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)?

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?

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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?

PS: To read the testimony of Vivek Kundra at the Subcommittee Hearing on: “The State of Federal Information Security”