Government at, and with, the edge: active citizenship in the new joined-up age

Martin Stewart-WeeksSenior Director, Public Sector (Asia-Pacific)

Internet Business Solutions Group, Cisco Systems

A starting point?

Paul Baran’s Theory of Distributed Networks

Node = a person

Line = a relationship between two people

“embedded”: the degree to which a person is connected within a network

more embedded = central

less embedded = periphery

Centre and edge 1Connected

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Context

Centre and edge

“We have grown used to the centre taking more and more of the decisions, despite the fact that in almost all cases the knowledge, expertise and experience required to inform those decisions are at the edge.”

Beth Noveck, author of Wiki Government and Deputy CTO, Open and Transparent Government, The White House

Public goals have become far more entangled with the behaviour of private individuals and organisations outside of government.<Donald Kettl The Next Government of the United States p115>

Among the elements common to successfully resilient systems was an ability to constantly reconceptualise problems, to generate a diversity of ideas, to communicate…and to encourage novelty …

The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us And What We Can Do About ItJoshua Cooper Ramo p197

Pull, not push…“Pull allows each of us to find and access the people and resources when we need them, while attracting to us the people and resources that are relevant and valuable, even if we were not aware before that they existed. Finally, in a world of mounting pressure and unforeseen opportunities, pull gives us the ability to draw from within ourselves the insight and performance required to more effectively achieve our potential.”

http://edgeperspectives.typepad.com/edge_perspectives/2010/04/the-power-of-pull-has-finally-arrived.html

Distributed capitalism

“The emerging logic of distributed capitalism rewards enterprises that realign their practices with the interests of the end consumer and punishes enterprises that try to impose their own internal requirements or, worse yet, maximize their own benefit at the expense of the individual end user.”

Creating value in the age of distributed capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff, McKinsey Quarterly, September 2010

Re-framing innovation

Formal settings Informal settings

Sustaining Innovation IMPROVE SUPPLEMENT

Disruptive Innovation REINVENT TRANSFORM

Learning from the extremes, Charles Leadbeater and Annika Wong, Cisco, 2010

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Examples

US Patent Office - Peer to Patent

Southwark Circle is a membership organisation that provides on-demand help with life's practical tasks through local, reliable Neighbourhood Helpers, and a social network for teaching, learning and sharing.

http://www.southwarkcircle.org.uk/

Dialogue Café is an initiative which results from the radical but simple idea that people have many things in common and given the opportunity, they will explore their common interests, sparking collaborations and stimulating ideas that address the major issues of today. Dialogue

Café is a global network for people who want to learn, share and collaborate. It’s a platform for creativity and innovation, with a focus on cross-cultural dialogue, social innovation, civic participation, arts and culture.

Dialogue CafeLisbon Rio de Janeiro

Tel AvivRamallah

Amsterdam

London

Dialogue Cafe

….Berlin, Oslo, Brisbane, Hyderabad, Melbourne, Auckland, Hong Kong, Seoul…

The Tanta Effect

“Blogging ‘turbocharged’ the ecology of intellectual discussion – enabling us to tap into the insights of people who would never have received the attention they were due back in the old days where reputations took a decade or more to build and were corralled into specialisms with little cross fertilisation and ‘contestability’ between them.”Nicholas Gruen

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Some implications

Dispersing power, authority and control

Communities and networks, as well as

organisations and institutions

Systematic serendipity

Coherence, Scale, Accountability

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...in spite of the many bright and enthusiastic people working in this field, they form a self-serving community that works on the assumption that e-participation is an end in itself, rather than a means to achieve better and more sustainable governance.In my humble opinion, the latter is a far bigger problem that the former. After many years of investments and effort on electronic petitions, democracy, participation,

and so forth, there seems to be still little evidence that anything substantial is being achieved.

eParticipation in Europe: Living in a Bubble? Andrea Di Maio | September 24, 2010 | blogs.gartner.com/andrea_dimaio/2010/09/24/eparticipation-in-europe-living-in-a-bubble/

A reality check?