First, the extent of this concern is dependent on the environment in which the government operates. In local governments in Europe, like in Austria and Germany, political parties play a major role. In North America, party politics play a less significant role on local level. However, the bigger the city, the more important the issue of partisan politics and the interests of lobby groups become. Well organized, lobby groups and opposition can make mountains out of molehills on a crowdsourcing platform. A government, which refuses to take care about an issue that has gained acceptance on a crowdsourcing platform, is likely to be grilled by the media. The headline: “Government does not listen to ordinary citizens”. Subhead: “Electronic participation served solely PR interests of government”. So my first answer would be: In an environment where a government or the ruling party fears that crowdsourcing could be exploited by the opposition for partisan politics there is one remedy: The activists of your own party should be active on the platform as well. Fight out the competition of ideas on the platform.

However, I think the core issue is the fundamental principle of representative democracy. We elect politicians e.g. every four years, which should represent the will of the citizens. Citizens can hold the politician accountable within the democratic system. Admittedly, this system is not perfect. I believe that democracy is more than casting a ballot once a time. Politicians should harness the wisdom of the crowd to improve government public policy and services. Although we can’t neglect that lobby groups or opposition could use these tools to push their agenda. Politicians also have to think about the interests of those people who do not participate in the crowdsourcing process. The reason for this might be digital divide, less awareness, less interest, or simply lack of time. In other words, politicians have to represent all citizens, not only those who participated on a crowdsourcing platform.

Key issue: participation rate

I had a look at the participation rate of the participatory budget models. In Freiburg, the participation rate was 0.84 % (still higher than having town hall meetings about the budget, the rate was in that case 0.09 %). The City of Solingen used crowdsourcing to get support and understanding for an austerity budget. They used the participatory budget model to collect suggestions from citizens on how to save public money. According to the homepage sohlingen-spart.de („Solingen economizes“), over 3,600 citizens – 2 % of the population -agreed on saving 31 Million Euros. In the Brazilian town Belo Horizonte the participation rate in participatory budget process was at almost 10 %. Admittedly these rates are certainly higher than in any other participatory process. But the lower the percentage of participation, the higher the chance that lobbying groups and interest groups can influence the opinion on the platform. Dustin Haisler, the CIO of Manor, told me that approximately 30 % of the population is using Manorlabs. Although Manorlabs does not include participatory budget, the high participation rate is astonishing.

Naumi and I have the hypothesis that the higher participation rate of citizens, the less the influence of lobby groups. We created following graph:

The assumption is that the influence of the population grows at a much faster rate because they are a much larger percentage of the population.  The “back-of-the-napkin” assumption is that 15 % of the population is somehow affiliated with a lobby group or opposition party and all of them participate. So, once you reach participation rate of about 30 %, the voice of the public evens out the lobbyists.  As overall participation increases, overall bias from lobbyists decreases even more.

If this hypothesis is true, what would that mean for governments? First, think about the environment you are in. Second, mobilize your own activists in case you operate in a harsh environment. Third, make every effort to create a high participation rate. To achieve this, you must develop an incentive model that attracts the engagement of citizens.

Obstacles for Open Data

One of the mayor concerns around open data is privacy. It is probably the single most important issue that is keeping this movement from going forward. The federal government is prone to make excuses about protecting SIN numbers and citizen’s private information, but it’s simple enough to solve this: only share data that doesn’t directly implicate citizens. Nobody is saying to share health records, or address details – but health industry statistics or population census reports might be useful. On a more serious note, there is also concern about a breech in national security and how an accidental leak might lead to dangerous, unintended consequences. But this isn’t new, people that want to hack into the government’s mainframe will find a way to do it, if they haven’t done so already. The real issue here is that the government doesn’t want to give up control over the information they have gathered.

Open Data as a strategic asset

The problem is that many government decision makers don’t understand the full breadth and significance of the information they possess. Their next step, to be able move forward with Open Data, is to analyze how and by whom it can be used. Of course, there’s no way of knowing all the ways this information will be used, but it’s important to target prospective users of this information, so as to maximize the benefits that can be accrued from open sharing with the public. As David Eaves expressed in an interview with us, “[he’s] always seen open data as a way to not only empower citizens, but to drive culture change in public service.” In this sense, data can be used as a strategic asset that won’t only benefit the government, but also citizens, start-ups, and traditional businesses that can use it to evolve their organizations.

