The concept of wikicracy – constructive collaboration between citizens and public institutions – in eight minutes, in the video of of my presentation at Happy Birthday Web (in Italian).

Sorry, this post in Italian only. I am holding a seminar (open access, in Italian) on the frontiers of collaborative public policies; and participate in the kickoff meeting of a research project on complexity science (invitation only – but I might be able to get you in, in English). Machine-translate for details.

La prossima settimana sarò a Venezia. Lunedì 23, insieme a Luigi Di Prinzio, Silvia Rebeschini e gli amici della Scuola di dottorato Nuove tecnologie dell’informazione territorio-ambiente, faremo il punto sulle frontiere delle politiche pubbliche collaborative al tempo della crisi. A quasi un anno mezzo dalla pubblicazione di Wikicrazia, queste frontiere sono in rapido movimento, e ha molto senso fermarsi un momento per aggiornarne le mappe. Info pratiche qui.

Il seminario è ovviamente collaborativo. Se avete delle esperienze di politiche pubbliche collaborative e volete condividerle (in un formato sintetico, per stimolare la discussione) scrivete a Silvia: srebeschini[chiocciola]gmail[punto]com.

Martedì e mercoledì mi fermo in laguna. Sarò ospite dell’European Center for Living Technology per l’incontro di inizio del progetto MD – Emergence by Design, nell’ambito del quale dirigerò lo sviluppo di un software per assistere i managers di comunità online (nome in codice: Dragon Trainer). L’incontro dell’ECLT non è aperto al pubblico, ma se ti interessa questa roba prova a scrivermi e vedo se riesco a farti entrare.

On the road again. This time I am going to a birthday party: we celebrate the twentieth birthday of the World Wide Web. The date: Monday, November 14th. The location: Rome, Hadrian’s Temple. The guest of honor: sir Tim Berners-Lee, the Web’s proud father, who will deliver the keynote speech. Much more modestly, I too will hold a short talk about Wikicrazia, i.e. collaborative, Internet-mediated governance.

In the foreground, the party; in the background, difficult times for Italy. But they only make the celebration more necessary: nobody dare take it from us! As Saint Augustine wrote sixteen centuries ago, we are the agents of the times: if we don’t like them, we can always invent new times, or at least try to. A growing number of Italian citizens, connected by the web, is doing just that. I am trying to do my bit, too: Wikitalia – we will talk about it on Monday – is exactly that, Italy’s birthday present to the Web, and the Web’s to Italy.

(The video above was not made for the occasion: it is rather an attempt to explain to some interested non-Italians what I want to do with my life. But I find it fits the occasion well.)

Last week – that appropriately ended with the Open Government Data Camp in Warsaw – has been extraordinary for Italians who care about open government and open data. The Emilia Romagna Region and the City of Florence launched the respective open data portals; the Ministry for innovation and public service announced the dati.gov.it, recruiting civic hacking competition Apps4Italy for added firepower; and Wikitalia, an ambitious civil society initiative, went public.

The present scenario seemed unthinkable just a year ago. Sure, there are reservations and new challenges, as Andrea De Maio warned; we need to be on our guard, and to keep our bullshit detectors on and fully charged. But we have reasons to savor the moment and treat ourselves to a small celebration.

The Italian way towards an open government is different from the more famous cases of the USA and the UK. In those countries the initiative was taken by the government, whereas south of the Alps the civil society has played an important role, in some cases a leading one. Informal meeting spaces – my favorite one is the Spaghetti Open Data mailing list – allowed the more curious and adventurous civil servants to interact with the movement and build up ammo to “sell” open government initiative to their respective institutions. For this reason, we in SOD (I know, unfortunate acronym) have watched most open gov-open data initiatives unfold from the very early days: the ones quoted above, but also others (the Ministry’s initiative is an exception).

This interaction between institutions and civil society has been extremely constructive. The latest example: the portal dati.emilia-romagna.it was launched on Monday morning. The link was immediately picked up and circulated onto the mailing list. In the space of about ten hours, the Region got a lot of kudos – pushed out onto the main social media by mailing list members – and a comprehensive expert test drive, as different members tried its features and posted suggestions for improvement, unsolicited and for free. Something similar happened with ENEL’s open data website, that went live with an unappropriate license. The community’s suggestions (and in this case the criticisms), amplified by social media, led the person in charge of the company’s open data initiative to subscribe to the mailing list, where he received a warm welcome and a passionate argument for changing the license and really opening up those data. Three weeks later, ENEL adopted a fully open license. Take a moment to ponder this: this is what governance could look like – pluralistic, respectful, fast, knowledge-based and low-cost. In my country, it generally does not.

