Last week I had the good fortune of meeting three public servants of three different countries, each with a very high intellectual profile. Each of them is a point of reference in his or her field.

On Wednesday I was with Geoff Mulgan, British, founder of Demos, CEO at the Young Foundation, appointed to lead NESTA. He comes from a communication background. In the UK he is a star, having served in top posts under the Blair administration; and it seems he is about to becom one in Europe, too, because his voice is heard with attention in Bruxelles on the issue of social innovation, just as the EU is making investment decisions in this field. He is committed to designing Prime Minister Cameron’s Big Society – a controversial, yet carefully studied model. That’s not surprising, because it is the only one that promises a solution for defending the European welfare state in a globalized, finance-dominated world..

That same evening I had dinner with Fabrizio Barca, Italian, director general of the Ministry of the Economy and advisor to the European Commission for the reform of regional policy. He comes from an economics background. He got to be in government coming from Banca d’Italia, together with Carlo Azeglio Ciampi (Ciampi is possibly the best statesman in the history of Italy after unity: a partisan turned central banker turned Prime Minister and then Minister of Treasury, who then went on to be one of the most popular Presidents ever). Ciampi and Barca shared an exceptional experience of institution building, recruiting a group of technicians with international experience to work on the issue of development of lagging Mezzogiorno. The result was the National Strategic Framework, the smartest, noblest policy document I have ever read. Fabrizio has an incredibly wide strategic outlook in which he subsumes everything from scientific papers to policy documents and his own conversations with civil society leaders, and is ultrafast (he answers his mail in minutes, and his colleagues say it is almost impossible to stay ahead of him). He is a leading authority on the issue of economic development.

I spent Thursday with Beth Noveck, American, founder of Peer to Patent, former deputy CTO at the White House, about to start a new appointment with the British government on OpenGov. She comes from a law background. Of the three, Beth is the one I feel I know best (we have been in conversation for a year, and she helped me with my book), and the one I am closest to in terms of interests. We both care about the collaborations between citizens and public authorities, and she is a world class expert in this field. Unlike the other two, she is above all an academic.

My take home from meeting these people is the usual one, always worth repeating: I have still much, much, much to learn. And learn I will.

Back on the road. I ended last week with a presentation of my work at the Complex Social Networks at the European University Institute, in Florence: now I am in Berlin, to prepare the programme of WOMEX 2011.

This week I look forward to two more great opportunities for learning and exchange. On Tuesday 24th and Wednesday 25th I shall be in Amsterdam for the SIX Spring School on Social Innovation. I have the honor of opening the second day: my friends in SIX set up an interview session in which I am expected to talk about online public policies. They are particularly interested in the Kublai story, which illustrates the extraordinary opportunity that the social web brings to policy makers but also the challenges it poses to administrations, often procedure-oriented and not always able to keep pace with emergent network social dynamics. The interviewer will be no less than Geoff Mulgan, the thinker who is thought to have inspired the recent wave of European policy on social innovation. Formerly at the Young Foundation, Geoff was recently appointed to lead NESTA, the leading British think tank on public policy innovation. I am very curious to meet him.

On Thursday 26th I will be in Rome, at the Italian Senate, to participate in the event on Open democracy and networked government of Fondazione Zefiro (info and registration). I am really looking forward to finally meeting in person Beth Noveck, ex deputy CIO of the White House; she and I have been talking on the wire for a year now. Beth and I will deliver the two keynotes of the day.

And then back home! I wonder if Milan is still where I left it…

Last Tuesday I evangelized. I had been asked to introduce the theme of Open Data to a group of managers and employees in the Bologna City administration. I did it my way, by offering the point of view of someone who believes in Open Data as a valid strategy but does not deny its limits and difficulties (my presentation is titled “Lies, damn lies and open data”). In particular — it’s one of my many obsessions — I made a case for creating a context for those who tell convincing data-powered stories about the society we live in to shine, be admired and inspire others: a sort of TED for Open Data.

My point of view is summarized in my slides. But the most interesting thing in the seminar was certainly the enthusiasm and the energy of the participants. Attendance was very high (about a hundred people); the top management was there en masse, and had invited along colleagues from the Regional administration and the University e-gov people; participation was vibrant (even too much: when I finally made it to lunch it was 2.30 p.m.!); and questions were very high-level. The organizers themselves were taken by surprise.

I would like to take credit for the result, but it would not be honest. It was obvious that an old story is looking for new ground to unfold once again, and that is the story of the civil servants that made Bologna and the whole Emilia region a source of inspiration for local administrations worldwide. Brilliant people, motivated by a strong public ethics, who designed the city’s future and built it under the leadership of effective and well-loved mayors like Giuseppe Dozza, never surrendering to the economically powerful. The Emilian model lost its magic decades ago for many reasons, not the least of which is a deteriorating quality of political leadership in the region. And yet Tuesday proved that civil servants in Emilia maintained a culture of serving the public, and are autonomous enough to raise their gaze from the day-by-day to interact with economist-musicians and their weird ways. The administration’s autonomy is clear from the date of the seminar: it was held just before the elections, so there was no one home to give or deny permission. These guys just went out and did it.