An example of this is Homezilla, a “home buying and neighborhood research assistant.” Homezilla is an online platform that gathers and puts together everything you would need to know when buying a home in one place: schools nearby, whether it’s a safe neighborhood, how far away the things that interest you are from your potential home. It reduces the amount of time a person spends researching, asking, and browsing around homes and uses open data to achieve this. Homezilla also uses open data to improve their Google street view accuracy for potential homes.

How to build a community for your platform

Another issue is participation. How do you build a volunteer community around an open source platform? How do you motivate people to participate and collaborate? Richard Weait, Open Street Map representative, says the most effective strategy they used is to make the collaboration fun. This is the same for Manor Labs, by making the online platform fun, people are more encouraged to volunteer and share. As Thomas mentioned in one of his blogposts the key motivators for participation are Love (for what you’re doing), Money and Glory. Both Manor Labs and Open Street Maps have found a way to build a contributing community on their sites.

Other platforms, such as Torontopedia.com, have not been so successful. Torontopedia is a non-governmental wiki for Toronto; it is meant to harness information from its citizen to create a comprehensive guide to everything you can find in Toronto. To do this, it needs people to participate, create pages, add/edit/update information. It is meant to be easier to use than Wikipedia because you don’t need to program or know how to use html. You do, however, need to sign up with your “Real Name” as your user name, create a page, and be “accountable” for the things you post. This, along with the fact that the site is unattractive and unintuitive, deters, rather than encourages, people to participate. It also dissuades people from commenting what they really think for fear of being immortalized negatively on the internet. Because of this, most of the pages that are on the site right now have been written by the creator of the site, HïMY SYeD; who ran for mayor last election period, and is planning to run again. The site does have some registered users that contribute from time to time, but it has yet to “take off” as a wiki platform.

For open data, or any kind of open source platform, it’s important to keep in mind that progress takes time, and even though this is the internet, and things happens at the speed of a click, people need to take some time to adapt to changing behaviours and learn to do things in a new way. We should also keep in mind that privacy will always be an issue, and the only way to move forward is to innovate pretending it’s not a pressing concern, come up with new ideas, and then tweak here and fix there to accommodate privacy. We have to push boundaries in order to create progress.

Editor’s note: Nitla is summer intern working at nGenera. She is currently enrolled fulltime at the University of Toronto majoring in Industrial Engineering.

When should we start?

The question for a government is: When should we start with an Open Government Initiative? We have learnt from the “Adoption Lifecycle” that it takes some time for citizens to adapt and appreciate these new instruments. In the beginning, citizens might wonder if Open Government instruments are really useful. I believe that the best time to launch an Open Government initiative is at the start of each legislative period. I created the following timetable for Open Government projects:

Phase 0: You can’t start an Open Government initiative at the beginning of your legislative period if you haven’t put some thought into it beforehand. For example, President Obama signed the Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government on his first day in Office. This is because his new administration had an Open Government strategy planned out before he was even in power.

Phase 1: Secure the approval of the legislative and support from key actors within the bureaucracy. Start the project as a “Beta” Version, which basically tells people: the government is trying out something new, so we can’t expect it to be perfect.

Phase 2: Many experiments in this stage will fail—that’s okay. Stay flexible. Launch several small projects. Include feedback loops in the prototyping process. Use cheap, throwaway technology and avoid rigid lock-in tied to technology integration and costly licensing agreements. Small successes in this phase will help you get more support for your Open Government project. In the case of Open Data, you might think of starting a contest to ignite the creativity of tech-savvy citizens. A showcase example for an application contest is Apps for Democracy. Also explore what other governments are doing.

Phase 3: Evaluate your prototypes and learn from your mistakes. Iterate early and often and adapt projects accordingly.

Phase 4: Popularize innovative solutions that have emerged by putting money and resources behind them. From the “Adoption Lifecycle” perspective this is the step between early adopters and early majority.

Phase 5: Leverage your achievements for your election campaign. Usually politicians don’t get elected for what they have done in the past, they get elected for what they promise to achieve in the future. However, if you have achieved nothing in your legislative period, it is difficult to convince your constituents that you are able to shape the future.

Bonus Phase: When you get reelected you can strengthen and deepen your Open Government initiatives.