So, the time has come for taking this scene to the next level, and that is Wikitalia. The idea first occurred to Riccardo Luna. He chanced to read my book Wikicrazia at exactly the right moment, as he was looking for new challenges after successfully launching Wired Italia magazine. Riccardo resonates with the vision of constructive collaboration I outlined in the book, that of Internet-mediated collaboration between citizens and institutions is both viable and badly needed if we are to live in Italy. During the summer he, I and others fleshed out this vision into an organization and an action plan. The result is a nonprofit initiative which is inclusive (the door is wide open to any collaboration), action-oriented and with a clear strategy, and natively global (I personally insisted in involving friends and colleagues abroad like Beth Noveck, Andrew Rasiej, Tom Steinberg, Marietje Schaake, Micah Sifry and others right from the start).

So, buongiorno Wikitalia. All Italians that want a regeneration are invited to invest in themselves and get to the next screen. Press PLAY to get started, and good luck.

Many people wrote me to congratulate for a high profile article on Repubblica (three full pages on one of the main national daily newspapers) on the topic of open government (called “Wikicrazia”, after my book, in the title)and of the interest it is attracting in the national debate. The article itself contributed to such interest: a very strong endorsement induced new curiosity in people previously unaware or uninterested, and prompted some who were already intrigued to take action.

I think the open gov movement, though still a niche one, is going to be irresistible in the long run. Why? Because the work can be divided in packets so small, and the tools are so cheap, that even a single person committing a little time can make a small, but noticeable difference, here and now, without having to wait for systemic reform or cultural change. But I also think that much credit for the present wave of interest should go to Riccardo Luna, former editor in chief of Wired Italy and author of the article in question. Riccardo is not only a good journalist and an excellent communicator; he has become an activist and an organizer of this movement. We talked a lot to each other in these latest few months, and I have seen his enthusiasm grow and become vision. He has an inclusive style, always taking care to give credit where credit is due and to avoid overpersonalization, has won him a lot of sympathy and credibility.

If I am allowed to offer advice – not so much to Riccardo, as to all of us – I think it is important to try to keep the focus on mass collaboration based on self-selection, avoiding to personalize the issue and resisting the temptation to make good, effective contributors to this movement into gurus. It would be misleading. With each project I start, I know that the most valuable collaborator is a person I don’t know yet. It for him or her that I design: so that they can find their way to the project that needs exactly his or her skills, and can be engaged in a useful, respectful and fun way.

Gurus, on the other hand, are just about the last thing we need.

I receive many invitations to speak at public events to present Wikicrazia, my book on government in the age of Internet collaboration. The topic is hot, and it is going to stay hot: from my vantage point it seems that Internet-enabled spaces of collaboration between citizens and public authorities are sprouting up all across Italy, and there are trailblazers in most democratic countries. I see my role, at least in part, in helping those people to connect to each other and with the global open government movement. I grew up in a small town, and I know well how empowering it feels to take action on your home turf while feeling a part of some global-scale phenomenon.

I am not in the country; it is much harder than usual for me to attend events in Italy, and I was resigned to stop doing so for several months. Last week, however, I got a really interesting proposal, and I had the idea to ask the organizing team if they would accept someone other than myself to present my book. They accepted with enthusiasm. At this point I published an update on Facebook to probe whether my friends and readers would be up for it; to my great surprise, in a couple of hours I got half a dozen volunteers. Fantastic: a book on collaboration,written collaboratively and now even presented “wiki style” by an open community! This must be a first.

Here’s the deal. Navarra Editore and I are looking for volunteers to present Wikicrazia on my behalf in the coming months, when I can’t make it myself (which will be most of the times). We require:

• being familiar with the book. You need not agree with it: a critical presentation is perfectly acceptable.
• being comfortable with speaking in public

And we offer:

• my gratitude!
• my famous slides (with notes).
• payment of travel and hotel expenses.
• a Skype or phone session to discuss how to set up the presentation (as suggested by one of the volunteers).
• a small gift from the publisher, to show appreciation

Our goal here is to build and “advanced wikicrats” group with members in most Italian regions (and abroad?), people that can contribute in a useful, competent and confident way to the public events that are organized therein. I have a feeling that such a group could be useful to do other things as well.

