Feedback, to someone my age, is everything, whether we are aware of it or not. Everything we do on the web has instant repercussions, creates immediate reaction, which prompts counter-reaction, back-pedalling or refinement: there is a feedback loop in most things we do on the web. We are used to friends commenting on what we post on Facebook, we assume that emails are replied to within a certain number of hours, we get a rating for our transaction on Ebay, and all this spoils us (The Economist calls us feedback junkies). We grow up in a world where we increasingly expect actions to produce immediate reactions. These expectations are translated into how we see our society at work and what we expect from services in the real world, we want them to work like our Facebook walls. This does not just apply to Fixmystreet.com or Recovery.gov, it applies to a wider change in thinking, and it might explain our disillusionment with politics, because failure to immediately deliver is much worse in today’s society than in the decades before. The standards we apply to the public sector are higher today. Everybody knows what is possible, because we use interactive software, gadgets and technology every day that show us how. A culture of feedback means that the citizens’ expectations need to be a) managed by politics and b) translated into proper governance mechanisms. At this purely theoretical level this has nothing to do with deliberative democracy yet. What we need to wrap our heads around is that we are no longer recipients of societal or public sector action, we are part of a feedback loop. We want feedback for our actions (elections, opinions, our participation in consultation platforms, etc.), and we expect politicians and administrations to appreciate and make use of feedback as well. And in that sense, please comment, I want feedback, please!

Sebastian Haselbeck is a graduate student at the Willy Brandt School of Public Policy and webmaster of the Center for Public Management and Governance. He is currently doing an internship at Intellitics Inc., an early e-participation start-up based in San Jose, CA.

The evolution of modern society is marked by continuous rise of government size, obligations and market interactions. According to Juergen Habermas, the expansion of the state into more and more private affairs led to a slow demise of the public debates over ideas and conflicts—the expression varying with context, history, and technology. Citizen-government interaction is reduced to election periods, interest groups and media-spin.

However, there was opposition to this development. Henry David Thoreau argued in his essay “Civil Disobedience” in the late 18th century, “government is best which governs least.” It implies a government reduced to the minimum in size accountable to its people. Because American government in the 18th century was already on its way to assemble the contrary, Thoreau suggested that if as many people as possible join peaceful protests, their actions would “clog the machinery of the state”, eventually leading to change. However, he did not succeed. And over the next 200 years, the state developed as the most successful organization form, an “imagined community” that structured the lives of most people on this planet. Today, however, with the advent of new network-based social platforms, Thoreau might have been more successful with his attempt to let his voice be heard and activate others for his cause.

In the 21st Century the ‘network’ has transcended the academic context and entered the wider field of the political discourse. Policy networks, networked governance, peer production, massive collaboration, open government, and radical transparency have become part of our political vocabulary that we rely on to legitimize why and how we act collectively. With web technologies and social media, such as interchangeable data-formats, wikis, transparency, and social networking, network society has become part of the mainstream global public policy discourse.

The early 21st Century evoke a Machiavellian time—a time when new technologies and new forms of thinking and governance emerged. So, if we are living in times of transformative change, where Internet technologies and an understanding of society as a network of inclusive, some-how like-minded, outcome-oriented, collaborators emerges we need to ask, what the logic of network society is, to be able to explain our world and predict future developments. Dave Clark, one of the original architects of the Internet, argued in 1971: We reject: kings, presidents and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code…

Read more on Macchiavelli 2.0 – Fundamentals of Network Society at the Harvard International Review.

If strategy is about optimizing choice in situations of strategic interdependence, how do you strategize in and against constantly changing environments? In New Bases of Competitive Advantage, they came up with the concept of adaptive advantage which addresses the challenge by taking strategy to the meta level:

We believe that companies can renew and sharpen their quest for sustainable competitive advantage by pursuing adaptive advantage. Organizations with adaptive advantage recognize the unpredictability of today’s environment and the limits of deductive analysis. They seek to develop the most favorable organizational context in which new approaches to new problems can continually emerge. Adaptive advantage thus enables them to unite reflection with execution and to balance deduction with experimentation.

