Bad news for open government and open data activists everywhere. data.gov, the Obama administration flagship open data portal, is being taken down downsized on the wake of the recent federal budget cuts. So is former White House CTO Vivek Kundra’s IT dashboard. Especially data.gov is a hard blow: that is the template, imitated by the faster-moving governments and envied by the citizens of the slower-moving ones.

What went wrong? Steve O’Keeffe summarized it like this: GIGO and overpromise. I am not qualified to judge GIGO in this case, but overpromise rings a bell. The movement is wired along Tim Berner-Lee’s “Raw Data Now”: release the datasets, civic hackers and market forces will do the rest. Decision makers in the faster-moving administrations were all too happy to comply: the number of datasets you release is an easy to monitor measure of acitivity, and it looks great on press releases.

The demand-side has been sagging. This is unsurprising: interpreting data to tell causally convincing stories is hard. Civic hackers need to know their measurement theory, probability theory, statistics, econometrics; computer prowess does not take you beyond download. We did have some good examples of data driven journalism, but most of the media ignore the data and stick to interviewing academia and gov brass when they want coverage of economic/social/environmental issues. Makes sense too: there is not enough readership for data driven journalism yet.

Worse, we were told that new ecosystem of innovative services would arise from the availability of government data, leading to growth and jobs. Hard to resist: the package of innovation, growth and jobs in one phrase is one of the very few passwords that will unlock serious funding these days, and proponents and funders alike went with it. Couple of years down the road, we do have some cool apps and some companies that use the data. We even have some jobs generated around data availability, but the numbers are unimpressive. The most I’ve heard trumpeted is 60 employees for a single company. That, too, is hardly a surprise: if your business is based on an open-access, unexhaustible resource like gov data, economic theory tells us it’s going to be hard to bake any seriouse margin into it. You tend to get undercut and outcompeted by non profits and zero-overhead college students operating out of laptops. Profit requires scarcity, not abundance – just ask music recording studios. Keefe’s post contains an interesting little fact, and that is the private business has indeed invested in data, but private and very muck locked down.

Given all this, and in the light of the demise downsizing of data.gov, I would recommend the open gov movement to resist the temptation to promise anything we are not sure we can achieve in any scenario. Envision low-cost, low-hype operations; offer the collaboration of nonprofits and the civil society; emphasize that, while people are welcome to make money out of value-added-on-open-data services, that is not the point of the exercise. The point is increasing the transparency, accountability, and efficiency of public policy. It will be less cool, it will take us off the spotlight and the big funding grants, but it will keep the movement going, almost invulnerable to disenchantment, budget cuts and lobby capture. If I am wrong, great: another year from now, we can make a comeback and boast all the jobs open data will have created in the mean time.

Kublai Camp 2011 is happening today; it is the third of its kind and the first one that I can’t take part in.. My friend Tito Bianchi at the Ministry of Economic Development asked me to make a short video to tell the people convened how I would envision Kublai’s future. I am happy to oblige: in the video above (Italian language) I outline three scenarios, two of which I would approve of and one I would not. They are:

1. shutdown at the end the next cycle and move on. We have gained a lot of useful knowledge we can deploy elsewhere, and that was the whole point of the exercise.
2. devolution of the project to its community, maintaining its public mission. This would be an extraordinary outcome: a public policy so appreciated that its beneficiaries step in to do the heavy lifting themselves. But it is a tricky one to pull off, and at this point in time I deem it unlikely to happen for reasons I explain in the video.
3. entrenchment and drift of Kublai into a kind of business planning online help desk, feeding into the plethora of contests for startups, creative projects etcetera. I think this outcome would be tired and – in the context of Italy’s constitutional architecture – not suited to a central government agency. I think it should be avoided.

I am curious to see what happens. More info on Kublai here.

Young Europeans are having trouble completing their transition towards full independence. The problem bites deeper here, because our social model is based on the status of full-time, long term employee, that unlocks important social and economic rights (in France, where I live now, if you don’t work you have no right to health care). This generates tensions, because it forces young people to fight for this status at all costs, even if it got very difficult to obtain and even if many of them would like to explore different roads. Result: 20% of 15-34 years old, in Europe, is not in employment, education or training. It is not even a matter of being young anymore: young people are in the line of fire, but citizens of all ages are losing autonomy.

