In September, the Open Government Partnership formally launched with a series of high-level meetings highlighting the transformative nature of open governance.
Events included a day-long multi-stakeholder discussion, "The Power of Open," that brought together governments, civil society, industry leaders, academics and the media in a series of panels and networking events. The launch page states, these were “focused on the role of openness in improving responsiveness, fostering accountability, creating efficiencies, promoting innovation and growth, fighting corruption, improving performance, and capturing dispersed knowledge in support of smarter policies.”
As part of this, Eight nations (Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, Norway, Philippines, South Africa, United Kingdom, and the US) formally endorsed a broadly-worded Open Government Declaration, all of them openly asserting that their goal is to achieve “greater prosperity, well-being, and human dignity in our own countries and in an increasingly interconnected world.”
This is something I feel incredibly hopeful about - I see increased 'Openness' in the public, private and community sectors as a huge step towards ethical, sustainable, agile progress. Last year I had a (somewhat radical) rant on the need (and possibilities) for crowd-sourced democracy here.
Watch President Obama’s opening address from the meeting, along with comments from multiple countries:
Highlights:
- The UK has ambition to be the most transparent government in the world. Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office, gave an extremely articulate speech and call to action (at 46:59).
- Rakesh Rajani, one of the civil society representatives used his moment well.
- President Obama's closing remarks included a pertinent comment on the challenge of being a human being in a position of power.
Read Susan Crawford’s detailed blog post on the topic, including how you can get involved in the US: http://scrawford.net/blog/
In the private sector:
- The power of the consumer is well known and is being leveraged in the marketing space ('Customer-made' became a trend back in 2006).
- In the B2B space, collaboration between internal and external experts, prospects and clients is becoming commonplace too.
- In large organisations, 'jams' are providing opportunity for internal crowdsourcing, for example, IBM's ValuesJam in 2003 gave its workforce the opportunity to redefine the core IBM values for the first time in nearly 100 years.
- These initiatives have generally been led from the top.
The community sector now has the power to lead and drive big change from the bottom up:
- Nathan Winograd made San Fransico the first 'no kill' state for shelter animals in the United States and went on to make the same change in other places (see 01.45 in video).
- A different example of community leadership is the collaborative, bottom up, coordinated research effort of the distributed http://occupyresearch.net project. Anyone can participate. A team led development of the wiki, which describes itself as "an open, shared space for distributed research focused around OccupyWallStreet / OccupyTogether". They are sharing ideas, research methods, tools, datasets, with a view to writing, analysing, discussing, codesigning new tools, and otherwise developing theory and practice together.
So, becoming more open (and finding ways for people from all sectors to collaborate on shared interests, beliefs, ambitions) is perhaps inevitable, since everyone now has a voice and anyone can drive change.
I see two keys to smooth progress in this area - the exact two challenges mentioned in my previous post; imagination and leadership. Scalable technologies have emerged that permit collaboration top down and bottom up. The question is, can a leader find constituents including experts who share interests, beliefs or ambitions - and lead them to;
- define a shared vision that represents ethical, sustainable progress (a 'win' for all constituents)
- and then work towards it in a coordinated way?
The project leader and participants would need imagination and leadership (internal and external) to commit to the possibility of a shared vision and to willingly, consistently collaborate and coordinate with each other over time to achieve win/win progress.
If you’re interested in hearing what OpenGov experts and enthusiasts have to say, feel free to follow this OpenGov Twitter list.
Lets hope the power of 'open' culminates in constituents with expertise collaborating to drive ethical, sustainable progress more transparently and democratically in all sectors.
Speaking of imagination, an interesting tangent to this topic: the Japanese Manga/Anime Neon Genesis Evangelion depicts a corporation called NERV that posseses 3 biological computers, dubbed The Magi, which are responsible for high-level decision making. Each component of the system represents a unique perspective (in the fiction: woman, mother and scientist). I'll come back to this in a bit.
The second key part to this rant is the concept of Big Data - the public availability of information collected by the government.
This should be of interest to IBM, considering the emphasis on driving innovation and business value through analytics.
My point is, crowdsourcing is one way of harnessing a large body of processing power to derive meaningful outcomes from specific inputs. I postulate that in terms of government and decisionmaking for the benefit of the population, we should no longer rely on deficient and unpopular policies contrived by fallible governments, limited and inefficient as they are, and instead focus on collecting the neccessary data to feed a system that tracks all the variables and derives an optimal solution - governmented by a system like The Magi if you will.
Interested parties would be invited to submit "Components" of this Magi system, so long as they Open Source the code for public scrutiny.
I'm sure there will be great reluctance to relinquish the rule government to a bunch of computers and computer geeks though, but I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords.
Posted by: Caesar Wong | October 22, 2011 at 09:53 PM
Caesar, you got me chuckling... I love the idea of being ruled by the Magi Open Source big-data-crunching overlords!
Should we start an open-source sci-fi novel, iteration 1 title: '2084'?!
;)
Posted by: Rowan Hetherington | October 22, 2011 at 10:18 PM