I receive many invitations to speak at public events to present Wikicrazia, my book on government in the age of Internet collaboration. The topic is hot, and it is going to stay hot: from my vantage point it seems that Internet-enabled spaces of collaboration between citizens and public authorities are sprouting up all across Italy, and there are trailblazers in most democratic countries. I see my role, at least in part, in helping those people to connect to each other and with the global open government movement. I grew up in a small town, and I know well how empowering it feels to take action on your home turf while feeling a part of some global-scale phenomenon.

I am not in the country; it is much harder than usual for me to attend events in Italy, and I was resigned to stop doing so for several months. Last week, however, I got a really interesting proposal, and I had the idea to ask the organizing team if they would accept someone other than myself to present my book. They accepted with enthusiasm. At this point I published an update on Facebook to probe whether my friends and readers would be up for it; to my great surprise, in a couple of hours I got half a dozen volunteers. Fantastic: a book on collaboration,written collaboratively and now even presented “wiki style” by an open community! This must be a first.

Here’s the deal. Navarra Editore and I are looking for volunteers to present Wikicrazia on my behalf in the coming months, when I can’t make it myself (which will be most of the times). We require:

• being familiar with the book. You need not agree with it: a critical presentation is perfectly acceptable.
• being comfortable with speaking in public

And we offer:

• my gratitude!
• my famous slides (with notes).
• payment of travel and hotel expenses.
• a Skype or phone session to discuss how to set up the presentation (as suggested by one of the volunteers).
• a small gift from the publisher, to show appreciation

Our goal here is to build and “advanced wikicrats” group with members in most Italian regions (and abroad?), people that can contribute in a useful, competent and confident way to the public events that are organized therein. I have a feeling that such a group could be useful to do other things as well.

We are kicking off with an event in Riomaggiore, at Cinque Terre, on 29th, 30th and 31st of July. See how it goes.

The campaign for this year’s municipal elections in Milan left us with a precious legacy: the awareness that many citizens are willing and able to collaborate with their elected representatives in a constructive way. Thanks to the large number of people involved, their great creative energy, and their Internet tools to coordinate towards common goals, the connected citizenry’s potential to contribute to a much needed general renewal of the country is out of the question. The Italian civil society claimed a role for itself; there was no Obama to summon it. As it turns out, it has proven to be at least as advanced as any other in the world, and possibly more so.

This legacy, it turns out, has a dark side. Besides citizens, the protagonists of the Milanese campaign were Internet communication experts, who tend to have a marketing background. The marketing-derived approach makes sense for election campaigns, because voting has near-zero cost; low thresholds for access; and above all is often driven by non-rational, gut feeling motivations. All of these characteristics carry through to the purchase of consumption goods. So, political communication experts speak the language of marketing and advertising: they tell stories like Nixon losing the presidency to Kennedy because, in the key TV debate, he was sweating. Their job is not to help the citizenry to build a realistic idea of what is needed in the next term, but cajole them into voting for a certain candidate, even if they do it for superficial or wrong reasons. Granted, it is not particularly noble, but it works.

Collaboration between citizens and public authorities is very different from competition for votes, and the analogy with purchase of consumption goods does not carry through. Designing and enacting policies is a high-cost, prolonged activity; it requires rational argument, data, competence. In this context the marketing profession’s seduction techniques don’t work well; what’s more, they risk doing damage. In particular, they risk creating participation bubbles: initially luring into signing up people that later, faced with the exhausting wrangle of designing policy, get disheartened and defect en masse – leaving themselves with a bad experience and others with the chore of reorganizing the whole process. Enacting the wiki government is not about attracting large crowds, but about enabling each and every citizen to choose whether to engage, and just what with, while giving her honest information about the difficulties, the hard work, the high risk of failure associated with participation. Indicators, too, have different meaning than in marketing: in the advertising world attracting more people is always better, whereas in the wiki government there is such a thing as too much participation (it entails duplication of information, with many people making the same point, and reduction in the signal-to-noise ratio, with low-quality contributions swamping high-quality ones).

There is a fundamental difference in the way the decision to engage is modeled: in wiki-style collaboration participants self-select, in marketing the communication experts selects a target in a top-down way. In the former the participant is seen as a thinking adult, that needs to be enabled and informed so that she can make the right decision; in the latter the consumer (or voter) is seen as a stupid, selfish individual that reacts to gut stimulation, and that needs to be led to do what we know must be done. The outcome of collaboration, when it is well designed, is open and unpredictable; the outcome of marketing, when it is well designed, is meeting some target set a priori.