The meta strategies they outline are: Signal Advantage (detect, capture, and exploit pattern advantage), Systems Advantage (Shape and manage business systems for advantage), People Advantage (leverage human resources beyond the firms boundaries), Social Advantage (leverage new social and ecological expectations for advantage), and Simulation Advantage (simulate for advantage). Read up on their ideas and reflect and discuss what they might mean for your business, brand, and lifeworld.

The media-realists in us know that function follows form and that the media industries need to adapt. It has become conventional wisdom that if new media allow for disruptive modes of production, discovery, search, or distribution and existing media will wither away. Friedrich Kittler developed the framework to reflect this interrelationship between modes of production and text in his seminal work, Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900 (Discourse Networks1800/1900). In later texts he predicts that in network society all forms of texting will converge into a general repository of knowledge. But will that happen?

Even as the google books settlement is making its way through the courts and the Ipad is seen as the savior technology for media industries in general there is a certain discursive silence about the withering away of the book, our all-time favorite medium:

Google, in contrast, tackles them head on, but not before reiterating its big-picture take on the settlement: its digitization efforts are the only thing preventing another Library of Alexandria-style tragedy, and making the results available is a public good that should override petty concerns raised by its competitors. “Approval of the settlement will open the virtual doors to the greatest library in history, without costing authors a dime they now receive or are likely to receive if the settlement is not approved,” Google’s filing reads. “Nor does anyone seriously dispute, though few objectors admit, that to deny the settlement will keep those library doors locked while inviting costly, fragmented litigation that could clog dockets around the country for years.”

Book writing and reading is special. Even bloggers admit to writing just to get the potential book deal. So we need to think the book not as a physical thing, but as a an event. Our respect of the “platonic” idea of a book forces to slow down our thinking to a level where we actually reflect on what we write, when we write. And reading a book is about as close to experiencing flying in second life.

Therefore, it is time to re-brand books as experiences not hold on to the idea of books as products of the “Gutenberg Galaxy.” This change of perspective will allow us to think in terms of unconventional business models. And Ludwig Wittgenstein’s idea of family resemblance (there is not one attribute that you find in all games or metaphorically speaking, the rope that holds the boat is not connected by one very long fiber) reminds us that these business models will be different for different books. What does the book mean to you? How do we frame it beyond its material instantiation? What are viable business models for the book of the future?

]]> http://www.philippmueller.de/whither-the-book/feed/ 2 http://www.philippmueller.de/a-revolution-in-140-characters/ http://www.philippmueller.de/a-revolution-in-140-characters/#comments Sun, 14 Feb 2010 20:14:59 +0000 Philipp http://www.philippmueller.de/?p=806 By: Florian Buhl, Sophie van Huellen, Philipp Müller

Two hours after the polls had closed on June 12, 2009 the re-election of the incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was officially announced. Soon thereafter the supporters of Iran’s opposition, especially those of Ahmadinejad’s rival candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, initiated a protest movement in order to get to an inquiry of the election results.

The protests soon were labelled Iran’s “Twitter Revolution” by Western commentators because the demonstrators made use of web technologies, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube, in a twofold manner: On the one hand, the online social media, functioned as a tool to organize and coordinate protests. On the other hand, the web technologies played a decisive role in rising awareness for the demonstrations in the international public sphere. Foreign traditional news media had to rely on the information, pictures and videos posted by Iranian protesters on platforms of the social web, because news correspondents and journalists in Iran were deterred to produce their own content by the Iranian regime. Clearly the interplay of web technologies, the global mass media, and politics in the Iranian case are of great interest, therefore, one needs to ask, how can we analyze the interplay between social networking technologies, traditional mass media, and politics?  [...read on]

Please follow the link to our draft paper,  based on our research project on the interplay of social networking technologies, traditional mass media, and revolutionary politics. We are looking forward to your feedback!

