The reality, I think, is pretty far from the mark: people don’t want high quality, (and in the case of media, accurate) content; they just want to be entertained. What’s more, the threshold for entertainment is frighteningly low. Even before the YouTube revolution, “Reality TV” was gaining ground and prime-time space with each new season, and Fox News/CNN were reporting on trivialities (on good days) — exactly the problem that crowdsourced media was supposed to remedy.

Unfortunately, look at the content that does really well online: stoned children, rude celebrities, general failure, and of course, cats — none of which requires any editorial effort, and generally reflects poorly on our collective taste. If we have network neutrality, and this is the content that really thrives, where then is the drive for media companies (or individuals) to make high-quality content when they can just as easily monetize the equivalent of the Springfield film festival winner? Instead, media becomes a race to the bottom with media companies competing with Joe-Sixpack to see who can first discover the one true lowest common denominator.

This mirrors the old saying about democracy: “it’s the form of government where the people get what they deserve” — we’ve now got democratic media, and people are going to get what they deserve there too. It seems to me that if we’re going to collectively demand network neutrality, and the power and responsibility that comes with it, we’re going to have to raise the bar in terms of what we expect and demand in terms of quality content — and “Twitter journalism” (and the like) shouldn’t make the cut.

Even if there isn’t a collective intellectual awakening, there will always be people online who want premium, high quality content. However, under this new model, in order to make the delivery of that content sustainable (let alone profitable), we’re going to have to pay for it, and it certainly won’t be cheap.

Giridharadas writes, “President Obama declared during the campaign that ‘we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.’ That messianic phrase held the promise of a new style of politics in this time of tweets and pokes. But it was vague, a paradigm slipped casually into our drinks. To date, the taste has proven bittersweet.” He notes that the Citizen’s Briefing Book, a concept created by the Administration to field ideas from the public that can be voted on by their fellow citizens, has had some disappointing results.

“In the middle of two wars and an economic meltdown, the highest-ranking idea was to legalize marijuana, an idea nearly twice as popular as repealing the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy. Legalizing online poker topped the technology ideas, twice as popular as nationwide wi-fi. Revoking the Church of Scientology’s tax-exempt status garnered three times more votes than raising funding for childhood cancer.”

Giridharadas continues, “Once in power, the White House crowdsourced again. In March, its Office of Science and Technology Policy hosted an online ‘brainstorm’ about making government more transparent. Good ideas came; but a stunning number had no connection to transparency, with many calls for marijuana legalization and a raging (and groundless) debate about the authenticity of President Obama’s birth certificate.”

Giridharadas observes, “Because it is so easy to filter one’s reading online, extreme views dominate the discussion. Moderates are underrepresented, so citizens seeking better health care may seem less numerous than poker fans. The Internet’s image of openness and equality belies its inequities of race, geography and age.”

“Perhaps most menacingly, the Internet’s openness allows well-organized groups to simulate support, to ‘capture and impersonate the public voice,’” wrote James Fishkin, political scientist at Stanford University, in an e-mail exchange with Giridharadas.

In a telephone interview, Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, told Giridharadas, “Now that it is so important, [the Internet is] actually too important not to think through the constitutional and governance issues involved.”

Despite, or perhaps because of, the many lies, slanders, and, to me, outrageous views expressed on the Internet, I tend to post responses now and then when I just cannot stand silent anymore. I will continue to do so, but I have to wonder whether I am engaging in passionate, well-reasoned discourse, or am helping to chew up, word by word, the potential of the Internet to further thinking and debate? I may be no better than the very people I think are inevitably ruining the power of the Internet to share information, truth, and, I hope, judgment and critical thinking. Whether I like it or not, the Internet is, it seems, becoming a source of propaganda for all kinds of vile and detestable – not just worthy – causes and ideas.

Giridharadas sums the situation up well, in my view: “There is no turning back the clock. We now have more public opinion exerting pressure on politics than ever before. The question is how it may be channeled and filtered to create freer, more successful societies, because simply putting things online is no cure-all.”