For me, this would be the perfect game plan to implement Open Government. This does not mean you cannot start Open Government initiatives when you are in the middle of your term. It’s probably better to start one, then to do nothing at all; however in order to sustain Open Government, initiatives will have to last more than one four-year term.

Music to my ears.  Evidence is mounting that the world and many of its institutions are stalled and need reinvention — from the financial system, the old model of government, the media, our energy and transportation systems, our cities, the university, science and even democracy. Needless to say, transforming these is a daunting challenge that will require the efforts of many parts of society.

“Global multi-stakeholder cooperation lies at the heart of the Forum’s mission to improve the state of the world,” says Professor Klaus Schwab, founder of the Forum. “We have to rethink our values – we are living together in a global society with many different cultures. We have to redesign our processes – how do we deal with the issues and challenges on the global agenda. And finally, we have to rebuild our institutions.”

Most significantly, our systems for global problem solving are broken. Says Professor Schwab: “We have to look at the Forum meeting in the context of what’s happening in the world … and we see that, clearly, the present system of global cooperation is not working sufficiently. So we want to look at all issues on the global agenda in a systemic, integrated and strategic way, and we want to address in particular the issue of global cooperation.”

While the Davos event is often misrepresented as a meeting of the business and political elite, this year’s 2,500 attendees will again include a broad cross-section of society, with representatives from business, government, the media, science, religion, the arts and civil society.

Nearly half of participants come from outside business, including more than 30 heads of state or government, at least double that number of government ministers, over 100 heads or top officials from international organizations and NGOs, over 200 leading academics, and more than 200 media leaders.  There will be over 30 social entrepreneurs present, and there will be almost as many labor leaders as central bankers participating, with over a dozen representatives from each category.

Like me, many attendees will have participated in the Forum’s Global Redesign Initiative, which began following the 2009 Forum. The Initiative is a multi-stakeholder dialogue addressing many of the challenges confronting our world today. Over the last year we have been developing recommendations to help adapt and improve the structures and systems of international cooperation.

Now, I appreciate that such an initiative sounds grandiose. Is it delusional for the Forum to try and pull off such an ambitious undertaking?  My response: If not the World Economic Forum, then who?

To achieve new models for global problem solving we have to overcome a major obstacle: The world is organized around nation states based on national economies and that is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. The idea of national sovereignty dates back hundreds of years with the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. After World War II there were many bold initiatives to create better systems of global cooperation, including Breton Woods, The United Nations, The General Agreement of Trades and Tariffs (GAAT), The Geneva Conventions, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and later the World Trade Organization and now the G8 and G20.

But, as evidenced by last month’s UN Climate Change Conference fiasco in Copenhagen, the existing structures are increasingly inept at fixing what ails the world. Contrast the Copenhagen failure to the growing global networks and movement of millions of people motivated to turn back warming.  Evidence that the solution to global problems is not to create some global government.  Rather there are new possibilities on the digital age to create networks involving business, government and civil society.  The Forum is a case in point — a global collaboration that is actually making the real progress in solving global problems on many fronts.  I for one am in!

Some might say this is all just talk and no action.  Wrong there too.  At the 2009 meeting, I participated with Mark Parker, the CEO of Nike, in presenting an idea called the GreenXchange (GX) project to a group of about 80 CEOs of large companies. Over the last year several other companies have been working to incubate this idea and this year at Davos it will be formally launched. My company, nGenera, is supplying the GX’s technology platform pro bono, because we think this idea is so important.

The GreenXchange is a clearinghouse for unpatented innovations (“know-how”), patent pledges, and patent licenses related to sustainability. Companies participating in the GX will be able to make both patented and unpatented “know-how” available for research uses and commercialization on standard and transparent terms and conditions.

Nike conceived the GX because there is too much duplication of effort in sustainability, and collaboration on shared challenges is a proven way to reduce costs and increase innovation. Companies face very similar sets of sustainability challenges — how to reduce resource consumption and achieve greater efficiency — but without the ability to share learning and best practices in response to those challenges, good solutions fail to take hold or make a broader impact. The GX was created to address this problem by making it easy to enable sharing and promotion of industry best practices leading to sustainability, while making sure that credit is given where it is due. The GX will also help reduce some of the barriers separating innovators from entrepreneurs in the sustainability space.

