Sorry, this post in Italian only. I review the medium term fallout from a generative regional policy I worked on in 2007-2009, wearing a Ministry of Economic development hat. The policy in question seems to have spawned quite a lot of interesting stuff. My tentative conclusion is that the ingredients of this success have very little to do with the amount of funding allocated, and are basically a function of an initial investment of attention for details, time, and freedom to explore alternative paths. Feel free to use automated translation if you are interested, and to get in touch with me if you want to learn more.

Era il 2007 quando ho iniziato a lavorare a Visioni Urbane, un progetto della Regione Basilicata che si proponeva di realizzare alcuni spazi per la cultura. Nel gruppo di lavoro rappresentavo il Ministero dello sviluppo economico; il mio compito era di spingere il progetto nella direzione di investire molto sulle competenze creative e imprenditoriali invece che nella costruzione di edifici.

I risultati di Visioni Urbane hanno superato le migliori previsioni. Il progetto – almeno per ora – ha avuto successo: la scena creativa lucana, in precedenza divisa da una cultura di sospetto reciproco, ha collaborato con generosità e competenza con la Regione per progettare una rete di nuovi centri per la cultura. Quattro di questi sono stati anche realizzati, non costruendo nuovi edifici ma recuperando edifici pubblici esistenti ma in decadenza e non utilizzati (in questo modo, circa 3 milioni di euro di nuovi investimenti in mattoni hanno messo a valore 10 milioni di euro di investimenti pubblici già effettuati), mentre un quinto, a causa di problemi strutturali insanabili, ha dovuto essere demolito ed è attualmente in corso di ricostruzione. La gestione di tutti e quattro i centri completati è stata messa a bando; in tre casi è già stata assegnata, mentre il quarto bando scade a gennaio. Due dei tre bandi già assegnati sono stati vinti da consorzi di associazioni e piccole imprese della comunità di creativi raccolta intorno al progetto.

Questi sono già ottimi risultati. Ma ancora più notevole è il fallout di Visioni Urbane: il piccolo gruppo di funzionari che lo ha condotto, e che risponde direttamente al Presidente della Regione, ha esteso l’approccio del progetto ad altre policies, parzialmente integrate con VU stesso. A quanto ne so io:

• la rete di coordinamento tra i centri immaginata per Visioni Urbane si è evoluta in una fondazione di comunità, partecipata dalle associazioni e le imprese della comunità creativa, da diversi enti locali e dalla Fondazione per il Sud (che funziona da acceleratore, perché raddoppia la dotazione finanziaria raccolta dagli altri soci). La comunità appoggia energicamente questa operazione.
• la linea di apertura a collaborazioni nazionali e internazionali di VU ha attecchito; i bandi per lo startup dei centri saranno aperti anche a soggetti esterni al territorio.
• il gruppo di VU è stato protagonista nel lanciare la candidatura di Matera a capitale europea della cultura nel 2019. La responsabile del progetto e il direttore vengono entrambi dall’esperienza di Visioni Urbane.
• la Basilicata ha costituito una film commission negli ultimi mesi del 2011. La comunità creativa ha chiesto più volte che il metodo molto partecipato di Visioni Urbane venisse applicato anche in quel caso. Non sono sicuro, però, che questo sia effettivamente accaduto.

Visioni Urbane è stato un progetto generativo. Nei primi tempi è stato necessario fare un investimento iniziale di attenzione, tempo e libertà. Attenzione ai dettagli, per imparare a fare fruttare al massimo ogni occasione e ogni euro di denaro pubblico; e tempo e libertà di azione per crescere, esplorare le alternative a disposizione, rimettere in discussione il proprio modo di pensare la policy (ne ho parlato nel mio libro). Questo ha ridotto, inizialmente, l’efficienza amministrativa misurata in velocità di spesa (ci abbiamo messo diversi anni a spendere quattro milioni di euro), ma ha lasciato all’amministrazione nuovi strumenti per analizzare e per fare. In tempi di crisi e di risorse calanti, è un pensiero che mi dà speranza.