In 2010, it has become a truism that culture, lifeworlds, and our political economies are transforming. It is obvious that the Web is impacting society, bringing in new lifestyles, attitudes, values, work patterns and relationships – it is now even officially (unofficially) nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. As the Internet for Peace Manifesto states,

We have finally realized that the internet is much more than a network of computers. It is an endless web of people. Men and women from every corner of the globe are connecting to one another, thanks to the biggest social interface ever known to humanity.Digital culture has laid the foundations for a new kind of society. And this society is advancing dialogue, debate and consensus through communication. Because democracy has always flourished where there is openness, acceptance, discussion and participation. And contact with others has always been the most effective antidote against hatred and conflict.That’s why the internet is a tool for peace. That’s why anyone who uses it can sow the seeds of nonviolence. And that’s why the next Nobel Peace Prize should go to the net. A Nobel for each and every one of us.

Wide-ranging opportunities for peer production, low transaction costs of participation and prominence of non-instrumental and non-material motivations can potentially transform the social world into more creative, collaborative and active (see Lessig 2008, Shirky 2009, Benkler 2006). Due to this interplay of factors the social reality is transformed from a Read-Only world to Read-Write world. In the latter, people shift from being passive consumers to acting as enthusiastic creators. As argued by Shirky, “revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new technologies – it happens when society adopts new behaviors” (2009, p. 160). Technology, however powerful it might be, cannot master the change alone. Technology has to be adopted and used by people, only then it can become ubiquitous and embedded in the everyday reality of society.

Although we witness a plethora of new digital phenomena on a daily basis, we are still lacking an overarching framework to think how these new technologies will transform our cultures, politics, our lives, and even personalities. This understanding and reflection occurs “on the go”, as we are forced to react to change and as we try to craft it. We face numerous questions along the way as technologies shape our lifeworlds and our lifeworlds shape our cultures and politics.

Culture, Lifeworlds, and Politics

Culture is a set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution, organization or group. Georg Simmel defined the concept as “the cultivation of individuals through the agency of external forms which have been objectified in the course of history.” Lifeworld is the social scientific term that reminds us of the incommensurability between academic description and the human experience social life. It is a term that asks us to think culture not only through the systemic perspective of the outside observer, but to hermeneutically engage with the subjects of our objects of analysis. As Habermas (1984: 117) conceptualizes it,

society is conceived from the perspective of acting subjects as the lifeworld of a social group. In contrast, from the observer’s perspective of someone not involved, society can be conceived only as a system of actions such that each action has a functional significance according to its contribution to the maintenance of the system.

Politics is the concept that deals with questions that are described as questions of choice for collectivities (Bartelson 2001; Anderson 1983). It can be circumscribed by the terms community and authority that can be ostensibly related to the questions “Who is member?” (the question of community or identity) and “who gets to decide?” (the question of authority).

From Read-Write to Read-Only and to Read-Write Reloaded

The concept of Read-Only (RO) and Read-Write (RW) was proposed by Larry Lessig in his book “Remix” (2008). As he suggested, human culture has for many centuries existed in Read-Write format, where one would not only perceive, but also create and change the culture. Culture was read-write ever since homo sapiens discovered her ability to paint, play music, and sculpt figurines such as the Venus of Schelklingen in the Swabian Alb 40.000 years ago. As stated in Wikipedia, the ultimate collaborative project:

The Swabian Alb region has a number of caves that have yielded mammoth ivory artifacts of the Upper Paleolithic period, totalling about twenty-five items to date. These include the lion-headed figure of Hohlenstein-Stadel and an ivory flute found at Geißenklösterle, dated to 36,000 years ago.^[1] This concentration of evidence of full behavioral modernity in the period of 40 to 30 thousand years ago, including figurative art and instrumental music, is unique worldwide and Conard speculates that the bearers of the Aurignacian culture in the Swabian Alb may be credited with the invention, not just of figurative art and music, but possibly, early religion as well.^[2][3] In a distance of 70cm to the Venus figurine Conard’s team found a flute made from a vulture bone.^[4]

It was only the 20^th century that has shifted the paradigm of cultural development to Read Only – a culture, where individuals are only consumers.

