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.

I have resigned as director of Kublai, the first web 2.0 project of the Italian central administration. My directorship had been an interim one for the past year: the Department for development policies of the Ministry of economic development, Kublai’s home base administration, has initiated a procedure for launching its final year and recruiting a new director, but the procedure met several difficulties and is still pending, after more than a year. The officer in charge of Kublai, Tito Bianchi, had asked me to stay on and bridge this gap, so I ended up with an unpaid role of interim director. Meanwhile the Department itself had to face a crisis, not directly connected with Kublai; as a consequence, starting in February, Tito’s contract was not renewed. In this new situation I did not feel like I could stay on, even as an interim director. I still hang out in Kublai as a member of the community, and still learn a lot from Kublaians. I am extremely proud of the liveliness the community displays even in difficult times: in these ways we are discussing whether to spin it off from government project to the third sector. If it works, it will be very unique: a demand-driven policy spinoff! And even if it fails, it will make for an extraordinary experience trying it. I am very grateful to the Department for the opportunity to develop such an advanced project.

Over and above the role I played in it, Kublai’s story seems to be representative of a tough problem in public policy: administrations find it hard to manage the interface with the online communities they collaborate with – even if they originate them. Online public policies can be incredibly efficient, because they enable citizens to contribute by taking actions — I should know, since I have designed and delivered more than one. In March 2009, ten months after kickoff, an independent study showed that two thirds of the comments feeding into business plans writing came from the community itself, and only one third fron the project’s paid staff. The key to high efficiency is the community’s activism, and community ties can break down if they are not lovingly maintained. A decrease in the credibility of the founding group, or even simply a slump in alertness, might take away the motivation to participate at any time.

In the last few years I spent a lot of time thinking very hard about policy communities, especiallty those that live online, and I learned much. It turns out that running them effectively requires some conditions to be met:

• an adequate planning horizon; if you need three years to build a resilient community, you have to have three years of guaranteed operations. Stopping before achieving your goals means wasting all of the resources invested.
• radical transparency: access to what goes on behind the scenes has to be allowed to those interested (and not imposed to those who are not). Active participation requires participants to feel ownership of the project, and we don’t feel that if we think we are not being told the whole story.
• low costs: a project based on voluntary work needs to show volunteers that its staff brings to the table a value worth the resources paid to it in salaries. This is a sensitive point, because the collaboration between staff and community is inherently unequal — we collaborate, but I get paid and you don’t — but, if the staff works well and hard, it is still acceptable. Justifying high overheads, on the other hand, is really hard. Every penny that goes down that route instead of the project’s own activities weakens its credibility.
• fast delivery, with little or no timeline uncertainty, and therefore streamlined procedures. Social dynamics in online communities are fast and inherently emergent, which means you cannot control them top-down. When stuff happens, it happens, and you have to act. If something needs doing now, you need to be able to go out and do it now. If this is not possible, you need to commit to a date for it to get done. “We don’t know, we are waiting for a green light From On High” destroys credibility, hence participation, hence efficiency,
• lowering the barriers between paid staff and the community. People participating to an online community on a voluntary basis make great candidates to become its staffers. They know it well and love it, they share its meeting places and times. conversely, many public sector employees are harnessed by rigid office hours and badges that keep track of the time they spend in the office; many more are sequestered behind corporate firewalls that inhibit the use of social networks (major tools of this particular trade). Requiring a person in this situation to work on a project like Kublai means asking for trouble.
• All of the above requires a lot of management leeway; this makes it inevitable that the assessment of these projects is carried out by weighing its results rather than checking its conformity to procedure.

