For a few years now I have been participating in various social networks. But I never abandoned blogs, neither as a blogger nor as a reader, and I have no intention to do so. After seven hundred posts and two thousand comments, I am very grateful to this blog: it put me in touch with people and ideas that have become important in my development (on top of everything else, I owe it my present job). Blogging helps me organize my thinking, and not to get lost while moving along a trajectory which is not all that linear.

I am also grateful to other people’s blogs. Over the years, my preferred reads have changed almost completely, as both my interests and those of my once-favorite bloggers shifted; but I continue to enjoy the relationship I maintain with the bloggers I do follow, certainly intellectual but strangely intimate. Long-haul, sustained engagement with the thinking of a bunch of smart individuals, seems to help me develop my own. So, I am dedicating this post to the second generation of my blogroll, the blogs I am reading and commenting now, in the spirit of 2004 and of the brief golden age of blogging.

As far as Internet-enabled public policies and open government I am still reading David Osimo. David is based in Brussels, so he has a usefully European perspective, though in the past year he has been writing less than previously. A few months ago Beth Noveck came back online, after a long pause from blogging due to her responsibilities with Open Government at the White House. I hope she keeps it going, it is a really important contribution.

Thanks to Dave Kusek and Francesco D’Amato I can keep the economics of mucis, an old interest of mine, in the radar. The former, America, teaches at Berklee and has a broad overview on market trends; the latter, Italian, teaches in Rome and has become a leading expert of crowdfunding for music projects. I also read a couple of Italian technology blogs.

I am also a faithful reader of two blogs that are not clearly specialized, but are well written and get me to engage with unusual trains of thought. One is that of the British science fiction writer Charles Stross: smart, imaginative and wittily speculative as trhe best science fiction can be. The other one was started relatively recently by Italian economist Tito Bianchi, a sort of Tristram Shandy of economics that moves nimbly from topic to topic in an engaging way. Finally, if you use Google Reader, I suggest you follow engineer and troublemaker Costantino Bongiorno: He is too shy to keep his own blog but he is doing an excellent job of filtering and sharing blogs about hardware hacking, Arduino and related topics.

What about you? Do you have any blog to recommend?

I just got back from presenting my book on Wikicracy at PDF Europe. PDF Europe is the spinoff of Personal Democracy Forum, a conference on how the Internet and communication technology in general can improve democracy (politics) and government (policy). The original PDF takes place in New York City and it started in
2004; its European spinoff is in Barcelona and started in 2009. I had the honor to be enlisted as a speaker in both PDF Europe editions; I think I can claim to know it well.

PDF Europe is a veritable child of the Internet culture of sharing knowledge and creating community. Like its parent conference, it was created by American entrepreneur Andrew Rasiej, an early adopter of the Internet who has enough traction to get on board the most innovative and influential thinkers around: Clay Shirky, danah boyd, Howard Rheingold, among others — for free. As soon as the New York conference was starting to get established, Andrew and his partner Micah Sifry created an European spinoff, and started all over again.

Internet tech conferences are legion on this side of the Atlantic, but PDF Europe is a pretty unique place. Firstly, it is not dominated by business: tech corporations are there (Google is an important sponsor), but they take care not to upstage the activists and public servants that constitute the backbone of the PDF community. You don’t hear much about branding or marketing: this year’s hit was the story of how Croatian blogger Marko Rakar exposed electoral fraud in his country with a dataset on a couple of CDs, a hard look at raw data and his blog (he even got arrested for it). Last year, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange told us how he does not feel he his in physical danger in Europe – in Africa, it’s another story. With all due respect, I am interested in these uses of the internet a lot more than in branding and marketing.

Secondly, PDF Europe embodies what I love best in American culture. The American presence is much stronger than in most European Internet-tech events. It is pretty amazing, when you think of it: here’s a bunch of Americans that are working very hard for free or for cheap (I’ll bet you that Andrew actually loses money so far) to give us Europeans a common platform to talk about e-democracy and e-government. They are like, come on, guys! You can and should create a continent wide movement for better democracy and better government. Here, we can help you, lets figure it out. It feels as American as apple pie: idealism, plus can-do attitude, plus a real sense of kinship with the Old Continent. It feels like the stories of long lost “uncles from America”, who suddenly show up – bearing gifts. And it makes me feel ashamed of how embedded in our petty differences Europeans sometimes can be.

