cost of full ownership. For someone facing foreclosure, selling a 49% of the ownership interest in her home is surely better than having to sell it or lose it entirely. Selling and buying shares in commercial real estate and vacation properties is already common, so why not personal real estate? Could be handy in a time of crisis, but I could also see how this could potentially accelerate the kind of absurdly risky and opaque behavior that triggered the crisis in the first place.

Love to hear your thoughts on this.

The full report is worth reading if these issues interest you at all. It’s in beta stage for the next 10 days, so your comments could help shape the future of digital governance in the UK.

Like many observers of the international scene, I find it frustrating to watch international organizations like the United Nations fail to shake-off the sclerosis and bureaucratic inertia that have marred attempts to get anywhere near meeting the millennium development goals by 2015. As my colleague rightly pointed out, there was so much optimism surrounding the Rio Earth Summit in 1992–a time when the United Nations had a much more positive public profile and, seemingly at least, the clout to make things happen. No more.

Described by my colleague as “closed and insular,” the UN is quickly losing its convening power and ultimately its relevance in addressing the global challenges that matter. Its power and authority have been usurped; by the US’s unilateralism on one hand, and by a multitude of more nimble and innovative stakeholder networks that have emerged to fill the leadership void—networks that compete with the UN and other international organizations for attention, loyalty and funds. If there was ever a time when the UN needed to embrace open source principles, this is it.

To be fair to the many good people who work hard for the UN, they are hardly operating in a benign environment. Eight years of neo-conservative attacks and unfavorable news media coverage have denigrated its image and perhaps even eroded its confidence. It’s also fair to say that making consensus decisions with 192 members on the board of directors is hardly a walk in the park, particularly when some of those board members are not very sympathetic to your cause.

Perhaps, in the final analysis, it won’t matter if the UN cedes leadership to new global “organizations” and networks so long as someone can get the job done. But my sense is that the job will not get done without the involvement of an international body that represents the world’s national governments. So in the spirit of renewing the United Nations, I’m offering up the following five six ideas for starters:

1. Hold a series of large-scale digital conversations (along the lines of Habitat Jam) on the each of the millennium development goals (MDG) to help develop new ideas, restore confidence, and engage the public. Set up an Ideastorm for each MDG to continue the dialog.
2. Start building a virtual citizen assembly with representatives from each country. I don’t see this as a “world parliament” as others have suggested, but as more of watch dog whose principle responsibility would be to hold agencies within the United Nations system accountable. See Campaign for the Establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, for example (thanks Tony for the link).
3. Develop a transparency toolkit and encourage social entrepreneurs to build new web-based applications to help track progress (or lack of progress) towards the MDGs, much the way the United Kingdom and the District of Columbia have done with their mash-up contests.
4. Stop producing stale policy documents and white papers and start leveraging rich, interactive media to carry-out the UN’s education and advocacy work.
5. Establish an international clearinghouse of sorts that would help foster greater coordination and knowledge sharing between the multitude of international organizations, aid agencies, NGOs, charities and social entrepreneurs that are engaged in international development efforts.
6. Experiment with InnoCentive and other talent marketplaces to help bolster the problem-solving capacity of UN agencies. Solution Exchange in India was developed by a local UN agency and could serve as a model for a broader collaboration platform.

United Nations 2.0 may sound far-fetched, but as my colleague aptly put it “he who cautions every step covers little ground.” Please add your own ideas in the comments section.

Government 2.0 Camp is the unconference about using social media tools and Web 2.0 technologies to create a more effective, efficient and collaborative U.S. government on all levels (local, state, and federal).

Government 2.0 Camp will bring together the leading thinkers from government, academia and industry to share Government 2.0 initiatives that are already in process and collaborate about how to leverage social media tools and Web 2.0 technologies to create a more collaborate, efficient and effective government — Government 2.0.

Government 2.0 Camp is the inaugural event of Government 2.0 Club, a newly-launched national organization that creates opportunities for government, academia and industry to share ideas and solutions for leveraging social media tools and Web 2.0 technologies to create a more collaborate, efficient and effective government.

Contests like these are worthwhile for a variety of reasons. One, if we left it up to public officials to make government more transparent I think we can all predict the outcome. Two, contests are a reasonably good way to incent broader involvement from the public. And three, third parties are not contrained by the bureaucratic encumberances and political considerations that stiffle innovation in the public administration. Thus they can build innovative new applications using public data sets faster and more freely than government.

That being said, we need to move beyond the “google map mash-up” paradigm and build applications that enable genuine interaction and engagement with government. And for that to happen, we need government agencies to genuinely engage in this process. I’m sure the folks at Sunlight Labs would agree!

Applications are due March 31st and winners will be announced on April 7th. The winner receives $15,000.