We are kicking off with an event in Riomaggiore, at Cinque Terre, on 29th, 30th and 31st of July. See how it goes.

The time has come for open government in Italy. As so many phenomena here, it is not immediately apparent because it starts from the fringes and spreads unevenly, rather than being set in motion by a strategic decision of the State, as happened in the USA and in the UK. In this phase, it seems, the movers and shakers are city administrations: just look at ePart in Udine, Karaliscrazia in Cagliari, Wikicrazia in San Benedetto del Tronto. The newly elected administration in Milano is expected to make a move soon: meanwhile, the mayor Giuliano Pisapia and, even more so, the alderman Stefano Boeri (very active on Facebook) entertain a rich social media conversation with their fellow citizens.

Digging deeper, though, it becomes clear that the real protagonist in this phase of Italy’s transition to an open government is the civil society. The San Benedetto initiative was kickstarted by a group of citizens and a local paper; in Cagliari the initiatives are two (Karaliscrazia and Ideario per Cagliari), and both spawned from the civil society; as for Milano, the openings towards Internet-enabled collaborative governance are championed by an association called GreenGeek, that proved itself able to ferry the connected citizenry from campaigning to get Pisapia elected over to collaborating with his administration. Local administrations are being more reactive than proactive (the exception is Udine, where the ePart project was initiated by the mayor). The Italian way to open government, then, is characterized by a double anomaly: it is local rather than central, and the civil society is blazing its trail in a way that it does not in other countries.

More cities are to follow. These days, with each passing week more individuals, citizens’ groups and administrations are getting in touch with me to let me know they are thinking of launching yet more initiatives of collaboration between citizens and administrations: they want to discuss withme, or invite me to public events. I feel honored and proud that many of them are using my book Wikicrazia as a user’s manual for collaborative governance: a tool not just for learning about the wiki government, but for actually going out and making it happen.

Such a wealth of participation is a great asset, but it involves a risk: that of administrations feeling cornered, and perceiving as contrived a collaboration that should be completely natural. My first advice to people that ask me “how should we do this?” is always the same: you need to get the mayor or someone in the administration to sign up to your project, so be prepared to tailor it in a way such that they are comfortable with it even if this means giving up on some of your ideas. Sure, citizens have every right to make proposals in any way they want: but making proposals is not open government. Open government requires an explicit collaboration between citizens and administrations: the latter hold the democratic legitimacy to make and implement decisions that, by definition, are going to affect all citizens, including those that do not participate in the collaboration.

In the coming months I intend to blog about the many stories of local collaborative governance cooking up or already out there in Italy and elsewhere. I would like to X-ray them, not to criticize but to distill the best ideas and practices from all this civic energy. If you know any, I would be grateful if you dropped me a line: you can find me on this blog, the main social media and by email at alberto[at]cottica[dot]net.

The campaign for this year’s municipal elections in Milan left us with a precious legacy: the awareness that many citizens are willing and able to collaborate with their elected representatives in a constructive way. Thanks to the large number of people involved, their great creative energy, and their Internet tools to coordinate towards common goals, the connected citizenry’s potential to contribute to a much needed general renewal of the country is out of the question. The Italian civil society claimed a role for itself; there was no Obama to summon it. As it turns out, it has proven to be at least as advanced as any other in the world, and possibly more so.

This legacy, it turns out, has a dark side. Besides citizens, the protagonists of the Milanese campaign were Internet communication experts, who tend to have a marketing background. The marketing-derived approach makes sense for election campaigns, because voting has near-zero cost; low thresholds for access; and above all is often driven by non-rational, gut feeling motivations. All of these characteristics carry through to the purchase of consumption goods. So, political communication experts speak the language of marketing and advertising: they tell stories like Nixon losing the presidency to Kennedy because, in the key TV debate, he was sweating. Their job is not to help the citizenry to build a realistic idea of what is needed in the next term, but cajole them into voting for a certain candidate, even if they do it for superficial or wrong reasons. Granted, it is not particularly noble, but it works.

