Cairns Blog

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.

Turning Rule Writers Into Problem Solvers: Creating a 21st Century Government That's Open and Competent by Improving Regulation and Regulatory Review

In last night’s State of the Union, President Obama declared: “We cannot win the future with a government of the past.” He emphasized plans, outlined in the Executive Order on Improving Regulation and Regulatory Review he signed last week, calling for each agency to review its regulations and determine if they can be: “modified, streamlined, expanded, or repealed so as to make the agency's regulatory program more effective or less burdensome in achieving the regulatory objectives.” 

Federal agencies enact between 4000-8000 (now closer to) 3,000+ rules each year governing every aspect of life from energy efficiency to endangered species, in contrast to one-tenth that number of statutes. Rulemaking is arguably the most important and far-reaching lawmaking mechanism in our democracy.

The White House can make good on its commitment to reduce the burden on regulated industries while still promoting corporate accountability and consumer protection if it uses technology – as the President repeatedly called for last night – to open up the rulemaking process to new voices and ideas from outside government.  This can be done without changes to the Administrative Procedure Act (the legislation that governs rulemaking) or new budgets.

Developing more collaborative rulemaking practices would help the White House identify creative solutions that go beyond telling regulated businesses what to do (or not do) and identify complementary (and in some cases, substitute) approaches that reinforce the effectiveness of regulations.

For example, the Progressive Automotive X Prize awarded $10 million dollars in prizes to the entrepreneurs who developed the best mainstream and alternative energy vehicle to achieve 100 miles per gallon fuel efficiency. Prizes are just one possible complement to regulation for creating the necessary incentive to stimulate under-produced innovations. Congress recently provided the legislative impetus for agencies to “to use prizes and challenges to spur innovation, solve tough problems, and advance their core missions to use prizes more regularly,” says Tom Kalil, Associate Director for Policy of the Office of Science and Technology (my former home base).  Challenge.gov, a new software tool, enables any public official to create a challenge, such as this one on connected vehicle technology.

For an agency considering how to achieve greater fuel efficiency, the rulemaking process is geared to do only one thing: write rules. Instead, the White House needs to retrain rule writers to be problem solvers.

Several reports have come out in recent years recommending strategies for using technology to make rulemaking improvements (here’s my  article on the “E-Rulemaking Revolution” (2003)). But there are three things the White House can do in the next year to expand the toolkit of governance beyond current rulemaking practices consistent with the new Executive Order’s mandate to seek “open exchange of information and perspectives” in the rulemaking process.

1) In the short term (today), the White House can immediately direct agencies to use social media to obtain input much earlier in the rule planning process. Regulations.gov is a government-wide commenting platform for directing comments from citizens to agencies in connection with already drafted and proposed rules. But agencies are generally asking for help after formulating the solution outlined in the rule.

Instead, every department and major agency already has an online brainstorming tool (Ideascale) that lets one person make a suggestion and others give it thumbs up or thumbs down resulting in a rank-ordered list of proposals. Agencies can repurpose these brainstorming sites as well as their Facebook and Twitter accounts and other free tools to solicit input on policy problems long before they become rulemakings.  Previously, it made sense to centralize commenting at regs.gov when technology was expensive and the public had a hard time finding commenting opportunities. With the newly redesigned daily gazette of government – FederalRegister.gov – it is far simpler to find public consultation opportunities wherever they take place and far simpler to run them.

The agency can host more online engagements in connection with a policy issue before it becomes a rulemaking on regulations.gov.  For example, the Department of Transportation recently outsourced the running of such an online consultation to Cornell University’s “Regulation Room” blog, demonstrating how easy it is to use a simple discussion forum.  Agencies have the convening power to attract maximum participation and should start running these policy consultations, too, vastly expanding the use of “outside in” policymaking.

2) Free social media tools are not ideally suited to obtaining structured, manageable, easy-to-read and relevant feedback -- 140 characters on Twitter may be a bit short to capture the nuances of fuel-efficiency --- which is why in the medium term (six months), the White House should employ a software platform that provides templates to organize citizen responses. 

Toward the end of my two years as United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer, I collaborated with colleagues on the description of the design for “Expertnet,” the purpose-built question-asking tool we thought was needed to create useful citizen consultations. Such a tool would make it simple for any public official to use a wizard to set up a topic with public consultation questions; distribute and direct those questions to those with specific expertise and interests; configure a template for use in responding to questions so that the public would be providing empirical support for their responses; and synthesize the feedback.

The idea for ExpertNet is rooted in my earlier experience designing Peer-to-Patent in collaboration with the United States Patent and Trademark Office.  There we created a template by which a participating member of the public could supply bibliographic literature to the Patent Examiner and explain why it was relevant to assessing the claims of a pending patent application. Simple to fill out. Simple to read.  While the Request for Comment in connection with Expertnet described the platform’s potential use in the context of seeking public input on agency performance management, such a tool could also be integrated into and replace the unstructured “click-here-to-comment” processes of regulations.gov.

3) In the long term (one year), rather than layer technology on top of the unchanged political realities, the White House should break out of the legislation-regulation paradigm and direct agencies, prior to any notice of proposed rulemaking, to invite people to develop short proposals supported by empirical evidence for alternative approaches to solving every problem on its agenda, considering every alternative.

At present, there is no opportunity for people outside of government to propose a prize-backed challenge, public-private partnership, social behavioral “nudge,” collective volunteer action, or new software platform as complements or alternatives to create the desired behavior change and consumer protection.

For example, with the release of massive quantities of data (data collected because of a statute or rulemaking) by agencies, Departments like Health and Human Services are beginning to explore how to collaborate with citizens to use this data to create tools that help citizens and policymakers make better, more evidence-based decisions.  Websites like healthcare.gov, by creating complete transparency in the market for health insurance, have the potential to drive greater accountability in that marketplace with simple web tools and powerful data.  These innovative, tech-based approaches are generally not substitutes but are important complements to regulation.

In order to enjoy a “a 21st century government that's open and competent,” as the President said last night, we need to network government – not reorg it. We need to take advantage of the opportunity created by networks to solicit meaningful, manageable and creative input from outside government early on in the regulatory process before a rule is ever drafted in order ensure that we are devising the most creative and efficient solutions and, at the same time, promoting the most robust democracy.