In the short term, the GX will make it easier for companies and individuals to identify, share, and obtain licenses to available technologies. The GX will enable rapid identification of commonalities in technology across industries and in turn identify gaps in available technology. In the long term, the GX will create a clearinghouse of public license offers for entrepreneurial development, innovation, and technology adoption. This is the sort of creativity the Global Redesign Initiative is designed to promote.

Contributing to the brainpower of the Global Redesign Initiative is the Forum’s Network of Global Agenda Councils – over 1,000 experts representing more than 50 thematic areas of international cooperation (e.g. Water Security, Pandemics, Migration). Approximately 3,000 participants drawn from the Forum’s industry, governmental, civil society, academic and media communities provided input.  They were selected as the most innovative and relevant thinkers to capture the best knowledge on each key issue and integrate it into global collaboration and decision-making processes.

I have spoken to many other members of the Councils over the last year.  Most of us were impressed at the high-caliber and sincerity of the discussions.  Our job at Davos will be to not only challenge prevailing assumptions, monitor trends, map interrelationships and address knowledge gaps, but to propose solutions, devise strategies and evaluate the effectiveness of actions.

I’ll be blogging and tweeting throughout to let you know how it’s going.  Stay tuned.

Appearing recently before hearings of the House of Commons industry committee, Mike Lazaridis, co-chief executive of Waterloo, Ont.-based Research in Motion, urged the federal government to intervene to avoid the loss to foreign control of technology he called “a national treasure.”  RIM would like to acquire the assets.

He told Members of Parliament that allowing the sale to proceed and having Canadians lose control of Nortel’s next-generation wireless patents would be similar to Canada’s notorious decision to cancel development of the Avro Arrow aircraft in 1959.

Writing in the Globe and Mail, Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and a member of the RIM board of directors, said the government didn’t appreciate how bare-knuckle the global marketplace can be.  He likened Canadians to being well-meaning but sometimes ineffectual boy scouts.

Bankrupt Nortel Networks Corp. is auctioning off its assets to pay what it can to creditors. A key component of those assets is valuable intellectual property related to the next-generation wireless standard, known as long-term evolution, or LTE. Those intellectual property assets were created by Nortel with millions of dollars of support from Canadian taxpayers through the Scientific Research Tax Credit program.

Sophisticated participants in the global wireless market who identified desirable intellectual property in Canadian hands came bidding for those assets with their chequebooks wide open. As a strategist, I absolutely would have encouraged them to do what they did. In the end, Swedish telecom giant Ericsson was the winner of the court-sponsored auction, gaining licensing rights to Nortel’s 125 LTE patents, though not ownership of the patents.

However, had crucial Swedish telecom intellectual property been up for sale instead, there would be no chance that any foreign company would have even have had a sniff at it, let alone get $300-million in financing for it (as Export Development Canada offered to Nokia Siemens Networks in its failed bid for the Nortel assets). And that’s because the Swedish economic policy leaders aren’t boy scouts.

The time is now – right now – for the Canadian government to step up to the plate and use the Investment Canada Act review provisions to demonstrate that, like the leaders of Canada’s great global companies, it has graduated from scout status to being a full partner in global competitiveness.

The sale should not proceed.

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.

The main problem is that people who contract such viruses are contagious before their symptoms become visible, making it extremely difficult to determine that a person has caught the virus before they transmit it to others. The Japanese government has recognized this issue as one of the main challenges in fighting potential pandemic and has planned an experiment to see if Japan’s advanced internet and cellular phone infrastructure can be used to help address the issue. As elementary schools are one of the main breeding grounds for contagious illness, the experiment will begin by giving each of the students at a particular elementary school a GPS-enabled cell phone and ‘infecting’ a few children with a fictitious virus. The students’ movements will then be tracked, and the parents of any children that have come in contact with infected students will be advised to take their child to a doctor so that students that do contract the virus can be diagnosed much faster, thus preventing them from spreading the virus any further. Due to the exponential nature in which viruses spread, even a small decrease in the amount of people infected by each carrier of the virus will have a major impact.

Although using GPS to track interactions can only inform people of possible infection and cannot predict the actual spreading of the virus, this strategy has the potential to be effective in slowing the spread of highly contagious viruses that warrant such extreme action. Equipped with the information that they have been exposed to such a virus, people can check with their doctors to ensure that if they have contracted the virus, they will be treated and not spread it further. Whether the health system could handle an influx of checkups in such a situation is a concern, but it is certainly better than dealing with a full-blown outbreak.