Unfortunately, these conditions do not match well with the work style commended to Weberian bureaucracies — and most public administrations are Weberian bureaucracies. In the case of Kublai:

• it has not been possible to guarantee the planning horizon. As we prepared to launch, the Department decided to unbundle it into three steps, one per year. The reason: a three-year project would have required a European tendering process, that was estimated would require a year and a half. The results: at the second year the project was funded, but in a way that undermined its effectiveness (see below) and with a gap of three months for formally reinitiating the project and seven months to actually go out and do stuff; for the third year we designed an architecture that was on paper more effective and used two delivery channels, but one of them was never initiated. My personal history is a sign of the stop-and-go nature of administrative processes: I directed Kublai for three years, and I had a regular contract for a total of sixteen months. The remaining twenty months were interim.
• full transparency is technically difficult. Even when public decision makers have the best intentions, they live in a system so complicated as to be incomprehensible for the uninitiated. For example, Kublai’s first year was delivered through an in-house company of the State, Studiare Sviluppo. In its second year, the Department’s legal office changed its mind and claimed that would not be possible: though Studiare Sviluppo and the Department itself have a common origin in the Ministry of the economy, the creation of the Ministry of economic development in 2006 (which contains the Department, but not Studiare Sviluppo) had created a rift between the two organizations. Delivery would have to go through Invitalia, another in-house of the State. This distinction is difficult to understand, so much that it remains controversial within the Department: in 2009 some of its programmes continued to flow through Studiare Sviluppo, but not Kublai. How do you tell a story like this in the “About” page?
• costs tend to balloon. Kublai 2009 had a higher budget than its 2008 version, but its effectivess seemed to decrease. Why? Partly because the overhead had gone up. Studiare Sviluppo charges 15% of the project’s budget to take care of all the administrative details; Invitalia’s overhead is more difficult to estimate and it varies from one project to another; with exceptions, it seems to oscillate between 30 and 40% (source: talks with several employees and former employees of the Department. I asked Invitalia for a precise figure, and am waiting for a precise figure).
• decision making always takes a long time, and it is always subject to uncertainty. To give you an idea, Kublai 3 should have started in January 2010. The idea was to activate a project, led by Invitalia, and use that as co-financing of a larger project, funded by the European Regional Development Fund. This, however, would have required a change in Invitalia’s accounting system (in ERDF projects human labor must be accounted for as a direct cost, excluding overhead). In May we realized that Invitalia could not or would not make this change fast enough (I’m told they are still in the process). Tito had to initiate a second procedure which tapped into a different financial source; this new procedure was launched in June, but moved very slowly, with a lot of backtracking and all kind of pitfalls springing up, without us apparently being able to see them coming and avoid them. We thought it would be over in September, then in November, then in February, and we turned out to be wrong every time. In February Tito and I agreed to come out. The truth is that no one can tell what will happen and when.
• in Kublai’s first year we used Studiare Sviluppo’s flexibility to recruit our staff directly from the community. We used very small contracts that recognized and encouraged voluntary work without forcing creatives to turn themselves into consultants to the public sector to work at Kublai. The vision behind this was to lower the barriers between “professionals” and “committed citizens”, and to build an ethics of fairness, where it could not happen that two people would be doing more or less the same work with one of them getting paid and the other one working for free. Starting in 2009 this process stopped: Invitalia’s internal rules dictate that only a small part of a project’s budget can be outsourced (15% of the budget in the case of Kublai); what’s more, it’s normal for recruitment procedures to take months, and even the smallest contract has to be signed by the CEO. Result: the administrative load of many small contracts was simply unsustainable. We had to retreat into a polarized version of the staff: on one side professional business plan advisors (public or quasi-public employees, who typically appreciate the stability a steady job gives them, and have little or no firsthand experience of business creation, let alone in the creative sectors), on the other side the creatives from the community, that we could not even cover travel expenses of if they held a presentation about Kublai at a creative industry event.
• as for evaluation, Tito and I built a structured evaluation activity into Kublai 3, but that’s stuck with the rest of the project: the project is at risk not to be assessed at all.

