Category Archives: Open government

The credibility singularity of institutions

So, I care about democracy, and dream about fixing it. For years, and in many different contexts, I have been weaving narratives of collaboration between citizens and their institutions towards the common good. These narratives have provided ideological scaffolding for creatives, radical changemakers and civil servants to work together, reaping the benefits of diversity and discovering that they can get stuff done.

This, however, is getting harder and harder. Global problems press humanity on (take your pick: climate change, feral finance, loss of biodiversity, mounting inequalities); a globally connected citizenry, fueled by the Steve Jobs-Obama ideology of change as desirable, possible, a moral imperative even, has raised their expectations levels. Institutions, while probably not moving any slower than they did twenty years ago, have failed to keep up with the acceleration. The result is a sort of (negative) credibility singularity: you can feel people getting more impatient by the week. And not without reason: the failure to take serious action on climate change after decades of talk is very hard to justify outside the institutions’ corporate walls. What could any government agency answer to Anjali Appadurai’s passionate call to action in the video above? “Give us ten years!” to which her answer is “You just wasted twenty”. “We must not be too radical”, to which her answer is “Long term thinking is not radical”. What is there to say? She’s right.

The singularity point itself is the place where people decide democratic institutions are not delivering, and route around them to get things done. I am not looking forward to it. In fact, I happen to think democratic government institutions are still humanity’s best asset towards cooking up a coordinated, global response to global threats. But if this is to happen, a lot more radical thinking needs to take roots in Brussels (and Rome, and London, and Washington D.C. etc.). And to do it fast, while credibility can still be restored.

(Thanks: Vinay Gupta and Jay Springett)

TweetyourMEP: online two-way dialog with members of the European Parliament

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Many observers have noted that most political leaders use social media mostly for one-way communication, as it they were a podium in an electronic square. The question is not so much whether they will change their approach, as whether citizens, changing their own approach to politicians online, will force them into a different communication style.

In the last week or so, a generous group of hackers and open data activists in the Spaghetti Open Data mailing list has cooked up an app called TweetyourMEP. It reuses the dataset of EPNewsHub, an aggregator of social media activity of members of the European Parliament. With the same data, TweetyourMEP takes a very different road: rather than enable MEPs to inform us on what they think and do, they enable us to let them know what we think and care about. And no, it is not like writing letters to your representative. There is a critical difference: letters (or emails) are private – no one sees whether I have written to a political leader, nor whether he or she replies. This makes engaging with individual citizens a pretty inefficient use of time (some MEPs have constituency of millions of voters). Tweets, on the other hand, are public: a MEP engaging citizens on Twitter is making a more efficient use of her time, because she is being seen to engage by everyone in both her own and that citizen’s social network.

TweetyourMEP è un piccolo atto d’amore per la democrazia europea da parte dei civic hackers italiani. Usatelo con orgoglio e rispetto, diffondetelo, aiutateci a migliorarlo. E avanti così.TweetyourMEP is a small act of love for European democracy from Italian civic hackers. Use it with pride and respect, spread the word, help us improve it. And keep up the good work!

Democratizing the data society