All in all, a shift towards marketing of the discourse on collaboration would be a mistake. An increase in the number of participants to a single process does not automatically mean an improvement; a mayor is not a brand; a willingness to help out is not a trend to be exploited on the short run (and if it is we have no use for it, because collaboration on policy yields results on the medium to long run); and above all citizens are not a target, because they don’t need to be convinced: they need to be enabled to do whatever it is they want to do. It is crystal clear that Italians are up for trying out a collaboration with any half-decent public authority; this collaboration needs space and patient nurturing to grow healthy and strong, sheltered from hype and unrealistic expectations. I hope that the leaders of Italian authorities – starting from the new mayor of Milan Giuliano Pisapia, the leader who best synbolizes the current phase – resist the temptation to frame collaboration as a campaign, citizens as voters, rational conversation as hidden persuasion. Yielding to it would mean shooting themselves in the foot, and wasting an opportunity that the country cannot afford to miss.

Sulla campagna che ha portato Giuliano Pisapia alla carica di sindaco di Milano è stato già scritto molto; e comincia a circolare qualche analisi anche sul ruolo giocato dai media sociali, e in particolare da Twitter con i casi #morattiquotes e #sucate. Non c’è dubbio che la campagna elettorale della squadra Pisapia-Boeri sia stata fortemente collaborativa (gli utenti che hanno usato l’hashtag #morattiquotes sono stati oltre quarantamila); e non c’è dubbio nemmeno sul fatto che Pisapia abbia capito e accettato il gioco, facendo un passo indietro e lasciando che fossero i suoi simpatizzanti a raccontarlo, con le parole e con i media che preferivano. Lascio ad altri, più esperti di me in materia, il giudizio su come l’esperienza di Milano modificherà le campagne elettorali del futuro.Much has been written on the campaign that led Giuliano Pisapia to being elected mayor of Milan. Analysis on the role of social media, Twitter in particular with the #morattiquotes and #sucate is begining to circulate. There is no doubt that the Pisapia-Boeri campaign was very collaborative (more than forty thousand users tweeted with the #morattiquotes hashtag); and that Pisapia himself played ball, taking a step back and letting his supporters do the heavy lifting of voicing for him, in the way and on the media they liked. I am not qualified to comment on how this campaign will change political communication in italy.

I do want to highlight that, as the campaign drew to a close and victory was declared, something unexpected happens: the loose collaboration between Pisapia the candidate and his supporters did not end with it. The first message that Pisapia the mayor delivered to the city was “Don’t leave me alone”, and his words rang sincere; a few hours later, to a journalist asking him how he would deal with the inevitable pressure of interest groups he serenely replied “There are hundreds of thousands of Milanese out there that are not going to let me sell out” (video, at 8′ 50″). Message received, loud and clear: Pisapia believes in the wisdom of “his” crowd. In this sense, he is a real wiki leader.

As the mayor seems to want to create, within his administration, some space that citizens can help fill with content, like a Wikipedia page, his supporters are giving signs that they want to play along. On Friday June 3rd, just four days after the election, a new hashtag spread over Italian-language Twitter, #pisapiasentilamia (Pisapia, hear my voice). The light-hearted tone recalls the campaign, but the content is serious and quite concrete. Citizens share their needs, priorities and dreams for Milan in the coming years: bikesharing in the suburbs, longer service hours for the metro, a single card to access every museum in town. Some promise to think about it in depth; others volunteer to work with the new administration for free. As is often the case, the willingness to help of the connected citizenry took by surprise commentators not accustomed to the Internet social dynamics.

Granted, the 140 characters of Twitter are hardly suited to designing policy; it is unlikely that they will much further than a book of dreams. But a threshold has been stepped over: some of the mayor’s supporters are migrating from (partisan) cyberactivism to (nonpartisan) collaboration with a city institution. This is the same collaboration that I tried to account for in my book; I think it arises fairly naturally as a feature of civility in the 21st century. In this new space it will be natural for people that did not vote for Pisapia to participate, and they will be welcome. If the new Milan administration plays its cards right, it could give rise to a world class participation experience, in which citizens not only contribute to policy design, but to policy delivery as well. I recommend it goes for it: wiki government is very efficient, and not nearly as disruptive as it sounds. I am confident that the Milanese — not just those on Twitter, either — would play ball like there’s no tomorrow.

