Tag Archives: Kublai

The Kublai files: imbrigliare l’inaspettato

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David Osimo mi ha chiesto un contributo per il numero dell’European Journal of E-Practice da lui editato, significativamente intitolato “E-government 2.0: hype, hope or reality?”. Ho unito le forze a quelle di Tito Bianchi, e insieme abbiamo prodotto un articolo che fa il punto di due anni di Kublai. Il succo è: le logiche web 2.0 applicate alle politiche pubbliche sembrano funzionare. Ma sono molto, molto lontane dalla cultura amministrativa dominante, che è basata ancora sull’idea weberiana di procedure impersonali, sottoposte a controlli tesi a verificarne la correttezza formale più che i risultati. Se fa 2.0, lo Stato deve presidiare l’interesse pubblico, ma incoraggiare i cittadini a provare a perseguirlo a modo loro. Il paper completo (in inglese) si chiama “Imbrigliare l’inaspettato” e si può leggere e scaricare qui; qui, invece, l’editoriale di David.

The Kublai files: harnessing the unexpected

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David Osimo has been guest editing an issue of the European Journal of E-Practice bearing the significant title asked me to contribute to the “E-government 2.0: hype, hope or reality?”, and he asked me to contribute to it. I joined forces with Tito Bianchi, and together we produced a paper that summarizes two years of Kublai. The executive summary is this: web 2.0 can be quite a powerful tool fo public policy. But it is very, very much at odds with the prevailing administrative culture, which is still based on Weber’s idea of impersonal procedures, subject to controls that are aimed at verifying formal correctness rather than performance. If it is to go 2.0 at all, the State should guard the public interest while allowing and encouraging people to trythings out their own way. The full paper is called “Harnessing the unexpected” and can be read and downloaded here; David’ editorial is here.

Can social networks undergo phase transitions?

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A few days ago I was giving a lecture to an audience of young creative people. Part of it was devoted to showing them how to use Kublai as a platform for developing their ideas into full-fledged projects. Since I thought the experience of joining Kublai would be more fun if students got early response from the community, I started to Skype people I saw online asking them to drop by and say hello to the newcomers. A few did; and, as the (about 15 students) started to interact with Kublai, the activity got noticed by a few more kublaians, who decided to drop by as well. < (lang_en>

As the number of people using Kublai simultaneously got in the 15-20 range, I got the almost physical feeling of the experience changing dramatically. Any action taken locally (in the classroom) would show up in the recent activity feed, and users across the country would pick up on it. Response was almost instantaneous: as soon as you finished writing something, somebody else had commented on it. It was quite exhilarating, for me and for the students.

I could not help being reminded of phase transitions (in physics that’s the transformation undergone by matter when it changes its state, say from solid to liquid to gas or viceversa). Kublai felt like a glacier: it had been moving in its solid state, pulled down by gravity and shaping the landscape with moraines, but now it was melting, and moving much faster as a result. This raises a fascinating question: is this the same process happening at a higher speed or does the higher speed imply a different process? In the example of the melting glacier the transition from ice to water gives rise a stream, which is most emphatically not the same thing as a faster moraine. My intuition would be that’s the case for Kublai too: specifically, I’m conjecturing that “liquid” Kublai tends to concentrate a higher share of the posts on the most active projects than the “solid” Kublai… but that’s very far from a founded conclusion.

In complexity science, matter at the phase transition threshold exhibits interesting properties and is said to be at the edge of chaos. So Ruggero and I got quite excited, and discussed ways to study this phenomenon through graph maths. Meanwhile, I enlisted some of the most active members of the community in running an experiment of using Kublai as a semi-synchronous environment: it comes down to doing a “project coaching jam” on a set date and time, trying to get 20-30 people to start posting at the same time, and we’ll see how that goes. Will the phase transition take place? Will other people get the same feeling that I did before? I’ll post any progress – if any – on the blog as we go.