Shaping Network Society

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!

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)?

Whenever I have talked to government officials in 2009 (in Cancun, Erfurt, Vienna, Salzburg, or Washington DC), at some point in the conversation they mention that “we need to develop new modes of interacting with citizens.” Implicit in this argument is a frustration with the fairly artificial tool set they have at their disposal.

Government as a Contract Society institution wants to insure the legality of its operations at all times, therefore, it is very careful in its communication: “if you really need an answer, please do not send an email, letters are better integrated into our (electronic) work-flow.” But network society logic (outcome orientation, eternal beta, radical transparency) have a way of sneaking up onto us.

In 2009, there is a clear realization that “things will be messy, but this is necessary (and not as dangerous as we think).” And everybody (and their grandmother) is scrambling to set up platforms to “ideate,” “deliberate,” and “collaborate.” On Wednesday, for example, we will discuss the participatory budgeting platform for the city of Erfurt.

The Obama adminstration has just gone through the first two months of the Open Government Initiative and there are interesting first lessons. And because online interaction is still so new, we are developing our sensitivity for deliberation 2.0. Here are some takeaways from Beth Noveck, in a recent NYTimes article:

If you don’t frame the debate, if you don’t ask a good question, you don’t get a good answer to the question.

If people are going to be asked to spend the time on contributing, you want to use the participation they give you.

If you run a dialog over weeks and weeks, you cannot begin to use the inputs you are given [there will be too many].

Government must also create a culture that is in some ways more formal than much of the rest of the Web. On sites like Slashdot, she said, the most popular posts are “the funniestor the snarkiest.” But that’s not an appropriate standard when trying to debate policy.

There is a reason you want people with expertise working in the jobs we have,(..) but the new online tools will nonetheless put pressure on officials to take public opinion into account.

Even something like having a blog with an open discussion about policy is revolutionary in the way government works.

In addition to the public brainstorming session, she ran another online discussion for government officials. This was unusual in that it asked for ideas from people at every level of government, speaking on their own. That’s very different from the usual structure in which feedback on ideas posed by one agency is funneled up through the chain of command at other agencies.

As we are preparing for the Erfurt Sessions, what are your takeaways from deliberation projects you have been involved in? What projects worked? Which did not? Why?

In the following video Beth Noveck outlines her vision for a world where public value is created by self-selected experts collaborating on platforms that mirror the collaboration process back to the participants:

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.