UPDATE: a few hours after this post went online Pisapia tweeted that he is reading all #pisapiasentilamia suggestions and grateful to everyone putting them out. That’s very good angling: he is not committing to act on the basis on those suggestions (indeed he could not do so), but simply to read them and take them into consideration. In a separate tweet he thanked me for the post. Meanwhile a #pisapiasentilamia showed up on Facebook.

My students at the Design for Social Business Master made me very proud last week with a clever reverse engineering of a (social) business plan based on nothing more than a set of slides intended as a brief for the graphic design of a website – and a whole lot of online investigation. The business plan in question is that of Bienestar, a health care initiative in the region of Caldas (Colombia) just being rolled out by the provincial authority and Grameen Creative Lab. This is supposed to be the focus of a forthcoming field visit of the students to Colombia; apparently Bienestar has no business plan (we asked), and the brief was all we had to work with.

With no business planning background at all — save for my own lecture — Alessandra, Barbara, Chiara, Mandy, Oscar, Simona and Tiago showed a remarkable ability to stake the territory. They combed the web for data like minimum salary in rural Colombia; the structure of health care, including recent changes in legislation; and the state of the road networks in the Caldas region, to get a feel for the logistics of traveling to Villa Maria to get treated. All of these data were used to generate a critical appraisal of the business plan as they reconstructed it from the brief. This appraisal was put in a document that visualizes cleverly GCL’s approach and the students’ own questions and critique. Besides being clever in itself, this document was written by a very advanced process of online collaboration; the students made the most of my lecture about it, and have become power users of the new Google Docs (it now embeds very cool features from Google Wave — and man, do they use them all).

Armed with that, we figured out what the economic engine that makes Bienestar sustainable is: treatment of new patients, that now are completely outside the system; moreover, these patients have to be fundamentally healthy, like pregnant women and children — it can’t work with patients with chronic diseaes. Now the students are putting figures to that, and have thus found a new mission: when they go to Colombia, they can be the business planning experts of Bienestar. They are already way ahead of GCL on this project!

If you are interested in social business and social innovation, I would really encourage to check out the course’s blog, and maybe drop a comment to say hello: they are really cool people, well worth knowing, and very friendly. The blog is in English, but they are a pretty international crowd and welcome comments in Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, Arabic and Italian as well.

As I assimilate this extrordinary experience, I will share interesting ideas, assuming I can think of any. As a first approximation, I can already say I find Nina Simon’s conclusions (after an experiment different from Wikicrazia in many ways, but with a similar spirit) roughly consistent with my own.

Riccardo Apreda, Gualtiero Fantoni, Paolo Valleri e i ragazzi del Leaning Lab di Pisa (anche spiritosi, come si capisce dal nome che gioca con il concetto di Living Lab) hanno sviluppato IPR Tracker: un software che, in un processo collaborativo di ricerca della soluzione ad un problema, ripartisce la paternità della soluzione stessa tra i partecipanti.

Immaginate che un committente – diciamo un’azienda – ponga un problema – diciamo “come fare a pulire una superficie”. I partecipanti provano a dare risposte interagendo attraverso un forum, e propongono varie possibilità, collaborando a svilupparle. Alla fine il committente sceglie una soluzione che trova convincente, e la retribuisce. Come dividere il compenso tra i partecipanti? Qui interviene IPR Tracker. Un parser analizza il testo e lo disambigua; un motore semantico accorpa sinonimi, antonimi etc. e identifica i lemmi di cui sono composti i post; infine, i lemmi presenti nella soluzione vengono “tracciati” nei post precedenti fino alla prima volta in cui sono comparsi. Alla fine, il programma propone una suddivisione della paternità della soluzione sulla base di chi ha fornito gli elementi che compaiono nella soluzione, e quando.

Lo trovo molto ingegnoso, e mi piacerebbe organizzare un test drive con la community di Kublai (gennaio?). Non posso postarvi il paper qui (non è Creative Commons), ma potete chiederlo agli autori.

Finalmente su Vimeo la versione completa di Us Now, il film di Ivo Gormley sulla collaborazione di massa mediata da internet. L’avevo visto in anteprima in marzo a Public Services 2.0, e ve lo stra- straconsiglio. Tra l’altro, vi compare (più volte) Clay Shirky in tutto il suo splendore.

(hat tip: Liz Azyan)

Us Now from Banyak Films on Vimeo.