The list of best-practice examples is long. It’s a good thing that some public transport providers react to that need. But my point is: we live in the year 2010, free accessible WiFi on public transportation and on public squares should be an expected standard. It is the job of local governments in cooperation with the transport authorities to ensure that.

In my home city of Linz in Austria—population of approximately 180,000—the local government is convinced that it is their responsibility to invest in public infrastructure that advances the free access to WiFi. The city provides the citizens with free WiFi on 120 hotspots in the public sphere. Recently, city councilor Christian Forsterleitner put forward a motion that the public transport authority of Linz should provide free accessible WiFi on the streetcars and in the most frequently used bus shelters. The public transport authority reacted positively.

This progressive move stands in stark contrast to what Toronto—my current city of residence—is doing: Toronto is getting new Street Cars from Bombardier in 2012. Linz has similar light rail and low floor streetcars since 2001. I think the TTC in Toronto should consider providing free WiFi for the new streetcars. A world metropolis must be able to offer the same service as a small city in Austria.

First, where do we stand on recession? There’s still room to debate whether we are in or out of it. Officially the USA is out but with concern about a double dip, with Krugman giving odds of 2:1 against back in January and the mood worsening a little since in some quarters. Friday of this week will be something of a watershed as the EU releases the outcome of its bank stress testing against a backdrop of rising industrial production.

It seems though there is still plenty to fear in the system, hence the stress tests, and this might still be the big issue  ahead of worrying over regeneration – do we still know the full extent of the problem?

The UK Office for National Statistics last week announced that UK public debt is five times its published level at 5, not 1, trillion GBP. Spanish debt levels far exceed those of Greece. Last week it emerged that 400 Spanish local authorities were unable to pay their utility bills with an empty payroll looming in August.

Whether the stress tests look good or bad the markets are already sounding cautionary notes about the tests themselves. All this is a way of saying if you manage a small town or a big city, your work is going to get tougher. You have opportunity in the age of Web 2.0 and Government 2.0 but the chances are your revenues are in decline.

Places currently lack a comprehensive management theory perhaps because they are rooted in traditional urban or rural spatial planning paradigms.

Over recent years places have been buoyed by the development of direct inward investment  as a supplementary way of managing employment creation and by cluster theory (another way of saying specialize your local labor force) or by the idea that the creative class can provide an engine for renewal. Grafted on to these fruitful but dislocated principles is place-branding, and the big gamble – sporting events and creative festivals. Get a big sporting event and like London you can justify spending $10 billion on regeneration programs.

The problem for many cities and towns is that even as they try to adopt these strategies, they are deprived of funding – national policies invariably hit the local in a variety of ways – lost rates on empty properties, people moving out, retailers shuttering.

Web 2.0 and Government 2.0 both create the infrastructure for people to get involved in their places once more, which is an unquestionable good. But I want to raise the question – is place management adequately developed as a managerial discipline?

I saw three initiatives recently that made me think another theme in place identity is springing up – the virtualization of place.

Boston has set up a global Boston alumnus network, Boston World Partnership, casting the net of stakeholders across the world. Places are beginning the search for a new type of identity, embracing the world outside their walls as part of the concept of place. Ireland recently announced a “certificate of Irishness” for the 70 million people of Irish descent who do not qualify for citizenship. Detroit too is exploring the language and benefits of becoming a global city focused on the origins of its residents, using the Web to connect to distant economies where there are established relationships through immigration.

This unhinging of place from its physical roots is not just Web 2.0 or Government 2.0. I think it will lead to a more profound acknowledgment of how interconnected we are and it will lead to an interesting debate around how towns and cities compete with each other, a debate the enterprise has to be interested in because that competition is often the lever for relocation subsidies; and an exploration of how virtual clusters, such as those we see in software ecosystems like the Apps Store, connect to local economic development.

As they explore these areas I sense cities and towns will need more theory, more cases and more guidance for the decisions they make and need to justify. It’s the time for place right now.

6. The world needs better governments.

Some governments in Central America and Africa are just holding on and many are dysfunctional.  But governability is becoming an issue for G20 countries as well.  One leader said the US is on the brink of being “ungovernable.”  One Chinese executive responded thusly when asked to defend his country’s lack of democracy:  “So we should adopt the American system where lobbyists run everything and nothing happens?”

Democracy was still seen as an unstoppable force but in many regions of the world it is becoming stalled, and in some cases losing ground.  Basic democratic institutions are at risk and in danger of failing part due to the economic crisis in poor countries.  The best predictor of democratic survival is per capita income.  In some countries portions of the government have been captured by interest groups. Other non-democratic countries are proving competitively stable and economically healthy.  And the current economic crisis shows that national governments and domestic regulation are inadequate to deal with the challenges of the global economy.   There is also danger of protectionism and isolationism.