So, whether you are an activist or a public servant, if you are trying to improve your democracy with the Internet I really recommend you head for the next PDF and check these guys out. They really believe in us. The least we could do is to believe in ourselves a little, too.

In 2010 I’ll release a book on user generated policies. I am passionate about this subject: I think that the web 2.0 wind blowing on public authorities is a great chance to bring about a profound change in the way citizens concern themselves about public policies, making it more informed, effective, and even fun.

The book is called Wikicrazia – Government at the time of the Internet: understanding it, designing it, participating as a leader, and will be released on September 15th by Navarra Editore. It aims at reporting from the frontier of the subject (certainly I put the best of my knowledge into it), dealing with complex issues while staying reader-friendly and engaging. I worked on it for a year, and have now gotten to a draft we think is good enough for printing.

But we are not going to print it just yet. We are going to do something different: this is a book on collaboration on the Internet, and it makes sense to open it to collaboration on the Internet. No one is smarter than everyone, least of all I. So I’d ask you, if you have a little time to spare and you are intrigued, to help me write a final, improved version, the one that will get printed. You stand to gain my everlasting gratitude and a public recognition of your work on the book. To take part, or just to have a look at the draft, start here.

As I had noted before, Public Services 2.0 left a small legacy: a group of people – just a couple of dozens, from all over the planet, rallied around David Osimo and Paul Johnston. This group has the knowledge and the stamina to try and bring the voice of the Net People in the European policy debate on e-government. As a pun, we call ourselves “the rowing committee”: there’s no helmsman, the harder you row the more respect you earn.

So, we started a collaborative process (with quite a few steps, and some very healthy mistakes), coordinating on a mailing list, writing a joint blog, and using other tools for collaborative editing. This way we produced a draft declaration, which is now receiving a last round of very helpful comments (people from my favourite e-gov projects, from Farmsubsidy to Patientopinion, are right at the forefront) before settling down in its final form.

We asked the European Commission that our declaration is presented at the Malmö ministerial conference, alongside the declaration of European ministers responsible for e-government. Please note that no one offered us a place: we claimed it. And the Commission – fair play to them – accepted; so next month in Malmö our small global tribe will establish a small precedent. This is (small scale) innovation, too.

There’s still room to help out. Go here, read and comment, help us spread the word, and walk with us the road to Malmö.

UPD October 13th – Today is the last day to comment the open declaration. Tomorrow we go live with the final version and on to the endorsement phase.

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.

Sono assolutamente affascinato da evasori.info, un’operazione geniale fin nell’URL. Se il ristorante non ti fa lo scontrino, o il dentista ti chiede i contanti, puoi segnalare l’evasione qui. La segnalazione rimane anonima sia per chi la fa che per l’evasore, ma contribuisce a un grande progetto: una mappa crowdsourced dell’evasione fiscale del Belpaese. E gli italiani collaborano, e come: finora siamo a 11 milioni di euro evasi segnalati e georeferenziati.

Questa cosa, secondo me, è squisitamente italiana. Pensateci un attimo: gli inglesi fanno Fixmystreet (segnalazioni alle autorità locali di necessità di interventi di manutenzione) o Patientopinion (cittadini che parlano della loro esperienza di pazienti del servizio sanitario nazionale). In queste iniziative il cittadino si rivolge  alle amministrazioni pubbliche perché intervengano per migliorare i servizi pubblici; ed esse, infatti, le finanziano. Evasori.info non sembra rivolgersi a nessuno in particolare, sembra una bravata alla Amici miei (“Costruiamo insieme una mappa di questo fenomeno sociale!” dice il claim del sito). E’ come se non ci fosse nessuno, là fuori, ad ascoltare. Le iniziative britanniche, insomma, sono pezzi di governo, o almeno di governance; evasori.info, invece, è un geniale, italianissimo sberleffo, e come tale rischia di non lasciare tracce, di non avere impatto.

Come fare e-government 2.0 (government di qualunque tipo) in un paese caratterizzato da scarso senso civico e sfiducia nelle istituzioni? Ne parleremo con David, mercoledì 6 maggio. Nel frattempo, segnalate, mi raccomando. Qualcosa resterà.

(Hat tip: David Osimo Linnea)

Su consiglio dello steering committee di Kublai, ho deciso di partecipare al Barcamp Innovatori PA, che si tiene a Roma ed è collegato con il Forum PA.