Let’s not get carried away, but it looks like the story of the Bologna city administration is about to get going once more. It is a powerful story, and it could have far-reaching consequences.

In my book Wikicrazia I claim that the public sector, society’s system to pursue the common good, can be made smarter by mobilizing the citizenry’s collective intelligence. Accessing collective intelligence entails enabling a large number of individuals to coordinate on some common goal. Normally, this is done by means of online commmunities, that use the Internet as their technological infrastructure and where interaction is mediated by some kind of social bargain, with somebody to resolve conflicts and keep the group focused on the goal.

There’s a problem here. On the one hand, online communities cannot be run by top-down command and control: it is exactly the free action of their different participants that make online communities so incredibly effective in processing large amounts of information. On the other hand, public policies have by definition a goal which is set exogenously with respect to the community itself: whereas Facebook users are on Facebook to hang out, and it does not really matter what they do with it, the users of Peer to Patent are there to process patent application; those of Kublai to write up creative business plans; those of Wikipedia (not a public policy, but similar in this respect) to write an encyclopedia. Community managers, myself included, are trapped in this dilemma: practically the only way we have to figure out the social dynamics in our communities is to spend an unreasonable amount of time participating in them, and we try to steer them by rhetoric and persuasion. We end up navigating pretty much by gut feelings. And as communities scale – even to just a few thousand participants – it gets really hard to understand what is really going on.

I thought our work would improve a lot if we could augment our ability to read social dynamics of online communities by using software. In essence, a policy community is a social network, and as such it can be represented by a graph with nodes and links, and studied mathematically. The community’s social dynamics should be encoded into the mathematical characteristics of the graph that represents it: for example, the creation of a cohesive group of senior users in Kublai in 2009 was picked up by the crystallization of a structure called k-core. If we managed to build some sort of dictionary that maps social dynamics onto mathematical characteristics of the graph, we could use network analysis to detect community dynamics that are invisible to the eye, because they happen at a scale too large for human participants: and this would work even for very large communities, at least in principle.

I intend to develop this software as my Ph.D. thesis. Colleagues at University of Alicante and the European Center of Living Technology will help. I call it Dragon Trainer, because doing policy through an online community is like training a dragon, an animal too large and dangerous to order around. If you are interested in learning how we plan to do this, you can watch the video above (12 mins).

I admire Beth Noveck‘s work, and I have been following it for years. American, NYU professor, blogger (her blog is a precious source for me), Beth is the founder of Peer to Patent, the first 2.0 project of the American Federal administration. Peer to Patent was much praised by candidate Obama; later, President Obama appointed Beth Deputy CIO to lead the White House’s Open Government initiative. In 2009 she published an excellent book, The Wiki Government, to tell the Peer to Patent story and discuss the implication of a collaborative approach to government.

My own trajectory feels a bit like a smaller scale model of Beth’s. The blog, the first 2.0 project of Italy’s central government administration, the book. We have been in conversation for about a year now: she generously contributed to my book, and even co-authored its preface. So, I am happy and proud to have the chance to work with her: we will hold the two keynote speeches in a public discussion on the Wiki government’s phase two, that of going from cool experimentation to standard work modality for government of all levels. The event will take place on May 26th in Rome, at Sala Capitolare of the Senate, and will be chaired by the Deputy Chairman of the European Parliament Gianni Pittella. At the helm of the organization is the excellent Fabio Maccione (thanks!) from Fondazione Zefiro, and you are all heartily invited. Register here. Jacket and tie are mandatory for men.

The predictable failures of public policies, those immediately obvious to everyone save the decision makers responsible for them, are legion. From the International Monetary Fund’s East Asian structural adjustment recipes to the 40-years-old Messina Strait Bridge project, we all have, at some point, read the proud announcement of some government project and thought “This is never going to work”. People who make these decisions, clearly, think they make perfect sense. How to explain such a large discrepancy? The only thing I can think of is that many public decision makers live in an information bubble which is completely disconnected from the world you and I inhabit. They simply do not have access to some relevant information. If it really is so, then maybe they are not qualified to make policy decision in the first place.

Consider, for example, a City of Milano project called Ambrogio. Here’s how it works: some organizations (district councils, local police) were given handheld devices, and they can use them to report problems with streets and public spaces. The report is filed in the databases of the competent offices, which then fix the problems.

This project has serious flaws.