With all of these problems, it is a wonder that the project was not born dead! If we we got anything at all done (2500 members, 400 projects being discussed and tens of businesses launched are an important result after all) is because some people poured an unreasonable amount of work and passion into Kublai. My staff was very generous, turning from paid staffers to volunteers when contracts expired and were not renewed (I absolutely need to quote Cristina Di Luca, Walter Giacovelli and Marco Colarossi); the officials in charge for Kublai at the Department (Paola Casavola, at the time the director general who made the initial decision, Tito Bianchi, Marco Magrassi and Giampiero Marchesi above all) have been visionary leaders from the policy maker’s side (Tito in particular has really put himself on the line for Kublai); Alfredo Scalzo at Studiare Sviluppo and Nicola Salvi, Federico Venceslai, Angelita Levato and Danila Sansone at Invitalia used all the autonomy their respective organizations allowed them to try and meet this project’s special needs. We have been a kind of pirate ship, part Luke Skywalker and part Dilbert: I remember Nicola posting from his own laptop and through the neighbor’s open wi-fi, because the corporate firewall would not allow him access to Second Life. Despite all of this commitment, we were a competent and motivated crew sailing a leaking ship. When the work input of the non-Invitalia staff, — the least embedded in bureaucratic procedures and way of thinking — was discontinued, Kublai clearly lost momentum.

A conclusion I drew from this extraordinary experience is that the interface between bureaucracy and network is not easy to navigate. Kublai can be viewed as an attempt to coproduce and codeliver a public service — assistance towards business creation — traditionally delivered (not too well) by local offices. It is a very hot theme: it is, for example, one of the key themes of NESTA’s Public Services Lab, that I have been in conversation with lately. From my vantage point at the Council of Europe, all European governments are moving in this direction, to defend the welfare state in the face of a structural fiscal crisis. I predict it will be difficult to get lasting results if the conditions I listed won’t be guaranteed.

I see only a way that they can be guaranteed: a new deal between government and the women and men who work for it. Such a new deal would work like this: administrations have to give trust and breathing space to their servants, be they employees or consultants like myself; and then assess their results, rewarding people who get results and punishing people who don’t. If there are abuses of that trust, they will be dealt with on a case-by-case basis: designing an entire system to prevent abuse is at a high risk to making it too rigid, disabling people to offer their best ideas. Designers of social media have a mantra: if you design a space to deal with trolls, your users will be trolls. Similarly, if you design a system to harness lazy or corrupt employees, your best staff members, frustrated and humiliated, will leave, and you will be left with the lazy and corrupt ones. It’s time to make choices; who will future public policy be designed for?

According to the World Bank’s noteworthy PSD Blog a senior official in the Kanpur district, in Northern India, has ordered his highest ranking subordinates to create personal Facebook profiles “at the earliest”, and associate them with the page of the district’s administration.

The idea is that officials, being more accessible to citizens, feel them breathing down their neck, and therefore be prompted to respond quickly to suggestions, complaints or applause (“Citizens are going to like this, as they will be able to track their complaints”)

I like the intuition: it’s in line with what I wrote in my book Wikicrazia, particularly in the chapters on “transparency” and “speaking in a human voice”. In the actual decision there remain a few kinks to iron out: one of them is that my Facebook profile is mine, not my employer’s, public authority or not. Maybe this problem could be addressed creating multiple accounts, or using platforms where users have a much better control on what they share with whom, like Diaspora.

What I find most interesting, however, is that the Kanpur district administration initiative stands for the idea that the more transparency, the better. Which, after all, is the opinion I thought was common ground to more or less all of us, until the Wikileaks affaire kicked in and several commentators (including authoritative ones, like Shirky) started making the statement (in my opinion without proving it) that government need secrecy by default to be able to function. Who is right? At a first glance, between Ms. Clinton’s Department of State and the Kanpur district administration, the latter seems more in sync in the times. We, the people, had to rethink privacy at the times of the Internet: it seems logical that public authorities rethink secrecy as well. Frankly, I don’t see that many alternatives: Wikileaks and entities like it are here to stay, like it or not.

Note: I have not been able to find the Facebook page in question – but I am in China, and Internet access is not always straightforward, so I try to stay away from long Google searches. Should a reader find it and point me to it, I would be grateful to her or him.

UPDATE, December 6th: Clay Shirky has added his authoritative voice to the debate. Like many American citizens, he is mainly concerned with making sense of the behavior of the U.S. government, by far the most committed to getting WikiLeaks out of the picture. His impression is unfavorable, because he sees it going after this goal with means other than a lawsuit (pressure on server space contractors, Paypal etc.). Also, he makes a distinction between short and long haul. I recommend you read the post for yourself, but all in all I think it’s fair to say that, while we wait for a new legal and societal equilibrium for a networked society to emerge, WikiLeaks is functional to a healthy democracy.

