Cairns Blog

From Russia with Love

A few days ago I gave a presentation on “Solving Public Problems with Crowdsourcing” for 80 assembled governors of the Russian Federation outside of Moscow at an event on Contemporary Management Technologies.

The presentation was a sweep of the global landscape covering ways institutions are engaging with the public on (and off) line to brainstorm, collect data, undertake tasks, generate economic wealth, raise money and elicit opinions.  In other words, I was focusing on how government institutions can collaborate with citizens to solve problems through crowdsourcing.

It was a diverse group to address. It included the governor of Arkhangelsk, an Arctic Circle state, with no roads that can only be accessed by helicopter as well as the governor of Krasnoyarsk, a state so big that it takes 4 hours to fly across it. The federal president appoints these governors. But a new law (recently reversed in part by Putin) is slated to establish direct elections this autumn. Hence many of these leaders are thinking about their electoral chances in a time of increasing dissatisfaction with the Kremlin and, above all of the need to deliver better services to improve Russian quality of life with dwindling resources.

My goal was to be concrete and specific (thanks GovLab Research) about how to use technology to solve real problems in practice not in theory. My perspective was informed by my experiences in public service where I learned how hard it is to get stuff done on a hundred topics a day without access to good information or the time to get it. I wanted to convey at this propitious moment with the promise (threat?) of elections around the corner that engagement is a way, not to get beaten up by the press and public, but to collaborate to the end of solving real problems.

Crowdsourcing itself is a slippery term. A recent article counted 40 different definitions of “crowdsourcing” and there are lots of terms from open innovation to collective intelligence to crowd crafting to human computation, which get substituted interchangeably. My approach to defining crowdsourcing centered around the following variables:

Institution + Platform + Incentive + Citizens/Communities = Crowdsourcing

Using this model, I wanted to get the audience away from thinking that citizens can only complain and, instead, to remind them that people are smart and will give if asked. Crowdsourcing, is in essence, about strategies for working with citizens, companies and organizations — whether those with specific expertise, passion and know how or the general public (didn’t know how to say Joe Q Six Pack in Russian) — to collaborate with a government institution to solve a problem.

Important to point out is what crowdsourcing projects have in common (and this I learned clearly fromDaren Brabham‘s excellent short book on Crowdsourcing) is that crowdsourcing projects must be directed by an institution and depend upon the institution to organize the practice and set the rules. They aren’t bottom up exercises like Wikipedia nor are they top down activities like a corporate contest to pick a logo. To quote from one of my favorite slides that I often use: “it ain’t a thousand flowers blooming or command and control.”

Rather, Crowdsourcing exists in the middle between institution and citizens. This liminal space between government and civil society is such a fertile and little understood idea, especially in the public sector, where there can be resistance to saying “I don’t know” and “I need help” from anyone outside my professional cadre. To do crowdsourcing well, the institution has to play an active role in planning. This demands work but it also creates an incentive to public leaders who fear that engagement might lead to plebiscite or free for all where either they get beaten up or are drowned in information they can’t use.

For the future, GovLab and others need to create materials that outline the anatomy of specific crowdsourcing projects.  For institutional leaders flirting with the idea of greater openness and engagement, it will help to understand concretely both the steps to take and the steps taken by others before. For example, it may be heartening for the wary and would-be innovator to know that Veterans Affairs ran several important challenges to decrease the backlog in Veterans benefits claims with a 3K piece of software and part-time assistance of one employee. It’s crucial to understand that the open health government data movement got started with one tireless individual working to convene a few dozen people to use the data to demonstrate what’s possible. Today that Healthdatapalooza movement has growth exponentially and others outside of government have stepped up to help. But it doesn’t have to be hard to get started.

To inspire real change, vision must be married to tactics.. In short, the more concrete, the more granular and the more specific we can get by telling stories of how innovations got done and why they worked, the more likely we are to encourage leaders to understand that engagement is a must have tool of successful governance.

So please share examples of the “how to” of crowdsourcing – who did what, how much did it cost, what were the tools and, above all, what were the outcomes — that can be used to inspire any leader to become more collaborative and, as result, more effective. Comments here or links cc @thegovlab. Thanks!