The paradox is that the currently young generation is probably the most creative, generous, idealist, collaborative ever. Everywhere you look young people are creating, seemingly out of thin air, their own jobs in entirely new businesses like my friends at CriticalCity or the extraordinary twentysomethings at Blackshape Aircraft; they experiment new ways to share resources, from their couches to motor vehicles, or going out to live off the beaten track; others still are building new way to meaningful activism, making their voice heard and matter in an age of crisis of representative democracies. These people don’t know each other, and they act independently; and yet, one can’t help get the feeling that their projects are somehow coherent, as if they were pieces of the same emergent future. The OpenStreetMap 2008 video (above) is of course completely unrelated, but it makes for a great metaphor of this emergence; and it gives me the same feeling of elation and hope.

The Council of Europe has an idea: try to dig out all of these experiences; aggregate them; validate them through peer-to-peer assessment; and use them to propose to the European Commission and its own member states a new strategy. We might call it adaptive; in plain terms, it is about:

1. figuring out what the young people of Europe are already doing to build the world we will all inhabit in twenty years. The proof of the cake is in the eating: if they struggle so hard to build something, it means they really want it. So that gives you a goal for your policy.
2. if possible, help them with it, in the sense of creating the conditions for these strategies – that today require a lot of resourcefulness and self-sacrifice, and are de facto accessible only to a minority – become viable for the average young person.
3. if it’s not possible to help them, get out of their way, by refraining from projecting onto them the social and economic model of the 70s. It is the one most senior European decision makers grew up in, but that does not make it the best or the best suited to this day and age.

This will be done through a web project, characterized by fully open and constructive interaction. Its final result will be presented in a high profile conference, probably in May 2012. I have the honor of managing this project, and the good fortune of having been able to put together a stellar team (I will introduce them in a subsequent post). I need to credit the Social Cohesion Research and Development Division of the Council of Europe for believing in the project, and for the courage demonstrated in rolling out such an open initiative.

The project is called Edgeryders. The platform will launch in late October; for now we have put online a provisional blog to start the conversation. Come say hello, and, if you think we are credible, pass word around: we will need all the wisdom and all the help we can get. And you, and we too, that means all of us are the real experts on future building: we struggle with it every day.

There is no denying that we economists are hardly everyone’s favorite characters. Our discipline is known as “the dismal science”; we are accused, in a more or less implicit fashion, of supporting the worst excesses of rogue capitalism; some of the most senior and best known members of the profession are known by the media with comic books supervillain nicknames like “Doctor Doom” (Nouriel Roubini) or “The Black Swan” (Nassim Taleb). This does not happen to linguists or astronomers.

Just like science in general, economic science has its share of skeletons in the closet: ideologies that were given a coverage of objectivity; wildly off-the-mark forecasts; policy prescriptions that failed to prevent, and even caused, much suffering and poverty. But just as many were the intellectual victories, the extraordinary inventions, the valuable contributions to human prosperity. I think this dualism is inevitable, because political economy is the offspring of moral philosophy: Adam Smith, that many regard as the father of the discipline, wrote a Theory of moral sentiments that he cared for just as much as for the more famous Wealth of nations. And moral philosophy is no walk in the park: it is a minefield, in which you have to make terrible choices with every step you take. Liberty or equality? Meritocracy or stability? Like Jedi Knights in Star Wars, moral philosophers and their cousins, economists, are always exposed both to the light and the dark side of the Force.

Recently I chanced to read Joseph Stiglitz’s Towards a General Theory of Consumerism: Reflecions on Keynes’s Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (in this book and Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons. Stiglitz deploys standard neoclassical theory like a true master to illuminate a problem we don’t think enough about: why is it that, though they could in principle afford to, modern societies do not choose to work less, exchanging some consumption for leisure time. Among other things, Stiglitz shows how elementary extensions to the standard model lead to reverting its result: for example, in a two-sector model it is not always true that increasing salary in one of them leads to an overall reduction of labour supply. To me, that inspires awe for the power and the flexibility of the model, and not a little embarassment for the unsophisticated way it is often wielded in common political discourse.

Ostrom tells of the efforts of several human communities, from Switzerland to the Philippines, in coordinating to manage common resources like fisheries, forests or irrigation systems. Successes, failures, institution provision through self-organization and reform attempts from outside are analyzed with theoretical rigor, explanatory power, radical thinking and empathy.

Joseph, Elinor, thanks. This is the Light Side economics, the one I wanted to study as a young man and that makes me proud of being somehow related to great thinkers like yourselves. If you organize a parade to affirm the pride of being economists – modeled on the Gay Pride, which seems to have worked well – you can count on me to show up.

