Global problems demand global governance: we have been repeating it for years. And truly, after World War II, international institutions have proliferated and ended up playing important roles in almost every field. It’s not just the United Nations, with their galaxy of agencies, but also the Bretton Woods twin institutions, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank; OECD; OPEC; the World Economic Forum; the structured military alliances like NATO and SEATO; the Club of Madrid; the International Atomic Energy; the WTO and many others. In Europe, this tendency is amplified by the continent’s unification project, and Brussels’s influence on public policies of EU member states has come to be very important. By some calculations, 70% of the activity of the average European country’s parliament consists in signing and stamping directives discussed and decided upon in Brussels and Strasbourg – which would make those parliaments little more than expensive decoration.

This system is extremely efficient. With 736 MEPs (the German Bundestag has 622) and a bureaucracy of only 33,000 employees the European Union runs the world’s largest economy, with 500 million inhabitants (Oxford Economics estimates public sector employees at 2.5 million in the UK in 2009, though the two figures are of course not directly comparable). But such efficiency comes at a price; many Europeans perceive the Union’s institutions as distant, inaccessible, unaccountable – at least to them. The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, is not elected, but appointed by the member states. The European Parliament is elected, but MEPs find it hard to reconcile the day-by-day work in Brussels with the need to stay in touch with their constituency, which tend to be very large. As a result, these institutions feel like they are working in a vacuum. They study official reports from far-away places, but the everyday life of citizens is perceived as some remote radio transmission with a lot of static on top. The combination of isolation and need for high quality information creates a space for lobbying, and, unsurprisingly, lobbying ensues. In the European political jargon, this problem is called democratic deficit.

The social Internet, I believe, has the potential to break the barrier separating the women and men working for international institutions from citizens. Social filtering allows to entertain massive-scale conversation without too many information overload problems. My past experience with Kublai showed that a central administration can open a direct dialogue with individuals in peripheral territories, leapfrogging all the local administrative levels, and that such disintermediated discussion is an very effective learning tool for the institutions that engage in it. My team and I are trying to enact similar tactics at the European scale with Edgeryders. Individual elected and appointed officials are exploring this space in a more agile way than large organizations can: Dutch MEP Marietje Schaake and Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes are notable examples.

International institutions are interested. Tomorrow (November 29th 2011) the European Parliament – led by its vice president, Gianni Pittella – hosts a discussion on this issue, with a lively program: I have the honor of presenting Edgeryders. On December 9th I will hold a webinar with United Nations Development Programme/Eastern Europe and Central Asia. It is a promising path: I hope it takes us far, because we are are in dire need of reinforcing supranational governance with democratic legitimacy.

The European Commission manages a lot of money. Just regional development projects are allocated a little less than 350 billion euro over the 2007-2013 period; research is allocated another 50 billion, and on it goes. Many critics complain that these resources end up funding mainly “the usual suspects”: universities, large corporations, public authorities, trade unions. These players can deal with the bureaucratic complexities of mounting a European project (for example, build a consortium with at least X partners in Y countries, one of which should be a new member State to increase chances of being funded); but they are not necessarily the most effective at using the money to everyone’s advantage. On the contrary, large organizations tend to have large overheads, a lot of middle management as opposed to line-of-fire staff, low propensity to risk.

Small and micro enterprises, young entrepreneurs, social innovators, creative businesses – often the most interesting players, who can contribute substantially to regional development, research and many more things beside, are left out of the game. As a rule they get demoralized by the formalistic, bureaucratic culture of these processes, and they don’t even bother to bid for funding; when they do bid, they almost always lose. All this has been clear for a long time; as of lately these people have been making themselves heard in a an unusually clear way, and Europe is starting to react. The video above, produced by my friends at CriticalCity Upload, proves the point: it has been shown in a plenary session at the Digital Agenda Assembly, as 1,200 people – including Commissioner Neelie Kroes – watched. Attendees reported the audience responded with thunderous applause.

With this problem in mind, the Department of Regional Affairs at the Prime Minister’s Office is building a project called Opera, a tool to build European project in a peer-to-peer modality (an open community will launch in September). One of its most fascinating features is the possibility to search for possible partners, and to comment and rate their performance. The community spots reliable, fast, collaborative partners and makes it easier to find them — and this will help the emergence of better partnerships and better projects, increasing the efficiency of that funding. The Opera project is explicitly inspired from Kublai, a project I helped launch in 2008 and directed until earlier this year. The Opera team promanates from Studiare Sviluppo, an in-house company of Italy’s central administration that also worked on Kublai. I am happy and proud that the work done by me and my tea, has helped inspire other Central administrations.