Good question, with no good or even so-so answer as yet. This may become the dominant issue for the next few years when it comes to discussions about the value of the Internet for political discourse; it may even come down to the question: Does the Internet have any real value when it comes to political discussion? I certainly hope so, and there are excellent examples, some mentioned in Giridharadas’ column. But I also see something less noble brewing: a stew of misinformation, lies, and rabble-rousing hyperbole that does not engage or ennoble, but rather reduces people to single-issue screamers whose very volume of verbiage overwhelms attempts at cooperation, collaboration, and compromise on political matters. I really hope I am wrong. It’s hard enough to collaborate in person; I hope we don’t squander the potential of the Internet to further collaboration and thoughtful commentary.

Failed systems. Constructs designed by humans that have faltered at some point in the process. Some might say education is the next to witness this.

Tom Brown, CEO of IDEO, questions the current economic model in North America:

I have been thinking quite a bit recently about the failure of the economy and whether we want it to recover to its pre-bust state. As I listened to the arguments for various stimulus packages, the main justification for distributing hundreds of billions of dollars seemed mostly to involve getting us to spend more by consuming more. As a short term fix this may be okay, but wasn’t it just such an unsustainable approach to growth and consumption that got us into trouble in the first place? Can we really expect to spend our way out of this downturn and somehow magically create a post-crisis economy that is sustainable?

You mean throwing money at a problem won’t solve it if the model has an inherent flaw? How do we redesign society on a macro level? How does one magically create a post crisis economy?

There is the concept of a participatory government, whereby citizens play a direct role in designing/monitoring/enforcing the rules that govern economic activity. Gong Szeto, designer and creator of YOUROWNDEMOCRACY, believes that we should redesign government as a computational platform:

Today’s technology allows for innovative online collaboration, networking, transactional, and information visualization. Integrated together in a coherent set of solutions for the citizens of democracy, it is now possible to conceive of a single-platform which is an independent non-partisan party whose sole mandate is to harness the power of these technologies into an accessible framework that will allow citizens the ability to stay informed about complex issues and to register their votes in favor or in opposition to processes in government. Transparency will lead to a stronger, more active and informed citizenry and more accountable government.

A Finalist in the 2009 Buckminster Fuller Challenge, YOUROWNDEMOCRACY is a web-based application geared to empower citizens of any democracy in the world to directly engage one another and their elected leaders on important issues on local, state, and national levels. Its goals:

•    empower collective action through citizen action
•    integrate with public citizens for immediate feedback.

You can read more about Gong’s proposal here. The concept applies today’s social networking, multimedia, and financial markets technologies to create a collaborative infrastructure that records and displays a population’s real-time sentiments. This data is measured and visualized for everyone as part of a continuous feedback loop.

I can appreciate that the idea makes issues digestible and actionable. Provided citizens are engaged, YOUROWNDEMOCRACY fosters a culture of transparency, openness and innovation. Transparency can even be a regulatory solution whereby connected citizens can act as monitors within the system. In the same breath though, transparency also means privacy issues.  Network and security issues could threaten public safety.  Data mining (especially on such a remarkable scale) and identity theft are not two phrases anyone enjoys hearing in the same sentence. With an accessible central repository of citizen data, the right data in the wrong hands could potentially be very harmful.

Scalability comes into play. Can the complete scope and needs of the people be adequately addressed using such a system? Do we have the physical resources required to support such an infrastructure. Twitter, an exemplary use of social media being used to track political events such as the post-election riots in Iran, has become a victim of its own success. It has experienced massive scaling problems due to the amount of page views per second.

There is also the daunting task of defining the parameters of the system. Should the system mimic the current infrastructure or does the change in methodology alter the system itself? Szeto’s approach is that of an independent non-partisan party whose sole mandate is to harness the power of these technologies into an accessible framework. This idea alters the current multiple party system of politics to that of a direct democracy. A changing model of governance also means a change in distribution of labour within government. Who is responsible for framing the questions asked – the government or the people? Careful understanding and use of verbiage in law is paramount. Ballot initiatives, a costly method of doing politics, have been considered to be the reason for paralysis of the political process in California and have been deemed the ‘crack cocaine’ of democracy by the Economist. Ironically enough, the original intention of ballot initiatives was to empower citizens at a grassroots level.