7. It turns out the internet DOES change everything

The much-discredited phrase from the dotcom period is not just geek speak.  The Internet and Social Networks were central to many of the discussions here.  The digital age seems to be coming of age.  I participated with CEOs of most of the important social networks in a session called The Power of Social Networks. It got a lot of buzz at Davos.  A few minutes into it the session we solicited questions from Facebook.  6,000 questions appeared in first 2 minutes.

The growing consensus is that new business models are emerging in every industry and throughout society.  I’ve argued that social networking is becoming social production and that a new mode of production is emerging – changing not only how we make software or encyclopedias but physical goods like motorcycles.

Most leaders love that a web company – Google –  is taking on China. The circumstantial evidence that the China-based hacking of Google was conducted by authorities looking for information about activists was the straw that broke the camel’s back.  Talking to Google execs I’m convinced they not going to back down.

8. Girls, women and gender. A sea change is underway.

There was lots of buzz about women’s emerging purchasing power, known as the Power of the Purse.  The expected worldwide increase of women’s income by 2013 is $5.1 trillion, which is greater than China’s expected growth of $3 trillion for the same period.

Deep interest in the so-called Girl Effect, i.e., investing in girls offers the biggest ROI in the developing world.  In African countries female illiteracy is almost a third higher than that of men.  But every year of schooling increases a girl’s future earnings by 20 percent.  And by earning more and influencing how dollars are spent, women would acquire a stronger voice in all aspects of their lives.

Although women are becoming stronger financially, they are still very weak politically.  Countries should be more aggressive in finding female candidates for public office, and look outside the regular channels. But increased financial and political power brings responsibility. Woman could be key in refocusing our political and economic efforts away from consumerism.

9.  We need new measures of progress

There is growing agreement that GDPs and GNPs are flawed tools for measuring the health of country, and we should instead emphasize the idea of Gross National Well-Being or something similar.  Just as some companies have moved to “triple-bottom line” reporting for their impact on society, many economists argue that GDPs and GNPs measure activities that are detrimental to society and ignore activities that are beneficial.

A pandemic will increase drug sales and visits to doctors, thereby driving up GNP.  Volunteer work or work in the home is not recognized as contributing to GNP.

There is no lack of research and creativity on this issue, as some governments and academics have developed a wide array of yardsticks to more accurately capture how well and healthily a country is growing.  The key now is to have these new tools recognized as legitimate and encourage their widespread adoption.

10. A new big idea.  The Global Commons.

Like a park in a village we need new global parks in the global village. Some of the global commons areas are well-recognized, such as our atmosphere, oceans and space, but there are less obvious areas that exist, or should be created, such as know-how concerning sustainability

Conventional wisdom says you should control and protect proprietary resources and innovations – especially intellectual property – through patents, copyright and trademarks. If someone infringes your IP, summon the lawyers out to do battle.  That’s often the wrong approach.  Contributing to “the commons” is not altruism; it’s the best way to build vibrant business ecosystems that harness a shared foundation of technology and knowledge to accelerate growth and innovation.

A good private sector example is when more than a dozen pharmaceutical firms abandoned their proprietary R&D projects to support open collaborations such as the SNP (single nucleotide polymorphisms) Consortium and the Alliance for Cellular Signaling.  Both projects aggregate genetic information culled from biomedical research in publicly accessible databases. They also use their shared infrastructures to harness resources and insights from the for-profit and not-for-profit research worlds. These efforts are speeding the industry toward fundamental breakthroughs in molecular biology – breakthroughs that promise an era of personalized medicine and treatments for intractable disorders. Nobody gives up their potential patent rights over new end products, and by sharing some basic intellectual property the companies bring products to market more quickly.

One overarching theme at the conference is the confidence that young people have such great potential. Obviously we have a lot of work ahead of us if we don’t want to pass on a deeply damaged planet to our children.  At the final session at Davos, we heard from six inspiring young people on stage on their hopes and ambitions.  There were more than a few tears in the audience.

1. The state of the world is not good.

The theme of Davos was Rethink, Redesign, Rebuild, which may sound a bit grandiose to some people. I doubt many attendees think this now. The world clearly needs fixing.

Figures cited at the Forum show we’re a long way from being out of the woods on the global recession. Jobs are and will continue to be a huge issue. It is estimated the unemployment in the word jumped by 50 million during the recession, and the working poor increased by 200 million.

But the financial meltdown and recession are arguably symptoms of a bigger systemic crises and deep institutional failures. There is growing recognition that many of the organizations and institutions that have served us well for decades, even centuries, are no longer able. Many of the pillars of economic and social life have come to the end of their life cycle. In 2009, the American auto industry — the epitome of the industrial economy — collapsed. The upheaval is now spreading to other sectors — from the universities and science, to entertainment and media, to government and democracy. The continuing collapse of many newspapers in the United States is a storm warning.

