Shaping Network Society

Just in time for the EU minsterial conference in Malmö, John Gotze brought together some of the most prominent thought leaders, including Don Tapscott, Tim O’Reilly and Lawrence Lessig, in the emerging field of Government 2.0 (“thinking government as a platform”) in the book State of the eUnion: Government 2.0 and Onwards, which is available for free download.

In my chapter (p. 275-282), Open Value Creation as a Strategic Management Approach, I argue that

[...] The 
idea 
of 
government
 (or 
business)
 as 
a 
platform
 necessitates 
an
 open
 value
 creation
 process. 
Open 
Value 
Creation 
consists 
of 
Open
 Policy Making 
(participation) 

and 
an 
Open
 Value 
Chain (collaboration). 
The
 distinction
 is 
slightly 
arbitrary
 but 
useful. 
It 
allows
 us 
to differentiate
 between
 coming
 up
 with
 a
 value
 generating
 process
 (policy) 
and
 repeatedly
 creating 
the value 
(value
chain).

Open
 policy
 making aims
 to
 open
 all
 aspects
 of
 the
 policy process
 (initiation,
 formulation,
 implementation,
 evaluation)
to
outside
inputs
and
scrutiny.
It
assumes
 that
 this 
allows
 better
 informed
 policy
making
 that 
is 
more 
legitimate and 
less 
costly.

The
 open
 value
 chain opens
 the
 implementation
 process
 (inputs, 
process,
 outputs, 
impact, 
outcome) 
to 
outside 
contributions
 under
 the
 assumption
 that
 a
 co‐produced
 public
 value
 is 
less
 costly
and 
more
 effective. [...]

Enjoy the book and let us start the discussion!

Guest-Blog by Ralf Leiteritz (now an international relations professor at the Universidad de los Andes).

…on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall I’ve come to think about my old country again. Seeing a short compilation of songs about the wall or more precisely its fall in 89, I thought about compiling my personal top 10/11 list of songs from/about East Germany. Not that my generation really listened a lot to East German bands – we were much more in tune with Western (West German, US and UK) music during the late 1980s. However, a few songs still stuck in my mind, mostly from around the time of the Wende (1989/90).

So here goes: 11 songs that bring me back to the GDR (actually Nr. 7 was from a West German artist), accompanied by some comments, plus a bonus track from….New York of all places. Hope you enjoy it!

1. Sandow: Born in the GDR (1990)
(makes – not so friendly – references to the sport star Nr. 1 in East Germany – ice skater Katarina Witt and the concert that Bruce Spingsteen gave 1988 in East Berlin in front of ….160,000 people)

2. City: Am Fenster (1978)
(with an awesome violin solo at the beginning)

3. Karat: Ueber sieben Bruecken musst Du geh’n (?),
(the song was made somewhat more famous in West Germany in a cover version by Peter Maffay)

4. Feeling B: Wir wollen immer artig sein (1990),

(half of today’s Rammstein come from this Nr.1 punk band in East Germany)

5. Electric Beat Crew: Here we come (1989),
(Hip Hop from East Germany!!! Only song from an East German band I know in English)

6. Karusell: Als ich fortging (1988),
(wonderful melody and lyrics written by a local poet – Gisela Steineckert)

7. Udo Lindenberg: Sonderzug nach Pankow (1983),
(in fact, Udo Lindenberg finally did manage to sing in the “Palace of the Republic” in East Berlin in 1987)

8. Nina Hagen: Du hast den Farbfilm vergessen (1978),
(who would have had thought that – Nina Hagen grew up in East Berlin; she must have been 18 years old or so when she recorded this song…)

9. Herbst in Peking: Bakschischrepublik (1990),
(the hymn of alternative East German rock during the Wende)

10. Die Skeptiker: Strahlende Zukunft (1990),
(a band labelled the East German “Dead Kennedys” – I think for the (political) quality of their lyrics they’d probably better be described as the equivalent of “The Clash”)

Bonus track:
11. Grandmaster Melle Mel: Beat Street Theme (1986),
(the movie “Beat Street” about life, rap and hip hop music in New York was shown in GDR film theaters in 1986 or 87 and revolutionized the local, unofficial music scene – lots of breakdance groups imitating the moves from the movie sprung up like mushrooms)

As history unfolds it is often hard to distinguish the truly historical from the incidental. As someone who has lived through German reunification 20 years ago these days, I can attest to that. But the absence of political theorists following the debate about open source in general and open voting systems in specific seems reckless. On Tuesday Sequoia, one of the major providers of electronic voting systems, announced the publication of the source code of its forthcoming e-voting product. This potentially can be a turning point in a battle fought almost single-handedly by Ed Felten:

The trend toward publishing election system source code has been building over the last few years. Security experts have long argued that public scrutiny tends to increase security, and is one of the best ways to justify public trust in a system. Independent studies of major voting vendors’ source code have found code quality to be disappointing at best, and vendors’ all-out resistance to any disclosure has eroded confidence further. Add to this an increasing number of independent open-source voting systems, and secret voting technologies start to look less and less viable, as the public starts insisting that longstanding principles of election transparency be extended to election technology. In short, the time had come for this step.

As members of network societies, we need to become attuned to the politics of such technical arcana and wrap our minds around these issues. We need to have positions on what we expect from a voting system and we need to reflect on what our general stance is towards the openness principle. And that needs our (and our political theorists) attention.

The trend in 2009 is to argue that in times of crisis, strategy needs to be more attuned to the changing realities of an organizations environment. As Stefan Stern argues in the FT:

At BCG, Reeves and Deimler has produced a paper, “New bases of competitive advantage”, that looks at something they call “adaptive advantage”. This is strategy, too, but not as we know it.

“Organisations with adaptive advantage recognise the unpredictability of today’s environment and the limits of deductive analysis,” they write. New problems are constantly emerging. Well-run businesses respond effectively to them.

How? First, they process relevant data – “signals” – quickly, and react to them. Google is an obvious master of this, getting closer than anyone else to understanding how online advertising works. Second, they see clearly how their business fits into a wider context. Amazon has made sure its Kindle e-book reader is supported by a network of valuable partners. Third, they are alive to social change and shifting customer preferences. Toyota managed this with its hybrid Prius car. Fourth, they experiment effectively, as Procter & Gamble does when trialling products. Last, they draw on the talents of the best people they can find – whether they employ them or not. Software companies such as Red Hat and TopCoder oversee large networks of programmers, using the best people with great flexibility. Their permanent staff is relatively small. But they have access to many more.

So it becomes clear that in rapidly changing environments we need to control our processes better than ever before, so we can understand the impacts of environmental changes on our processes and react upon them in real-time. In order to cope with potential blindspots, we need to build as much critical reflexivity into our processes right from the start and construct powerful levers that allow us to implement changes with no lag.

An there of course Michael Barber comes to mind, with his take on the delivery unit he headed for Tony Blair from 2001 to 2005 and his approach of deliverology, which is a critical strategic approach asking: What are you trying to do? How are you trying to do it? How do you know you are succeeding? If you’re not succeeding, how will you change things? How can we help you? Do read his Instruction to Deliver, where in chapter three he outlines his approach to deliverology. Here my quick “adaptive advantage” reading of his approach:

- Setting Goals – deliverology allows you to reflect on the goals you really care about – now!

- The Map of Delivery – reflect your boldness and quality dimensions.

- Delivery Chains – outline potential paths to achieve your outcomes (might be through your process or by influencing other processes)

- Trajectories/League tables – compare processes in your portfolio on the medium term trajectory they are on.

- Stocktakes – choreograph the people sessions where you account and control.

Distributed leadership is still a new concept, even though it sometimes seems that most of what we do is

building robust and resilient communities of like-minded individuals that are willing to be engaged in the value creation process, even though we do not control them through contract or the muzzle of a gun.

Think new corporate governance strategies, the millenial workplace, enterprise 2.0, collaborative strategizing, municipal participatory budgeting, user-centric design processes, open source software development, UN multi-stakeholder processes, etc.

The first challenge for successful distributed leadership is to see the loss of control over open processes as an opportunity not a threat. “There’s this interesting tension between the value of having contributed information versus a clear loss of control over the process,” says Eric Kansa, executive director of the information and service design program at the University of California, Berkeley. Open processes allow us to leverage not only the wisdom of the crowds, increase our legitimacy by outsourcing accountability to the interested public, but also increase capacity massively. The only comparable historical management reform that comes to mind is Napoleon’s idea of the levee en masse, moving from expensive hired guns (mercenaries) to a citizen army of Frenchmen proud to fight and die for their country.