Despite the potential that this experiment has to lead to a strategy that could drastically reduce the spreading of an epidemic, the idea that the government could track people’s locations has caused great concern and cries of “Big Brother”. Privacy is a concern that many have when it comes to the internet, but most often, the discussions of privacy revolve around the danger of predators and the concern that corporations are gaining too much personal information about consumers. When it comes to fighting a serious epidemic though, the consequences of inaction are much greater and location information could be the best defence we have.

If you are not familiar with BigThink.com, here is how the site describes itself: “Through an ever-expanding platform of knowledge content, including in-depth interviews with the world’s leading experts, Big Think is a vital hub for important information to help you function, and succeed, in a rapidly changing world. In keeping with our belief that crucial information should be freely shared, discussed and debated, we have developed a full menu of tools to engage, disseminate, and subscribe to uniquely powerful content. Whether you use Twitter, Facebook, Digg.com, Delicious, Google Reader, Vimeo, YouTube, a personal blog, Tumblr, or any application with an RSS feed, Big Think allows you to share bright ideas with the wider Big Think audience as well as your personal cadre of lively thinkers-quickly and easily.”

Schwarzenegger reasoned that “Textbooks are outdated… For so many years, we’ve been trying to teach the kids exactly the same way.” Having grown up in a lecture-style learning system supported by textbooks, I must agree that it is not the most efficient way to learn given the more interactive tools available today. Universities, which are known for their lecture-based style, are being criticized for failing to adopt new learning models that are student-focused instead of teacher-focused. Many high schools can be accused of the same faults. As secondary education budgets decrease, class sizes increase, and it is increasingly difficult to customize learning or engage the class. Introducing collaborative, web-enabled games that can help students grasp key concepts could be one way to get students involved and interested in learning. Such learning methods would be particularly applicable to geography or cultural studies, in which the class could learn about another culture or geography by engaging in a discussion and exchanging videos with a class from that culture or region.

In support of his plan to abolish textbooks, Schwarzenegger asked, “Why are California’s school students still forced to lug around antiquated, heavy, expensive textbooks?” This brings to mind the issue of whether it is healthier to strain children’s backs with textbooks or their eyes with computer screens.

It will be interesting to watch how the plan rolls out and see what kind of opposition the government receives from parents that grew up on textbooks. There are some legitimate concerns about digitizing learning, the most troubling of which is how students that do not have the means to own computers at home will be affected. One way this initiative will fail, though, is if schools simply convert textbooks to a digital format and do not implement any changes to make the learning environment more interactive and collaborative.

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

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.

The issue of cybersecurity is nothing new; you can read Obama and Biden’s homeland security agenda, and specifically their objectives for “protecting our information networks” right here.  On a more interesting note, the issue of a Katrina-like disaster in cyberspace has been a topic of major interest over the past few months.  In February, former Whitehouse cybersecurity official Paul Kurts addressed the lack of a ‘FEMA for the internet’.  More recently, the online discourse surrounding cybersecurity has ramped up substantially, particularly following the anxiety over last week’s Conficker Worm.  This only stengthened the push for an American cyberecurity czar, which according to US Senator Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), is an absolute necessity.  In a statement released last week, Snowe (co-author of the new bill) argued that “if we fail to take swift action, we, regrettably, risk a cyber Katrina.”

The bill’s most striking proposal (Section 18, paragraph 2), and the central issue of the article I cited above, is that the new legislation would give the President emergency authority to halt web traffic, effectively shutting down the internet.  Not surprisingly, this created something of an uproar among political bloggers over the weekend, many of whom took issue with this expansion of federal powers.

Much of the opposition to the bill falls among ideological lines; one blog reader commented that “he who would sacrifice liberty for security deserves neither,” rehashing a libertarian argument that long predates the internet. 

Debates involving a liberty-security tradeoff are nothing new, nor is a generalized a lack of trust in federal government, both long-standing issues among Americans.  On the flip side, the analogies to the disasters of 9/11 and Katrina are also largely disconnected from the issue at hand; these arguments have a tendency to bubble up every time a debate arises over the liberty-security tradeoff.