Many other serious problems loom. Lack of access to fresh water is a catastrophe for humanity, as 2.8 billion (or 44%) of the world’s population already live in high water stress areas, increasing to 3.9 billion by 2030. In a world of growing capacity, global poverty is getting worse. Ten children die of hunger every minute and a third of the world’s population fester in slums. Almost everyone, especially the scientists at Davos is deeply troubled by climate change. We need to reinvent out energy grids, transportation systems and reindustrialize the planet. And we’re running out of time.

As Bill Clinton said to a few of us at a cocktail party, “The world is too unequal, unstable, and unsustainable.”

2. Everywhere there are new collaborative models emerging to solve global problems

Our systems of global cooperation are not rising to the many challenges we face. The global warming conference in Copenhagen has become a metaphor for failure.

I believe the Forum itself is an example of the global multi-stakeholder cooperation that is picking up where nation states and formal institutions left off.

The global humanitarian response to the Haitian earthquake is showing us what is possible. The 7.0 magnitude earthquake not being just a Caribbean island crisis, but a world crisis. Millions of people and thousands of institutions have responded in non-traditional ways. They are donating their time, money, goods and services. Charitable organizations such as the Red Cross received donation of tens of millions of dollars within days by using new technologies such as texting, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Social media has become the pre-eminent tool to connect people around the world, and help empower people become active participants in relief efforts.

There are 100 million people on Facebook Causes – the biggest application on Facebook. These are not just people talking to each other. They are now organizing activities in the physical world. I heard of dozens of examples at Davos.

3. There is a profound rethinking of the financial services industry and its role in society.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy put it well: “The banker’s job is not to speculate, it is to analyse credit risk, assess the capacity of borrowers to repay their loans and finance growth of the economy. If financial capitalism went so wrong, it was, first and foremost, because many banks were no longer doing their job. Why take the risk of lending to entrepreneurs when it is so easy to earn money by speculating on the markets? Why lend only to those who can repay the loan when it is so easy to shift the risks off the balance sheet?”

The mood at Davos was widespread: Banks need to be reined in, the sooner the better. US banking executives used to be the stars of Davos. Now they are a low-key, humble and dour looking group. Last year at Davos everyone was in a degree of shock. This year, a better term would be “fed up.” Fed up with banks that are “too big to fail,” with government bailouts, with the human costs of this crisis and with an industry that basically got out of control. For some CEOs the crisis warrants a critical re-evaluation of market capitalism.

4. Executive pay, especially for bankers, needs fixing.

There was a very strong sentiment that the issue of exorbitant executive compensation needs to be corrected. The biggest targets of discussions were bankers and other architects of the financial crisis. Many heavily damaged their own firms, some to the point of bankruptcy, paralyzed the commercial credit market for tens of thousands of companies, and today are not able or willing to loan money to entrepreneurs. To set aside $billions for bonuses just after they had been bailed out by the government was viewed by almost everyone as unconscionable. Even those banks that didn’t need a bailout cannot justify 8 digit compensation packages.

5. Sustainability is an idea whose time has come. Business is moving from talk to action.

As one executive put it: “It’s no longer about the Green Economy; it’s about the Economy.” Sustainability is the central issue many businesses face.

A few short years ago, sustainability was buried in a company’s PR department and it was primarily a matter of spin. But then governments began forcing certain reporting and behaviors, and the corporate issue became compliance. Then sustainability became a matter of competitiveness and cost reduction, by capturing efficiencies such as reducing waste and energy use. CEOs everywhere at Davos said we’ve now arrived at the point where sustainability must be integrated into the business strategy — what is a business, and how it does it operate and relate to the rest of the world.

We’ll see if they walk the talk.

I’ll post themes 6 – 10 tomorrow.

To highlight these differences further, my personal observation was that there was a dramatic over-emphasis on visual, programmatic, and evangelical descriptions of the Government 2.0 examples presented during the event. However, there was an under-emphasis on subjects such as process change, adaptable methodology, and cultural dynamics.

The one notable exception was Eric Ries of Kleiner Perkins Caufield whose “lean start-up” discussion was an insightful, but moreso from the perspective of the “developer of a product” and not “the implementer of a large-scale enterprise solution” – see Eric’s blog for more: http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/

This is not to say that presenters dismissed the subjects. But their comments amounted to lip service clichés, such as “you have to manage the change” and “it’s important to get your management’s support.” But there were practically no specifics given for how to perform those critical activities.

In fact, the only presenters that spoke confidently about such issues were the government reps themselves: CIOs and directors, for example, from large healthcare, communications and defense agencies. However, it sounded as though most were relying heavily on their knowledge and skills with existing, time-tested Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC) frameworks, leadership approaches, and change management methods.

This is a problem. On the one hand, the Whitehouse and current administration is opening up the floodgates of structured and unstructured data, supported by everything from policy directives, such as the Open Government Initiative, to technology innovation, such as last week’s initial roll-out of the federal Apps.gov website, promoting Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications and cloud computing.

On the other hand, there is an enormous federal bureaucracy with its supporting technological, procedural, and people infrastructure supporting systems and that are mission critical and strategic – they can’t go down and they can’t fail. Many people’s lives and livelihoods depend on them.

