1. Designing a Research Network on
the Impact of Technology on Governance
November 9 – 10, 2012

2.  Problem: Challenges of Contemporary
Democratic Governance;
 Potential: Technological and Scientific
Advances and Drivers;
 Paradigm Shift: Contours of the
Transformation in Governance;
 Proposal: Deepening our understanding,
broadening our capacity and increasing the
practice of Opening Government;
 Pre-Network: Connecting Disciplines and
Expertise.

3. PROBLEM statement

4. “Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of
sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it
has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all
those other forms that have been tried from time to time”
Winston Churchill, November 11, 1947, House of Commons
Legitimacy Deficit Effectiveness Deficit
Percentage of bills proposed by the last US Congress that became law: 3
(2011, US Library of Congress)

5. •TRUST AT AN ALL-TIME LOW – JUST 9% IN THE UNITED STATES
•FAILED STATES CANNOT PROVIDE ADEQUATE SERVICES
•FUNCTIONING STATES ARE MIRED IN PARTISAN POLITICS
•EXHAUSTED BY POLITICS, PEOPLE HAVE LOST FAITH IN DEMOCRATIC GOVERNANCE

6. “If Congress had a 9% approval rating
while George Washington was still alive,
he would have shoved his wooden
dentures in his mouth, assembled a
militia and marched on the Capitol. The
nation's founders weren't big fans of
dysfunctional governments. I'll bet we
could solve our energy problem by
connecting a generator to John Adams's
corpse, which I assume is spinning in its
grave.”
Scott Adams, Wall Street Journal,
November 5, 2011
* couldn’t resist

9. The systems that provide us with energy, health, social care, transport, food and
knowledge are also being remade in ways as radical as those of 70 years ago…Each of
these systems is, at present, visibly broken: energy systems designed to produce and
distribute energy, but not to use it well; a food system that generates worsening
obesity; a health system dominated by hospitals ill-suited to populations suffering
from long-term conditions, including mental illness; social care systems wholly
unprepared for rapid ageing; and, among others, economic systems that still suffer
profound imbalances of unused resources and unmet needs. In each case, these
systems that now look broken are as much victims of success as anything else. As so
often, success repeated itself until it finally became failure, which is why those at the
heart of each of these systems are often the last to understand how they need to
change.”
Geoff Mulgan

10. Governments fund research grants; invest in broadband
infrastructure; support science education.
But they spend next to nothing on reinventing
.
government institutions
What industry doesn’t regularly improve on its core
business model? .
Not the same as experimenting with different policies in
different jurisdictions (Laboratories of Democracy) but
experimenting with how we make policies, spend money, and
legislate in the first place.

11. POTENTIAL

13. BIG DATA AND
COMPUTATIONAL TOOLS OPEN DATA LAW AND POLICY

14. Creating the potential for more informed and effective governance

15. "Open data is an important pillar of open government
initiatives and those are about changing the way
government and its constituencies relate and
communicate.”
José Manuel Alonso
“..Tracking the spread of disease across regions,
paying health benefits to workers who live and work
in different countries, fighting crime, and
monitoring air quality in border regions, among
many others.”
Theresa Pardo

16. COLLABORATION AND OPEN GOVERNMENT
DISTRIBUTED WORK TOOLS POLICY

17. Creating the potential for access to better and more innovative ideas faster
“In a world marked by so much turmoil, we need open
government to build trust and to revitalize the social
compact between states and citizens. Openness can
bring governments and citizens together, cultivate
shared understandings, and help solve our practical
problems…The course of human progress is never
straightforward. But the human spirit is such – with our
curiosity to know, our impulse to speak out, our tenacity
to get things done, and our deep rooted desire for
freedom and dignity – that in the end we will settle for
nothing less than open government.”
Rakesh Rajani

18. “Giving citizens a voice is only one part of the equation.
Often overlooked is the process of institutional change
that must pave the way and which ultimately enables
governments to be responsive to citizens.”
Tiago Peixoto
“The open government movement—which has emphasized
transparency, collaboration, and participation at the
Federal, state, and local levels—is finding increasing
application on the international and diplomatic stage, as
evidenced most recently by the launch of the Open
Government Platform.”
Chris Vein

19. What is the Shift Technology Enables?:
Radical Change in Information Production

20. “In the past decade and a half, we have
begun to see a radical change in the
organization of information production.
Enabled by technological change, we are
beginning to see a series of economic,
social, and cultural adaptations that make
possible a radical transformation of how we
make the information environment we
occupy as autonomous individuals, citizens,
and members of cultural and social groups.”
Yochai Benkler

21. “We ‘simply do not have enough genes
to program the brain fully in advance,”
we must work together, extending and
supporting our own intelligence with
“social prosthetic” systems that make
up for our missing cognitive and
emotional capacities: “Evolution has
allowed our brains to be configured
during development so that we are ‘plug
compatible’ with other humans, so that
others can help us extend ourselves.”
Steven Kosslyn

23. PARADIGM SHIFT

24. *CENTRALIZED NEED NOT IMPLY PRIVATIZED

25. e.g. Peer to Patent platform for connecting
volunteer scientists to national patent
Offices to inform patentability determinations

26. e.g. Challenge.gov has enabled 45+ agencies to
collaborate with the public to address 200+
Problems with innovative solutions

27. e.g. first responder projects erode
the line between professionals and
volunteers
e.g. Participatory budgeting and spending
projects asks people to raise and spend
taxpayer money on public functions

28. PROPOSAL

29.  It is intuitive to want to get rid of hidebound
institutions and partisan politics but what do
we replace them with? What happens the Day
After the Arab Spring? What works?

31. Why a research initiative?
We could create governance that is:
1) Smarter: Yet we don’t know yet how to leverage collective
intelligence well or how to balance participation with efficiency.
2) More collaborative: Yet we don’t know yet how to coordinate
distributed work to produce the most effective results.
3) More decentralized: Yet we don’t know yet how to cede control
while safeguarding the public interest.

32.  Silo/Disciplinary Organized
 Issue Focused (e.g. Democracy vs Performance)
 Technology Focused (e.g. Big Data vs Social media)
 Little transfer to the field and exchange
 Building an open and networked (can’t be 40 people
around a table) Research Infrastructure to accelerate
understanding and emergence of the governance
paradigm shift

33. “If we are to make use of these impressive new capabilities to
address the kinds of problems that governments have
historically failed to solve, we also need to think differently
about the problems themselves. Social problems, that is, must
be viewed not as the subject of rhetorical debates, but as
scientific problems, in the sense that some combination of
theory, data, and experiment can provide useful insights beyond
that which can be derived through intuition and experience
alone.“
Duncan Watts

34.  Causal Hypotheses - With the growth of big data and
social media, governance will become more open and
collaborative.
 Normative Hypotheses - Closed ways of making and
implementing decisions leads to ineffective outcomes
and distrust in public institutions. Openness and
collaboration lead to economic growth, greater trust
in government and an increase in participatory
practices.
 Policy Hypotheses - Existing laws and policy will need
to be changed and new initiatives undertaken in order
to overcome impediments and realize the positive
benefits of open and collaborative governance.

35. How to Use Data to Make Government Smarter?
“We want to explore how Web 2.0-like
tools can allow the citizenry and the
government to engage in a conversation
about the information the data represents.
Much as systems have evolved to harness
the “wisdom of the crowd,” social data
networks, to coin a phrase, will enable the
government to get better information,
and the citizens to be more trusting of the
data produced.”
Jim Hendler

36. Does Transparency Create Greater Accountability? Decrease Corruption?
“I think that we have a world where those in
power have secrecy and citizen are forced to be
transparent. I think that modern technology
has made this increasingly so. I think that
fundamentally, it should be the opposite.
Public figures and institutions in power should
be forced to be transparent and private citizen
should have privacy and the right to speak
without fear of retribution or persecution. I
think this is essential for democracy and open
society and we need to push for and enable this
to happen.“
Joi Ito

37. Participation should provide ordinary citizens with the opportunity to have a voice in the making of
decisions by which they are affected but how? And does participation lead to improved quality of decisions,
policies and services?

38. “People should feel empowered by the
idea of a science of team building, The
idea that we can transmute the guess
work of putting a team together into a
rigorous methodology, and then
continuously improve teams is exciting.
Nothing will be more powerful, I believe,
in eventually changing how
organizations work.”
Sandy Pentland

39. How to Create Incentives for Participation?
“We have a connection here that’s broken in the larger scheme, but it works at
the local level. We care, and it’s important that we care about government,
because government really is the way we do things collectively that we can’t
do individually”
Jenn Pahlka

40. A model of the way a democracy should tackle
the kind of challenges that it confronts when it
comes to accountability. You have political
leadership from governments at the highest
level, you have governments working with civil
society to develop a reform agenda, and then
you have objective metrics of progress on the
delivery of that agenda.”
Jeremy Weinstein