what would machiavelli do?

In philosophical terms, we are missing a realist perspective on the fundamental transformation we are experiencing. In keynotes and seminars, I have expressed this need with the question, „what would Machiavelli suggest in the 21st Century?“

Machiavelli was the earliest thinker that was able to see the new modern paradigm and translate it into strategic advice. He understood the perpetual governance crisis of modernity that developed when authority was not anymore legitimated by a transcendent source, i.e. God. Where until the 16th Century an allusion to god or nature was sufficient to explain human governance, he unearthed the relevance of immanent legitimation and formulated it as strategy advice to the prince. We are living through a similar time, the shift is just as profound. We are moving away from the idea of hierarchical organizations in business, government and civil society into a world of networked and project-centered open value chains. However, our conceptual vocabulary and our culture is still stuck in the 20th Century and, therefore, we do not yet fully realize their potential. What is missing is a strategy guide to this brave new world. Machiavelli took up the challenge of trying to make sense of a world that was moving from understanding itself as deterministically following the transcendent will to a world of freedom and choice. In an analogous fashion, we have to try to understand the underlying principles of many-to-many society to outline strategies for successful collective action.

There are two major drivers of many-to-many society: the ease to connect (technology) and the willingness to connect (culture). The ease to connect stems from technologies that allow us to ignore territorial space and linear time. We can post an answer to a question in a forum that was asked several years ago on a different continent. The person that has asked the question might have moved on, but the answer might be relevant to someone in the future that is not even born today. However, without a willingness to interact, without a network culture, the ability does not lead to a changed world. It is not technological determinism, but the interplay between new social practices and enabling technologies that have transformative potential.

living in a low transaction cost society

With the radical reduction of the transaction costs of collective action through many-to-many technologies new form of organization becomes possible. Commons-based peer production is a term coined by Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler to describe a new model of economic production in which the creative energy of large numbers of people is coordinated (usually with the aid of the internet) into large, meaningful projects, mostly without traditional hierarchical organization or financial compensation. He distinguishes commons-based peer production from (a) firm production where a centralized decision process decides what has to be done and by whom and (b) market-based production where tagging different prices to different jobs serves as an attractor to anyone interested in doing the job. If this mode of collective action is viable, we need to ask how to structure such interactions and how to lead such processes.

Over the last 30 years, we have been observing a move from black box production, with a focus on optimizing the value chain, to co-production and its focus on supply chain management, to open production on user-generated work-flow-platforms such as Wikipedia and Ubuntu, but also facebook and twitter. This means that strategy changes from competitive strategy (positioning) to communicative meta-strategies (persuading and community creation).

openness as strategy

Open value creation consists of open policy making and the management of the 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 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, a principle-based, user-generated platforms, with flexible moderation capacity, the forum, a question driven user-generated knowledge platform, blogging, a core message with feedback/discourse loop, and work flow management and visualization tools such as enterprise resource planning, process mapping tools, think SAP, Oracle, SugarCRM, etc. Together they allow us to structure policy and value creation processes, by enhancing ideation, deliberation, i.e. commenting and discussion, collaboration, generating values, and accountability, i.e. through the parsing of data to control processes. Therefore, the architecture of our value creation processes is of utmost concern. How do we design such processes? The simple answer is Larry Lessig’s “code is law” (1998), which says governance can be encoded into software, as in the first rule of twittering: “thou shalt not write more than 140 characters” where enforcement is automatic, technically, you cannot send a tweet of more than 140 characters. So in our simplest many-to-many society, code, law, strategy, and enforcement are one.

However, in order to fully utilize open value creation strategic transparency is necessary. Strategic transparency is a management approach in which most 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 closed, 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. In decision making strategic transparency ensures access to draft documents, allow commenting, and include the public in final decisions. For the work flow, you need to design application interfaces that allow the public to access the work flow in real time, participate in a granular and modular fashion. In a many-to-many society we need to rethink most of our conceptual frames.

Therefore, counter-intuitively, if he were alive today, Machiavelli, the hard-nosed realist, would advice the princess to create open value chains with interfaces to outside stakeholders both in policy and implementation, from research and development to after-sales.

Planetary thinking is a term introduced by Martin Heidegger, to reflect the role of philosophy (a Greek/Western concept) in comparison to other systems of thought. Planetary public policy balances different approaches to public policy problems, reminds us that problems come in all sizes (local to global), that we can learn from each other, but that solutions need to be “tropicalized” (adapted to the local context). If public policy is about thinking about having a structural impact, then planetary public policy is about “rocking the planet.”