Accessibility is yet another concern. PM Stephen Harper recently announced the government’s intention to improve broadband internet access to rural Canada. Although this is a step in the right direction, it illustrates the point that not all citizens of Canada have equal access to broadband technologies. Those unfamiliar with the technology may not be as inclined to use it as well.

Will this design have longevity? With technology constantly evolving, would the current system, and therefore the political system (depending on mutual exclusivity of the two) be able to stand the test of time due to technological obsolescence? Would interest fade? The law of diminishing utility could mean that citizens could simply get bored of using the system and participation could simply diminish over time.

Are people truly ready, willing, and able to govern themselves?

I’m not sure, but I think the answer is contigent on whether facebook profiles are public or private spaces — the problem is that there seem to be a lot of ways to define if it is. Facebook is public if you don’t know how to set your privacy settings (or if you don’t care to). It’s also public in that everything said is part of a record over which you don’t have much control (people can easily screenshot, quote, save or remember anything said or done).

At the same time, privacy settings do exist for a reason, so maybe calling a profile “public” is too strong in some regards — these settings exist so that only friends (or at least people you never talked to in highschool) can see what you’re up to and interact with you. At best, facebook is a semi-public (does that equate with semi-private?) space, so how do we decide how we behave in this new space?

In real life (or meatspace, as the kids today call it), the division between public and private space is pretty well defined, something is public if you’re broadcasting it outwardly in a public space. Canadian free speech/hate speech laws are a good example, you can say any number of distateful and hateful things to your friends sitting around a table in a bar, but if you stand up on the table and say those same things a little more loudly, you’re no longer in your own private world, and there very well could be some consequences for ”sharing your views.”

How does this situation play out on facebook (or other social networks)? Where’s the line between public and private with regards to what constitutes a public statement? It seems that just to be safe, you have to regard everything as public. But how does this apply to etiquette?

If someone posts something, is it considered fair game for debate or disagreement? Or are the rules the same as at a nice dinner party, where you bite your tongue in favor of social graces? If the space is shared, have you got an obligation to make your dissenting opinion known when someone says something objectionable? What are some possible best practices if you decide to do so?

What do you think?

The move from people to pigeons as carriers was important in that all the sudden there was a task performed over a distance that could now be automated. Nowadays, instantly sending a message to someone on the other side of the world is trivial — but that doesn’t mean that modern technology has yet been exhaustively used to solve older problems.

There’s plenty of old technology that still works — works well enough in fact that no one has bothered to replace it with a better, more efficient alternative. Here are a small list of examples:

• The Steam Engine. A.K.A. nuclear power. It’s pretty much the same principle, just instead of burning coal or wood to boil water and use the steam to move turbines, it’s nuclear fission. We’ve supplemented an old technology with new components, but the base principle hasn’t changed in 300 years.
• Physics. More accurately, Newtonian Physics. It’s easy to forget that just as things like steam engines and the internet are tools, so are ideas like laws of Physics. The set of tools for modeling the Physical world that Newton and his contemporaries invented were, and are, extremely useful and accurate. They’re also inaccurate and have been superceded by ones that take into account a larger picture of the universe.
• Government. The oldest governments of today were built for a different world, structured to address different issues, for people with different priorities. The election of representatives worked well for people whose lives were spent largely on farms and in factories, unable to travel the distances required to participate in the democratic process. The stability that has made governments reliable in the long run also makes them resistant to change, after all, you go with what you know. Governments are, to their credit, now adapting to involve citizens in the process of running their country, but it’s necessarily a slow-going process as this new technology is tested and accepted.

In the business space, the drive of competition should drive the constant reevaluation of all technological assumptions in favor of more efficient alternatives. But the same might not be true in other areas of society.

In the three examples above, all work well in their native context, especially Newtonian Physics. If you’re calculating how long it takes to fly between Toronto and New York, you don’t need to take into account relativity, so there’s an argument that, in that context, the older tool is just fine. This leads us to the question: should we be aggressively looking for ways to apply new technology to everything in our world, constantly re-evaluating old problems with modern eyes and modern problem solving skills? Or were some problems solved well-enough the first time, and we should focus our attention on other areas?

