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!

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)?

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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One of the “Web 2.0-type” concepts for a (semi-)structured citizen e-participation are ideation platforms. The aim of these platforms is to tap into the wisdom of crowds to  discover and develop ideas. The first big ideation platform was Dell’s Ideastorm. It was launched in February 2007 as part of a new strategy to engage consumers in conversations after a public relations disaster concerning Dell’s after-sales service. Other companies using such platforms are Starbucks and in Germany, Tchibo. Typically these ideation platforms allow users to:

1. Propose ideas

2. To comment on other ideas

3. To vote ideas up or down

The public sector also implemented e-participation platforms including elements of ideation, like Baltimore’s Citistat, the e-Petition system UK’s number10, or Peer-to-Patent, the US patent offices pilot program for distributed patent review. In May of 2009, the Obama administration introduced the Open Government Initiative, the biggest governmental ideation experiment yet. So in less than a year, ideation platforms have become fairly main stream projects of governments on all levels. However, they are not yet well understood both from an operational and from a democratic theory perspective. There are several questions that we need to ask:

What problems are amenable to ideation platform types of projects? In what contexts?

How do ideation platforms interlock with other forms of online collaboration (peer production, data-mining, implicit voting)?

What population of self-selected (expert) participants do we need in order to assure success?

What population of participants will satisfy our democracy requirements? How do we distinguish between context where we care (e.g. participatory budgeting) and where we assume that the quality of the outcome itself legitimizes the process?

What else? What do you think?

LInk

This is new political theory, counter-intuitive from a Habermasian deliberative democracy perspective. It shows that it makes sense to “listen carefully” to technology.