Dave Karpf, Ph.D.@davekarpf

Shoutingloudly.com

The Limits of E-government:

Assessing the True Demand Curve for Online Participation

Two distinct conversations about e-government

• In the academic literature– Discussion focuses on governmental

transformation (West 2005), citizen empowerment (Noveck 2009), “horizontal integration” (Layne and Lee 2001)

• In government, among practitioners– Discussion focuses on service delivery,

transparency. Practical challenges (Govloop). Occasional references to aspirational goals.

What are the boundary conditions of wiki government?

We need to learn not only from our successes, but also from our failures

Two types of failure

“Blessed are the Organized”

“Field of Dreams Fallacy”

“Write it down: Americans Elect. What Amazon.com did to books, what the blogosphere did to newspapers, what the iPod did to music, what drugstore.com did to pharmacies, Americans Elect plans to do to the two-party duopoly that has dominated American political life — remove the barriers to real competition, flatten the incumbents and let the people in. Watch out.”

-Tom Friedman, July 24, 2011.

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The Results

Total Primary Votes for Obama: 6,158,064

Total Primary Votes for Romney: 9,414,851

Obama received 8,064 votes in the Iowa caucuses alone

The Field of Dreams Fallacy

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(There Is No Radical Center)

An Old Lesson

“…Commercial companies make software for money, so money is the limiting factor. Open Source developers make software for the love of the thing, so love becomes the limiting factor as well. Unloved software can't be built using Open Source methods.”

-Clay Shirky, 1999

“The Interest Horizons and the Limits of Software Love”

http://www.shirky.com/writings/interest.html

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The Internet Does Not Create Our Interests. It Reveals Them.

Lesson 1: Technology Does Not Create Participatory

Communities. It Supports Them.

A Second Problem - Blessed are the Organized

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• In practice, there is rarely any such thing as “the public.”

• Instead, we act as a nation of publics.

• If e-government initiatives assume a participatory mass public, they set themselves up for failure

Lesson 2: Be aware of trend toward“Geek-Based Governance”

• Techies are one such public.

• Reddit, Slashdot, BoingBoing constitute the hubs of an online community.

• We must remember that most citizens do not, cannot, and will not write software code.

E-government projects must engage in user-oriented design

• Some areas of government receive high public interest, others low.

• Some areas of government are highly polarized, others are not.

Low interest

Low polarization High polarization

High interest

A simple model

Low public polarization, high public interest

High public polarization, high public interest

Low public polarization, low public interest

High public polarization, low public interest

(EPA standard-setting)

(Education reform)(Space exploration)

(Department of Transportation)

Appropriate E-gov Initiatives

Wikis, user-generated content

Open data

Online service delivery

Streamlined public comment systems

(EPA standard-setting)

(Education reform)(Space exploration)

(Department of Transportation)

Digital government can be transformative. But it will not be transformative everywhere, all at once.