The predictable failures of public policies, those immediately obvious to everyone save the decision makers responsible for them, are legion. From the International Monetary Fund’s East Asian structural adjustment recipes to the 40-years-old Messina Strait Bridge project, we all have, at some point, read the proud announcement of some government project and thought “This is never going to work”. People who make these decisions, clearly, think they make perfect sense. How to explain such a large discrepancy? The only thing I can think of is that many public decision makers live in an information bubble which is completely disconnected from the world you and I inhabit. They simply do not have access to some relevant information. If it really is so, then maybe they are not qualified to make policy decision in the first place.

Consider, for example, a City of Milano project called Ambrogio. Here’s how it works: some organizations (district councils, local police) were given handheld devices, and they can use them to report problems with streets and public spaces. The report is filed in the databases of the competent offices, which then fix the problems.

This project has serious flaws.

1. it is technologically flawed. Why incorporate this functionality into a physycal device? It would have been enough to write software for smartphones. This would have enabled anyone with a smartphones to participate. Plus it would not force the poor “sentinel citizens” to carry yet another device, recharge its batteries, update its software etc.
2. it is socially flawed, as it disables self-selection. Only individuals sected top-down by the City can use the system directly: it would have made social sense to enable everyone, leaving each individual to decide if and when to decide. Large numbers in potential participation lead to high impact even when participation rates are low – as is almost always the case. This way, a lot of potential contribution will never happen, and many of those devices will gather dust in some drawer.
3. it has useless features, like the possibility to attach photos. If somebody abandons a bicycle chained to a pole, uploading its picture on the City’s servers adds no significant information and burdens the system with image recognition algorithms. A simple form to report textual information is much easier to process. Additional advantage: since you can fill the form typing on your home computer’s keyboard, you don’t even need a smartphone to participate
4. it lacks transparency. As I write – and the civil’s society requests notwithstanding – Ambrogio has no website; it in unknown how much it costs or what technologies it uses. Given that the technology partner is Telecom Italia, hardly a champion of free software, I don’t expect those technologies to be open. If I am right,
5. it clashes with common sense and with the E-government Code of Laws, which mandate the reuse of technology. The city could have used FixMyStreet, a British open source project that was later adopted in Norway. The Norwegen meshed it with the OpenStreetMap geographic database, itself open source. The code is up and running, it would have been enough to translate the user interface into Italian! Or it could have asked the city of Spinea for its system, and maybe add a couple of thousand euro to add a smartphone app to it.
6. it is expensive – though, given the lack of transparency, we don’t know how much. Media reports have spoken of 400,000 euro.

What strikes me about this series of mistakes is how easy it would have been to avoid them. A Google search would have returned FixMyStreet and Spinea. Just talking to Milano’s own civil society would have led to competent, passionate people who work on technology as a participation enabler, like the Green Geeks and the creators of NetLAMPS. Putting their work front and center of the city’s effort would have reinforced a narrative of empowerment of an active citizenship. But that did not happen: instead, the people responsible for Ambrogio somehow managed to avoid any contact with these informations and the people who might have helped them. Unfortunately this is a common situation.

I have no problem with a mayor not being a technology expert: she might have other expertise, other experience to serve the citizenry with. But when no one, in her circle of advisors, even thinks of doing a Google search or giving some cognoscent citizen a call before spending 400,000 euro of taxpayer money, I find it unacceptable. Something to meditate upon, since elections are coming up.

PS – I am curious about the famed handheld device. Does anybody recognize it?

PPS – The post’s title is a tribute to García Márquez.

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.

Economists are commonly deemed to be more prone to abstract reasoning than to concrete action. There must be a grain of truth in this, because it is quite common to hear economists jokes in Economics Departments. This one, for example:

After a shipwreck, an economist ends up stranded on a desert island. He looks around and sees a wooden box, washed upon the shore by the waves. He opens it: it is full of canned food, nutritious and long-lasting! However, he does not have any tools to open the cans: is he doomed to starve amidst abundance? The economist does not lose his cool, and he tackles the problem the way his profession tas taught to to: “Assume I have a can-opener…”

Many of us yearn for concreteness. This is why I am so happy to fly to Potenza on Friday 4th: in May 2007 the Ministry of Economic Development asked me to help the Basilicata regional administration in designing a policy to build creative spaces, and now the first space (called Cecilia) is here, and the other four will follow in a matter of months. Not only have they been designed chiefly by the local creatives that are going to use them; they also come with clear guidelines for being turned over to private sector– and third sector entities or running them, which the competent local authorities have signed off to; and are integrated with a pretty advanced governance model of the Region’s cultural policy.