I met Julian Assange in 2009 in Barcelona. We were both speakers at Personal Democracy Forum Europe (where the video above was taken), where people interested in augmenting democracy (like him) or governance (like myself) meet to exchange news and views.

WikiLeaks is obviously not a government project. If it were not for this, it would rest well among the examples of Internet-enabled public policies in Wikicrazia because, like them, it is oriented towards some notion of public interest (transparency and accountability of public authorities); and, like them, it mobilizes collective intelligence to sift through a great many data that come from government sources and use them to tell convincing stories about what governments are up to, and why.

I claim that WikiLeaks is oriented towards the public interest because its activity is not directed against the states whose classified documents they are making available. On the contrary, Julian is convinced he is helping them: better informed citizens make for a more robust democracy. If more people think about our past choices, they make it more likely that we will make wiser ones in the future. And I claim it mobilizes collective intelligence because it does not attempt to sell any “truth”: rather, it is trying to supply raw data to journalists, the judiciary, committed citizens and historians. The “truth” is not in the individual document, but rather in the shared interpretation of the documental evidence that will emerge from public debate. WikiLeaks is in the business of putting classified documents in the public domain, and leaving the collective intelligence I refer to in the book to infer the bigger picture. If a single document puts human lives at stake, it is just not released: this is what happened for military documents about U.S. troops deployment in Afghanistan.

On these topics, Julian’s position is strikingly similar to those of leaders committed to transparency and accountability. If you put him in a room with President Obama and Prime Minister Cameron, the three men would agree on almost everything. But not on a key point: WikiLeaks thinks even the most transparent governments abuse confidentiality, and it feels it is both its right and its duty to intervene to put out in the open documents that have no reason to be confidential. For what it’s worth, I agree with the first part of the argument: public authorities do tend to keep their doings away from public scrutiny almost as if by instinct. Most of the time this is useless (they have nothing to hide) or even harmful (by being secretive, they fail to build mutual trust with the citizenry). In Italy – admittedly not the most open of countries – when two consumers association asked to see the paper trail of the ill-fated portal Italia.it, which cost taxpayers 45 million euro and imploded a few weeks from launch they were met with refusal. Clearly there are no lives at stake here, no national security matters, so those documents should be made public. In a democracy, public debate is a source of wisdom and guidance to governments, and the more we feed it information, the better.

I am fairly sure many honest, devoted civil servants would agree, and I imagine it is well meaning insiders that pass information on to WikiLeaks! A little provocatively, you could argue that Julian and his crew are in a mutually supportive relationship with the states that claim to be damaged by what they do: “pro-transparency” civil servants feed WikiLeaks documents, and it in returns help them overcome the blockades built by their colleagues who would prefer a greater degree of confidentiality. An ecologist would speak of symbiosis: WikiLeaks is not like a virus attacking the host, but more like an useful bacterium that helps its metabolism. In computerspeak, it is a feature of democracy, not a bug.

Here’s a prediction: Cablegate will have little, if any, large scale impact on diplomacy, just as so far releasing public data in open formats has had no backlash effect – even when they were potentially controversial, like budgetary data. It’s the diplomatic equivalent of posting your picture taken at a drunken party on Facebook, forgetting your boss might see that too: embarassing, but not that big a deal. According to the Huffington Post two to three million gov employees were cleared to see these documents: hardly top secret. And no revelation has come forth so far. Diplomacy is by definition a cold-blooded, Machiavellian relationship: what individual diplomats think of a foreign head of state is of little consequence.

With time, diplomats and governments themselves will get used to managing their privacy in a connected world, like we all do, and most of what they do will be confortably out in the open (I agree with Micah Sifry on this one) At that point there will be no need for a Wikileaks, and Julian will move on.

Finally, charging him with rape is a very bad idea even from the point of view of his opponents. It is likely to backfire, reducing the space for dialogue between public authorities and the smartest, most idealistic part of the civil society.