Crowdsourcing Governance

 

[Video intro ends at 52 seconds; Intro by Dr. Gref ends at 2'18; Speech ends at 11'15; then Q&A]

These remarks have been edited from a 9-minute speech made in Moscow on November 12, 2011 at the 170th anniversary of Sperbank, Russia's largest and oldest financial institution. Speakers at this panel were introduced by Dr. Hermann Gref (CEO and Chairman of the Board, Sperbank, and former Russian Minister of Economic Development and Trade) and included Vladimir Putin, Prof. Jeff Howe (Northeastern), Prof. Tom Malone (MIT) and Dr. Paul Saffo (Managing Director of Foresight, Discern Analytics), Patrick Howard (Vice-President and Global Cloud Leader, IBM Global Business Services) and Klaus Kleinfeld (CEO and Chairman of the Board, Alcoa).

For Prime Minister Putin's presentation, click here.

Crowdsourcing Governance

We’ve heard today that as individuals we are smarter collaborating together than working alone. That is as true for institutions as it is for individuals. We are also smarter working across the boundaries of institutions with groups and individuals outside the walls of a single organization.

Collaboration makes businesses more successful. After all, Sberbank made $30 billion rubles ($1 billion U.S. dollars) as a result of its recent crowdsourcing experiments. But how do we, practically speaking, use technology and these collaborative processes to marry the chaotic success of Wikipedia to the hierarchical institutions of governance and government at the national and local level?

Challenges

To do so, we have three challenges we must first overcome: 

1. Serious Problems: The problems governments face are serious and complex. We live in a world with 7 billion people and soon we’ll live in a world with 10 billion people, 40% of whom will not have access to healthcare, clean water, or basic education. The breakup of the Eurozone is not the same as the Eurovision song contest. Are these kind of contests too frivolous to address the problems we face?

2. Declining Legitimacy: Globally, trust in government institutions is declining. We only need to witness the Arab Spring or the Occupy Wall Street movement. In the United States, by some measures trust in government is at an all time low of 9%. Government has to act with legitimacy. It has to engender trust. It has to have stability in its decision making. Is trying to connect the pulsing, vibrant network to the institution too experimental, too radical for government?

3. Too Costly: Finally, are these techniques too novel for government? It might be nice to have, but is crowdsourcing a must-have that is worth the investment of time and money?

Solutions

I would argue that collaboration is more important for government than for business in these very tough economic times, because it enables government to deliver better services for less money and more democratically.

First, crowdsourcing is a serious solution to serious problems.

1. Saving Money: Twenty nations, and countless states and local governments, have created and launched national data portals to put out spending data. With information about how government spends money, citizens can crowdsource the development of solutions to spot fraud and waste, such as sophisticated models, visualizations, and predictions. But what they can also do, as in happened in the state of Rajasthan, India, is crowdsource the reading of that data in the town square and the writing of that data on one hundred thousand walls of villages, so people can then identify paychecks that have been written to someone who has died or bridges that were never built when the government claimed that they were.

2. Spotting problems: There are local platforms like See Click Fix, in use now in seventy governments across six continents, that allow for distributed problem spotting. Identifying red lights that are out at intersections or potholes in the street allows government to target the delivery of services more effectively and more cheaply.

3. Innovating Solutions: But crowdsourcing also allows for innovating solutions and not just the spotting of problems. The Department of Defense has used crowdsourcing to design a new combat vehicle. And they got it done not in years, not in months, but with 159 competitive, serious submissions obtained in a matter of weeks. How did this work? The Obama administration’s Open Government Initiative created a single platform called Challenge.gov that makes it simple and easy for every ministry to post a challenge and ask people not simply to suggest ideas but to develop solutions. Our Office initially helped ministries to frame the question, to pick the judges, and to identify their goals. Initially we provided some support centrally to educate the lawyers and the ministries to say “you too can do this,” or “it’s okay to do this.” But very quickly we put ourselves out of business because the ministries began to talk to each other. Now there is an effective community of practice with at least sixty agencies who communicate about the challenges they’ve created, the successes they’ve had, and they have learned from their experience putting these challenges on the web through this single, free platform.

Second, designed right, these are not experimental projects.