Similarly, when you look at your day to day life, how many of the tools and technologies that you use everyday seem like little more than sleeker versions of Historic designs — what items are missing from my list?

LittleSis mixes Facebook-ish user interface with Wikipedia-like user editing to create profiles of the “powers that be” in both the private and public sectors.  Users who register as analysts can log in and add information to profiles of major figures like Barack Obama, Robert Rubin or Bill Gates.  The site focuses on 3 main factors about an individual:  Relationships (which includes Business/Government positions, other memberships, education and donation/grant recipients), Interlocks (people in common organizations), Giving (who they’ve donated to, as well as other individuals that have given to the same recipients) and the basic personal information.

Like Facebook, LittleSis also includes groups.  When I look up Citi Group, I can see their leadership and staff, but I also get a look at people and organizations that Citi has done businesses with. My favorite group feature is the “targets of lobbying”, where I learn that from ’99-’08, they lobbied the Senate and House 19 times.  They also lobbied the Department of Education 7 times between ’04 and ’07 (why would that be?)  If I go to the Department of Education group, I can follow up and see who they’ve done business with, who’s lobbied them, and which organizations have leadership and staff in common with the Department.  I can also check out which organizations have received donations from people who work in the Department.

The key to LittleSis is that it’s not Barack Obama, Citi Group or the Department of Education controlling their own profile and network.  Analysts like myself (I signed up for an account) are the ones doing the writing and editing, much like Wikipedia.  LittleSis also has a metric for determining which Analysts score the most points for making edits – a good system to (hopefully) maintain the integrity of the site.

At this point, there are a few shortcomings to LittleSis.  As I mentioned, the site is still in a Beta version, so it’s not a completed project yet.  Also, you can certainly question the accuracy of the information, and more importantly, the completeness of it.  I can read that a major CEO donated to groups x, y and z, but he may also have donated to a, b and c, with that information not yet uploaded.  As with Wikipedia, I think that a major prerequisite to a complete and successful version of LittleSis will be achieving a critical mass of users to police information and ensure the completeness of it.

Regardless of this shortcoming, I see a lot of potential in LittleSis.  Having this kind of facebook-like platform to follow donations and relationships among America’s elite is a fantastic development for public and private transparency.  Previously, we had to rely on journalists to follow the string and inform us about these relationships.  This website, if successful, allows individual citizens to see this themselves in a platform that’s very similar to the facebook sites they’re so adept at navigating.

The Sunlight Foundation is on the right track – let’s hope that LittleSis gets a strong enough user base to reach its potential.

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.

(Editor’s Note: Ali joins us from the Carnegie Endowment and has prepared a three-post series on his suggestion for a Global Challenges Wikipedia, check out posts one and two.)

If it’s designed and implemented carefully, the GCW that I’m proposing would offer us insight into at least four high-level questions:

1. How can the global community allocate its resources more effectively?  It’s all too often the case that fundamental questions such as this one are either ignored or don’t receive their due attention in the rush to make “progress.”  We need to understand how people, technology, and money are being allocated.  This examination would allow us to take stock of where we are in the fight against global challenges and determine where we need to go.  
2. Which players are best suited to accomplishing a given task?  For example, is an NGO more equipped to engage in nation-building than a government?  On what variables, if any, does the answer depend?  Identifying players’ comparative advantages would lessen the extent to which they tread on each others’ turf and create deadweight loss.
3. What geopolitical patterns emerge?  Do certain problem-solving paradigms work better in certain countries or regions or in application to certain global challenges?  Intuition suggests that bilateral negotiations between developed and developing powers will be instrumental to slowing climate change, whereas grassroots, experiment-based initiatives will be instrumental to reversing global poverty.  The more extensive the GCW becomes, the more likely it is that it’ll be able to flesh out that intuition and, again, eliminate deadweight loss.
4. Can we predict where global challenges will go in the future?  Forecasting has long gotten a bad rap on the grounds that those who attempt it advance specious claims to sell books, get on TV, and, more broadly, gain attention.  I agree that one who forecasts to be fashionable doesn’t contribute much to our understanding.  I’d argue, however, that as time passes, engaging in long-term strategic thinking on the basis of objective evidence will only grow  more imperative.   

