Category Archives: Open government

Open government Xtreme: when public policy takes to the streets

The Council of Europe has a project called Edgeryders (info). Just as it is drawing to a close, it seems to hold a piece of the future; never before, in my experience, had a rather technical project born of a public institution (producing recommendation for a reform of European youth policy: hardly the stuff of dreams) driven so much citizen engagement, and even ownership.

As part of the project, we organized a conference called Living On The Edge (#LOTE to the initiates), that took place in Strasbourg in June 2012. To my great surprise, about a month ago the Edgeryders community practically summoned itself to Brussels for a #LOTE2 (info), to take place on December 6th to 9th. And here’s what’s happening:

people are paying out of their own pocket to participate. Since edgeryders tend to be young and strapped for cash, the community is trying to come up with ways to support each other. Those of us who leave in Brussels are opening their homes to host fellow #LOTErs.
the European Parliament stepped in to provide a room for free for one of the days – credit must go to 25-years-old Amelia Andersdottir, MEP for the Swedish Pirate Party, and to her assistants
a local artist offered to rent us studio space for very cheap for the remaining days – the poorest edgeryders can camp there, too.
one particularly enterprising member of the community picked up the phone and called AirB’n’B. They, too, stepped in, offering a €25 voucher to #LOTErs wishing to stay with an AirB’n’B host in Brussels. Intrigued by the project, they are also sending their experts on community building to the event.
all organization is run by members of the community who volunteered. The result is an amazing rainbow of generous, skilled young Europeans. Asta (Icelandic) is sorting out logistics. Noemi (Romanian) and Andrei (Moldovan) keep the website updated and makes sure no one falls through the crack. Giovanni (Italian) acts as media liaison. Matthias (German) Michal, Petros, Mike (Poles) and Eimhin (Irish) are writing specifications and getting geared up to redo the Egderyders website according to the community’s requests.
institutions are taking notice. Senior officers engaged and provide suggestions of people to invite. Every day we receive new offers and helpful suggestions.
meanwhile Elena – a 23-year-old Russian woman who lives in Sweden – inspired by the project has started Edgeryders Sweden, reusing the Edgeryders name, aesthetic, visuals and mystique (it’s okay – everything is licensed under creative commons). Elena has not participated in Edgeryders – she learnt about it from an acquaintance.

This is a taste of what might happen if we ever got serious about involving citizens in public policy. The Council of Europe is holding its own at its center. But its stake in #LOTE2 has become a strange creature: on the one hand its leadership on Edgeryders as a source of inspiration is recognized by all. On the other hand, however, it has little choice but to go along. The community has pretty much put together a zero-budget event: paradoxically, if the Council of Europe were to disassociate itself from this meetup, #LOTErs would probably shrug it off and go ahead. And why not? “We should think of government as platform”, open government people like to say. And platforms don’t make decision: they enable people to do whatever they want to do in the name of the common good.

It could be the future of government: build platforms for collective actions, then step back and accept that you, as an elected representative or a civil servant, should make as few operational decisions as possible, and let yourself be overridden by ordinary citizens in most situations. On the other hand, it could also be just a golden moment, the last autumn glow: that’s what it will look like, retrospectively, if European institutions don’t see the potential of all this goodwill to generate more goodwill and creativity, or simply can’t bring themselves to give up control for citizens to take ownership. In that case, the system will revert by default (without even needing to decide to) to an administration-driven, top-down mode. Which does not work – just ask disgruntled European citizens what they think of the effectiveness of their common institutions – but is so much more reassuring.

Debugging democracy with network analysis

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A few weeks ago I presented at TEDx Bologna. I used the opportunity to try and stitch together the pieces of my intellectual journey of the past five-six years, and see if they form some coherent pattern.

The result was the video above. In a nutshell: collective intelligence is the most promising weapon we have to face the many dire problems threatening our species, and that transcend the individual scale. Climate change, feral finance, mounting inequalities; we can’t touch these (and others), because they don’t exist at the same scale as us – they emerge from the interaction of billions of us. To address these problems, it seems intuitive that we should deploy an equally emergent, same-level collective intelligence. Unfortunately, representative democracy is concocted in such a way that does not allow the emergence of solutions (in the sense that Wikipedia is an emergent solution to the problem of writing an encyclopedia) within democratic institutions. Participatory democracy could, in theory, lead to such a result, but it does not scale. To make it scale we can use the Internet. First, we design online interaction environments from which we think collective solutions might emerge; then we measure the social dynamics the these environments host and foster, as if they were coral reefs colonized by many species. I wrote “measure” because, thanks to network analysis, social interaction dynamics have become measurable, even for large communities.

Maybe, using these techniques, we’ll finally be able to make the dream of a working, large-scale participatory democracy come true. We have held on to it for twenty-five centuries! It’s certainly worth trying.

Debugging democracy: riprogettare la partecipazione con la network analysis

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Qualche settimana fa ho presentato al TEDx Bologna. Ne ho approfittato per provare a mettere insieme i pezzi del mio percorso degli ultimi cinque-sei anni per vedere se ne usciva qualcosa di coerente.

Quello che è uscito è il video qui sopra. Detto in pillole: l’intelligenza collettiva è l’arma migliore che abbiamo per affrontare i molti e gravi problemi che minacciano la nostra specie, e che trascendono la scala individuale. Riscaldamento globale, finanza fuori controllo, disuguaglianze in aumento; non possiamo toccare questi fenomeni, perché non esistono alla stessa scala a cui esistiamo noi, ma a una superiore – un po’ come i neuroni non possono capire, né tantomeno governare, il cervello. Purtroppo la democrazia rappresentativa è congegnata in un modo che non consente l’emergere di soluzioni collettive all’interno delle istituzioni democratiche (nel senso in cui Wikipedia è una soluzione collettiva al problema di scrivere e tenere aggiornata un’enciclopedia). La democrazia partecipativa in teoria potrebbe portare a queste soluzioni, ma non scala. Per farla scalare possiamo usare Internet. Prima progettiamo ambienti di interazione online per sviluppare soluzioni collettive; poi misuriamo le dinamiche sociali che questi ambienti ospitano e favoriscono, come barriere coralline colonizzate da molte specie. Ho scritto misurare, perché, grazie all’analisi di rete, le dinamiche di interazione sociale si possono misurare, anche per comunità piuttosto grandi.

Forse, usando queste tecniche, potremo finalmente realizzare il sogno di una democrazia partecipativa che funziona su scala grande. Dopo venticinque secoli! Sicuramente vale la pena di provarci.A few weeks ago I presented at TEDx Bologna. I used the opportunity to try and stitch together the pieces of my intellectual journey of the past five-six years, and see if they form some coherent pattern.