Previously, I had some experience creating a platform called Peer to Patent, in which we connected volunteer scientists and technologists to the national patent offices. The program, began in the US, then expanded to the UK, Japan, and Australia. This is is a structured, targeted process that uses rating and ranking - thumbs up and thumbs down - to deliver to the government official not ten thousand suggestions, not one hundred suggestions, but ten pieces of information that will help to inform his or her ultimate decision about the application that deserves a patent. I describe this at length in my book, Wiki Government.

This week, the British Prime Minister announced a new initiative to crowdsource the identification of regulations that are impeding and hindering entrepreneurship of new businesses. But he’s not just asking for those thousand ideas, he’s offering a process to ask the crowd to then help implement those suggestions and gather the data that’s necessary, so that crowdsourcing doesn’t create more work for government officials. It helps them in making their decisions.

Third, innovative solutions such as crowdsourcing are a must have, not just a nice to have. The tools to crowdsource are free or nearly free and the solutions are generated quickly. It makes government cheaper, smarter, and more effective.

In the Department of Veteran Affairs in the United States, the agency asked the nineteen thousand employees for a solution to the problem of how to bring down the wait time for veterans coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq to receive services that are owed to them. The time was reduced from more than a year to now only to a few weeks. It took only one person in the ministry, part time, to run a project that generated involvement from seven thousand employees in the first month alone.

There’s a town in California that just launched an iPhone app that manages a network of trained volunteers who respond when someone has a heart attack but before the ambulance can arrive. This saves lives at no extra cost.

The Latvian Parliament is working with Latvia’s banks to authenticate citizens identities in order to crowdsource the development of new legislation. The legislation is shaped by citizens, who are advised by a network of voluntary experts before the legislation is implemented.

And we’ve heard from the Prime Minister that here members of the public in Russia are helping to rewrite new laws, like a law on fisheries, and working together to supplement official government efforts by providing aid and assistance during the devastating fires that rampaged Moscow last year.

Closing

So let me close by saying that we have the means to engage more people in the life of their democracy.

This is not about the technology. That’s free.

It’s about asking questions. It’s about a willingness to ask and to create engaging and accessible opportunities for people to participate. But it’s not the same ad voting. It’s not about creating a single mass process that’s one size fits all. What’s required is crowdsourcing wisely, not crowdsourcing widely: developing many different, small ways for people to lend their expertise, their experience, and their enthusiasm for the public good whether it’s about patents or fish, veterans or potholes.

Churchill said, “democracy is the worst form of government except all others.” But we can do better. And thanks to the techniques that we’ve heard about today, we have the experience to make institutions of our democracy more effective and more participatory. Not just in principle, but in practice. Thomas Jefferson said we can “mak[e] every citizen an acting member of the government in the offices nearest and most interesting to him.” This in turn, Jefferson went on to say, “attaches him by the strongest feelings to the independence of the country and it’s Republican Constitution.”

Thank you and happy birthday.

Club de Madrid: Digital Technologies for 21st Century Democracy

Last week the Club de Madrid, the non-profit organization composed of 80 democratic former Presidents and Prime Ministers from 56 different countries, held its annual meeting in New York. The theme was Digital Technologies for 21st Century Democracy.  Irving Wladawsky-Berger posted his reflections on the meeting and, in particular, on the question of how governments manage the cacophony of open innovation here. I posted the remarks that I shared with the Club Members here.

The Club provides peer to peer strategic advising by former world leaders to current world leaders, exploiting the global profile of its members to raise awareness of major issues that can strengthen our democracies. Just as music, publishing, and other commercial industries are transforming, so, too, must the institutions of our democracy evolve with the changing technological reality. The conference aimed to explore how network technologies might fundamentally change what we mean by democracy for the 21^st century.

As Prime Minister Wim Kok of the Netherlands expressed at the outset of the conference:

We will hear about such recent innovations having a profound impacton participatory democracy as large-scale computational tools. The explosion of “big data” might enable us to deepen our understanding of the world around us, potentially avert crisis and make better decisions. We will learn about collective intelligence technologies – also sometimes called social media -- that allow us to work together in new ways, heralding an era in which citizens and the state work together to solve problems collaboratively.