 
Alright.  Three blog posts about one idea might seem like overkill, but (if you can’t already tell) I’m excited.  If only by virtue of the fact that others are starting to embark on similar projects, I’m convinced that the GCW has extraordinary potential if we get the details right at the outset, work hard, and dream big. 

What do you think?  Please feel free to contact me at awyne@alum.mit.edu.  I look forward to hearing from you!

This begs the question – how can Web 2.0 tools improve on this model and move beyond the suggestion box?

One innovative case of public policy consultation can be found in the city of Freiburg, Germany.  In 2008, the municipal government of Freiburg invited its citizens to partake in a participatory budgeting exercise.  The goal was to gather citizen input for the drafting of the 2009/2010 municipal budget.   With the help of software company TuTech Innovation, the Freiburg government created a website that used discussion forums, wikis and a new innovation – the budget slider.

Citizens who registered for the website could manipulate these sliders to create their own individual budgets, by moving the sliders up or down to either increase or decrease spending to any one of the 22 budget areas.  The key constraint was that the total budget had to balance to 2008 levels, so spending increases in one area necessitated economizations in another.  Citizens were also invited to provide written justifications for their changes. 

Following the completion of the process, all of the individual budgets were aggregated into one single “Citizen’s Budget”, which gave a clear picture of the participants’ wishes for the 2009/2010 municipal budget. 

Overall, 1800 citizens registered to use the website, with 1291 writing individual budgets (750 of whom provided written justifications).  Although this is less than 1% of the city’s population (217 000), it still represents a sevenfold increase over the roughly 150-200 citizens who might show up for an offline, townhall consultation process.

Building on the Change.gov model, this input was actually used as a focal point in the local government’s debate over the drafting of the actual budget.  In one case, 400 000 Euros were redirected to childcare spending, a change that may not have occurred without the widespread support that the measure received in the Citizen’s Budget.

Also building on the suggestion box model, the final Citizen’s Budget was drafted into a report that was published by the municipal government.  This allowed a great deal of transparency, as this budget could now be compared to the actual budget that was written into law, also providing an improved degree of government accountability. 

Overall, this case demonstrates the new relationship that’s possible between government and citizens.  Simple tools like the budget slider can add a whole new level of transparency to the public square dialogue.

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.

When President Obama announced last month that he’ll ask ordinary Americans to help him change America, it didn’t take long for the influencers inside the Washington beltway to ring the alarm: What happens if ordinary Americans actually come up with some new ideas to run government? Will things get out of control? Will they become bullies who will force Obama and Congressional lawmakers to bend to their will?

To me, they sound a lot like the traditional marketers who are worried that they’re losing control over their brand. Both marketers and lawmakers are struggling to adjust to a digital world where consumers and voters now have powerful tools to talk back, and even influence the brand or the policy. So let me give the Washington lawmakers the same message I have delivered to the marketers: Let go. You can’t control everything. The genie has slipped out of the bottle and she’s not coming back. And I think this is a really good thing…

Read the full post here and then join the discussion.

This reminded me of an article from the Washington Post that appeared last week, “Well Connected Parents Take on School Boards”.   Parents are now using social networking, email blitzes, partnerships with business groups and data access to fight for a wide range of changes.  The battles they fight cover a broad spectrum of issues, such as pushing back school start times or redrawing district boundaries. In atleast one case, parents have even used the web to force changes on grading schemes (lowering the bar for an ‘A’ from a 94 to a 90, in percentages).

Many new parents today have grown up digital, and know how to leverage the web.  But many haven’t.   To quote a source from the article,  ”Schools need to be more concerned about the digital divide than ever before…We don’t want to create two levels of power, those with access to information and those without it.”  Clearly, this divide has the potential to widen the have and have-not gaps.  In the case of redrawing boundaries, for example, it’s very difficult to create a situation where all parties gain.  If the change was created by a computer-literate interest group, it’s reasonable to fear an increased disparity between socio-economic classes. 