Planetary public policy combines (a) an acceptance of global problems (climate change, trafficking of women, drugs, weapons, etc.), with (b) an appreciation for comparative learning in public policy (e.g. issues of birth control, slum dwelling, public transportation, crisis management are similar in kind in very different environments), and (c) a sensibility for inter-civilizational exchange of ideas concerning our planetary publics. It is a simple doctrine, but remember territorial sovereignty, the doctrine that has been guiding our thinking and doing for the last 300 years is just as simple. Simple grammars allow for surprisingly complex frameworks. But in the 21st Century, no public policy school can ignore it.

Looking back…

The doctrine of territorial sovereignty developed as part of the transformation of the medieval system in Europe into the modern state system, a process that is linked to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. The emergence of the concept of sovereignty was developed in analogy to the Roman civil law concept of private property.  Both emphasizing exclusive rights concentrated in a single holder, in contrast to the medieval system of diffuse and many-layered political and economic rights. Within the state, sovereignty signified the rise of the monarch to absolute prominence over rival feudal claimants such as the aristocracy, the papacy, and the Holy Roman Empire. Internationally, sovereignty served as the basis for the anarchic nature of the international system and for its ground rules like the exchanges of recognition on the basis of legal equality, diplomacy, and international law. This led to an international system where states were responsible for their own security and self-sufficient in their social and economic needs.

However, with globalization we moved into a world where somehow these two core rules of the international system are broken. we are moving into a world where states are not reliant on themselves in terms of economic production anymore, and neither are they in terms of security. The most basic question we would ask you is, who of you is wearing clothing that’s made in just one country, at this moment. Even Lederhosen, the typical Bavarian dress, all of them, including the Burghausen style are produced in India.

What we are missing is a unifying doctrine that allows us to place our actions in such a world. Territorial sovereignty has lost its grip over us, but planetary thinking is only slowly emerging. Here are the three basic tenets of this emerging doctrine:

Accepting Global Problems

Global problems become global by being referred to as global. Even if the impact of climate change will be different locally, we have firmly constructed it as a global problem. But others less so. Last year, our planet’s population lost $9.3 billion to 419 scams. 419 is a paragraph number in the Nigerian penal code, in the law, which deals with a very specific cyber crime, which is basically have you ever received an email that said,

I am a princess from Nigeria, and my dad left me $80 million in a bank account that I need to transfer out of… Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Mexico, Argentina, Texas, or Southern Bavaria. I need your help to do that, and I will be of course very helpful in giving you 50 percent of what is in the bank account if you help me.

Is that a global problem? Should it be constructed as such?

Comparable Local Problems

Planetary public policy assumes that there are local problems that we can compare to each other and learn from each other. For example, squatting on public lands. What is the Malaysian solution to squatting on public lands versus what is the Mexican solution to squatting on public lands versus what is any other country that has that problem? For a long time, we had assumed that local contexts would be so different that learning across continents would not take place.

Inter-civilizational Meaningful Conversations

Inter-civilizational Meaningful Conversations remind us of the question, how can we develop a fair platform on which we can have a conversation? A conversation between different cultures and through space and time. And that, of course, is the challenge we are facing in the Brandt School, with students from more than 40 countries. But it’s also the challenge that we have to face when we are trying to solve this issue of humanity surviving on this planet.

So public policy in the 21st Century needs to focus on global problems, comparative public policy challenges, and inter cultural, inter civilizational meaningful conversations.

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.

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?

His latest letter to the US CIO and CTO is a great example of the types of political battles we will be seeing all over the world in the years to come.

Dear Mr. Kundra and Mr. Chopra:
I am writing to request your assistance in making available at no charge and for bulk
access two of the most important legal databases maintained by the executive branch:

Publications in the Federal Register System, maintained by the National Archives
and Records Administration (NARA).

Patents, maintained by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).
While the U.S. government maintains a minimal web presence for both databases,
those web sites are only useful for casual browsing. In both cases, the underlying
source code for the documents is only available for substantial fees.
A yearly subscription to the Code of Federal Regulations for bulk access to the “SGML”
source code with images is $17,000/year. The same $17,000 fee applies to other
NARA databases such as the Federal Register. While there are PDF versions of the
Federal Register and text versions of the Code of Federal Regulations available for
browsing, it is impossible to easily download them in bulk, and the underlying source
code which could be used for creating new versions of these documents is prohibitively
priced.
Likewise, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office makes a web site available for casual
searching and browsing, but the only bulk access to patent data is limited to the first
page of a patent. To get the full text of current and historical patents requires a very
substantial fee. For example, the Patent Grant Data/XML v. 4.2 ICE (Current Calendar
Year Subscription) (EIP-5300P-OL) costs a breathtaking $39,000.
These fees are so substantial that they actively discourage the use of these key U.S.
government databases by public interest groups and scholars, limiting access to a few
well-heeled corporations. In particular, at Public.Resource.Org, we would make much
more extensive use of these databases if we could afford access, helping fulfill our
mission of making America’s primary legal materials available to the public.

