Shaping Network Society

The following entry was written by Justus Lenz with Philipp Mueller:

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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?

Beth Novack, the author of WikiGovernment (Brookings 2009), is the new deputy CTO for Open Government of the Obama Administration. She is leading the Open Government Initiative. After a brainstorm phase, we are moving into the discussion phase today. Read her White House blog-posting here.

As we are setting up Government 2.0 parallel to our existing democratic institutions, it is time to re-visit the pre-2009 writing and experiences on participatory forms of governance. Ruckelhaus’ experiments in the EPA with town halls come to mind or any text written by Archon Fung.

And we should not forget to ask the questions that we have been asking of governance ever since Cleisthenes introduced democracy to Athens in 508 BC: Who was participating in the brainstorm sessions? How heavy-handed was the moderation? How are opinions aggregated? Do we have access to the raw postings to hold government accountable on the issues? How is the discussion organized? What forms of structural power are instituted in the process? Who are the people that are participating? What are their backgrounds? What percentage of the US population is participating? Are participants representative? What would count as a success?