In my opinion, the ideological arguments that simply cite pre-internet cases and debates, both for and against the bill, do little to confront the issue at hand.  The issues surrounding cybersecurity and cyberterrorism are very different than anything we’ve confronted in the past (contrary to most of the parallel arguments currently being made).  I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t have a full grasp over the threats at hand.  Whereas I feel well-read enough to comment over issues like journalism censorship or detainment of suspected terrorists, the issue of cybersecurity is one where I simply don’t know enough about the threats to make an informed opinion on the liberty-security tradeoff (even though I have been reading about it).  Even the blogs and articles I’ve read have done little to convince me that these authors have much more understanding of the issue than I do.

Growing up with a very open and libertarian internet, I’m no fan of the notion that a federal government could shut it down.  But then again, with the recent scares over Conficker (see Steve’s Skynet blogs), we may be entering a new age where more internet policing becomes a necessity, with governments needing more tools to limit damage in an emergency situation.  The scale and scope of said tools is currently up for debate, and rightfully so.  But that said, let’s try to focus the debate on the risks and needs that we’re now facing, and avoid referring solely to ideologies and analogies that pre-date the internet.

“The lesson that capitalist countries needed to combine the efficiency of markets with the broader values of community … did not come to them easily. It took the calamitous collapse of the Victorian era of globalization — into worldwide war, followed by extreme left wing revolution in Russia, extreme right wing revolution in Italy and Germany, militarism in Japan, the Great Depression, unprecedented financial volatility and the shriveling up of world trade.”

The quote is from John Gerard Ruggie, Director of the Center for Business and Government at Harvard University. His point, which he originally made in 1982, is nicely summarized in a lecture Ruggie gave at the LSE in 2002 (see transcript). He talked about why a new era of globalization requires a new social contract, suggesting that unregulated free markets could spawn another series of cataclysmic events if adequate social and environmental protections were not somehow embedded in the global economy.

Apart from making the obvious point that history repeats itself, what’s fascinating to me is that if one starts counting from the end of the Cold War our recent spell of global free market capitalism really only survived a couple of decades before crashing down around us. Even more fascinating will be to see what kind of new political orders emerge as a result.

I believe in Ruggie’s general principle that the efficiency of markets must be combined with the values of community to sustain a viable global society. I am no longer convinced that the institutions that established the historic social bargains that underpinned post-WWII prosperity (i.e., national governments, business associations, and organized labour) are the rights ones to help rebuild the global economy and fashion a new form of sustainable governance.

Although society appears to lack serious alternatives (unless you believe that the G20 is a serious alternative), I do believe two things: 1) that markets abhor a vacuum and 2) that governmental inertia will be the mother of invention. In other words, the fumbling efforts on the part of governments and international organizations to impose regulations on unregulated global markets will help stimulate the creation of new governance models and I won’t be surprised if many of the new innovations are driven by political entrepreneurs acting outside of the traditional realm of government. The unfortunate reality may be that things will need to get a whole lot worse before mainstream society recognizes the flaws inherent in our current arrangements and invests in building these new institutions.

Open standards and open source software already enjoy widespread support in Europe, particularly among governments who fear the influence of Microsoft and other proprietary software vendors. So this year’s conference will examine some of the issues that will define the Internet of the future. How will the next 5-10 years of technology innovation transform the Internet, for example, and are today’s regulations sufficient to ensure that the Internet remains open?

My role is to help make a broader case for openness in business and government, with my main point being that greater openness — socially, technologically, politically, and strategically — underpins any hope we have of solving some of the massive challenges that confront humanity. Here’s the description I’ve just finished drafting:

Open standards are fueling a period of unprecedented innovation on the Internet that is reshaping every institution in modern society. In business, smart firms realize that openness can accelerate innovation and unleash the knowledge, ingenuity and skills of a diverse global talent pool. In government, greater openness is generating radically more productive, equitable and transparent services and unlocking new possibilities to crowdsource solutions to global challenges. The Open Internet not only underpins these important transformations, it helps reveal a more general competitive and political imperative for the 21st century. Without greater openness in all institutions, the world will be ill-equipped to confront the complex challenges that face humanity.

I hope to see you at the event if you’re in or near Brussels on on April 24th.

Wordles can be a great way to visualize political discourse, especially when you use them in comparative form.  After Inauguration Day in January, Naumi wrote an excellent post , using IBM’s ManyEyes analysis to compare Obama’s inaugural speech to those of his predecessors.