As Web 2.0 tools start to reach an increased proportion of our population, there is (understandably) a push to increase citizen input into policy-making (such as Obama’s change.gov). In some instances, there’s even evidence of a movement towards small-scale direct democracy (see England’s “Vote for Your Park” program).

But an increase in collaborative policy-making has to be met by an increase in Web education and public progams to ensure universal internet access.  Reading the papers last week, I was somewhat letdown that in the America’s spending on broadband expansion to rural areas was being reduced in the proposed stimulus package (relative to what was initially proposed).  I think this is a mistake.

Moving forward, I see a wealth of opportunities for increased citizen collaboration in policy-making.  But let’s work a little harder at getting everyone up to speed.

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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.

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.

Click on the YouTube video above to hear President-elect Barack Obama invite the nation to participate in the Inauguration festivities surrounding his swearing-in as President on January 20. True to form, Obama’s opening words include “But this inauguration is not about me. It’s about all of us.”

It’s this kind of inclusive thinking that clinched him the nomination and then the election.

Can’t make it to Washington to participate in the official ceremonies? Then host a Neighborhood Ball Party of your own. Invite your friends. Want to roll up your sleeves and participate in the spirit of renewal that he promises will be the hallmark of his administration? Begin by going to www.USAservice.org and volunteer in your community the day before the inauguration to help mark Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Watch the online video by Michelle Obama encouraging everyone to participate. Enter the YouTube video contest and find out about local events through Facebook.

The Obama administration promises to employ the digital tools of Web 2.0 as much as possible in the campaign to introduce to the country a newer and much more participatory democracy.

Here’s a clip from the Globe’s PolicyWiki site:

So much of what happens in Canada when it comes to developing public policy occurs behind closed doors, inside committee rooms and legislative offices. Even the discussion about many of the issues that affect us as a country, such as the federal budget, foreign policy, our relationship with the U.S. and so on, tends to take place primarily in academic or official circles. Opportunities for public comment are rare, and often overly restrictive.

We’d like to try and open that process up a little, and this is our attempt to do that. One of the benefits to the Internet is that it lowers the barriers that can prevent people from discussing these kinds of important topics, and allow them to provide their thoughts about the direction the government should take. Some would argue that it lowers the barriers a little too far, but that’s a subject for another day, and another wiki . . .

If this experiment succeeds — as we sincerely hope it will — we’d like to expand it to become an ongoing project to tap what we like to call the “Two Million Minds” of our readers and other concerned citizens, a kind of open, crowd-powered forum that we could use to collect the thoughts and opinions of the Canadian public on the important issues that confront our country and us as a society.

There are various ways to contribute. For example, you can simply vote on the ideas that have been already been presented by various Canadian politicos or you can add your own proposals. We desperately need this kind of forum in Canada, so do take some time to contribute. 

Since 2002, Humboldt County has promoted the Humboldt County Election Transparency Project, an initiative set up to ensure adequate rigor in vetting the electronic balloting process. The software—called Ballot Browser—was developed by Mitch Trachtenberg, a local area software engineer. After the ballots (some potentially with chad, just wanted to throw a reference in there somewhere) are scanned by the Premier system, they get scanned a second time. Trachtenberg’s software is then run on these scans to identify where the punches were made.

After the Transparency Project’s audit, it uncovered 197 ballots missing from Premier’s counts. After some troubleshooting with Premier, the cause was revealed to be a bug in their proprietary software, which inadvertently deleted portions of the ballots it had previously counted. As the story from Wired goes, each stack of ballots fed into the scanner is given a “deck” number starting at zero (0, 1, 2, and so on). If during the process an operator interrupts any subsequent deck, the software deletes the deck 0. The scary bit is that the logs would show no evidence of the deleted deck zero, or of its existence entirely.

The error had been revealed earlier in 2004 with a simple workaround: delete the “deck 0” before it has any meaningful data in it, and you’re set. Not a great workaround, but serviceable.

The major concern is this: what would have happened without this auditing system? Odds are that the votes would have been lost into the ether. Not a frightening prospect in wide-margin victories, but what about the tight races? Any thoughts on these Premier/Diebold balloting machines? I’m certain that the software error wasn’t a vast right-wing conspiracy, but does it underline a need to be wary of proprietary software? Or is that alarmist, and this is an isolated incident?

