Tag Archives: eups20

Genio pontieri

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.

E-government 2.0 as mesolevel policy

maths001

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)