The project is called Visioni Urbane. I have dealt with it before. I’m told it’s becoming some sort of flagship project for the regional adiministration; the “Visioni Urbane method” is being demanded on tackling other policies (for example setting up a regional Film Commission), and the administration itself is building upon the partnership with the creatives created within Visioni Urbane to launch Matera’s bid for European Culture Capital 2019. It is no coincidence that the person in charge of Visioni Urbane, Rossella Tarantino, has been appointed as coordinator of that bid; and another Visioni veteran, Paolo Verri, is serving as scientific director.

My book Wikicrazia contains a lot of Visioni Urbane war stories, and the grandopening of Cecilia will include a book presentation. But what I’m really looking forward to is the joy of witnessing a policy that I helped to develop go live, live and so concrete that I can actually sit and listen to a concert in it. For an economist, this is a thrill, alas, all too rare.

I joined a Council of Europe workgroup on Quality job creation through social links and social innovation (the social innovation part is a recent add to the group’s name, and I think I am partly responsible for the add). One of the issues we are discussing is this: given that there is an interesting group of people who started calling themselves social innovators; given that these people seem to have potential for improving the society they (and we) live in; given that they look like a new kind of social and economic agent, as such requiring a new kind of public policy – the ones in place for firms and nonprofit orgs might not work in their case; given all this, it follows that public authorities might soon be required to do new things, perhaps radically new ones. That’s great; but how do public authorities actually learn?

This looks like a relevant question to me. I have worked on pilot government initiatives hailed by some as innovative, like Kublai or Visioni Urbane; the challenge they now face is integration into mainstream policy, becoming a part of the default arsenal for their parent authorities to do their job. Thanks to the Council of Europe’s support I have been able to look deeper into the issue. My provisional conclusion is that the prevailing learning model for public authorities is rational-Weberian and way off the mark. Here’s how it works:

• a new issue, after its importance has been validated by the scientific community, gains importance in the eye of the public opinion.
• politicians, competing for votes, include it in the list of issues they promise to tackle once elected.
• after taking office, representatives embed action to be taken thereabout into law.
• new law is enacted into policy

This model is elegant but useless. It only works if (1) alternative courses of actions can be identified, discussed and selected already in the democratic debate phase; (2) the electorate has effective means to enforce their pact with its representatives, constraining them to keep their promise by making law; (3) law enactment is “linear”, i.e. a law translates unambiguously in a course of action at the level of the executive branch (the main tool for law enactment is generally assumed to be the impersonal, rational Weberian bureaucracy); (4) and policy is a one way street: government acts upon society, trying to mould it according to its goals, whereas society does not exert any influence on government, save through the democratic process. None of this is even remotely true.

So what? So it makes more sense to abandon Weber and the mechanism metaphor for framing governance, and embrace an ecosystem metaphor instead. I propose to look at public authorities as complex adapive systems, coevolving with society and the economy. Teaching them to deal with social innovation – or anything they never experienced before – means helping them to think of economic and social agents as driven by evolutionary forces that reward the fittest. Policy, then, works best by shaping the fitness landscape, and letting agents work their way through it towards the desired outcome. It is a policy that enables and incentivizes agents to give input, rather than forcing outcomes top-down. This has clear implication for designing policies in practice. One of them is that a constitutional architecture that enables bottom-up learning (like Common law) is inherently superior to one that does not.

If you care about this topic, you can read the paper: the Council of Europe authorized me to share it online. Thanks to Gilda Farrell and Fabio Ragonese for the kind concession.

David Osimo went to Forum PA to hold a keynote on e-government 2.0. He had perhaps the highest profile slot to address Italian public administrations, short of a cabinet appointment. Despite the success of his presentation, he is ot happy: everyone seems to agree that wiki government is a good idea, but there is very little action in the matter. Furthermore, he feels that the existing e-gov 2 initiatives are too elitist: designed, he says quoting the New York Times, for Lisa Simpson, not for Bart. David is somewhat disappointed.