Whether in longstanding or fledgling democracies, digital governance is only in its infancy.  Many government institutions are only just getting online.  Even those that had long used technology are just discovering how openness, enabled by technology, might help them work more effectively and more democratically.

There are many conferences about politics and yet more about technology. By convening expert technologists and experienced politicians as well as business leaders, social scientists and journalists, we hope to develop a nuanced picture of how to realize the long-term vision of a more innovative and participatory democratic culture despite the short-term realities of electoral democracy.

For me, this conference will have been a success if it accomplishes three things. First, the discussion, whether in formal sessions or in the hallway, over the next two days should give each of us an understanding of how technology is impacting democracy globally.

Second, I hope that through our conversation, we each come away with clearer vision of the kind democracy we want to achieve and the impediments to such innovation.

Finally, we should each strive to identify three concrete ideas, principles or projects each of us can champion, whether individually or collectively.

Used well, digital like bio-technologies have the potential to improve human flourishing and quality of life for people and the planet.  They can also transform our institutions for the better.

 

 

 

 

Evolving Democracy for the 21st Century

Network technology has irrevocably changed campaigning and elections. It has the potential to transform governance and the workings of our democracy for the better.  These improvements, however, have been slow in coming.  Innovations in governance have been thwarted by politics as usual and resistance to devolution of power away from hierarchical bureaucracy to networks of diverse, public participants.  In Tripoli, Tottenham or Wall Street people have been protesting failed policies and a lack of opportunity to participate in elections once every two or four years. Whether in failed states or old democracies, most simply want a state that works.  But they have lost faith in government and other centralized institutions of power.   For example, just eleven percent of Americans polled express optimism about the future of the United States government.[1]  Churchill was fond of saying that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others, but by democracy he surely meant something better than this.[2]

Democratic elections alone do not remedy the crisis of confidence in government.  Moreover, there is no viable justification for a democratic system in which public participation is limited to voting.  We live in a world in which ordinary people write Wikipedia, the most comprehensive and highest quality global encyclopedia; spend their evenings moving a telescope via the Internet and making discoveries half a world away; get online to help organize a protest in cyberspace and in the physical world, such as the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia or the demonstrations of the ‘indignados’ throughout Spain; or pore over purloined State Department cables.

The same technologies enabling us to work together at a distance are creating the expectation to do better at governing ourselves.  But to achieve the twin goals of more participatory and effective governance, we must innovate in how we govern.  Thanks to technology, if we have the will to do so, we also now have the opportunity. 

Continue Reading Evolving Democracy (Download Evolving Democracy). Approx 10 pages.

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[1] New Poll Finds Deep Distrust of Government, New York Times, October 25, 2011 (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/26/us/politics/poll-finds-anxiety-on-the-economy-fuels-volatility-in-the-2012-race.html).

[2] Sir Winston Churchill, Speech Before the House of Commons, Hansard, November 11, 1947 (http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1947/nov/11/parliament-bill#column_206).

Reputation Economies Conference at Yale Law School

The Information Society Project at Yale Law School is proud to present Reputation Economies in Cyberspace.  The symposium will be held on December 8, 2007 at Yale Law School in New Haven, CT.

This event will bring together representatives from industry, government, and academia to explore themes in online reputation, community-mediated information production, and their implications for democracy and innovation. The symposium is made possible by the generous support of the Microsoft Corporation.

A distinguished group of experts will map out the terrain of reputation economies in four panels: (1) Making Your Name Online; (2) Privacy and Reputation Protection; (3) Reputation and Information Quality; and (4) Ownership of Cyber-Reputation.  See below for more detail on each panel; a current list of confirmed speakers is available at the conference website.

Online registration is available now at: https://wems.worldtek.com/RepEcon. There is a $95 registration fee, which includes lunch. Yale students and faculty and members of the press may attend for free. For more information, see: http://isp.law.yale.edu/reputation.