Proprietary software has garnered significant investment by development firms, in part, thanks to its clear-cut business model. Perhaps open source will see further attention as government realizes that the plus of near-ubiquity in proprietary software comes with its fair share of transparency-related caveats. With a few more strong showings by open source in the governance arena, policymakers may have to recognize it as a viable contender.

1. Mass collaboration could change virtually every aspect of government: From the way we deliver services like education and health care to the way we develop policy and engage citizens in democratic decision-making to the way we recruit new talent into government agencies and orchestrate capability in the public service.

2. Toronto has an enormous talent pool with more than 4 million residents in the GTA. That’s a lot of brainpower to apply to the challenges that face this city. Could we make the city the most vibrant, progressive and dynamic urban space on the planet? Yes, but we’ve got much work to do to harness this latent potential. That’s why this summit was a good start.

3. Web 2.0 has enormous promise at all levels of government, but the local applications have the greatest potential to make a real difference in how citizens interact with government. The services offered by local government and the kind of decisions taken in the council chambers impact people’s lives very directly. They shape the quality of the urban experience in Toronto and the evolution of its many neighborhoods. The irony is that engagement at the local level of government is typically low, in large part because the existing consultation mechanisms are slow and cumbersome and exclude the vast majority who may not have time to show up to a council session or a town hall meeting. Web 2.0 can make decision-making around issues such as transportation and urban planning more transparent, and that transparency can bolster our ability to scrutinize our local officials (see They Work For Us). With greater transparency comes greater input, with intuitive online tools for information gathering, brainstorming, and collaborative filtering making the process of contributing less onerous and more productive. The City’s facebook consultation on the Jarvis St. streetscape improvement project (demo’s this morning) is a good start.

4. There is an emerging consensus that one of the best ways to enable government 2.0 innovation is for government to embrace the kind of platform openness that has driven the success of entities like Wikipedia, flickr and Amazon. In other words, government should open up their data and online service applications to enable any individual or third party with the skills and inclination to develop new service innovations. The rationale is simple. Government can’t anticipate how citizens’ needs may change or all of the creative ways in which services could be delivered in the future. So by providing an open platform for innovation they can leverage the talents and insights of a much broader community of co-innovators. Indeed, it’s probably fair to assume that citizens, non-profits and businesses—being generally unconstrained by rigid internal brueaucracies and strict accountabilities—will innovate around the data far faster and more freely than government can. Apps for Democracy in DC and “Show Us a Better Way” are showing us the way forward.

5. The City of Toronto’s website needs a major overhaul. Rather than a static portal for disseminating information to residents and visitors, we need a dynamic platform for citizen engagement and service innovation, using the kind of approach described above. One thing is clear from this meeting: the web 2.0 commmunity in Toronto would gladly get this done quickly — just give them access to the underlying data and services. In other cases, the city could simply piggy back on what the community has already provided, much the way local councils in the UK leverage fixmystreet.com, an application developed by a non-profit called mysociety. As of today, 200,000 people have written to their MP for the first time using mysociety’s tools, over 8,000 potholes and other broken things have been fixed, nearly 9,000,000 signatures have been left on petitions to the Prime Minister. No need for government to reinvent the wheel.

6. More than a better website, we need a new form of participatory urbanism that gives citizens a major role in addressing some of our most pressing challenges–e.g., how do we reduce the city’s carbon footprint, improve local transport, and ensure the city remains an attractive destination for investment and job creation. We need a city-wide talent marketplace and solution exchange where problems citizens can converge around these issues. This participatory urbanism project has become one of my latest favorites.

7. None of this needs to be prohibitively expensive. Technology is the easy part – it’s relatively cheap, quick to install and easy to use. The tough challenges are about changing people, processes and culture in the way things are done in the city’s administration. It will take a combination of grassroots wiki communities growing organically (with enthusiastic participants that demonstrate the benefits) and strong leadership from the mayor and other officials to create an environment where innovation can flourish.

8. Finally there’s a wealth of pathbreaking projects to draw inspiration from. This blog is a good source. Be sure to check out The Collaboration Project, run by my friends at the National Academy of Public Administration.