Maybe he is right on European public administrations being too conservatives, his viewpoint is certainly more panoramic than mine. As for the elitism of wiki goverment, I think that’s a feature, not a bug. It works like this: in an oriented environment (i.e. where the values of rational open discussion and of meritocracy are shared and continuously reinforced: this makes all the difference) Internet-based tools filter the best contributions and bring them to the forefront. Lisa Simpson quickly becomes a star in the community. Bart finds it hard to produce quality content, so his contributions are normally ignored. The difference in quality is amplified by the continuous quoting and liking of Lisa’s contributions, so that the Internet-based community enhances the difference in prestige between brother and sister, leaving the former way behind. Peer-to-Patent, Evoke and Kublai are networks in which almost all the action is in the top one or two percent contributors. I explain this far better in Chapter 9 (of my forthcoming book: btw, you are very welcome to collaborate to it, click here for an English explanation).

Why do I like it? Because, if access to the system is open and encouraged (and this makes all the difference too: I discuss this in Chapter 11) and if the system is merit-based, e-government 2.0 is both more effective and more fair than old-style participation. For the same reason: namely, that it selects an élite which is not the usual old boys network, but rather a merit-based, emergent élite in which Lisa is gong to be a leader – as she deserves to be – rather than watch from the sidelines as Mr. Burns runs things in Springfield. As for Bart, the door has to stay open for him; but in the meantime, having Lisa rather than Burns in charge is a hell of an improvement, if you ask me.

Seminascosta in un lungo post che parla d’altro, Tim O’Reilly lascia cadere questa osservazione:

In questi anni passati a osservare gli alpha geeks, abbiamo concluso che molte rivoluzioni tecnologiche non cominciano con gli imprenditori, ma con degli hobbyisti che si divertono. Pensate ai fratelli Wright e agli altri che diedero inizio all’età del volo, all’Homebrew Computer Club che ha aiutato la nascita dell’industria dei personal computer, ai primi siti web costruiti senza aspettarsi di guadagnare alcunché, agli sviluppatori open source che hanno scritto codice, come ammette Linus Torvalds, “just for fun“. [...]

All’inizio, la rivoluzione Maker sembrava semplicemente un mondo di eccentrici, che inventavano per il gusto di inventare, divertirsi, imparare: “tecnologia nel tuo tempo libero”, come ha scritto Dale Dougherty nella testata della rivista Make. Ma, come in altre e precedenti rivoluzioni tecnologiche, c’era un’opportunità di business in vista. Puntualissima, una nuova generazione di aziende sta emergendo da quello che sembrava un gruppo di hobbyisti che si divertiva.

Come tutte le rivoluzioni tecnologiche, anche questa ha un notevole potenziale di rimescolare le carte, e scompaginare le classifiche delle aziende – e dei territori – più competitivi. L’Italia, con la sua forte tradizione artigianale, ha per una volta qualche carta da giocare. I miei colleghi che si occupano di politiche pubbliche farebbero bene a cogliere l’occasione, non ne passano tante così. Per quanto mi riguarda, ho deciso che questo è un asse strategico su cui voglio lavorare nei prossimi anni. Promuovere il cambiamento è faticoso, che almeno ci sia da divertirsi.

(Hat tip: Costantino Bongiorno)

The other thing I am going to do in 2010 is publish a book, my first. It will be probably called “Wikicracy”, and will deal with my experienc and thinking about user generated public policy. I started to write it in summer 2009, and I am bout to finish the first draft.

I don’t write just for people in my line of business, but for any intelligent individual who wonders why public policy seems unable to hold its ground as it confronts the problem of solving the problems of an ever more complex society. I claim that the problem may be seen as as a structural eyeballs deficit, and I suggest we try to solve it with the tools of mass collaboration, mediated by the Internet. This means managing a paradox: the networks of individuals linked by information exchanges are extremely powerful information processing entities, but by definition they cannot be controlled top-down. Yet the goals of public policy are set by the democratic process, and therefore exogenous to the networks themselves, at least in part. Is it possible to “persuade” these networks to move along a trajectory which is consistent with policy goals? I think it is. It’s difficult, but it can be done (in the book I also discuss the “how-to”)

Anyway it can’t be more difficult than writing the damned book. This is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.