There are some technological reasons for the shift to RO that took place in the 20^th century. Such inventions as phonograph, TV, radio, CD, VHS, DVD enabled wide distribution of culture products and established the principle of delivering culture to people packed in copies. A TV provides a copy of a talk-show. A CD provides a copy of a song. A DVD provides a copy of a film. If in the previous centuries culture was distributed freely and cultural products were easily built upon (like fairytales, told by people to each other without being written down and with possibility to add or change details; like folklore music, sang by people in private circles and on holidays, composed by nobody in particular and by everyone in general), the 20^th century technologies have emphasized and boosted up the growth of copyrighted culture, provided in fixed and unchangeable form.

Now, in the 21^st century, the world has the chance to go back to RW culture and creativity (Lessig 2008, p. 252), but on steroids. Read-Write combined with the power of a global broadcasting platform. The logic of active participation renders obsolete the image of an individual, nurtured by the pop culture of the 20^th century: the image of a consumer. The tools for this shift are provided by the new Web, which favors free creation, voluntary project commitment and collaborative effort; where simple users can become active netizens (Zittrain 2008, p. 161). Through its participatory effects, the new Web fosters the reality of active creation, not passive consuming. Today people “are gratified in significant ways by the ability to play an active role in generating content, rather than only passively consuming that which is created for them by others (Harrison and Barthel 2009, p. 157). There is “substantially less dependence on the commercial mass media of the twentieth century” (Benkler 2006, p. 9). As the costs for participation in the new Web fall and as the complexity of  handling technologies decreases, more and more individuals are empowered to become co-creators of our cultures and can have their voice heard. This, however, necessitates also a new way of critical listening.

An Attack on Professionalism

This results in the rise of an amateur culture. In the new Web it is not necessary to pay professors and experts to start an encyclopedia – instead, it is easier to harness the potential of individual knowledge, as Wikipedia did. It is not necessary to pay professional photographers to obtain pictures of a certain event – pictures of nearly everything are available for free and are easily searchable in folksonomies on free photosharing websites like Flickr. It is not necessary to buy expensive machines and spend money on marketing campaigns and personnel to create a newspaper – everyone can be a press outlet of his own with the use of blogging platforms since today “the mass amateurization of publishing undoes the limitations inherent in having a small number of traditional press outlets” (Shirky 2009, p. 65). It is not even necessary to turn on TV to get updates on burning news – livestream of first-hand information is available on Twitter and blogging websites. Similar limitations are destroyed in other spheres.

As a result, professional culture is challenged. A professional is a member of a vocation founded upon specialized educational training, who does not need supervision. Think of doctors or lawyers as classical examples. As a patient, you need to trust your lawyer or doctor, because there can be no absolute proof of her quality, therefore, she needs to convince through secondary attributes (being well-dressed, a fancy office) and/or professional codes of honor. Being member of a profession of course is always exclusive and normally connected to better-than-average incomes. With the democratization of tools of the trade professionalism is under attack.

Firstly, it is not needed in the amount it was needed earlier. As statistics shows, traditional media are suffering losses, laying down the personnel and generally loosing the competition to online media, including the ones run by amateurs (see Keen 2008). Secondly, professionals are not considered as reliable as before. If information, cultural products and meaningful content can be provided in the same (if not bigger) amount, faster and easier than before, there remains little ground for professional culture to preserve its monopoly.The result is the formation of more diverse, more vibrant, more active social universe. Remix culture of improving, changing, sampling, mixing derivative works aspires to replace the culture of permission, that existed before.