A few weeks ago, after a happy hour in Rome, people started spontaneously to share links on Italian open data and tools to crunch them with. With a few others, I thought it would be nice to collect these links in one place, a sort of one stop shop for people interested in trasparency not just in theory, but in the practice of extracting information from public data. One thing led to another, and today Spaghetti Open Data is born. We aggregated 32 databases; not bad when you consider that data.gov, with all the firepower of the Obama administration, had 47 at launch.

It’s only a small thing, but it feels right for various reasons.

• Firstly, it is a concrete achievement. I have had enough of complaining about the idle government, the backwardness of Italian culture, the financial crisis, bad luck. I have precious little time to spare, and I would like to invest it on projects that pay me back by yielding some kind of result. The Spaghetti Open Data group has put in some work, and in a few weeks it produced something which is actually there, and it works. If you want to build something with Italian open data you can, right now, without having to wait for structural change or a new generation in government. All it took is some voluntary work and 41 euro for hosting.
• Secondly, it is intellectually rigorous. We had to ask ourselves the same questions that I imagine confronted the people in charge of data.gov and data.gov.uk. Are statistic data open data? (Apparently not) Does it make sense for statistical and open data to be collected in the same place? (Apparently it does, so that citizens can correlate the ones with the others) How to organize metadata? (We went for compatibility with CKAN, as in data.gov.uk) we have mapped a possible way for Italian open data, and future legitimate websites of open data have an all-Italian benchmark that they can consider, or even copy.
• Finally, it is the expression of a small community of about fifty bloggers and civil servants that worked together towards a common goal, across their considerable cultural differences, showing mutual respect along the way. I have also had enough of bashing bureaucrats as stupid or evil. Some are just that, others are wonderful people and great war buddies. Most are reasonably clever, well-meaning people who happen to be very different from me: collaborating requires investing a little time and effort to come to understand each other. It is almost always worth it.

In the future, I only want to do this sort of thing. I’m done with declarations, petitions and talk. Simply doing is too much fun, even for a daydreamer like me.

An unusual piece of good news from Italy: the local open data scene – open data are databases owned by the public sector that are made accessible to the general public for reuse and remix – is starting to take off. It does so like everything gets done in Italy, in an irregular fashion, with different authorities doing different things. There is no all-encompassing initiative, no dat.gov or data.gov.uk; I am not aware of one being planned, and if it were I’d be surprised. What there is episodes, early adopters, forward looking people who get stuff done as much as it is in their power to. Lately I got wind of two initiatives: one is the Piemonte region data website, dati.piemonte.it. Its available databases are still few, and not very relevant: I don’t care about local food markets, and foreign states codes I can find on Google anytime, what I’d like to see is data on the regional administration’s expenditure, on health care, waste recycling etc., so as to be able to compare across towns and provinces. But it’s a start, and there’s a survey of how citizens are using the data.

The second initiative comes from the State’s Accounting Service. Here the data are real juicy: the state’s budget and balance sheet AND the transfers to regional authorities for financial years 2007 to 2010. If you really want to understand the discussion about budget cuts, nothing better than download the data and play around, maybe producing some nice colourful chart as an added bonus.

This is a wonderful opportunity or the civic hackers David Osimo likes to talk about. We don’t need to take things on trust anymore (or to mistrust them, which amounts to the same thing because we are still unable to form our opinions autonomously); when we hear that “health care expenditure is out of control” or “this government is cutting culture’s life support” we can actually download the data and do the math to see for ourselves how much truth there is in those statements, and share our conclusions with our peers. This way, too, do democracies grow and thrive.

In questi giorni, come vi preannunciavo, mi sono dedicato a riscrivere Wikicrazia (è la quarta volta!). Ho riletto attentamente tutti i commenti che mi sono arrivati (quasi 200, contando le mie risposte): complimenti a parte, la maggior parte contengono correzioni o proposte di integrazione su punti specifici. Ci sono però anche — e per fortuna — alcune critiche “di sistema”, cioè critiche che, se accettate, renderebbero inutile tutto il ragionamento. Le posso dividere in due filoni; per chiarezza espositiva mi permetto di esagerare un po’ e chiamarli, rispettivamente, “antidemocratico” e “benaltrista” (seguite i links ai commenti, in cui gli autori esprimono le loro critiche in modo più assennato).