Kublai and Opera make use of Web.20 to get to a fascinating result: making public policies more inclusive and more efficient at the same time. Enhanced inclusivity stems from opening the door wide open to get on new agents that are fast and innovative; and these, cutting a slice of the pie for themselves, increase overall efficiency (the efficiency gain is impressive: CriticalCity Upload – incubated in Kublai – has a cost per user reached that is one thirtieth of European e-participation projects). It is not so surprising, because public policies work through people, and chaning the players is a great way to change the game. It remains to be seen whether policy innovators will manage to protect iniatives like Opera from the inevitable backlash of incumbents, that have so far gotten a very confortable deal under the present system. For all the talk of Creative Destruction, not everybody likes creative destrucion.

In the last year, as I took part in a Council of Europe workgroup that tries to make sense of some emergent phenomena in the economy, I got the idea that social innovation is really, really important. Certainly important enough to curve the mental space I inhabit: whatever I do I seem get more and more entangled into it. The latest news – though not the last, I have a feeling – is that the Young Foundation, a British think tank close to the European Commission’s President Barroso and the single most active organization on the social innovation front, has enrolled me for the advisory board of the new Social Innovation Initiative for Europe. The projects’s objective is to create a social innovation community hub that, among other things, will provide input into the design of a new European social innovation fund.

European funds are large scale financial instruments for public policy. They are measured in hundreds of millions of euro, if not billions. Their allocation criteria among and within member states are the object of thorough negotiations, led by the highest ranking European public officials. The Commission does not design new funds every day: clearly, someone at the top thinks this is a very important matter.

From my vantage point as a Council of Europe advisor it is not hard to figure out what’s going on. The representative of the States in our group are worried silly: the welfare state, keystone of the European social model and staple ingredient of the Old Continent’s humanized version of capitalism, is crumbling before an irreversible fiscal crisis. No one believes the current level of public service provision is defensible within the current model. And no, it can’t be put down to ineffective management. We are not talking about Italy or Greece here: the most worried people I talked to come from advanced welfare countries like Austria or Norway, in which the public would never accept a retreat from the current service level – a retreat that, nevertheless, is coming.

Interestingly, though, no one is talking about privatization. We learned a lesson in the 80s, and that is that privatized public services are not necessarily any cheaper than those directly provided by the State. There are many reasons for this, and an important one is that the private for-profit sector wants to, well, make a profit. And that means high margins: if they are not there, private business is simply not interested. Here’s where social innovators gets to be given a chance; their blend of social economy (i.e. weak orientation to profit) and disruptive innovation borrowed from their Silicon Valley brethren is the only candidate for providing solution to turn public services around the way Wikipedia did with encyclopedia writing, defending the level of service while driving costs way down.

It does not take a genius to figure out where this is going. It leads to public services that are redesigned from the ground up, and that will look nothing like what we are used to. School? YouTube videos (Khan Academy style) instead of teachers in classrooms. Health care? Online fora instead of queing up at your local doctor for most less serious conditions. University? A badge system for informal learning on the open web instead of degrees (the Mozilla Foundation is working on it already). Policy design? Wikicracies instead of professional weberian bureaucracies. It’s safe to predict that the transition to such a scenario will be problematic, and it will imply very many people who are working in the public sector becoming — to put it bluntly — completely useless, because we can’t use what they can do and they can’t do what we need done.

The fund that the European Commission is designing can address at best half the problem; enabling social innovators to rethink radically public services. The other half is to make sure that the social contract holds, and that scared, enraged Europeans do not take to the street to set fire to cars, ATMs or their slightly different-looking neighbours. For this we need a high level political leadership: the present system was conceived by giants like Bismarck (the pension system) and Lord Beveridge (modern welfare). Let’s hope we find comparably enlightened leaders for the current phase.

Kublai, the Italian central government’s first (or at least one of the first) government 2.0 project, has quickly gained a certain international visibility. After the two showcases with the European Commission (EUPS20 and Wikicrats) and the French exchange of ideas, last week it was the World Bank, following up on an interview I had given to the NYC-based blog Betterverse

As it becomes clear that the Internet is great at producing public goods, the conversation on e-government 2.0 goes global. Ideas circulate smoothly among us Europeans (the EUPS20 group, or Headshift, recently acquired by an American company), Americans (Sunlight Foundation) and Asians (Futuregov), and it seems there is a good deal of mutual trust out there. Maybe there is hope.

On November 19-20, 2009, the EU ministerial conference will define the main priorities of e-government in the next three years.