These three tag clouds were all pulled from the Capitol Words Application, another development from the Sunlight Foundation (who we’ve written about previously – here, here and here).  Capitol Words is a program that takes every word entered into the congressional record and archives it online in a mashable and searchable form.  With different search metrics and visual aids, it allows you to see who’s saying what – broken down by individual, state or date.  One application lists the “10 most vocal” and “10 quietest” lawmakers of the last 60 days (over this most recent period, Michael Michaud has only uttered 8 words in Congress, while Richard Durbin has said almost 70 000).

Above, I’ve copied 3 tag clouds.  One of them represents all the words that John McCain has entered into Congressional Records over the past year.  Another one is from Nancy Pelosi, and the third is from all the representatives from the state of Massachusetts.  Can you guess which is which?

Too easy?

If you got the first three, here’s a more challenging one:

Representing all the words that he/she entered into record over the past 12 months, which well-known member of Congress does this cloud belong to?  (note:  I had to blur out the name of the state to avoid giving away the answer)

Unable to pinpoint all the barriers to widespread adoption of EMR, I got in touch with Dr. Nadine Gebara, Resident, currently at University of Toronto. I asked her why our health care institutions have been so slow in digitizing their info - something libraries started doing almost 20-years ago. I quickly learned that the barriers to EMR are greater and more deeply engrained than I had imagined.

Initially, I suspected that resistance on the part of physicians had something to do with hospitals’ slow move to EMR, but Dr. Gebara’s experience suggested otherwise: “I have seen very little resistance on the part of health care workers. There’s actually some frustration among physicians about not having adequate EMR systems. Overall, attitudes towards electronic records are overwhelmingly positive given the clear benefits to efficiency and ease of access to critical information.”

While EMR promises clear long-term benefits to efficiency and quality of care, government is reluctant to spend on the technology. The investment in EMR is seemingly a no-brainer. Sure, it’s expensive in the short-term, but soon enough we’ll see increased efficiency, more care to more people, and health care providers happy not to have to sift through piles of paper records to find critical information.

The “no-brainer” status I assigned to an investment in EMR was challenged as I continued to explore the issue with Dr. Gebara.

“There are a handful of companies offering EMR products and platforms [like this one and this one, or just look here for a comprehensive list]. Hospital A, for example, might use one platform, but Hospital B down the street uses a different one. It’s great that they are using EMR, but the problem we run into is that you generally cannot share data between the two systems,” she said. 

The fact that different platforms cannot be integrated creates uncertainty around what the outcome and ROI of any wide-scale (and expensive) EMR initiative might be. Inability to clearly estimate and articulate the benefits of EMR hampers efforts to secure government funding. And, quite simply, ”lack of funding is the greatest barrier to universal EMR.”

One (partial) solution would be for government and health institutions to select a single platform so that data can be shared in any hospital in any region.  But, if the government selects one service provider, do they not create an illegal monopoly in the industry?

Without government intervention, leaders in EMR technology will just have to emerge over time. With fewer players in the field and more hospitals adopting the same platforms, scalability and the ability to share data between hospitals will increase. In turn, the case for EMR funding will strengthen. Unfortunately, this implies simply waiting for the fittest platform to emerge. If that’s the case, then we shouldn’t hold our breath waiting for universal EMR. 

Adoption of Wikinomics principles on the part of the health informatics industry (referring to companies building and providing EMR platforms and services), however, would speed the journey to easily integrateable platforms. My guess is that the first company from within the EMR space who breaks down silos and produces a platform that integrates with others will be dominating the field when EMR arrives in full force – sooner, rather than later.

So what did they do? They took matters into their own hands and auctioned the funds to the highest bidders -  other municipalities who had projects ready to go paid them cash for the rights to the MTA funds (in one case just $.61 on the dollar). The city selling the MTA funds would then be able to take the cash and use it for anything it liked.

Three interesting things about the situation stand out:

• First, the swaps/marketplace itself is quite innovative/creative. An interesting case in optimizing results in a grass roots way. Grade: A-
• Second, the low prices paid for the funds suggest that, in some cases, stimulus dollars are being weilded very inefficiently  (A $.61 price suggests a 39% inefficiency) Grade: C
• Third, the MTA appears to have put the brakes on these swaps. Maybe because of the publicity they generated? Who knows. But cities must now build (invent?) a case for their use, or risk losing them altogether. This seems to create the wrong message and set of incentives. Grade: D 

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).