Learning to Trust

The new Web stimulates active engagement of people, impacts their lifeworlds and leads to “the rise of effective, large-scale cooperative efforts – peer production of information, knowledge, and culture” (Benkler 2006, p. 5). This active engagement expands the limits of our experience of culture and politics – it changes individuals that participate. Most of us remember the night when we moved from Read-Only to Read-Write, for some it is an experience similar to a first date or to first driving a car -  it might be writing for Wikipedia, posting photos on Flickr or rating links on Digg, with each and every click a person does in the modern Web, he or she is adding value to the community. Voluntary entries in Wikipedia have helped to build the world’s most consulted encyclopedia within a very short time span. Ratings of goods on Amazon.com help other consumers to select products and learn about items in categories they are interested in. Tagging photos on Flickr or music on Last.fm helps other people to find what they are looking for.

Distributed Leadership

It has to be acknowledged that this type of production is not dramatically new, since people were getting together to produce collectively since primordial times. However, only Internet technologies have made the work flow of this type of collective action easily manageable and allow cooperation across both space and time. It means we need different leadership skills,  leaders that have the ability of “convincing people who care a little to care more” (Shirky 2009, p. 181), leaders who can design open processes and engage distributed collaborators to contribute little pieces to bigger projects. Web technologies enable the  decrease of transaction costs of production and participation. Humans make them happen.

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!

…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.

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).

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?

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

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 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!

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!

1. @zephoria is calling for epistemological open-mindedness when analyzing social networks: http://tinyurl.com/nel2k5 #networksociety2 minutes ago from TwitterFox

2. @chr1sa Will professional journalists become extinct? The Spiegel interviews Chris Anderson with naive indignity: http://tinyurl.com/macgqfabout 21 hours ago from TwitterFox

3. @arenda @rmmdc @tocat @kohenari thank u for ur tweets on socialtheory/socialmedia: http://bit.ly/muSyo need more constitutive theorizing!10:21 AM Jul 25th from web

4. Do social media need political philosophy and social theory? http://tinyurl.com/kmvyk7 #opengov #gov20 #radicaltransparency #socialmedia11:15 PM Jul 24th from TwitterFox

5. @ U Beck’s #Future-of-Modernity Symposium: fine-grained analysis of contemporary society, completely ignoring the social media elephant.9:47 AM Jul 24th from TwitterFox

6. discussing the IDC-Framework (ideation, deliberation, collaboration): http://tinyurl.com/q74b7d #gov20 #social media #ogi #opengov #web2011:19 AM Jul 23rd from TwitterFox

7. Radical Transparency as Management Strategy? http://bit.ly/9Z6e5 #gov20 #opengov #enterprise20 #web20 #transparency #radical transparency4:04 PM Jul 21st from TwitterFox

8. I will address the ESPP Graduates tonight (www.espp.de). What should I tell these future public policy entrepreneurs from over 20 countries?11:57 AM Jul 17th from TwitterFox

9. CDC has a chilling year-by-year visualization of obesity trends from 1985 to 2008: http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/…11:11 AM Jul 17th from TwitterFox

10. A necessary reality check on the Government 2.0 Hype by A. Schellong: http://www.iq.harvard.edu/b… #gov20 #opengov via @schellong11:25 AM Jul 14th from TwitterFox

11. Carl Malamud and the struggle for open sourcing the code of law: http://tinyurl.com/leqvxd #opengov #malamud #vivek kundra11:11 AM Jul 14th from TwitterFox

12. When the world is changing, we need to re-learn how to read-write engaging manifestos: http://tinyurl.com/lhavfj #generation m #manifesto8:49 PM Jul 13th from TwitterFox

13. How to structure governmental online deliberation processes: http://tinyurl.com/mthmov #deliberation #collaboration #gov20 #opengov11:17 AM Jul 13th from TwitterFox

14. Learning by Historical Analogy: Lessons from Information Revolution 1.0: http://tinyurl.com/ns63rq #infosociety #web20 #gov2010:48 PM Jul 12th from TwitterFox