Filone antidemocratico: le persone sono facili da influenzare, e anche la democrazia in fondo è una cosa troppo seria per lasciarla fare al popolo. La wikicrazia non è un correttivo perché non porta alla convergenza alla soluzione “più saggia”. Questa preoccupazione è esposta da Francesco Silvestri, Paolo (che scrive in prima persona plurale, perché affiancato dal suo e mio amico Stefano) e Tito. Mi scrive Paolo in una mail (niente paura, mi ha autorizzato a pubblicarla):

Tu sostieni che se c’è abbastanza gente che guarda si correggono gli errori, e citi il caso di Linux e di Wikipedia. Bene, hai ragione. Nel caso di Linux, c’è un gruppo, una rete di tecnici con uno scopo preciso e condiviso, gli errori, se così posso dire, sono dello stesso ordine dell’obiettivo, se non si eliminano l’obiettivo non può essere raggiunto. [...] Nel caso delle politiche gli errori e i dati, sono di ordine diverso dalle conclusioni, l’importante è che tutto suoni bene [...] Dunque, non si guardano e non si trovano errori, se si trovano la cosa non è troppo importante per il dibattito.

Filone benaltrista: la wikicrazia è un gingillo carino, ma se i governanti sono ottusi e corrotti nulla può. Questo è un tema saltato fuori più volte; due commenti in cui si vede bene sono il precedente commento di Paolo (si legga la parte dove si parla dei rifiuti in Campania) e uno di Giuseppe Paruolo (che è anche l’unico contributo alla discussione lasciato da un politico: Giuseppe, un informatico, è stato assessore comunale a Bologna). Scrive Giuseppe:

Credo sia illusorio pensare che un approccio wiki possa di per sè impedire malgoverno o malafede [...] La buonafede di chi governa è un prerequisito indispensabile.

Prendo molto sul serio tanto le critiche quanto le persone che le esprimono, che stimo. Ma non sono d’accordo.

Agli “antidemocratici” c’è un’obiezione facile: nemmeno la democrazia rappresentativa garantisce che si faccia sempre la scelta più saggia: anzi, sappiamo da Churchill che essa è “il peggior sistema di governo mai inventato… salvo tutti gli altri”. Tuttavia rimango abbastanza sereno, la storia ci ha mostrato che i despoti illuminati possono vincere qualche partita, ma il torneo lo vincono sempre le democrazie, con tutti i loro difetti: allargare il novero di coloro che esercitano potere e influenza sembra garantire risultati migliori. Ma c’è anche un’obiezione specifica, ed è che, invece, nella mia esperienza il consenso emerge quasi sempre. Non sono le persone a convergere, ma le conversazioni: cioè, nessuno che sia veramente convinto di una cosa cambia idea, ma chi si avvicina al processo in modo abbastanza laico vede emergere una posizione nettamente più convincente delle altre. In genere succede che a un certo punto qualcuno propone una cosa e tutti si mettono a discutere della proposta, ignorando completamente le posizioni precedenti (e magari contrapposte). Il messaggio è chiaro: quelle posizioni, semplicemente, non hanno trazione, e quindi non hanno legittimità. Certo, chi le sostiene può continuare a spingerle, ma otterrà solo di irritare gli altri: ha già detto la sua, la discussione è andata avanti, cosa vuole ancora? Se le decisioni sono tanto più legittimate quanto più sono partecipate, il dissidente si trova perdente in una discussione fortemente legittimata.

Ai “benaltristi” rispondo che, in un ambiente informativamente trasparente e in cui l’attenzione è una risorsa abbondante le rogne saltano fuori prima o poi e il malgoverno diventa più difficile. La versione finale di Wikicrazia riporta questo esempio canadese, in cui una politica di open data ha permesso di scoprire 3 miliardi di dollari di evasione fiscale (la scoperta l’ha fatta un cittadino, non l’agenzia delle entrate). Mi viene in mente il passo famosissimo in cui Adam Smith scrive che noi non ci affidiamo alla benevolenza del macellaio per mangiare, ma alla sua capacità di fare il proprio interesse; non vedo perché la cosa non dovrebbe valere anche per i politici e i governanti. Non chiediamo loro di essere santi o eroi, ma persone ragionevolmente intelligenti che agiscono in un ambiente che fornisce loro gli incentivi giusti.