1. it is technologically flawed. Why incorporate this functionality into a physycal device? It would have been enough to write software for smartphones. This would have enabled anyone with a smartphones to participate. Plus it would not force the poor “sentinel citizens” to carry yet another device, recharge its batteries, update its software etc.
2. it is socially flawed, as it disables self-selection. Only individuals sected top-down by the City can use the system directly: it would have made social sense to enable everyone, leaving each individual to decide if and when to decide. Large numbers in potential participation lead to high impact even when participation rates are low – as is almost always the case. This way, a lot of potential contribution will never happen, and many of those devices will gather dust in some drawer.
3. it has useless features, like the possibility to attach photos. If somebody abandons a bicycle chained to a pole, uploading its picture on the City’s servers adds no significant information and burdens the system with image recognition algorithms. A simple form to report textual information is much easier to process. Additional advantage: since you can fill the form typing on your home computer’s keyboard, you don’t even need a smartphone to participate
4. it lacks transparency. As I write – and the civil’s society requests notwithstanding – Ambrogio has no website; it in unknown how much it costs or what technologies it uses. Given that the technology partner is Telecom Italia, hardly a champion of free software, I don’t expect those technologies to be open. If I am right,
5. it clashes with common sense and with the E-government Code of Laws, which mandate the reuse of technology. The city could have used FixMyStreet, a British open source project that was later adopted in Norway. The Norwegen meshed it with the OpenStreetMap geographic database, itself open source. The code is up and running, it would have been enough to translate the user interface into Italian! Or it could have asked the city of Spinea for its system, and maybe add a couple of thousand euro to add a smartphone app to it.
6. it is expensive – though, given the lack of transparency, we don’t know how much. Media reports have spoken of 400,000 euro.

What strikes me about this series of mistakes is how easy it would have been to avoid them. A Google search would have returned FixMyStreet and Spinea. Just talking to Milano’s own civil society would have led to competent, passionate people who work on technology as a participation enabler, like the Green Geeks and the creators of NetLAMPS. Putting their work front and center of the city’s effort would have reinforced a narrative of empowerment of an active citizenship. But that did not happen: instead, the people responsible for Ambrogio somehow managed to avoid any contact with these informations and the people who might have helped them. Unfortunately this is a common situation.

I have no problem with a mayor not being a technology expert: she might have other expertise, other experience to serve the citizenry with. But when no one, in her circle of advisors, even thinks of doing a Google search or giving some cognoscent citizen a call before spending 400,000 euro of taxpayer money, I find it unacceptable. Something to meditate upon, since elections are coming up.

PS – I am curious about the famed handheld device. Does anybody recognize it?

PPS – The post’s title is a tribute to García Márquez.

The more I use the Internet, the more I grow fascinated with networks, because they behave in unexpected, counterintuitive ways. They seem to summon order from chaos as if by magic. Consider the web: large masses of amateurs who don’t know each other and have no command structure should produce some kind of shapeless informational blob, right? Wrong. Day after day, people and content inexorably self-organize in such a way that they are one or few clicks away from each other. Building an exhaustive map of the Internet is impossible, but finding any one thing in it is quite easy. It is a bit like sticking your hand in the proverbial haystack and finding a needle, every time.

The more I study networks and the more they amaze me for their ability to organize information, in an apparently effortless way. Reading the history of scientific exploration of social networks is almost dizzying. Stanley Milgram gives random American letters for other random Americans asking the former to deliver through an unroken chain of aquaintances, and a surprising number of them reaches home in very few steps. Mark Granovetter discovers that aquaintances are more effective than close friends or family in finding us jobs. Fredrik Liljeros looks at a network of sexual contacts, and concludes that the existence of a small number of very promiscuous people renders AIDS impossible to eliminate. Nathan Eagle finds that the prosperity of a small area can be predicted from the pattern of allocation of calling time across their contacts of that area’s inhabitants (in poorer communities people spend a higher share of their calling time with one or two contacts). All these results seem independent of the actual people in the networks: in almost all models nodes are identical. All the action is in the link structure. Network papers are academic, but somewhat alien: Hogwarts comes to mind.

I am convinced that the properties of networks can help explain many phenomena that we experience every day but don’t really understand – and give us anxiety. Why do we feel surrounded by young, successful entrepreneurs (though there’s not that many of them)? Why were peer-to-peer file sharing services fatal to the recorded music industry? How does Wikipedia work so well?

My Holy Grail is to tame online social networks, forging them in a powerful, precise tool to design and deliver public policies. I have done it before in Visioni Urbane e Kublai, but a lot of time I had to steer by instinct. I was lucky, but for this to become a generalised method I need to understand it a lot better. So I study the language of networks: these days I am often at the European University Institute in Florence, to attend Fernando Vega-Redondo’s Complex Social Networks course. It’s a bit tough (I get up at 5 a.m., because Fernando usually lectures at 8.45 sharp), but so be it. I really need to understand this thing.