Collaboration between citizens and public authorities is very different from competition for votes, and the analogy with purchase of consumption goods does not carry through. Designing and enacting policies is a high-cost, prolonged activity; it requires rational argument, data, competence. In this context the marketing profession’s seduction techniques don’t work well; what’s more, they risk doing damage. In particular, they risk creating participation bubbles: initially luring into signing up people that later, faced with the exhausting wrangle of designing policy, get disheartened and defect en masse – leaving themselves with a bad experience and others with the chore of reorganizing the whole process. Enacting the wiki government is not about attracting large crowds, but about enabling each and every citizen to choose whether to engage, and just what with, while giving her honest information about the difficulties, the hard work, the high risk of failure associated with participation. Indicators, too, have different meaning than in marketing: in the advertising world attracting more people is always better, whereas in the wiki government there is such a thing as too much participation (it entails duplication of information, with many people making the same point, and reduction in the signal-to-noise ratio, with low-quality contributions swamping high-quality ones).

There is a fundamental difference in the way the decision to engage is modeled: in wiki-style collaboration participants self-select, in marketing the communication experts selects a target in a top-down way. In the former the participant is seen as a thinking adult, that needs to be enabled and informed so that she can make the right decision; in the latter the consumer (or voter) is seen as a stupid, selfish individual that reacts to gut stimulation, and that needs to be led to do what we know must be done. The outcome of collaboration, when it is well designed, is open and unpredictable; the outcome of marketing, when it is well designed, is meeting some target set a priori.

All in all, a shift towards marketing of the discourse on collaboration would be a mistake. An increase in the number of participants to a single process does not automatically mean an improvement; a mayor is not a brand; a willingness to help out is not a trend to be exploited on the short run (and if it is we have no use for it, because collaboration on policy yields results on the medium to long run); and above all citizens are not a target, because they don’t need to be convinced: they need to be enabled to do whatever it is they want to do. It is crystal clear that Italians are up for trying out a collaboration with any half-decent public authority; this collaboration needs space and patient nurturing to grow healthy and strong, sheltered from hype and unrealistic expectations. I hope that the leaders of Italian authorities – starting from the new mayor of Milan Giuliano Pisapia, the leader who best synbolizes the current phase – resist the temptation to frame collaboration as a campaign, citizens as voters, rational conversation as hidden persuasion. Yielding to it would mean shooting themselves in the foot, and wasting an opportunity that the country cannot afford to miss.

Sorry, this post in Italian only. It’s only book presentations in Sicily; please use Google Translate if you still want to know more about them.

Amo e la Sicilia e ammiro i siciliani. Sono particolarmente contento di potere presentare Wikicrazia sull’isola, e questo succederà tre volte nei prossimi tre giorni. Sabato 4 sarò a Palermo, per Una marina di libri, una nuova fiera del’editoria indipendente (evento Facebook). Domenica vado a Patti, in provincia di Messina, dove sarò ospite del mitico Caffè Galante. Patti, come molti comuni siciliani, ha completato il primo turno delle elezioni municipali e attende il ballottaggio; proveremo a montare una presentazione del libro centrata sulla dimensione comunale (evento Facebook). Lunedì 6 sarò invece alla Sala Hernandez di Catania, in un evento organizzato dagli amici di The Hub Sicilia (evento Facebook). Mi sposterò da una presentazione all’altra in moto, tanto per aggiungere un po’ di turismo (spero) intelligente allle occasioni di lavoro.

Ringrazio molto il mio editore Ottavio Navarra (siciliano, of course) per avere organizzato questo minitour siciliano, e festeggio riproponendo qui sopra il video che racconta i suoi primi passi come editore, in una terra bella ma non sempre facile per gli imprenditori puliti. Il calendario delle presentazioni è qui.

One more week on the road for more Wikicrazia presentations. Tomorrow – Wednesday, April 7th – I am laying my home field at The Hub Milano: 6 p.m., so we have time for a happy hour (Facebook event).

Saturday, April 30th I will be in Capri for the Trendwatching Festival 2011. It looks like a more glamorous event than the ones I usually participate in; I don’t know what to expect exactly, but it seems that wiki style collaboration between authorities and citizens has been promoted to trend status. Works for me (Facebook event).

Speaking of Wikicrazia, recently an American publisher showed some interest in the book. I’d love him to read it, but there is a problem: he does not read Italian. So I tried a lateral approach, sending him English language links and materials; but in the end it felt like the core idea of the book was missing from those materials, and that is that Internet enables us to have an impact on society as individuals, not just as representatives of organizations. So I made this video, also a good way for me to celebrate Liberation Day (April 25th, the day the Nazi Army was kicked out of Italy by the partisans and the Allied armies – but the partisans came first in most cities). If you are curious about the sources, you can find them here.