Our desire to work with this data is shared by many other groups, including our
colleagues at the Sunlight Foundation, Columbia University, Cornell University,
University of Colorado, Harvard University, Northwestern University, Stanford
University, and GovTrack.US. All of these academic and nonprofit groups have notable
track records for providing innovative uses of government data, and the lack of bulk
access to these databases has greatly discouraged development of new applications.
Patents and “the law” have a very special place in our system of government, being the
only two executive branch databases specifically called out in the U.S. Constitution:
The very purpose of the patent database is to “Promote the Progress of Science
and useful Arts.” The very essence of a patent is publication, and deliberately
restricting access goes against the explicit language of the Constitution. While
we are sympathetic with the desire of the U.S. Patent Office to derive revenue
from the sale of these bulk feeds, such a policy runs directly contrary to their
primary mission. Filing fees imposed on those that seek economic gain from
the public through the issuance of a patent are more than sufficient to make up
any revenue shortfall created by making bulk data available at no cost.
Likewise, the purpose of the Federal Register system is to provide a systematic
vehicle for notification and publication of regulations that are enacted by the
government. Restricting access to this data by putting it behind a series of
$17,000 pay walls yields less than $200,000 in annual revenue to the
government, yet is costly enough that only a few well-heeled corporations have
access. The public interest simply can’t afford to play.
Initiatives such as Data.Gov have been very successful and you are both to be
applauded for the dramatic change in philosophy in the U.S. Government when it
comes to release and dissemination of information. However, it is my worry, a worry
shared with my colleagues listed above, that any progress on releasing the USPTO and
NARA databases in bulk will become entangled in bureaucratic delay, and I am writing
to urge that you make these crucial documents of our democracy available sooner
rather than later.
Respectfully yours,

Carl Malamud

The exciting idea of “bulk access” is to make government data available not in edited form, but in machine readable (xml) formats, so that the user can decide what to do with it. In the words of Ed Felten et al:

Rather than struggling, as it currently does, to design sites that meet each end-user need, we argue that the executive branch should focus on creating a simple, reliable and publicly accessible infrastructure that exposes the underlying data. Private actors, either nonprofit or commercial, are better suited to deliver government information to citizens and can constantly create and reshape the tools individuals use to find and leverage public data. The best way to ensure that the government allows private parties to compete on equal terms in the provision of government data is to require that federal websites themselves use the same open systems for accessing the underlying data as they make available to the public at large.

Is this salient for your work? How is it different in Europe, the Americas, Africa, or Asia? What is your experience with fully opening up databases to the public?

1. Transparency increases legitimacy. Because transparency is possible, it is expected, so there will be punishment for non-transparent ventures.
2. Transparency allows us to improve our processes. Following Linus’ Law “with enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow.”
3. Transparency allows us to outsource parts of the process to interested third parties. They can build on our data and co-produce. Radical transparency saves us money.

So you are convinced of the approach. Here is the rough guide to implementation:

1. Define what data you will free. Explain the limitations explicitly, outline the next steps to full transparency.
2. Make sure you make all data available in machine-readable format, ideally in real-time. Do not massage or edit it!
3. Do not define who will be able to access your data, let your collaborators self-select.
4. Define standards for participation, do this in code and convention.
5. Do not ask open questions like “what do you think of Europe? How do we integrate minorities?” Structure the conversation, define expectations, but allow for flexibility and participation in the debate about the core principles of the collaboration.
6. Design reflexivity into the process. Use work flow mapping and meta-data on the deliberation processes to mirror the community back at its members. Sophistication will increase.

This posting is based on my teaching notes from this week’s strategic management lecture at the Erfurt School of Public Policy, Beth Noveck’s WikiGovernment, and the brilliant insights of my colleagues at PepsiCo. It is a work in progress, so please comment!

We wanted to explore retweeting as a conversational practice. In doing so, we highlight just how bloody messy retweeting is. Often, folks who are deeply embedded in the culture think that there are uniform syntax conventions, that everyone knows what they’re doing and agrees on how to do it. We found that this is blatantly untrue. When it comes to retweeting, things get messy.

It’s a must read and reminds us that there is serious grammatological work to do. We need to ask how does Twitter as a system of writing shapes, structure, and delimit our thinking and communication. The simple encoded rule “speak less than 141 characters,” the open question “what are you doing?” and emergent convention “RT, via, retweet, @philippmueller, etc.” allow for surprisingly complex human speech. Time to re-read Friedrich Kittler’s Aufschreibesystem 1800/1900 and Derrida’s Of Grammatology?