15. Reflecting the Rise of the Ideation Platform (with Justus Lenz) http://tinyurl.com/lc8hl2 #opengov #gov203:14 PM Jul 11th from TwitterFox

16. Sofia Elizondo (BCG) on the End of Classical Strategy: http://tinyurl.com/mrwzq4 #enterprise20 #strategy #BCG9:24 PM Jul 7th from TwitterFox

17. Aristotle Reloaded: Beth Noveck challenging representative and deliberative democracy: http://tinyurl.com/neym7u #opengov #gov201:18 PM Jul 7th from TwitterFox

18. Do RSS our family-stream at: http://picasaweb.google.com… and write a guest blog for http://www.shapingnetworkso…8:44 PM Jul 6th from web

19. Will teach gov20 strategy to 70 austrian mayors in 1 hour. Anything specific I should say? #socialmedia #gov203:29 PM Jun 26th from TwitterBerry

20. Is engineering finally permeating governance? http://tinyurl.com/lx79an #gov20 #engineering #governance #techcrunch #auren hoffman12:12 PM Jun 24th from TwitterFox

Is there an added value in such an exercise? Or is this just part of the new recycling game we are playing?

I just spent the day at the Futures of Modernity Symposium in Munich, held in honor of Ulrich Beck, the grand sociologist and author of Risk Society (1992). The idea of the event was:

Throughout the world, contemporary societies are facing the challenges posed by a set of heterogeneous phenomena of social change which are not only placing existing convictions and interpretations in question, but are already creating new and multiple realities that escape the established categories of thought. The emerging outlines of a Cosmopolitan World Risk Society cannot be grasped in terms yesterday’s sociology which takes its orientation from industrial society in the nation-state and from the exclusiveness of European (i.e. Western) modernity. Nevertheless, the multitude of social phenomena which point to epochal transitions towards a new future open up novel horizons of critical analysis and discussion and pose a range of pressing questions that must be addressed today if we are to be ready for the challenges of tomorrow.

It was a great event, however, I was shocked that nobody spoke about the emancipatory potential or the totalitarian dangers of new forms of technologically mediated ideation, deliberation, and collaboration. New forms of collective action such as peer production, crowd-sourcing, and networked governance were completely ignored, as if all that had happened recently was the 40th anniversary of the landing on the moon and the 20th of the fall of the Berlin Wall. What about Twitter, the opening of the Facebook stream APIs, or the Open Government Initiative? :)

Ulrich Beck’s main thesis is that we live in a second modernity. Modernity for Beck is the move to instrumental rationality (ends-means rationality) as the main mode of thinking. This means during modernity (roughly 17^th to the end of the 20^th century) the aim was to control nature and human institutions to reduce risks to our societies.

Second modernity develops when we realize that we cannot control all risks because the complexity of institutions we created to control risks, states, the financial markets, insurance companies, nuclear energy, or genetic engineering, themselves create new uncontrollable and global risks.

Beck states that in second modernity we have left modernity, but cannot go back to premodern forms: all flavors of fundamentalisms (Christian, Islamic, or other) are modern responses to the challenges of our age not premodern uprisings. He also warns that post-modernity neither gives substantive answers to the challenges that risks confront us with, nor to the inequalities of our worlds. This means we are effectively living in a Gramscian interregnum.

This framework of risk society allows us to describe all types of phenomena from the injustice of the subcontracting in the global supply chain to the risk propensity of Wall Street bankers that show no remorse about their actions, explaing responsibility away by calling it “systemic failure.” Because these human manufactured uncertainties are of planetary nature, Beck calls for cosmopolitan Realpolitik as a response to the challenges of second modernity. He asks, how can national states re-conquer a state-political meta power vis-à-vis those economic actors – in order to force a cosmopolitical regime upon world-political capital that includes political freedom, global justice, social security, and ecological sustainability?

And here is where I would want to disagree. It is not by re-awakening early modern zombies that will save the planet.