Yale Law Schoo Reunion: The Internet Influencing Democracy

Video now up

The New Tools: The Internet Influencing Democracy
Moderator: Robert C. Post ’77, David Boies, Professor of Law, Yale Law School
Panelists: Susan Crawford ’89, Associate Professor, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law; Beth Simone Noveck ’97, Professor of Law, New York Law School, Director, Institute for Information Law and Policy, Director, Do Tank and Democracy Design Workshop; Joshua Micah Marshall, Columnist, Writer, and Publisher, Talking Points Memo

Clay Shirky at Amateur Hour - Cyberspace is Over

Clay Shirky jump-started the Amateur Hour conference with the opening keynote, presenting themes from his forthcoming book, Here Comes Everybody.  Clay demonstrated the progression that new media has enabled from aggregation to collaboration to collective action. 

First, there is the pooling of stuff.  But we move quickly from aggregation to collaboration and annotation that goes beyond the cute and social, like the cats on I Can Has Cheezburger to collaboration that produces greater transparency and reduces corruption.  For example, the google maps mashup of the location of Tunisian prisons.  People are making knowledge available outside of large, formal organizations.

One up skill from collaboration is collective action. Flashmobs, such as the pillow fight in Toronto,  the Zombie walk in San Francisco, and the first flashmob in Manhattan, the pigeon party in Central Park are all examples of an emergent form of real space collective action enabled by the Internet.  What was originally developed as a way to make fun of Hipsters has become something political and a force for collective action.

The "Internet turns the organizing strategy inside out," says Clay.  It creates a group where no group  exists in advance.  The group is not create and conspired privately but broadcast in public and formed spontaneously.  So when Belarussians gathered in October Square in a flashmob to eat ice cream or to smile at one another, out came the secret police.

“The idea of cyberspace is over.”  Just as the phone has become an annotation for our daily lives, so, too has the Internet.  We are using it as a tool to enable this kind of collective action.  And that trend is only accelerating. “Freedom of speech, press and assembly are all the same freedom” now.  We are only going to see more of this spill-over from real space into cyberspace and back which will be hard to fake and harder to ignore, such as the "Nuts Online Jericho" web protest against the cancellation of the TV show Jericho which used web-based community to make a real space protest happen: users organized the delivery of 20 tons of peanuts to the television network.

DIY Film Festival - Feb 8-10

Apropos of UGC......From Machina guru Paul Marino....School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California, February 8-10, 2008

We are in the early stages of a fundamental transformation in how we create, share and view dynamic visual media. This transformation is enabling a new media ecology that can support widespread amateur video creation, and peer-to-peer and many-to-many distribution to audiences both large and small. Although it is clear that there is tremendous demand for user-generated and bottom-up forms of digital video, it remains unclear how best to support these creative projects, what the implications are for artistic practice and how to build bridges between old and new media.

24/7: A DIY Video Summit will bring together the many communities that have evolved around do-it-yourself (DIY) video: artists, audiences, technology providers, academics, policy makers and industry executives. The aim is to discover common ground, and to chart the path to a future in which grassroots and mainstream, amateur and professional, artist and audience can all benefit as the medium continues to evolve.

Amateur Hour Conference Live Blogging

The Amateur Hour Conference on user-generated content kicked off this morning at New York Law School.   Organized by my colleague, Prof. Dan Hunter, the conference kicked up a hailstorm of protest before it  started when Dan mentioned in passing to the speakers that the conference is being webcast.

Well, Was.

Streaming has been canceled for all except the talks by the non-lawyers and the sane.

The problem is, according to NYLS prof and official conference kibbitzer, Prof. Seth Harris, that lawyers view themselves as being risk-avoiders rather than risk-evaluators.   The events preceding the conference perhaps even more than the conference itself are the more important lesson for us as law professors and teachers to impart to our students.  If we are teaching the values of social justice, deliberation, and open exchange of ideas, we have to teach our students how to balance these values with the practical demands of an increasingly litigious profession.

Ironically, the legal beagles, worried about being on the record talking about the legal and business implications of amateur content, forget entirely about amateur content.  The audience is full of bloggers and "citizen journalists" reporting on the event.  So I feel obligated as a matter of principle to live-blog the conference taking place.   Of course, the lawyers aren't expected to actually say anything  so I think I'll talk about Clay Shirky's keynote, instead.

State of Play Virtual Worlds Research Workshop, Dec 1-2

Dec 1-2, 2006

http://www.nyls.edu/sopny