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

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

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

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

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.

Dan Borge: Director, LECG, a global expert services and consulting firm. Former senior managing director and head of corporate strategy at Bankers Trust where he was the principal designer of RAROC, the first enterprise risk management system. Author of the Book of Risk.

John Hull, Maple Financial Group Chair in Derivatives and Risk Management, Professor of Finance and Co-Director, Master of Finance Program, Rotman School of Management, U of Toronto

Robert (Bob) Tapscott, interim CEO, RISConsulting

Moderator: Chuck Bralver, Senior Associate Dean – International Business and Finance, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University (former Partner and Vice Chair, Oliver, Wyman & Company)

I was chair.  We had an excellent discussion and I’m pleased to report that a video of the session is now available online.  To view the video, click here.

The discussion took place from 5:00 to 6:30pm, Jan. 22, 2009, at the Fleck Atrium (ground floor), Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, 105 St. George Street, Toronto.

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.

Essentially, anything that gives an advantage to national companies at the expense of non-national companies is trade-distorting, and thus a protectionist measure.  But during a global recession, it’s very difficult to avoid these actions.  For a simple example, take the auto bailout.  In North America, we assume that the auto industry is “too big to fail”.  But in giving a bailout to GM, Ford and Chrysler, we’re distorting trade – at the expense of German, British and Japanese auto companies.  Naturally, this issue has already been raised.

Now, a note on free trade.  Generally, most economists agree that free trade is good, and protectionism is bad.  Since the Second World War, regional trade agreements and the World Trade Organization have been, overall, reasonably successful in promoting global trade and lowering barriers to trade.  But let’s remember – we still don’t have absolute free trade.  Canada still has tariffs – you can read our official list if you’re that interested.  So although we have relatively “free-er” or “more open” trade than previous periods in history, it’s still not completely free or open, in any absolute sense.

Now as I mentioned, most economists will agree that we need to move towards free trade, not away from it.  Protectionism, and sometimes even bailouts, are often regarded as the “slippery slope” towards deeper recession (or even depression).

What makes this even worse, however, is the retaliatory nature of protectionism.  Just look at the “Buy American” clause in the US stimulus package, which prompted Canadian politicians to start talking about possible retaliatory measures.  Michael Ignatieff warned the US that Canada is a “force to be reckoned with”, while European leaders made open threats that this could spark a trade war.

But is this kind of rhetoric helpful?  Do our politicians really have to talk tough and make threats? 

Words like “war”, “threat” and “retaliate” all have very negative connotations.  The word ‘war’, in particular, is one generally associated with violence and malice.  Is this the kind of discourse we should have between North America and Western Europe, regions that are supposed to be close allies?  Using the term “war” angles this as state-versus-state conflict.  Is this how we want to frame this issue, at a time when global economic cooperation is more important than ever?

Politicians are savvy- they know the power of words (journalists too).  When they need to gather public support for a cause, they’ll often frame it as an us-versus-them issue – note the “War on Drugs” and the “War on Terror” (on a sidenote, I’ve always thought that a barrier to progress on global warming was the term itself – “global warming” doesn’t sound very threatening – who doesn’t like warmth?  Why hasn’t anyone thought of a more threatening term for this?)

When the newspapers front headlines of “Trade War”, it’s likely to create public support for retaliation.  When public support goes up, it’s more likely that politicians will act on it.

So let’s go back to the auto bailout.  Was it protectionist? Yes.  Is protectionism detrimental to global trade?  Of course.  But did challenging times necessitate a bailout?  You could easily make this argument (as many economists have).  In a recession, states will do things like this, and yes, they will be trade-distorting.  But to frame bailouts and stimulus packages as acts of war is only going to make matters worse.

So let’s stop making threats of retaliation, and stop calling this “war” – this isn’t war.  Let’s not blindly assume that free trade is our ideological goal, and that any barriers to it are evil.  Instead, I’d rather see our politicians act with pragmatism, and come to new agreements on how the world can come through this crisis together.

People are already upset over the worsening economic condition.  So let’s choose our words more carefully, before the discourse of “war” causes national populations to villanize one another.

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