It’s like having two gears that are spinning at very different speeds, but extremely rapidly, with the force of the government 2.0 movement forcing the gears together. My opinion is that the solution to enabling the gears to mesh and spin together is from innovations in process management and service implementation of enterprise 2.0 (or what I’ll refer to, for simplicity’s sake, as “collaborative”) systems.

It may not sound so thrilling, but I believe it is absolutely the key to success. At nGenera, we have spent a great deal of time and money studying organizational collaboration, large and small. And, from this research, we have learned what elements are crucial for the success of large-scale collaborative initiatives, like those that lie ahead of the federal government as it implements more government 2.0 initiatives.

Some of these elements are well-documented, for example, “Eight Ways to Collaborate,” published in the Harvard Business Review by Tammy Erickson and Lynda Gratton in 2007, from their landmark study on enterprise collaboration.

Since then, at the heart of newer research, is a construct referred to as “collaborative intents.” In other words, collaboration and collaborative systems are not an “end” in themselves…they are a means to an end. The question is what are the difference kinds of “ends” – or better said “outcomes” – that leaders seek to achieve through collaborative systems. This is an absolutely fundamental, crucial decision point that must be met early in the design and development process.

Far too often, unfortunately, the collaborative intent or intents are not decisively settled. This lack of clarity can be a major source of misalignment and can cause significant hardship resulting in cost and timeline over-runs for a major government 2.0 project. We’ve developed a boardroom imperative describing collaborative intents that you can download.

Others have begun to recognize that existing management processes and approaches to implementing new services are insufficient, as well. At the conference that Nick and I attended, there was a large presence from major service providers, such as Booz Allen Hamilton, to smaller niche players, such as Aquilent. In every case, there was no doubt that there was a great deal of momentum and a lot of learning going on about how the old ways of doing things needed to be re-thought.

I’ll be talking more about collaborative intents and associated methodologies in future posts. In the meantime, I look forward to hearing from others about their experiences with implementing new social networking-based or collaborative systems for their public sector purposes, whether local/municipal, state/provincial, or federal.

1. How valuable and what are the benefits of Web 2.0/social media tools to military families with love ones who are deployed? Is this a critical necessity, or merely a useful addition to your options?

2. What impact would there be to families, with loves ones who are deployed, if Web 2.0/social media tools were NOT available to military members serving over seas?

3. When communicating with your love ones who are deployed, which social medium do you use most frequently?

The result has been an incredible 230+ comments, many of which are carefully crafted responses telling personal stories.

I thought I’d point out a few of those responses here:

“When my husband first deployed to Iraq in 2002 we used chat with webcam alot. This allowed our son then aged 2 1/2 the chance to see Daddy and communicate with him. For the longest time he was convinced his Daddy lived in the computer. It also allowed my husband to watch our newborn baby grow up and regularily hear his cries. The interaction that the social networking sites allow the soldiers and the families are of utmost importance–it makes the seperation a little bit easier by allowing the soldier a glimpse into the daily happenings at home.”

“Without the social networking tools, the immediate communication will be lost unless they can get a call thru and there isn’t always time to stand in a line and wait to use the phone. The nice thing is they can go to any base or outpost that has internet and get a quick message thru to say “hey I’m ok” when on a long mission or they aren’t back when expected due to problems. I also know of other families that would use the video feature on different messaging software to see their children. I would say there isn’t even a word for the peace of mind it gives parents, spouses, etc to be able to have almost immediate contact with their soldier and Marine.”

“Generationally, we have seen communications methods change in a deployed environment from letter writing, telephone calls e-mail to social media networks, each with accessibility, timeliness and cost pros/cons. The current generation has grown up with the hi-tech / real-time communications options and the previous generations are adopting them. If the tools were not available, I think it would adversely affect morale and possibly lead to decreased enlistment/re-enlistment. Perhaps some partnership can be accomplished between DoD and the media providers to better secure these sites or communities within those sites for military member use.”

“As an ex military member and a spouse whose husband is currently deployed, I say Security and Safety are first and foremost. We personally only use email correspondence and are looking into web cams but are concerned about security of his location. I agree these social networks can be great morale boosters however, if these are in anyway unsecure and can place our troops and/or their mission in harms way then stop them now, no questions asked!!!! Years ago families survived without them and although I know they are wonderful for morale, unless the governement can be 100% certain that no breech of security exists by using these then I say better safe than sorry and we can learn to live without them.”

I’d encourage users to visit the forum and scroll through some of the responses. They paint an amazing picture of how consumer Web 2.0 technologies have allowed those deployed to keep in touch. Through the forum, the DoD was also able to get a feel for what tools are important for families (Facebook and Skype seem to be the most popular) and what some of the risks might be (e.g. a webcam revealing someone’s location). As stated in a followup post, the next steps will be learning how to mitigate those risks and implementing training programs and policies to allow families to safely use social media tools.

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?