Gigi Cogo ha pensato di chiedere agli iscritti dei video sulle loro aspettative e sui loro interessi nel partecipare al Barcamp. Sembra un gioco innocente, ma come sempre il diavolo è nei dettagli: il successo di Public Services 2.0 è stato nel centrare esattamente il posizionamento tra alterità culturale (la cultura hacker è assai lontana da quella degli eurocrats bruxellesi) e disponibilità al dialogo. La commissione europea ha capito tutto: cioè che “noi” siamo diversi da “loro”, che questa diversità comprende la padronanza di concetti e strumenti per “loro” interessanti, che “noi” non siamo in alcun modo subalterni a “loro”, ma che siamo apertissimi al dialogo. Il risultato è stato una giornata utilissima, in cui non ci sono state autocensure di sorta ma in cui il clima era assai costruttivo. E quindi funzionari very senior hanno partecipato e preso appunti.

Provo a dare un piccolo contributo al posizionamento culturale di Innovatori PA. Visto che il versante del dialogo è ben presidiato (il ministro Brunetta è stato invitato sia da Gigi che da Nicola), mi sono orientato sull’alterità culturale. Mi è venuto fuori questo video, il mio primo approccio a quello che i miei amici americani chiamano con affetto “inspirational bull%#it”

Public Services 2.0 turned out to be really exciting. Of course I knew most of the projects out there, but it was good to get to meet the people behind them in person and to get their vision behind the projects themselves.

Regularities surfaced. For example, participants in policy-oriented social network are regularly more constructive than you would expect (half the messages in PatientOpinion are to say thank you – this on a highly sensitive government area like the National Health Service and with anonymous posting). Also, most projects emphasize collaboration, but there is a great deal of competition as well; Social Innovation Camp is structured as a beauty contest; we have our own Kublai Award; and everybody does metrics, “karma systems” of some sort to acknowledge active membership of the community. Networks seem to have a number of interesting properties that are emergent: they cannot be well understood just by looking at the level of the participating agent. They sometimes seem to have a will of their own: both Savvy Chavvy and Kublai evolved towards uses quite different from the ones they were designed for.

If networks are entities (I suspect they may in fact be complex systems, and that some of the complexity math could apply) and not just ways to connect nodes, then just what are we are doing here? We are deploying services and doing policy, that’s for sure. It’s not macro policy – we don’t manipulate aggregates like public consumption. And not micro policies either – we don’t tweak incentives for individual agents, like tax rates. It’s meso policy; and that’s a pretty unchartered territory so far. In a policy oriented social network, their creators enjoy in their turn somekind of meso status; we do not wield coercion power (macro), but it certainly cannot be said we are just users among users (micro). We work by meso tools: moral suasion, reputation management, expanding islands of rules for  local interactions that generate “flocking behaviour” (like “when you log in, take a minute to say hello and welcome to the newly registered members”) – hell, even parties in Second Life! It’s an entirely new territory, that must be chartered; and the crowd that David, Lee and Dominic gathered in Brussels seems the most likely candidate to do it. So let’s get down to it!

(More related posts, videos etc. here)

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.

Ieri ho deciso di presentarmi al RomeCamp. Le ragioni principali sono due: ho voglia di “toccare base” con la scena barcampica e bloggante italiana, dalla quale manco da un bel po’ per ragioni varie di tour, convegni e altro; e ha preso forma “dal basso” un incontro di Kublai, visto che saranno presenti diverse persone del mio gruppo di lavoro (tra l’altro uomini delle istituzioni, che non hanno mai partecipato a un Barcamp) e vari membri della community kublaiana. Sono molto curioso, per esempio, di incontrare in presenza i ragazzi di Critical City (faranno anche una presentazione), un progetto su cui in Kublai si sta lavorando molto.

Farò una presentazione anch’io, venerdì pomeriggio (slides qui sotto). La mia idea per la società del futuro è il crowdsourcing dell’azione di governo del territorio (ambiziosetto, me ne rendo conto): immagino un mondo di politiche user-generated, in cui le immense risorse di intelligenza e conoscenza del territorio incorporate nelle testolinedi noi tutti vengano mobilitate da strumenti 2.0 e sorrette da una solida etica hacker (quest’ultimo punto è stato espresso benissimo da David, che purtroppo al RomeCamp non ci sarà). Nel suo microscopico, Kublai è – o almeno vorrebbe essere – proprio questa cosa qui. Ma il vero punto forte della mia presentazione sarà la distribuzione delle ultime spillette.;-)