David Osimo, whom I hold in high esteem, is coordinating an effort to bring to Malmö the voice of citizens 2.0. I think he has the traction to do that, especially since his Public Services 2.0 – with a highly successful workshop held in March in Brussels – showed the European Commission that there is a new generation of state-of-the art European e-gov projects, and that the people who run them are connected in a scene. As I’m writing this and only for a few more days – a very international group of people who care about this issue are collaborating in writing a European civic hackers manifesto. If you care too, join us: just go here and get busy.

I may be too optimistic, but I see some signals that a new kind of conversation is opening between (some) public administrations and (some) citizens. Here they are:

1. The OECD workshop I took part in last week, in London. We talked of co-design and co-delivery in public services, public administrations and citizens together; and we went about it in a free flowing, informal style, basing the discussion on detailed case studies. Interestingly, it was not a one-off, but part of a series (Innovative Delivery Workshop Series), so it seems that the OECD has some intention of carrying this stuff forwards.

2. The Public Services 2.0 group is launching today a collective brainstorming that should lead to an open declaration to present to the EU ministerial conference on the European IT strategy (Målmo, November 2009)

3. The European Commission participates an a typical hacker conference like Reboot, and it chooses it as the venue for a workshop on how to help the new European Parliament to make wise decisions on technology policy.

It is not realistic to expect miracle solutions from all this; they are very small initiatives. But they are small wise moves, and they are way better than the current balkanisation of the debate (check out this video). in which the Hon. Gabriella Carlucci (former TV showgirl, presently vice president of the Italian parliamentary commission on childhood) tells dissenting blogger Alessandro Gilioli that she wishes his son would be stalked by a pedophile while on Facebook. Check it out, and then tell me we don’t need to let all sides talk, openly and respectfully.

In un post molto efficace – e che vince il premio per il miglior titolo: Hacking the European Commission – David tira le somme di Public Services 2.0, e si dichiara soddisfatto. Il workshop era proprio giusto: autogestito, ma non caotico; franco e diretto, ma non gratuitamente polemico; ad alta intensità di tecnologia, ma non esoterico. Di conseguenza, molti funzionari di rango elevato della Commissione ne hanno percepito la novità, ma senza per questo considerarlo strampalato o minaccioso.

David, Lee, Dominic e Justin hanno costruito un ponte tra la Commissione e il mondo del web 2.0. A questo risultato abbiamo contribuito tutti noi, ma un merito particolare va attribuito a David, che ha passato anni a Bruxelles, ha lavorato per la Commissione stessa e ne conosce bene linguaggi e logiche. Proprio questa conoscenza gli ha permesso di mettere in piedi un formato così efficace. Nessuno di noi ne sarebbe stato capace.

Ci vogliono gli innovatori, quelli che gli americani chiamano trailblazers. Ma in fondo non ce ne vogliono poi così tanti: la nostra capacità di migliorarci in quanto società non sembra limitata tanto dalla capacità di produrre innovazione, quanto da quella di assorbirla e metterla a sistema. Le persone come David, che si impegnano per tradurre le cose, portandone il significato profondo ad attraversare i linguaggi, le pratiche, i sistemi di pensiero: queste persone sono importanti perché costruiscono ponti, allargano strettoie, sbloccano ingorghi e permettono alle idee di diffondersi sempre più lontano.

E a proposito di costruire ponti, è stata molto bella l’esperienza dell’endorsement istituzionale di Kublai. Ne racconterò presto.

L’ultimo numero di Nòva dedica la copertina all’innovazione digitale nella gestione pubblica. Il titolo è accompagnato da un articolo di David Weinberger nel quale si sostiene che il web 2.0 può avere un importante impatto nel progettare (non solo nel fare funzionare) le politiche pubbliche. Nel paginone centrale Di Corinto ribadisce che il web 2.0 “funziona bene” e che il settore pubblico deve applicarlo all’e-government. Il tutto è accompagnato da una lunga spiegazione del piano e-gov 2012 del ministro Brunetta (che però si dota di obiettivi che, pur condivisibili, sono in genere assolutamente 1.0, tipo i certificati giudiziari online) e da alcuni esempi di e-government molto noti.

Apprezzo molto l’interesse di Nòva per questo tema, al quale ho intenzione di provare a dare un piccolo contributo. Inseguendo il tema assai diverso della creatività, mi sono trovato anch’io a fare parte della (ancora ristretta) schiera dei project managers di iniziative di e-gov 2.0 (la mia, naturalmente, è Kublai, preceduta dall’esperienza ibrida di Visioni Urbane). Per ora preparo le valigie per Bruxelles, dove si terrà il primo incontro delle esperienze europee web 2.0 nei servizi pubblici, organizzato da Tech4i2, Headshift, FutureGov e il portale e-practice della Commissione Europea. L’anima dell’iniziativa è David Osimo, il cui approccio è davvero vivificante:

This gap cannot be filled by repeating the same PRESENTATIONS ON WHAT CAN BE DONE with web 2.0. It is high time to DEMONSTRATE WHAT IS DONE ALREADY and to learn from experience.