The second is to ignore the political realities of the hierarchy, specifically, middle management. Middle managers fear whatever flattens the organizational structure and makes them superfluous. A response to one of the top evangelists of the Intellipedia project in the intelligence community by a staff member: “ ‘I don’t need top cover, I need middle cover. I need someone to convince my manager this is something we need to do.’ “

The third challenge is to change organizational culture. There is no way around it: open processes are different and counter-intuitive: Sharing information increases your power, giving up control increases your capacity, giving up the ability to control your image (transparency) increases legitimacy. As the head evangelist of intellipedia says, “There’s a reason this is called disruptive technology. These are counter-cultural concepts, which can be very daunting.”

It is not easy, but it can be done. And the payoffs will be huge – think of the impact Napoleon had on today’s Europe.

The blog-post was inspired by Jill R. Aitoro’s article in nextgov The Gospel of Government 2.0. All quotes (except the first) are taken from his article (the hyperlinks point to it).

I am in Chamonix right now, working on my book Shaping-Network-Society. There are lots of little tidbits of insights that I have posted to this blog over the last years and so yesterday night, I had the idea of downloading all entries and then picking and choosing what would be useful for the book.

There is a function in Wordpress to download all blog-entries as .pdfs. Which I did, but when starting to copy-paste, I was confronted with lots of annoying formatting problems. So I decided to do an xml-dump, hoping it would be easier to parse through hundreds of pages in a word processor. This is what I got:

...<guid isPermaLink="false">http://importer9.wordpress.com
/2006/08/04/governance-in-network-society/</guid>
[CDATA[On Monday, I was in Mexico City, invited by
Lourdes (the president of CIAPEM)

Now of course, I know that technically, there are many things I could do with the xml-file. But the questions that the Google Data Liberation Front asks of any online service are pertinent in today’s network society.

1. Can I get my data out at all?
   
2. How much is it going to cost to get my data out?
3. How much of my time is it going to take to get my data out?

Think about if you ever would want to leave Facebook, Picassa, Twitter, Gmail, or Xing, but take your data with you. These questions are fundamental to our network societies and clearly express the political tension between networks as choice communities and the path dependency inherent in the participation in networks.

These issues are much more important to society in the 21st Century than the silly debate on if Journalism will survive the internet. Should we be worried that Google seems to be one of the few political theorists of network society? Will we refer to them as the distributed/crowd-sourced Thomas Hobbes of their time in 300 years? Or is this taken directly out of Monthy Python’s Life of Brian?

Distributed leadership is an important puzzle piece for making open value creation work. The internet gives us the tools to create open value, but that does not mean we will all be great at using them. In the following MIT-lecture, Marshall Ganz outlines the distributed leadership approach they used in the Obama campaign. In a nutshell, he argues that (a) we need to develop a motivation narrative/story, then (b) focus on relationship building by constructing commitments to common purpose, (c) structure transparent and open organizational processes and roles, (d) strategize, and (e) act (=produce measurable outcomes).

“In the Obama campaign, there was no internet strategy, there was strategy that used internet tools.”

There are not many instances when a governmental memo shaped the political philosophy of a generation. Clearly Kennan’s Long Telegram comes to mind:

The ‘Long Telegram’ was sent by George Kennan from the United States Embassy in Moscow to Washington, where it was received on February 22nd 1946. The telegram was prompted by US enquiries about Soviet behaviour, especially with regards to their refusal to join the newly created World Bank and International Monetary Fund. In his text, Kennan outlined Soviet belief and practice and proposed the policy of ‘containment‘, making the Telegram a key document in the history of the Cold War. The name ‘long’ derives from the telegram’s 8000 word length. (quote from About.com)

The social media community believes Obama’s Transparency/Participation/Collaboration memo will have a similar impact on our century. The framework implied in the memo has been taken up governments worldwide, real world policies have been implemented, and the “access-to-information-legislation” topic has moved from arcane to center field. It is surprising, however, that not much is known about the background/history of the memo. Who drafted it? Who developed the TPC framework? Who brought the topic onto the agenda? Who knows more? Who can point me to the relevant people?

The countdown has started for the Government 2.0 Barcamp in Berlin (August 27/28). Join us, because the event can radically transform our thinking about public adminstration and government in the 21st Century. The German interior ministry and other policy makers will be there to discuss new forms of ideation, deliberation, and collaboration with us.

The interior ministry has tasked my team and me to document and reflect the discussions we will be having. We will be setting up a blogging platform (anyone interested in joining the team?) at the Center for Public Management and Governance and we will aggregate your #g20c tweets, interviews, ideas, etc. into a publication. Please twitter and comment at the site!

We plan to do two documents a documentation of the event and a more in-depth study of collaborative governance.