Feel free to suggest other sources or add your observations about the meeting!

For a sneak peek at what a web 2.0 strategy for the City of Toronto could look like check out iLive.at, the winner of the District of Columbia’s “Apps for Democracy” contest.

Most of the proceedings will be webcast. So, if you’re not in the city — or can’t get off work — you can still see how citizens and local officials can use web 2.0 technologies to transform their city. Hope to see you there!

As Obama has noted, there is a steep hill ahead to climb. Think of the challenges: renewing government and democracy; fixing the economy, education and health care; accelerating scientific discovery; fighting climate change and providing global security, to name a few. And he must do all of this with diminishing financial resources.

Obama needs to assemble a real A team of leaders and we’ll be hearing more about his cabinet choices today. But his only real hope in dealing with the tremendous challenges the country (world) faces will be to harness the collective ingenuity of citizens on a massive scale. In other words, he must enlist a level of participation in generating and acting on innovative solutions that has no obvious parallel in history.

Obama has already built a vast network of committed supporters. He has the inherent charisma and intelligence to lead. The questions now is how will Obama mobilize his supporters to affect real change? Will he “open source” government much the way thousands of dispersed Linux programmers converged on the Internet to develop one of the world’s leading computer operating systems? What mechanisms will he deploy to channel citizen input into policy-making? AND, How will he engage all sectors of society in carrying out much-needed reforms in sectors such as education, health care, energy and finance?

Over the next few days and weeks I would like to humbly offer a few Government 2.0 strategies for the Obama administration to pursue. We’ve got dozens of ideas but I would not want to spoil the fun by releasing them all at once!

So, here’s today’s first idea: Set up a series of citizen councils, organized around key policy themes, and equip users with an Ideastorm. At first these communities might look and feel a lot like Digg.com, the popular technology news aggregator. Users post policy suggestions and the community votes so that the most popular ideas rise to the top. Ideas are harvested from a broader spectrum of the population and the user-driven idea filtering process eases the burden on staff resources by harnessing “the crowd” to sift through mountains of feedback.

Dell Computer’s IdeaStorm provides a useful (albiet imperfect) template for the administration to follow. Less than a week after Dell’s IdeaStorm was launched, users had contributed over 1,300 ideas that were voted on more than 120,000 times. Many of the ideas contributed by Dell customers have already been translated into product and service innovations and customers can discuss these ideas directly with Dell’s product developers. Herein lies the critical peice. The administration will need to demonstrate that the ideas the community generates will be considered in the legislative process and acted on quickly if they receive support from democratically elected representatives. Easier said than done, of course, but there will be much more to come on this later. Stay tuned!

As a side note, Newseum also has a physical museum in Washington DC that includes additional news exhibits and photo galleries, journalist memorials, as well as a 3D thrill ride through “the most dramatic events in journalism history.” Talk about digital physical convergence.

The injunction has ignited a debate over the ruling’s merit, which names each of the students as well as MIT in the temporary restraining order. The MBTA has taken issue with the fact that the “students offered to show others how to use the hacks before giving the transit system a chance to fix the flaws”, while the students’ representative from the Electronics Frontier Foundation (EFF) says “the students were simply trying to share their research and planned to omit key information that would make things easier for anyone who actually wanted to hack the payment system.”

In banning the presentation, which had already been distributed to conference attendees, and managed to make its way online, (go figure – handed out at a hacker conference and quickly made its way online) many have questioned whether the ruling has actually made things “worse”, helping the Hack gain increased publicity. According to EFF representative, Jennifer Granick, the ruling also leads down a “dangerous” path whereby “If you prevent legitimate researchers from talking about their findings, it’s not going to stop people from finding vulnerabilities. It’s going to stop the good guys from talking about them and from learning from each other.”

While I’m certainly not proposing anarchy here, I can’t help but wonder – with the knowledge of savvy individuals like Anderson, Ryan and Chiesa, does it make sense to alienate them with such court injunctions? As a result, has the MBTA missed an important opportunity, suppressing potentially valuable conversation that could/would have been a natural follow-on to the presentation, helping improve the MBTA and potentially other systems?