Troppo ottimista? Forse. Ma in Wikicrazia ho deciso di non lasciare nessuno spazio alla lamentazione e al cinismo, al “governo ladro” e al vaffa. Sono posizioni che comprendo e rispetto, ma in questa fase scelgo di non farle mie e di concentrare i miei modesti sforzi su ciò che possiamo migliorare qui e adesso, senza aspettare cambiamenti sistemici o rinnovamenti culturali. E senza scuse.

Daniel Kaufmann fa il punto della situazione dopo-terremoto di Haiti. Nei tre mesi dopo il sisma, la comunità internazionale ha erogato aiuti per oltre due miliardi di dollari (di cui uno da donatori privati); il fabbisogno a tre anni è stimato a 11,5 miliardi. Se nell’emergenza molti aiuti sono stati portati ad Haiti direttamente da associazioni solidaristiche internazionali – bypassando sia le istituzioni che la società civile di Haiti – nei prossimi tempi ci si aspetta che il governo haitiano giochi un ruolo centrale nell’erogazione degli interventi. Ciò richiederebbe uno stato forte ed efficace; lo stato haitiano, invece, non solo è debole, ma è soggetto a cattura da parte di pochissime famiglie dominanti, che lo gestiscono come se fosse una loro proprietà. In questa situazione, il rischio di vedere i denari degli aiuti internazionali sprecati o intascati dai ricchi è, purtroppo, molto concreto. E ancora più concreto è il rischio che la gestione di questi flussi venga affidata ai soliti sospetti, che finirebbero per vederne ulteriormente rafforzata la loro posizione. Questo è stato riconosciuto da tutte le parti in causa.

Molti suggeriscono di copiare la strategia delle autorità indonesiane per la ricostruzione post-tsunami (qui il rapporto della Banca Mondiale), che ha in realtà lasciato la zona di Aceh in condizioni economiche migliori che prima della catastrofe. Kaufmann crede che questo non sia realistico, e suggerisce una strategia “indonesiana” corretta per la presenza di uno stato debole. E cioè:

1. Mitigare gli effetti dei conflitti di interesse delle figure senior nella pubblica amministrazione e nei tribunali. I loro redditi e le loro proprietà dovrebbero essere pubblicati online in modo che accedervi sia facile. Occorre anche vietare che queste persone gestiscano imprese private, obbligandole a conferire i loro averi a blind trusts.
2. Ridurre il rischio di cattura. Per esempio, è stato proposto che la Commissione per la Ricostruzione di Haiti sia co-presieduta dal Presidente di Haiti e da uno straniero eminente, come Clinton o Lula. Queste persone non sono ricattabili e tengono al loro buon nome, per cui possono richiamare l’attenzione della comunità internazionale su eventuali irregolarità. In aggiunta, occorre fare in modo che il governo non abbia potere di veto su ciò che la Commissione fa, e renderla molto trasparente incardinando questa trasparenza già nella legge istitutiva
3. Costruire un sistema di appalti competitivo e trasparente. C’è una cosa che si chiama Internet, che può fare molto in questo senso.
4. Rendere trasparente il lato dei donatori. Chi mette soldi nella ricostruzione deve rendere pubblico (con il solito criterio della facile accessibilità online e dei dati machine-readable) a chi li sta dando, quanti e per fare cosa.
5. Dare un ruolo forte alle comunità locali e alla società civile, il “popolo delle carriole” della situazione. I cittadini non sono clienti, e non gli consegni un paese ricostruito “chiavi in mano”. Sono loro i protagonisti della ricostruzione.
6. Promuovere la trasparenza nelle politiche in senso ampio: istruzione, sanità, fisco, ambiente etc.