The Greek verb κυβερνάω [kubernáo] which means to steer was used for the first time in a metaphorical sense by Plato. As we are moving into network society, we need to ask, what are the conditions of possibility of steering? The simple answer is Larry Lessig’s “code is law” (1998), which argues that governance can be encoded into natural law, as in the first rule of twittering: “thou shalt not write more than 140 characters” where enforcement is automatic “thou shalt not be heard if you express yourself in more than 140 characters.”

So in our simplest model of governance in network society, code, law, and enforcement are one.

When the R.F.C.’s were born, there wasn’t a World Wide Web. Even by the end of 1969, there was just a rudimentary network linking four computers at four research centers: the University of California, Los Angeles; the Stanford Research Institute; the University of California, Santa Barbara; and the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

I labeled the note a “Request for Comments.” R.F.C. 1, written 40 years ago today, left many questions unanswered, and soon became obsolete. But the R.F.C.’s themselves took root and flourished. They became the formal method of publishing Internet protocol standards, and today there are more than 5,000, all readily available online.

Instead of authority-based decision-making, we relied on a process we called “rough consensus and running code.” Everyone was welcome to propose ideas, and if enough people liked it and used it, the design became a standard.

This was the ultimate in openness in technical design and that culture of open processes was essential in enabling the Internet to grow and evolve as spectacularly as it has. In fact, we probably wouldn’t have the Web without it. When CERN physicists wanted to publish a lot of information in a way that people could easily get to it and add to it, they simply built and tested their ideas. Because of the groundwork we’d laid in the R.F.C.’s, they did not have to ask permission, or make any changes to the core operations of the Internet. Others soon copied them — hundreds of thousands of computer users, then hundreds of millions, creating and sharing content and technology. That’s the Web.

As political scientists we need to ask, what are the strengths and weaknesses of governance mechanisms build on RFCs and code-is-law , do they only work for engineering and standardization problems (not for dilemmas) or can the constitute cultures that can deal with a wider set of collective action problems? If they do, then we need to ask questions about the identity requirements of members of such RFC-communities, etc. A lot of very interesting questions that we are only slowly getting into. David Post outlines an approach to ask these types of questions in part 2 (order) of Jefferson’s Moose, but there are many questions left.

Remember, “all” German speaking high-ranking government officials are lawyers, educated in the continental tradition of law and therefore share a strong code-centered culture. Therefore, the inherently legal(istic) question of the day was, how are the civil service laws of Austria, Germany, and Switzerland transforming as we are moving towards outcome orientation (network society)?

Now, in theory (dogma in legal terms), all countries are undergoing a radical transformation. The classical idea of the civil servant (public law) is being questioned and the flexibility of civil law (cl) as the framework to regulate the relationship between the state and the civil servants is being evaluated. However, in practice, we can observe the following developments:

• In Austria, the evidence is mixed. Austria has had both civil servants and cl-employees for quite some time. In practice the distinction does not go along lines of function (core state functions vs. non core functions). After several failures with the introduction of objectives-based renumeration, some states are actually reneging on changes.
• In Germany, there was a change in the constitution (Art. 33 Para 5 GG and Art. 74, Para 1, N.27 GG) that modified the civil service guarantee and the spheres of influence between the federal government and the states. However, in practice this change has almost no impact and because of federalistic competition mobility of civil servants between the states is decreased.
• In Switzerland, a change has take place with the new Bundespersonalgesetz. It is mainly felt in introducing unlimited employment contracts (Swiss civil servants originally were political appointees for the duration of a government’s term), the capacity to fire employees, and linking renumeration to achievements. However, new challenges have not been dealt with both on the dogmatic (what happens when core state functions are taken up by cl-employees, how do we deal with non-compliance) and the pragmatic level (how do we deal with mobbing, constitutional rights, etc.).

In general, the move towards outcome-orientation in employment contracts did not have that many supporters in the room, which is not surprising because all participants were either government officials or Professors from public universities. The main critique was that because the objective of the state is not to maximize profit, having performance contracts makes no sense (is that a category mistake or a level-of-analysis problem?). The response of the vocal minority to this was that for most aspects of what most government employees do, objectives can be specified and performance indicators developed.
Another critique was that because not enough resources were available for performance incentives, in practice, bonuses where given out not for over-performance or were not significant enough to impact behavior.

Overall, more interesting than the substantive arguments was the style of arguing. Lawyers will always be lawyers, even if they speak about transformative change. And theoretically, there should be incommensurability between the legalistic-institutional contract society and outcome-oriented network society.

However, one should never underestimate lawyers, because they are very smart, know how to write and speak, and are pretty adaptive. In European public administration, network society is only imaginable, if driven by lawyers that have internalized outcomes into their text culture. It will be interesting to see, if this will be a performance culture that is legally embedded or a legal culture with a sprinkle of of outcome-orientation.

[pictures taken by Gregor Wenda('s camera)]