Last week I had the opportunity to attend the Open Government and Innovations Conference in Washington, DC. The two-day conference was a fantastic opportunity to hear some of the leaders in open government thinking, including:

• Aneesh Chopra, Federal CTO – “The Innovation Imperative“
• Vivek Kundra, Federal CIO – “Town Hall Meeting – The IT Dashboard“
• Dave Weinberger, Harvard Law and Cluetrain Manifesto – “Transparency as a Virtue“
• Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media – “Government as a Platform“

(If you’re interested, those talks are available via Adobe Connect here. Click on the linked headshot of the speaker you’d like to watch.)

I sat in on some great panel sessions as well:

• Openness, Information Sharing, and the Use of New Media in DoD
• Case Studies in Citizenship Engagement
• Transforming Citizen Engagement with Congress
• Embracing a Collaborative Culture

It was also great to connect with some of the participants and speakers through the conference’s live Tweet grid. If you’re interested in more links and insight, just search the hashtag #OGI on Twitter.

Throughout the conference I picked up on a few core themes that seemed to run through all the sessions. While the official themes were Government to Government, Government to Business and Government to Citizens, the following seemed to be the three focal points for moving forward with open government initiatives.

1. Despite the hurdles, collaboration is possible

You may be familiar with the memorandum President Obama issued in January to all heads of departments and agencies in the Federal Government. Aneesh Chopra highlighted this in his opening address, crediting the memo with enforcing the ‘three pillars of open government’: transparency, participatory and collaborative. Since that memorandum, new government collaboration projects have surfaced and already-existing projects have enjoyed being in the spotlight of case studies and media writeups.

One great example is the Transportation Security Authority’s (TSA) ‘Idea Factory’, which is also featured in the White House Open Government Innovations Gallery. The Idea Factory, boasting the slogan “Innovate. Collaborate. Succeed”, is a two year old project connecting some 50,000 geographically dispersed employees across countries. Tina Cariola, the Idea Factory’s Program Manager, said the TSA needed a way to tap the knowledge of all of their employees across the organization. She had clear guidelines: the site had to be up and running within only a few weeks and was to be designed as more than just an online suggestion box.

The result was a dynamic community allowing employees to interact and collaborate with each other around ideas. What’s really interesting is the fact that the Idea Factory was originally rolled out as an innovation program, yet the community has turned into a powerful tool for employee engagement and communication. TSA management is actually using the Idea Factory as a way to monitor the workforce ‘pulse’, providing insight and awareness of key trends among employees.

Currently, the Idea Factory is seeing around 300 ideas submitted per month, and after community and management review, 1-2 of those are being implemented.

Tina’s tips:
-Establish cross-functional teams when originally establishing your collaboration strategy and reviewing user generated ideas (lawyers, IT, management, HR)
-Publicly recognize key contributors and leaders within the community. This could mean award ceremonies as well as involving that individual as ideas are selected to advance to the next stage of development.

Cases like these demonstrated for the audience that despite the oft-cited security and IP risks, collaboration within, and even across, government departments is possible. In many instances, government employees’ experience in dealing with sensitive information was seen as a real asset when making the shift to a culture of collaboration.

2. Open innovation on a continual basis

Perhaps my favourite part of the conference was hearing about departments opening up and making considerable efforts in the areas of citizen and business engagement. By governments building an effective platform for participation, sharing information and inviting participants to build off of that, communities can be established where innovation can come from anywhere at anytime, RFP issued or not. Aneesh Chopra presented the platform idea via a “Menu of Open Government Tools”, empowering others to develop their own initiatives in a cost-effective manner:

A shining example here is the Department of Defense website DefenseSolutions.gov:

“A portal through which innovative companies, entrepreneurs, and research organizations can offer potential solutions to the Department of Defense. This portal, and the team behind it, are designed to encourage companies that have never considered doing business with DoD to participate.”

Aneesh Chopra also outlined the open dialog initiative wherein the White House invited citizens to draft policy recommendations for a Presidential Directive. Using well known collaborative tools such as IdeaScale and MixedInk, the three stage process produced thousands of votes and comments and can still be seen at each individual phase here:

1. Brainstorming
2. Discussion
3. Drafting Recommendations

For me, this marked the transition from a mindset of closed, project-based, incremental innovation to a government prepared to take good ideas from anywhere. As Aneesh pointed out, “Great ideas get funding, regardless of the rules“.

3. The need to provide compelling experiences

Last, but not least, I felt a real sense of urgency for government agencies to rethink their interactions with participants; the need to provide compelling experiences. This includes with other agencies, government employees, businesses and citizens.

Tammy’s talked about the power of great experiences before. As the idea of government as a platform takes off, I think this becomes even more crucial. Talent, customers, processes and selected information reside outside of the traditional boundaries of the organization. How people interact with the platform out ‘there’ is what’s important. Why should they engage? What’s the reward of doing so?

Part of this comes in presenting information in a consistent, clear, interactive and useful way. The IT Dashboard, as presented by Vivek Kundra, was a great case study here. The searchable and customizable dashboard is so compelling it has attracted more than 30 million visitors since it was launched…on June 30! It’s been effective, too. One presenter spoke of a case where nearly 45 projects were halted at once when someone interacting with the data raised some red flags about cost management.

By making all this data available for mashups and other innovative services, everyday people are allowed a view into government with far more relevance on their personal lives than, say, just tables of data. And when people are compelled to take action, change happens (e.g. 45 projects get halted because of poor contractor performance). A few weeks ago I posted an interview I did with Zappos about engaging potential talent. The same principles apply here when engaging the public. Compelling comes in the form of personal, emotional, and/or relationship-based interactions.

David Weinberger labels this human touch as ‘the spiritual lure of the Web’, in the The Cluetrain Manifesto:

This fervid desire for the Web bespeaks a longing so intense that it can only be understood as spiritual. A longing indicates that something is missing in our lives. What is missing is the sound of the human voice.

The spiritual lure of the Web is the promise of the return of voice.

Citizens and business are beginning to engage with government in interesting ways because of new expectations of a two way exchange of information and learning. New social tools are combining with changing mindsets on openness and collaboration and are starting to demonstrate the real power of that ‘return of voice’ in the form of effective citizen and business engagement.

A revolution is happening in government as the result of a new generation of government employees, the rise of Web 2.0 technologies, and the Obama administration’s focus on transparency, participation, and collaboration. This revolution is often called “Government 2.0” and GovLoop is at the center of this movement.

Since its launch, GovLoop members have written over 1,500 blogs, started 1,200 discussions, posted over 450 events, shared 4,000+ photos and created over 200 videos.

GovLoop members have already:
• Developed a burgeoning “Acquisition 2.0” movement to employ innovative acquisition methods
• Been the leading source of government input into the Obama Administration’s Open Government Memo
• Established a repository of best practices on items including Social Media Policies, Government Hiring and Government Twitter Use
• Launched a top-rated podcast “Gov 2.0 Radio” (http://gov20radio.com) with guests like Tim O’Reilly (founder of O’Reilly media, http://oreilly.com) and Craig Newmark (founder of Craig’s List, http://craigslist.com)
• Helped GovLoop.com win the prestigious Federal 100 award and stand as a finalist for the 2009 ACT Intergovernmental Solutions Award

If you want to follow me, my Twitter name is @A_Marsh.  You’ll notice that 3/4 of my posts are very short comments designed to entice followers to click through on links I’ve provided (many of which are in the Wikinomics theme).  Essentially, I use Twitter as a gateway to substantive content, a style of Tweeting that Denis blogged about previously. 

As far as using Twitter as a research tool, I generally follow other user who also use it as a gateway to more substantive content.  For me, Twitter is something like a news condenser, or a filter.  I’ve handpicked a series of intelligent users to follow on Twitter, users who filter through the glut of information available on the web, and highlight what they believe to be the most useful and important.  If you pick out the right users to follow, it can be akin to having an entire team of researchers working for you, pro-bono and in realtime.

So here’s two examples of how I’ve used Twitter to stay up to date on developments in the world of Government 2.0.

In the Gov2.0 space, there have been a series of conferences this year (or rather, unconferences) that I’ve been unable to attend.  Yet I was still able to follow the updates and view most of the same resources as the attendees for events like transparency camp and Government 2.0 camp, mainly through Twitter.  As more and more events are broadcasted live online, having Twitter users to alert you in realtime is incredibly valuable.  The use of hashtags on Twitter makes this even easier, with tags being added to Tweets, thus making them more searchable.    Do a Twitter search on #gov20 and youll see what I mean.

Twitter also allows me to follow, in realtime, individuals with similar research interests.  For example, one of my interests happens to be participatory government, and I’ve come across a researcher named Tiago Peixoto whose work is very relevant to my own.  I started to follow him on Twitter – @participatory – and upon reading through his backlog of Tweets, I came across dozens of useful links and articles on participation.  None of his Tweets are narcissistic, self-aggrandizing or personalized in any way.  Almost everything he Tweets is relevant and of interest to me.  So now, every time he comes across a good resource on participatory government, I am immediately alerted to it via Twitter.  In the research world, that’s an incredible resource for collaboration.

Finally, I’d like to post my Twitter #FollowFriday recommendations for the week, all of whom fall into the Gov2.0 space: @Corbett3000, @participatory, @johnwonderlich, @govloop, @govwiki, @markelliot.

At noon yesterday, the Sunlight Foundation announced the winners from the Apps for America contest.  The top prize (which came with a $15 000 reward) went to the makers of Filibusted.us, a web-based application that sheds light on which Senators have been filibustering legislation in the US Senate.  There were 16 prize winners in total, and I definately recommend checking out the winners for yourself (my favorite is Legistalker.org).

Next came the recently-launched INCA – the Innovative and Creative Application Contest, based out of Belgium.  This contest is open for anyone to submit an application, be it a website, widget, google mashup or mobile application, to be used by Flemish citizens to help solve “collective and social problems.”  Prizes will be awarded to the ten best submissions, with the top developer receiving a prize of 20 000 Euros (about $25 ooo USD).  Deadline for submission is April 27th. 

With INCA, Apps for America and last November’s Apps for Democracy, we’re starting to see a very exciting trend in the Gov 2.0 space:  software developers and programmers engaging in social causes and public sector development.  Can these contests help spur the creation of new services along the lines of fixmystreet or transparency tools like opencongress?  After speaking with Sunlight’s John Wonderlich and Apps for Democracy architect Peter Corbett over the past two weeks, I’m convinced that they can.

The key to improving on these contest models is to create, in the words of Peter Corbett, a “Cradle-to-Grave” strategy to promote citizen-driven innovation in the public sector.  Corbett’s Cradle-to-Grave approach seeks an 8-step process for future application contests:

1.  Problem Sourcing:  Idea-sourcing, in this case, will work best when a specific problem/social issue is being targeted (such as crime, traffic congestions, etc.)

2.  Open Data:  A key to the success of Apps for Democracy was that Vivek Kundra made DC’s government data openly available with over 240 data feeds. 

3.  Government Sponsorship:  To support the idea-sourcing contest.  This was done in DC’s Apps initiative.

4.  Establish Contest Framework: Well-constructed in all three above examples.

5.  Launch and Run the Contest:  Also well-done in the three above-cited cases.

6.  Award:  All three contests had multiple award winners (not just financial – the recognition is probably a more powerful incentive to participation).

7.  Absorption by Government:  For the best applications to live on after the contest and provide real value to the public sector, they need to be adopted, maintained, and ideally, improved upon.  This represents a murky point, and an area where the initial contests haven’t found a working model.  It’s unclear how this is best handled.  Should the government provide ongoing grants for development of applications?  Should government internalize the best applications?

8.  Commercialization:  Lastly, Corbett believes that the applications need to somehow become commercialized, although it’s unclear whether or not government should be involved.  Could iLive.at or DCHistoricTours have a business model, wherein they could be licensed to other cities to use?  Another possibility might be a sponsorship arrangement with a private company.

Overall, citizen-driven idea sourcing and app creation represents a means of maximizing web 2.0 potential in public sector development.  The room for improvement is massive – outside of DC, for example, very few governments have truly open data (Corbett’s 2nd step).  But even if we’re still years away from widespread adoption of this model, at least we have the model (or rather, a model), with forward-thinking governments seeing the merits and beginning to move in this direction. 

If you’re really into this space, there’s a major development coming over the horizon – but that’s a whole other blog post in itself.

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.

In the initial round of protests on January 26th, when traditional media reports were unavailable to and from many regions, social media played an important role in information relays.  Now, crisis reporting is made even more transparent with an open platform developed by Ushahidi.  Ushahidi (meaning “testimony” in Swahili) was first developed to report on violence during the 2008 Kenyan election, using a collaborative base of citizen journalists to map crisis information and gather insights.  The platform has also been in used in Gaza and Congo.

Here, you can see the Madagascar-specific site, where citizens can check the Google Maps mashup to learn where crises are occurring (and have occurred previously).  They can also view a listing of all reports, submit their own (via internet or mobile) and receive SMS alerts on their mobiles about any developments in their locality. 

The functionality and ability of citizens to text-in and receive updates (with a proper verification process) can go a long way to reduce harm in crises.  Also, in many of the developing regions where such crises are most prevalent, the mobile is an ideal channel for this information.  At the end of 2007, there were 280 million mobile subscribers in Africa, representing a 30% penetration rate.  In Congo, for instance, there are only 10 000 fixed-line telephones, but over 1 million mobiles.  If you want to read on about mobile penetration in Africa, check out this article that appeared in The Guardian in January.

In a study by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiaitve on last year’s post-election violence in Kenya, Ushahidi’s data was compared to the information released by bloggers and traditional media.  Not only is Ushahidi able to get infomation out quicker, but in many cases, it helped with reporting information that was “off the grid”.  Whereas bloggers and news media often focus on the same areas and echo one another, Ushidi allowed coverage of a much broader area.  Here’s a more in-depth blog from last October that covers this and other findings in more detail.

Twitter, microblogging and citizen journalists may be excellent tools for crisis reporting.  But to take it a step further, platforms like Ushahidi, which can properly aggregate the information and feed it back to those who need it, greatly improves the potential for rapid aid deployment and optimal use of response resources.

While information is available, you generally have to search for it.  Admittedly, while I care a great deal about ethical corporate behaviour, I simply don’t have the time to research the companies that produce all of the goods and services I pay for.  I suspect that many consumers would be interested in more accessible information regarding corporate behaviour, but are limited by this same constraint.

Slowly, information is becoming available about products attached to “good” practices, as we’ve seen with fair trade labelling organizations.  But what about labelling the “bad” products?  Producers aren’t going to do this, nor will retailers.

This is where Knowmore.org can play a role.  Dedicated to revealing unethical business practices, Knowmore has 2 main features.  First, the site is based on a wiki, where registered editors (anyone can become one) are encouraged to build on their library of companies and edit the company wikis.  The five key issues are worker’s rights, human rights, environmental concerns, political influence and business ethics.

The more innovative feature, however, is the Firefox add-on that brings all of this information to your browser when you visit a company’s website or search for them on Google.

Once a user adds the Knowmore application, they’ll get information resembling the image I’ve posted above (the top bar urging the boycott shows up on the Nike website, and the text below it is the hit that comes back on Google).

When I searched “Nike” on google, all 5 of the key issues came up as ‘red’, indicating that the wiki editors at Knowmore have major concerns on each metric.  For comparison, when I search Pfizer, I see that they (according to Knowmore) have issues with human rights and business ethics, although the other 3 areas get a “yellow”.

Similar to LittleSis (which is admittedly only a Beta), Knowmore has shortcomings based on usage.  For this site to reach its potential, it would really need a Wikipedia-sized following to broaden its library of companies, and to watch over the editing to ensure fairness and accuracy.  Knowmore also has consistency problems – some of the companies get flagged on Google search, some do not (even when they’re in the wiki library).  Moreover, some companies get a notification pop-up on their website (see Nike above), but others do not.  I think this shortcoming relates to Knowmore’s reach – as with other Gov 2.0 applications, it needs a very broad user base in order to fulfill its potential.

Still, I love this potential.  As more consumers are researching products and making purchases online, the Knowmore feature serves as a push-based alert (one you opt-in to by downloading it), notifying the user about corporate ethics issues that they otherwise wouldn’t have taken the time to research.  Not every consumer is a social activist, and very few conduct corporate research for their purchases.  But I suspect that many, if alerted to, say, human rights abuses, might think twice before buying a product from a questionable source (especially when other options are available).

Knowmore has the potential to bring a truly open participatory process into corporate regulation.  Using an interface and editing process similar to Wikipedia, critical mass could create a very accurate, transparent database to monitor corporate behaviour.  Tying this to consumers’ browsers might actually cause companies to rethink some of their policies.

So how do you get consumers to download this application?  Would they be interested?  How can we help Knowmore, or a similar application, reach critical mass?  I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

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.

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.

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).

“When we get to 2010, I want my campaigns here,” Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele said as he held up his cell phone at the party’s Tech Summit on Friday. “I want whatever we’re doing to be within my thumb’s reach. We don’t want to just do what Obama did in ’08–that’s the floor.”

Republicans have some catching up to do, and atleast a few party members may need convincing of this.  One was quoted as saying that “Despite what the press says, we actually had an e-campaign in 2004 that did many of the things the Obama campaign did.  They just did it with many more people.”  I’m not sure I can agree with this.  As this article points out, 2004 was when facebook was still limited to universities, and YouTube didn’t even exist, making this a very difficult comparison.  A more telling anecdote is the 2008 election, John McCain had only four people working on his new media campaign.  Barack Obama had over 90.

So far, the party has started engaging on Facebook and Ning to collect input into some key areas.  For example, here’s their Grassroots facebook page, and here is their mobile suggestions page.  This may look like a good start, but it hasn’t exactly taken off yet – the mobile page only has 56 members, and a whopping total of 7 wall posts.

That’s not to say there weren’t some innovative suggestions to come out of the Tech Summit.  This article lists some of the best, notably: 

1) An iPhone app that shows you how your local congressman is voting, with his contact info.  2) A video game like Nintendo’s classic Paperboy.  Except in this version, the paperboy would be Barack Obama, and instead of tossing newspapers, he’d be biking up the street tossing wads of money away at houses.

Some suggestions, however, were less innovative.  One proposal was to use mobile ads to connect with hard to reach minority groups.  I’m not sure this would do much to create party support, as untargeted mobile ads would probably do little to boost engagement.  Rather, apps like the ones listed above might actually provide services or entertainment to users in a way that would improve their perception of the party. 

How much of this talking and brainstorming will actually translate into improved citizen relations for the GOP?  One bright spot might be their new National Committee Chairman, Michael Steele, the RNC’s first black chairman.  Having been denied this job previously by former President Bush and Karl Rove, Steele now has big plans for updating the Republican image.  He says he wants an “off the hook” PR campaign that can apply the party’s principles to “urban-suburban hip hop settings”.  According to Steele, this new strategy will be based on a campaign that is “avant garde, technically”.  This is a big change for the party that, in recent years, has targeted much of their campaigning towards a conservative base.

Based on all this, do you think the Republicans can take the “old” out of the Grand Old Party?  Can this “off the hook” campaign shake off the crusty image, and use new media to reach new voters?

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.

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.