Non sono mica dei brutti consigli. Alcuni di questi potrebbero forse essere utili anche nell’Italia del dopo terremoto all’Aquila. Nel mondo globalizzato può capitare anche di dovere “copiare il compito” da Haiti, mentre la performance stellare (dice Kaufmann) dell’Indonesia resta completamente fuori portata.

Sono tornato in Basilicata – dopo quasi un anno – per essere presente a una tappa importante di Visioni Urbane. Il riassunto delle puntate precedenti è questo: la Regione Basilicata aveva programmato 4,3 milioni di euro sulla costruzione di spazi laboratorio per la creatività. Invece di partire dai contenitori, cioè dagli edifici, ha deciso di partire dai contenuti, cioè dalle attività creative che quegli edifici avrebbero ospitato. Questo ha comportato mobilitare una community creativa lucana, lanciare un blog, organizzare seminari (memorabile quello con Bruce Sterling a Matera) ecc. Io ho partecipato al progetto come advisor, in rappresentanza del Ministero dello sviluppo economico.

Visioni Urbane è un progetto che crede nella trasparenza come valore. Ci crede con una convinzione francamente spaventosa per la maggioranza delle amministrazioni italiane, e infatti su alcune scelte (tipo quella di non moderare i commenti del blog, o quella di dire con chiarezza ai creativi “noi possiamo fare proposte, ma a decidere è – giustamente – il presidente”) ci sono state discussioni anche piuttosto accese. La Regione era, legittimamente, intimidita dall’idea di mettere in piazza tutto.

Pare che quelle discussioni siano servite. Un anno e mezzo dopo ritorno a Potenza e trovo che (1)  l’intera community creativa è stata invitata a presenziare alla firma delle convenzioni tra Regione e i vari comuni, e si è presentata in massa: i sindaci sono naturalmente invitati a dire la loro, ma lo devono fare davanti a tutti e non nelle segrete stanze; (2) il testo della convenzione e la lettera con cui il presidente della Regione li ha convocati sono scaricabili dal blog in questo post. Mi hanno scavalcato a sinistra! La lezione che ne traggo è che la trasparenza genera trasparenza; un piccolo cambio di mentalità su un singolo tema può diventare una prassi generalizzata. E’ solo un piccolo segno di cambiamento e di speranza, ma mi fa piacere.

UPD 18/3/2009: E’ online il video dell’incontro:

Con l’incontro del 5 maggio si conclude il progetto Visioni Urbane, e si conclude – credo – con un successo. Sono reduce dalla scrittura di un paper (che presenterò a eChallenges 2008, in un workshop sui “Living Labs e sviluppo locale” proposto da Jesse Marsh); per scriverlo ho dovuto pensare molto a VU. La mia conclusione – provvisoria, ci mancherebbe – è che l’ethos orientato alla meritocrazia e allo spirito di servizio (“qui non si distribuiscono soldi, si progetta il bene comune”), combinato con un ambiente informativo molto trasparente, in cui la comunicazione era sempre molti-a-molti, è riuscito a modificare in modo sostanziale la percezione reciproca di ente Regione e scena creativa. Purtroppo, però, la magia di VU funziona solo su chi ha condiviso quell’esperienza: il più grande limite del progetto – scrivo in quel paper – sta nel fatto che non è riuscito a convincere gli altri settori della Regione che i creativi lucani sono una risorsa vera. Però non è detta l’ultima: il gruppo ha elaborato un documento che traccia la rotta per usare nel miglior modo possibile le risorse per gli spazi laboratorio (che non sono neanche pochissime, 4.3 milioni di euro), e in quel documento prevediamo una conferenza strategica annuale sulla cultura in Basilicata. Grazie all’adozione di un modello di governance abbastanza sofisticato, dovremmo riuscire a dare una voce autorevole alla community creativa nel dibattito sulle politiche in Regione (tenete presente che il presidente della Regione l’ha condiviso e fatto proprio). Speriamo! Sono proprio curioso di vedere come va a finire.

Nel frattempo i ragazzi e le ragazze di Agoraut hanno raccontato l’incontro conclusivo di Visioni Urbane in un bellissimo video. questo qui: