Reboot asks: are we ready for more open and transparent government?

Micah L. Sifry writing in the Independent, explores this idea,

On his first full day in office, U.S. President Barack Obama issued an executive memorandum that may someday be seen as signaling the most important shift in how government works in America since the rise of the New Deal.

His subject? Not jobs or health care or the environment, but transparency and open government. In five succinct paragraphs, he promised to create an “unprecedented level of openness in government”, arguing that it would: “strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in government.”

Most significantly, and in what can only be understood as an explicit tip-of-the-hat to Web 2.0 thinking, he declared that in addition to making government more transparent, it should become more participatory and collaborative.

In a post entitled Obama = Engagement, I cited Henry Jenkins

What Obama embodies is something different — a networked model of the relations amongst all of us who are involved in the process of transforming American society. The differences between Obama and Clinton have less to do with issues of policy but rather differences in process, in notions of governance, in cultural style, though the subtle differences in policy may reflect differences on these other levels, as when Clinton wants to require everyone to buy health insurance (top-down) and Obama seeks to make insurance accessible to everyone (bottom up). Those of us who are passionate about Obama (and yes, I’m an Obama boy) are responding to an alternative vision of the country — one based less on fragmentation around identity politics or partisan differences than one which values diversity of perspectives as opening up the possibility of refining our collective organization and enabling us to solve problems together which defeat us as individuals.

And this is what Barack had to say

“Public engagement enhances the government’s effectiveness and improves the quality of its decisions. Knowledge is widely dispersed in society, and public officials benefit from having access to that dispersed knowledge. Executive departments and agencies should offer Americans increased opportunities to participate in policymaking and to provide their government with the benefits of their collective expertise and information? Executive departments and agencies should use innovative tools, methods, and systems to cooperate among themselves, across all levels of government, and with nonprofit organizations, businesses, and individuals in the private sector.”

Micah explores then the realities of realising what some might view as rather ambitious goals, both in terms of the promise made good or indeed – what happens when we all join in? That’s a lot of people – right? And on top of that what happens when we don’t agree?

The more difficult issue for advocates of opening up a process of ‘co-creating’ government is what might happen when newly empowered citizens inevitably collide with entrenched interests.

Good question?

But the evolving history of the social web, says Michah offers one encouraging hint. From Wikipedia to Craigslist to Amazon to Google, the web keeps rewarding those actors who empower ordinary users, eliminate wasteful middlemen, share information openly, and shift power from the centre to the edges. And why is that? well lets rewind a little bit.

Demokratia
– is a feminine noun, with strong feminine connotations. John Keane remarks that it takes some imagination to comprehend a world that was itself surrounded by a family of corresponding nouns that are grammatically feminine. Think about it Keane says, “imagine how our perceptions and feelings for such democratic institutions as press freedom, and periodic elections might be altered if, we presupposed that they embody life-giving ‘feminine qualities’”.

We all gratuitously point to Athena as the birthplace of Democracy. Yet in fact John Keane in his recent book The Life and Death of Democracy shows us it was the Phoenicians who understood the importance of democracy - why? Because the Phoenicians were a seafaring culture and they had learnt through hard won practical experience that it is only through the cooperation of people collaboratively working together to; build boats, sail them, sail through raging storms in them, fight in them, and trade via them.That they understood that Democracy by assembly was the best model to allow us all to get along.

It was Cleisthenes from Athena however, who had the epiphany that Democracy by assembly must include people from all walks of life (much to the disgust of some of ruling elite, who believed that the great unwashed had no right to govern, something that in fact is still practised today) - and the Agora - the open space in the middle of Athens where the Demos performed their daily Democratic duties was designed and conceived that all people were equal. Indeed Keane says the Agora was their Viagra. In extensive detail Keane takes us through how Athenians managed their Democracy via the agora. Keane mentions a word aidós= meaningful well-being and mutual respect. As I immersed myself through this fascinating story I reflected on our recent past - the banking crisis, the political furore over MP’s misuse of the expenses system, and the political tug-of-war over whether the British inquiry into the Iraq War in should be conducted in front of - in the public realm - or behind - opaque closed doors.

Three things occurred to me. [1] That you cannot run successful and thriving Democracies on the cheap [2] That Twitter in some respects is representative of the Agora of Athens - an open public space where people are engaging with each other. And Barack Obama’s rise to the Presidency and his ongoing Town Hall engagement project echoes this and [3] That we face a stark choice – either we all become political agents - who demand and exercise our political responsibility. Because if we don’t - we give up the right to our freedoms and we pass them to those that would want to rule us in less Democratic ways, the BNP for example in Britain spring to mind. Remember you don’t leave nothing in a vacuum.

Also it seems to me that we need to rescale the management society to a human level, devolving beauracracy and governance where Democracy is practised by us, where we are all individually and collectively responsible to each other. You might say well, we do that already - but I think we are so far removed from this practise that we have walked away from what we see is our metaphorical Agora, the House of Commons and quietly seethe with anger about our disenfranchisement.

Reboot is a event happening next Monday [6th July @ the Savoy Place] exploring what and how Britain in the networked society could be and should be like. You should come along!

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Posted in: Alan Moore Speaking, Culture, Engagement Civil Society, Ethics, Generation C, Government & Politics, Identity, Participation, Philosophy, Society, Strategy, Trends

Reboot asks: can public service start-ups transform Britain?

Paul Miler says YES WE CAN.

We’re still just at the beginning of understanding the relationship between government and the ways that digital technologies can help deliver public goods – sometimes through government itself and sometimes through new lightweight public service start-ups, argues Paul.

John Thackara talks about the need to make to make services light-weight and flexible - he describes a world that is heavy - in fact too heavy - his impassioned call goes like this…

We need systems and platforms - services that enable people to better cooperate together more effectively and enjoyably - from faster to closer - from context to deeper context. A culture of community and connectivity has to be fun as well as challenging, as well as responsible. An asthetics of service and flow should inspire us, NOT JUST SATISFY US.

To put that into context Paul tells, what I think is a true story of inspiration…

One weekend in April last year we opened the doors of the Young Foundation in Bethnal Green for the first Social Innovation Camp funded by NESTA. Some of the best coders and designers in the UK showed up but they got a surprise because this wasn’t like their day job. We forced them together with people who understood social problems that we wanted them to try and come up with a solution for in the space of a weekend.

In the previous six weeks we’d collected over a hundred ideas for websites that could change the world from people all over the UK and then narrowed those down to six with the help of some expert judges. Over the course of the weekend, the participants not only built prototypes of the services but also fleshed out business plans and ideas for branding and how the sites might spread. They took them from ‘idea in the pub’ to something that people – whether investors or potential users – could look at and say that it might just work. At the end of the weekend, the teams pitched against one another with a prize awarded to the idea that could show the best ‘proof of potential’.

We’ve now run Social Innovation Camp two more times in the UK (in London and Glasgow) and the idea has spread to several other countries. What makes it work is the mixture of ‘fun and fear’ – or collaboration and competition – and of course that the participants like the challenge of building something cheap and quick that could change the world.

Now how cool is that? Remember, people embrace what they create!

Paul says… This model of starting small is a characteristic of start-ups that I think government needs to understand better…

and he goes onto say,

For me there is no question that a flurry of digital innovation could lead to both the better public outcomes and economic vibrancy we need to create new jobs and wealth.

Without a shadow of a doubt Paul is prescient in his declaration - but it requires a different logic and ethos - Thackara says we should embed socialbility into all that we do… as the social innovation camps so clearly demonstrates the way to do that.

Paul also touches on a very important theme about the apparent separation of offline (analogue) - online (digital). Digital - “the shock of the new.” This is what Gibson says,

One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real, the virtual from the real. In the future, that will become literally impossible. The distinction between cyberspace and that which isn’t cyberspace is going to be unimaginable. When I wrote  Neuromancer in 1984, cyberspace already existed for some people, but they didn’t spend all their time there. So cyberspace was there, and we were here. Now cyberspace is here for a lot of us, and there has become any state of relative nonconnectivity. There is where they don’t have Wi-Fi.

So then:  grassroots, deep context, flows of information and cooperation, co-creation, embeded sociability, transforms Britain for the better. This is the read-write society, we are currently building, its a wonderful thing!

Reboot is a event happening next Monday [6th July @ the Savoy Place] exploring what and how Britain in the networked society could be and should be like. You should come along

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Posted in: Administrative, Convergence, Culture, Engagement Civil Society, Events, Generation C, Government & Politics, Participation, Social Networks, Society, Strategy, Trends

Reboot asks: from social media to social good?

In 1997 Charles Handy wrote a book called the Hungry Spirit, in it he asked

Can Capitalism be made more decent and its instrument business work more obviously for the good of all, everywhere?

Handy to my mind sits alongside Ivan Illich as one this country’s great unsung heroes. As his thinking, a decade later has taken center stage and Andy Hobsbawm takes Handy’s theme forward in an article for the Independent that forms a series of leading articles and thought pieces that shape the thinking around the Reboot Britain participatory conference [6th July @ the Savoy Place] He points out that cooperation, represents the dawn of; civilisation, and of community based groups, who understand that cooperation provides the very best form of survival - for all.

Andy’s insight is…

communal impulses are older than our civilisations and an in-built part of how humans behave in groups. Digital tools and network technology hasn’t changed this, but it has made new kinds of collective interaction possible, given us many new channels of social and philanthropic expression, and made it much more potent and visible as an information-based economic activity.

The internet has the ethos of cooperation written into its very DNA - we have taken the code of human beings and written it in digital form. Andy lists 6 examples of technologies of cooperation - working towards the social good. [you ccan read more about them in the Independent article]

1. Mass collaboration

2. Mutual aid networks

3. Micro-donations

4. Micro-lending

5. Public innovation challenges

6. Social business resources

I believe that the crisis of our post modern society is a crisis of meaning, as does Andy, and he quotes Nobel Laureate economist Robert Fogel, ‘people’, says Fogel ‘have enough to live, but nothing to live for; they have the means, but no meaning’. This crisis is not to be understated - from it stems an extraordinary array of complex social problems that the state struggles to manage and find credible solutions to. Charles Handy writes

In Africa, they say there are two hungers, the lesser hunger and the greater hunger. The lesser hunger is for the things that sustain life, the goods and the services, and the money to pay for them, which we all need, The greater hunger is for an answer to the question “why?”, for some some understanding of what that life is for… to think that better bread, and a bit of cake to go with it, would make us all content, because governments and business together might be able to deliver on that contract. The consequence of that thinking is that money ultimately becomes the measure of all things. We can measure our lives in pound notes, deutschmarks or dollar bills and then compare our scores. we have all become Hungry Spirits.

And this statistic, I find extraordinary, volunteering in Britain nearly doubled between 1994 and 2004.The quest for identity, meaning and belonging in this world has inspired, organised and driven the creation, installation and deployment of Technologies of Cooperation.

Now we have a vastly expanded range of ways to make these meaningful contributions online. And not only are there many new, global channels to find meaning by giving or sharing, but people can see the cumulative effects of their participation as it happens. This is an entirely new and extremely powerful combination: the collective power of connected individuals; ‘network effects’ making the whole ever greater than the sum of the individual contributions; and people perceiving the growing force of their individual contributions massed together, which stimulates more of the same behaviour.

Anyone that pooh poohs this as liberal bullshit had better thank again. Jamais Cascio, argues that technology can be weilded as agaents of social and political change. I will leave that though hanging….

Jeffrey Sachs in Commonwealth wrote that…

the defining challenge of the twenty-first century will be to face the reality that humanity shares a common fate on a crowded planet. That common fate will require new forms of global cooperation, a fundamental point of blinding simplicity that many world leaders have yet to understand or embrace… In the twenty-first century our global society will flourish or perish according to our ability to find common ground across the world on a set of shared objectives and on the  practical means to achieve them.

Andy recognises the same challenges through his own lens,

There’s no doubt that the internet symbolises a potential global connectedness the like of which we’ve never seen. And this comes at a time when a challenge like climate change represents a global crisis the like of which we’ve never faced. The only way to tackle something that affects all of us is together, so some level of global consciousness is going to need to take place if mankind can defeat a problem of this scale.

Reboot is a event happening next Monday [6th July @ the Savoy Place] exploring what and how Britain in the networked society could be and should be like. You should come along

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Posted in: Alan Moore Speaking, Convergence, Culture, Darwin, Engagement Civil Society, Ethics, Generation C, Government & Politics, Health, Identity, Participation, Philosophy, Politics, Social Networks, Society, Trends

Reboot asks: what is the highest form of efficiency?

According to Woodrow Wilson it the

spontaneous cooperation of free people.

Lee Bryant in last weeks Independent – asked the question, whether people power can reboot Britain?

Reboot is a event happening next Monday [6th July @ the Savoy Place] exploring what and how Britain in the networked society could be and should be like.

Lee makes the observation that there is a growing list of challenges that are significant to the extend that we must overcome them;

political and economic (fiscal) reform are headlines on his agenda – and I for one am there by his shoulder.

Reboot is about YOU & YOU & YOU & YOU & YOU

Can we go back to business as usual Lee asks? As we no longer in the age of ‘Fordism’ – but a post Fordist age…

Over the past decade, we have learned a lot about how network thinking and specifically the social web can dramatically reduce the costs of co-ordination and collective action, allowing new ways of involving people in organisational, democratic or social processes. Many people have argued that government and industry should take advantage of these innovations to create more people-powered organisations. Now, in the face of serious crises in both the economy and the political system, and in the middle of a recession that calls into question whether we can even afford ‘business as usual’, it is time to take a serious look at how we can leverage human talent, energy and creativity to begin rebooting the system to create sustainable, affordable, long-term mechanisms for public engagement.

Lee has some suggestions:

[1] To make better use of government spending to make it go further. Government procurement should be treated as a stimulus fund, and used to deliver social and economic benefits as well as products and services.

[2] The second thing we can do is harness people power to improve existing democratic and public services. [Don't just create a service and leave it to languish – enable the constant flows of feedback to constantly and incrementally improve the effectiveness of that service – remember, nobody is as clever as everybody]

Henry Jenkins - De Florz Professor of the Comparitive Media Studies Program @ MIT wrote

In a networked society, people are increasingly forming knowledge communities to pool information and work together to solve problems they could not confront individually. We call that collective intelligence.

We are witness to a new form of participatory culture - one that I might add a growing band of “WE” are demanding. In contrast, the current cost of fixed, siloed organisations is like a lead balloon for society - but its more than that; its about flexibility and speed, combined with an adaptive capability built into the very DNA of the organisation. More feminine one might say. Demokratia [2] – is a feminine noun, with strong feminine connotations. John Keane in his book: The Life and Death of Democracy remarks that it takes some imagination to comprehend a world that was itself surrounded by a family of corresponding nouns that are grammatically feminine. Think about it Keane says, “imagine how our perceptions and feelings for such democratic institutions as press freedom, and periodic elections might be altered if, we presupposed that they embody life-giving ‘feminine qualities’”. Equally we need some collective, participatory imagination to realise our possible future.

Lee sums up

The big question, though, is how to achieve any of this. In the United States, federal CIO Vivek Kundra recently outlined plans for pursuing these ideas, which is unsurprising since the internet was crucial to Obama’s spectacular refactoring of the US body politic. But here in the UK, we have a late 20th century government in its final phase, so we should not expect too much. Perhaps it is better for all of us to simply get on with it and create our own structures and services, as mySociety and others have pioneered.

It is somebody else’s turn now, somebody who has a vision for the future.

Lee says the 20th Century is over – indeed it is the end of the Belle epoque. If you are curious, concerned, motivated, about what the future could hold for Britain – I suggest you come along and become the change you want to see in the world. As Obama said “Yes We Can” – now I am not waiting for anyone in our political parties to say the same - so that is what we all are saying at Reboot - that is what Lee is saying, and I am saying too. This is our time to re-engage with society to fill its sails with some wind, and give it some direction.

If you want to build a ship, don’t divide the work and give orders; teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

ANTOINE de SAINT-EXUPÉRY

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Posted in: Alan Moore Speaking, Convergence, Culture, Darwin, Engagement Civil Society, Ethics, Government & Politics, Health, Identity, Participation, Philosophy, Politics, Social Networks, Society, Strategy, Trends

Roku’s Reward

http://www.flickr.com/photos/yasminespics/2976422239/

When the world is your playing field, and the game is afoot, having what you need when andwhere you need it at your fingertips makes the difference between winning and losing writes the makers of the movie.

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Posted in: Convergence, Culture, Gaming, Generation C, Identity, Media, Mobile, Trends

Mobile Intelligence

Jamais Cascio talking about mobile intelligence

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Mad Avenue Blues

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Rebooting Britain

A call to arms has sounded - that hails you and I to be participants,  as Woodrow Wilson wrote

The highest and best form of efficiency is the spontaneous cooperation of free people.

That’s us then!! Reboot Britain shouts from the rooftops - let me paraphrase - We must become the change we want to be.

An extraordinary one-day event which will take a totally different look at the challenges we face as a country and the new possibilities that – uniquely - this generation has to overcome them.

We face an unprecedented set of challenges: a decimated economy, ever increasing demands on our public services and trust in our political system at an all time low.

But instead of more pessimism, how can we begin to punch through the gloom and take advantage of the radically networked digital world we now live in to help revive our economy, rebuild our democratic structures and improve public services?

I am included in an impressive speakers lineup [list below]

Martha Lane-Fox | entrepreneur and campaigner | twitter

Gillian Tett | Assistant Editor, FT

Howard Rheingold | Technology guru | twitter

Sir Michael Bichard | Director, Institute of Government

Jon Gisby | New Media Director, Channel 4

Craig Newmark | Customer service rep and founder, craigslist | twitter

Alan Moore | Media and Communications | twitter

Paul Miller | CEO, School of Everything | twitter

Lee Bryant | Director, Headshift | twitter

Andy Hobsbawm | Co-founder, Green Thing & Agency.com[block]25[/block]

Daniel Heaf | Digital commissioner, 4iP | twitter

Included in this very innovative and interactive event are possibilities for you to engage with these far ranging topics

Demos who present their Progressive Conservatism thinking which will look at the major challenges we face for public services,

Reboot SICamp and PICamp [health and politics]

WeBank Given the failure of traditional banks and financial instruments, are peer-to-peer platforms the answer or just a fleeting phenomenon?

Jeff Saperstein presents ‘Busting Open Silos,’ his view on how our organisations need to restructure in order to adapt and grow

For the People, By the People Two sessions from UK Online exploring what users of public services actually say.

Innovation Live wants you! Join the collective mindpool at Reboot Britain for a live brainstorming  session to develop practical solutions out of the content of the day.

Social by Social will challenge you on how to make social technologies work for local neighbourhoods

Learning Without Frontiers slate a number of sessions, from how technology is changing cognitive development, to redesigning our schools for the new age.

In the project I am currently developing [No Straight Lines] I write,

As I continued to research the evolution of the media and the commercial communication environment. I had a dawning realisation that what I was witnessing was something deeper, more profound, more epochal, more revolutionary.

It is in fact a communications revolution. And once you have stormed the Bastille you don’t go back to your day job, just ask anyone; Robspierre, Lenin, Che, take your pick. Why was this happening? What were the deep social undercurrents driving this revolution that is as big, if not bigger, than Gutenberg inventing moveable type?

And as Jamais Cascio explained to me; technology can be wielded as a powerful agent of social and political change, as it is indeed  being wielded today with great force and ferocity. We seem to have arrived at a crossroads, faultlines run through every aspect of our society - this makes me fearful  that few truly understand the underlying reasons of what  is happening now, nor the implications of what happens next.

So I want you, Reboot Britain wants you [sign up here] - we need each other, as Jung wrote

“I”
needs “We” to truly be
“I”

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Quotes for the early 21st Century

The guys at Freedom Lab - have set up a shop on the Spreadshirt platform - selling T-shirts with quotes from various people they have interviewed as part of their future studies program.

Here’s mine

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Posted in: Alan Moore Speaking, Culture, Quotes, Sociology, Strategy, Trends

Crowdsourcing Blade Runner in a read-write participatory culture

That is a mouthful but it pretty much sums up this project.

RSA films are developing a series of web shorts for Blade Runner, The project is called “Purefold.” The series of linked 5- to 10-minute shorts, aimed first at the Web and then perhaps television, will be set at a point in time before 2019, when the Harrison Ford movie takes place in a dystopian Los Angeles. enabled by the very interesting gentlemen at Ag8.

We don’t take any of the canon or copyrighted assets from the movie,” said David Bausola, founding partner of Ag8, who said he hoped the series would debut later this summer and that the first episodes would depict events about two years into the future. “It’s actually based on the same themes as ‘Blade Runner.’ It’s the search for what it means to be human and understanding the notion of empathy. We are inspired by ‘Blade Runner.

This is the interesting bit, as reported by the New York Times

In an indication that the filmmakers are interested in exploring a new kind of collective, social creativity, the episodes in the series will be released under a Creative Commons license, marking the first time a major Hollywood director has embraced that alternative licensing scheme. The license means fans of the series can take the episodes and remix or otherwise repurpose them, and even make their versions available commercially under the same license.

The Purefold project is described as

Purefold is the first product conceived by Ag8 and developed in partnership with Ridley and Tony Scott’s newly launched entertainment division Free Scott. Purefold is an open media franchise designed for brands, platforms, filmmakers, product developers and communities to collaboratively imagine our near future.

With a central theme ‘What does it mean to be human?’, the franchise explores the subject of empathy - a shared theme with Ridley Scott’s most compelling Science Fiction movie, Blade Runner.

The franchise contains infinite interlinked story lines, turned into short-format episodes by Ridley Scott Associate Films’ global talent pool of directors, and informed by real-time online conversations from the audience, which are harvested through FriendFeed, the world’s leading ‘life streaming’ technology.

Taking place in the near future, Purefold enables participating brands to take an alternative route to brand integration than traditional product placement and embrace invention within a narrative framework.

You can even follow the project on twitter People embrace what we create, and since we want to be part of writing ourselves into existence - this approach makes enormous sense to me. It also interesting to reflect that four years ago, I wonder whether this project would have got off the ground? It is a signifier of how much has evolved over the last few years since writing Communities Dominate Brands.

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