I am proud to announce that our team has just recently been joined by Bernie Krieger (Phd, Cambridge in Cyberanthropology), Holger Kindler (MPP, ESPP), Justus Lenz (MPP, ESPP), Violetta Pleshakova (MPP, ESPP) and Ksenia Meshkova, (MPP, ESPP). Other members are Sebastian Haselbeck (ESPP), Elisa Rebrin (ESPP), Sophie van Hüllen (University of Erfurt) and Sven Welters (University of Erfurt). You will greatly enjoy talking with them in Berlin!

In 2009 we are confronted with new public policy and management approaches in mediated policy initiation and formulation (Obama’s Open Government Initiative), distributed intelligence gathering (the US intelligence communities Intellipedia), crowdsourcing of accountability (The Guardian’s British Parliament invoice scandal platform), or peer produced political campaigning (the Obama Campaign), and even social media enhanced  revolutions (Iran).

Not everything government does can be addressed by these new mechanisms, but with technologically mediated open value creation we have been handed a powerful tool to make the world a better place. O’Reilly asks the pertinent questions in Forbes:

How does government itself become an open platform that allows people inside and outside government to innovate? How do you design a system in which all of the outcomes aren’t specified beforehand, but instead evolve through interactions between the technology provider and its user community?

The idea of government as a platform necessitates an open value creation process.

Open Value Creation consists of Open Policy Making and an Open Value Chain.

The distinction is slightly arbitrary but useful. It allows us to differentiate between coming up with a value generating process (policy) and repeatedly creating the value (value chain).

• Open policy making aims to open all aspects of the policy process (initiation, formulation, implementation, evaluation) to outside inputs and scrutiny. It assumes that this allows better informed policy making that is more legitimate and less costly.

• The open value chain opens the implementation process (inputs, process, outputs, impact, outcome) to outside contributions under the assumption that a co-produced public value is less costly and more effective.

Open value creation can be achieved if it is applied in all phases of the policy cycle and the value chain. At the Erfurt School of Public Policy we refer to the IDCA framework (ideation, deliberation // collaboration, accountability) for this purpose:

1. Ideation (policy)

Ideation is the process of collectively coming up with ideas and developing them. What is need is a platform that allows participants to post ideas, to comment, and to weed out the bad apples.

2. Deliberation (policy)

We understand deliberation best, because it has its analog in the offline world and there is sufficient text about it. The idea is to create a space in which the better argument and not the structurally advantaged position wins. What is needed is a platform to present ideas, discuss them both syn- and diachronically, and to weigh them in concordance with the underlying governance principle (think Digg-style, Reddit-style, or IMDB-style).

3. Collaboration (value chain)

We have most difficulties with collaboration, because it is new. Collaboration allows access to the work-flow by self-selected outsiders. The idea is to make the work flow modular, granular, and redundant, so that very different contributions can be integrated without endangering the quality of the output. A collaboration platform must be governed by a combination of self-enforcing code, simple but strong core principles, and an inclusive culture (think Canonical’s Launchpad or Wikipedia).

4. Accountability (value chain)

Accountability is often not well understood. We see it as a danger and not a strategic asset. By accounting to our stakeholders we decrease our error rates by adding free expertise and increase legitimacy, and public pride and ownership.

Core Technologies of Open Value Creation

Open value creation is possible because of new technologies that allow us to structure idea generation and information aggregation in digital form.

The core technologies of open value creation are the wiki (principle-based, user-generated platforms, with flexible moderation capacity), the forum (question driven user-generated knowledge platform), blogging (core message with feedback/discourse loop), and work flow management and visualization tools (Government resource planning, government process mapping tools, think SAP, Oracle, SugarCRM, etc.). Together they allow us to structure policy and administrative public value creation processes, by enhancing ideation (idea-generation), deliberation (commenting and discussion), collaboration (generating public values), and accountability (parsing data to hold government accountable).

How to implement such projects?

By combining these modular core technologies into custom-tailored open policy and value creation platforms organizations can address the challenges they are facing and capture the hearts and minds of local, national, and international stakeholders.

• Agree on set of principles for all policy and adminstrative processes according to the framework.
• Provide a set of (open source) tools to all parts of government responsible for implementation.
• Put together an inter-functional consulting group that helps cross-functional implementation.

At the moment we are working on several such projects with municipal (participatory budgeting, crowdsourcing security), state level (knowledge management, cross-border collaboration), and federal level stakeholders (legal ramifications of new forms of collaboration, strategy development) worldwide. So if you have an interesting project, please comment about your experience or send us an email!