Mi aspetto molto da questa conferenza, per quanto ne so la prima del suo genere: non solo per la qualità delle iniziative rappresentate (tra cui mypatientopinion, farmsubsidy.org etc, cioè le cose che sono partite per prime e di cui tutti parlano) ma anche perché so che David presidierà il formato, privilegiando la discussione e evitando le solite passerelle. Gli organizzatori considerano Kublai una policy, per cui il mio intervento avrà luogo nel pomeriggio. Si sta formando un “torpedone Kublai”, per cui se vi interessa venire datemi un cenno.

Visto che Monica mi tira in ballo (chiamandomi simpaticamente “Yamato”!) provo a partecipare a questa catena che riguarda Second Life. Si tratta di dire otto cose della propria seconda vita e di chiedere a otto bloggers di fare lo stesso. Ecco, dunque:

1. Tutti i residenti più anziani hanno letto “Snow Crash” di Neal Stephenson e vedono SL come la realizzazione del metaverso descritto in quel libro. Il Black Sun, il locale più figo del metaverso, ha ispirato un numero impressionante di iniziative in SL, soprattutto nei primi tempi. In generale, si vede a occhio l’impatto culturale del cyberpunk, anche se oggi molto meno che in passato.
2. SL è un luogo dove la nobile arte della conversazione è tenuta in somma considerazione. Una persona distinta in SL si riconosce non tanto dall’aspetto fisico dell’avatar (benché i truzzi si riconoscano al volo), ma dall’eleganza del digitare, dal chiamarti per nome, dall’usare le abbreviazioni (tipo “brb” per “be right back”, che vuol dire “scusate, torno subito”, o “Mr V” per “Mr Volare”, che sono poi io) solo quando hai un minimo di confidenza e non da subito.
3. Per qualche motivo, mi è venuto naturale editare il mio avatar in modo da assomigliarmi abbastanza, difetti compresi. Non credevo di essere così affezionato alla mia carcassa!
4. Molti veterani di SL preferiscono comunicare digitando testo che parlando al microfono.
5. Se usi la chat voce procurati un buon microfono, o renderai agli altri abbastanza sgradevole parlare con te (“la SLetiquette di Mr. Volare”).
6. La mia migliore amica in SL è stata per vari mesi una che faceva la prostituta (ma nella vita reale fa la contabile). In realtà usava SL per procacciarsi clienti, poi passava su Skype per la prestazione (questo era prima che i ragazzi di Linden Labs introducessero la chat voce). Si faceva pagare in Linden dollars, il che lascia pensare che il suo movente fosse più il divertimento che il lucro. Non sono mai riuscito ad appassionarmi al genere. Mi hanno assicurato che mi perdo molto.
7. Per me SL ha acquistato un senso forte quando ho cominciato a pensare di usarla per lavoro anziché come luogo di cazzeggio. Io faccio il consulente e il musicista; viaggio molto, e lo faccio essenzialmente per parlare con gente fisicamente lontana (riunioni , seminari, interviste ecc.). Se si riescono a usare ambienti SL come metafora efficace di questi ambienti sociali RL, si potrebbero realizzare enormi guadagni di efficienza (meno tempo perso in viaggio), impatto ambientale (meno auto, aerei, treni…) e opportunità (possiamo interagire con gente che in RL ci è difficile incontrare). Per questo motivo sto facendo da alpha user a unAcademy (ne ho parlato qui).
8. Secondo me, SL come idea è vincente. SL come piattaforma, invece, mi sembra abbia un sacco di problemi: poco intuitiva, lenta, farraginosa (non so neanch’io quanti messaggi tipo “wow, latency is really bad tonight” ho letto in quindici mesi). In più, anche se ultimamente Linden ha aperto il codice sorgente del client, la loro grid è ancora proprietaria, e quindi nessuno può metterci le mani per migliorarla. La butto lì: perché non proponiamo alla Commissione europea di lanciare un progetto di una piattaforma sociale 3D tipo SL ma open source? I ragazzi di IBM, Nokia e le altre imprese tutte “social” e “open innovation” e “wikinomics” , così vicine alla Commissione, sarebbero felici di dare un mano, ci scommetto. E anche noi italiani di SL.

Rilancio la palla a:
David Orban
Alberto D’Ottavi
I Maestrini
Leeander
Diego Bianchi
Clarita
Elena
Francesco D’Amato

(L’idea originale è di Mario Gerosa)