The emancipatory power of concepts like radical transparency, open collaboration, and network governance stems from an emerging new paradigm in social theory. Unfortunately, at this point there is no enough political philosophy or social theory discussion on this important topic, which will probably shape human societies for the next 300 years.

Clearly, it is time to collaborate on this “beyond modern” planetary political theory and public policy project!

]]> http://www.philippmueller.de/network-society-and-the-futures-of-modernity/feed/ 0 http://www.philippmueller.de/the-idc-framework-ideation-deliberation-and-collaboration/ http://www.philippmueller.de/the-idc-framework-ideation-deliberation-and-collaboration/#comments Thu, 23 Jul 2009 09:03:43 +0000 Philipp http://www.philippmueller.de/?p=692

as we are learning to use social media in organizations, we overestimate some aspects of this new approach and are confused about others: What is new, what is not? What is hype, what is real? Therefore, it is a time for careful definitional work. Yesterday, Andy Blumenthal, the CIO of the FBI did this in an article in Government Technology where he outlined the difference between communication and collaboration:

Information technology has traditionally been about “communication” of information — capturing it, processing it, moving it, storing it, finding it and using it. But now, with Web 2.0, we have evolved from communication to “collaboration.” Well, what’s the difference?

…the real difference between communication and collaboration seems to be related to an organizational and cultural transformation taking place…

We’ve always communicated. But much of the communication was within our own stovepipes — particularly within our own chain of command — to our bosses, staffs or peers primarily within the same organizational function. That was where most of our communication took place — in our organizational verticals.

Now, however, we are transforming from mainly vertical communication to the horizontal collaboration. We are breaking down the stovepipes, which one of my colleagues euphemistically calls “silos of excellence,” and we are instead working across organizational and functional boundaries — hence, we are doing some genuine collaboration!

This is a useful conversation starter and it reminds us of that we are still only learning to “collaborate.” I want to distinguish between three modes of technology-enabled collaboration: Ideation, deliberation, and collaboration, what I refer to at the ESPP as the IDC framework.

All three are useful to governments (and business) when confronted with specific policy issues. Often but not always, you might start out with an ideation phase, move to a deliberation phase, and then to collaboration, the classical example is the Open Government Initiative. Of course, collaboration and deliberation is part of ideation and vice versa, but on the project level, they can be clearly distinguished.

Ideation

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.

Deliberation

we understand deliberation best, because it has its analog in the offline world and there is sufficient text about it (Aristotle, Habermas, Sunstein come to mind). 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).

Collaboration

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).

What do you think? What would a full-fledged framework look like? Is it mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive (MECE)?

]]> http://www.philippmueller.de/the-idc-framework-ideation-deliberation-and-collaboration/feed/ 4 http://www.philippmueller.de/strategizing-radical-transparency/ http://www.philippmueller.de/strategizing-radical-transparency/#comments Tue, 21 Jul 2009 13:42:06 +0000 Philipp http://www.philippmueller.de/?p=684

Sometimes very simple ideas are counter-intuitive. Radical transparency clearly is one of them. Let me define the concept, ask why one would want (not) to go “radically transparent,” and how to implement the strategy.

What is radical transparency?

Radical transparency is a management approach in which all decision making is carried out publicly and the work flow has open application interfaces. It is a radical departure from existing processes, where  (a) decision making was never fully open, to ensure security and the discretion of the decision makers and (b) the work flow was a black box, where outside intervention would be looked upon as outside meddling.

What is the value added of the approach?

It is important to realize that radical transparency is not a requirement put upon a process from outside stakeholders, but an actively chosen strategy. So why go transparent? Radical transparency impacts value identification, capacity, and legitimacy of any project.

When to apply it?

As with any management strategy, radical transparency is not a panacea. So the question is what types of problems are amenable to the approach and what types of problems are better left in the dark.

When to not apply it?

There are other issues, where it is best not to pursue a radical transparent approach:

How to design radically transparent procedures (a rough guide to implementation)?

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