Good news: a research project I helped to write has been approved for funding by the European Commission’s Future and Emerging Technologies program. The project is led by one of the scientists I admire the most, David Lane, and rests firmly in the complexity science tradition associated to the Santa Fe Institute. We intend to attack a big, fundamental problem: innovation is out of control. Humans invent to solve problems, but they end up creating new and scary ones. Which they tackle by innovating more, and the cycle repeats itself. Cars improve mobility, but they come with global warming and the urban sprawl. Hi tech agriculture mitigates food scarcity, but it also gives rise to the obesity epidemics. To quote one of our working documents:

While newly invented artifacts are designed, innovation as a process is emergent. It happens in the context of ongoing interaction between agents that attribute new meanings to existing things and highlight new needs to be satisfied by new things. This process displays a positive feedback [...] and is clearly not controlled by any one agent or restricted set of agents. As a consequence, the history of innovation is ripe with stories of completely unexpected turns. Some of these turns are toxic for humanity: phenomena like global warming or the obesity epidemics can be directly traced back to innovative activities. We try to address these phenomena by innovation, but we can’t control for more unintended consequences, perhaps even more lethal, stemming from this new innovation.

We want (1) build a solid theory that concatenates design end emergence in innovation and (2) use it to forge tools that the civil society can use to prevent the nefarious consequences of technical change. It does not get any bigger! And in fact we got a stellar evaluation: 4.5 out of 5 for technical and scientific excellence and 5 out of 5 for social impact.

The project commits to building Dragon Trainer, an online community management augmentation software. The idea is to make a science of the art of “training” online communities to do useful things (like policy evaluation), just as you would train an animal too large and strong to push around. I am responsible for producing Dragon Trainer, and it is quite a responsibility.

I am superhappy, but worried too. Taxpayers foot most of the bill, and this makes it even more imperative to produce the absolutely best result we can. I will need to work very, very hard. I am seriously thinking of devoting myself to full time research for a couple of years starting in 2012. Does this make sense? What do yo think?

Many people wrote me to congratulate for a high profile article on Repubblica (three full pages on one of the main national daily newspapers) on the topic of open government (called “Wikicrazia”, after my book, in the title)and of the interest it is attracting in the national debate. The article itself contributed to such interest: a very strong endorsement induced new curiosity in people previously unaware or uninterested, and prompted some who were already intrigued to take action.

I think the open gov movement, though still a niche one, is going to be irresistible in the long run. Why? Because the work can be divided in packets so small, and the tools are so cheap, that even a single person committing a little time can make a small, but noticeable difference, here and now, without having to wait for systemic reform or cultural change. But I also think that much credit for the present wave of interest should go to Riccardo Luna, former editor in chief of Wired Italy and author of the article in question. Riccardo is not only a good journalist and an excellent communicator; he has become an activist and an organizer of this movement. We talked a lot to each other in these latest few months, and I have seen his enthusiasm grow and become vision. He has an inclusive style, always taking care to give credit where credit is due and to avoid overpersonalization, has won him a lot of sympathy and credibility.

If I am allowed to offer advice – not so much to Riccardo, as to all of us – I think it is important to try to keep the focus on mass collaboration based on self-selection, avoiding to personalize the issue and resisting the temptation to make good, effective contributors to this movement into gurus. It would be misleading. With each project I start, I know that the most valuable collaborator is a person I don’t know yet. It for him or her that I design: so that they can find their way to the project that needs exactly his or her skills, and can be engaged in a useful, respectful and fun way.

Gurus, on the other hand, are just about the last thing we need.

The Fondation pour l’innovation politique 2011 report on World Youth contains the graph reproduced above. Opinion polls need to be taken with a very large pinch of salt (people tend to lie when responding), but it is enough to give you pause. It’s gone full circle: ten years ago the establishment was pro-globalization and the young protested against it. Now the establishment gives signs of uneasiness about globalization, and the young embrace it. What gives?

Quite possibly, Joseph Stiglitz was prophetic in his 2002 book: globalization has been seriously mismanaged, but over and above mismanagement it is generally beneficial, as it provides for previously unthinkable opportunities. Youths worldwide – significantly, more so in the developing countries – are simply recognizing this.

Yet there may be another, more unsettling explanation: that the young (especially the educated ones) are switching their allegiance away from their countries – less and less able to give them a meaningful life, less and less interested in doing so – and over to their peers. The globalized economy and society is where the opportunities are: where will the young stand if it comes into conflict with the old nation states?