Participation and Open Data

Participation & Open DataLee Bryant, Social Strategy Talk, Amsterdam, October 2009

The Twentieth Century is over,but its political structures live on

Slow shift from old, tiredideological battles to solving problems & delivering services

smart government =bigger (inclusiveness) but

smaller (bureaucracy)

this is our time andI think ‘we’ can do better

But even Obama’s callto ‘We’ is still morerhetoric than reality

We face problems that governments cannot solve alone

We face problems that multiply through networks

We face problems of fragmentation, identity, belonging

We need public services that can do more with less

participation + open dataare part of the answer

http://www.endorsetheopendeclaration.eu/

TransparencyParticipationEmpowerment

lessons of the social web

(Simple actions * scale) ^ aggregation= potentially powerful network effects

cost of group forming & collaboration falling all the time

the power of feedback

some use cases

Make invisible data visible & leverage open data for improvement

Participation & feedback can drive evolutionary improvement, enable co-design of services

Participation & feedback can drive evolutionary improvement, enable co-design of services

Participation & feedback can drive evolutionary improvement, enable co-design of services

Treat government budgetsas innovation funds & build solutions with people

The DIY / guerilla approach to opening up government data & services pioneered by mySociety

Why are governments not doing more?

why are we still working atthe edges whilst government

“procurement” wastes millions ?

contemporary critiquesof transparency...

“Transparency is the new objectivity” Some limits of transparency ?

“More information does not always produce markets that are moreefficient … people may ignore

information, or misunderstand it,or misuse it.”

Full Disclosure: The Perils and Promise of Transparency

“...the problem of attention-span.To understand something--an essay,an argument, a proof of innocence--

requires a certain amount of attention.”

Larry Lessig

issues of legitimacy?

“The fear is that, by forging a path between the ... Weberian defence of the state and the democratic Habermasian defence (a path manifest in the concept

of 'civic hacking' that mySociety represents), that we get some hybrid of

bureaucracy and democracy, that is neither quite as effective as the former,

nor as empowering as the latter”Will Davies

limits to participation?

Who do we not want to participate and why?

Conclusion

participation + open dataare ready for the mainstream

Applying Social Business Design Social Business Design is a framework for rethinking how business gets done. This framework can be applied to help businesses solve the problems they face today. We focus on companies at the level of their component parts when applying Social Business Design, as each major operating function has its own inherent challenges and opportunities.

To that end, we focus Social Business Design on three key practice areas:

» Customer Participation

» Workforce Collaboration

» Business Partner Optimization

Social Business Design | October 5, 2009! Page 12

! ©2009 Dachis Group

ecosystem

co-design

signals / data

filters

Key areas of focus for online participation & open data projects

there are many formsof online participation

We need to learn a lot more about different participation methods, & reach non-geeks better

Thanks for listening!

I am [email protected] live at http://www.headshift.com

Except where otherwise stated, photos courtesy of Flickr using Creative Commons license.

Thanks to the following photographers:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/greenpeace_italia/2430328823/http://www.flickr.com/photos/markrjones/47761183/http://www.flickr.com/photos/marcn/2174935053/sizes/l/http://www.flickr.com/photos/wili/1999071010/sizes/l/http://www.flickr.com/photos/andyarmstrong/4035014763/in/pool-stopthebnphttp://www.flickr.com/photos/arenamontanus/375127836/sizes/o/http://www.flickr.com/photos/pushandplay/2586461185/in/set-72157603886536530/http://www.flickr.com/photos/pushandplay/2968259379/

Other references:

http://potlatch.typepad.com/weblog/2009/10/what-is-the-postbureaucratic-state.htmlhttp://www.tnr.com/print/article/books-and-arts/against-transparency