Workshop Report

Future-building for Wikicrats. Workshop held at Reboot 11, June 25-26, Copenhagen

Initiated by Information Society and Media; the department for ICT addressing societal challenges.

Organised for the European Commission by Bror Salmelin and Nadia El-Imam.

Disclaimer: This report summarises the outcome of the workshop held in the Reboot 2009 event. It represents the view of

the rapporteur and the participants, and is not binding the European Commission in its actions.

Report by Nadia EL-Imam :www.linkedin.com/nadiaelimam.com Emailt: nnegash@gmail.com Skype: niasan

How to use this document

Document organisation

This document is divided into three sections. The first, “Where we started” presents our hypothesis as well as

some general information about the Reboot event and why we decided to hold the first Wikicrats workshop

there. The second section, “Where we got to”, presents the workshop results and a summary documentation of

its contents including a summary of the major discussions that took place. The third section, “Where to go next

“, puts forward proposals for further action as suggested by participants in the workshop.

I used many quotations from sessions to render the lively participatory atmosphere of the workshop sessions at

Reboot. These quotations are not attributed to named individuals as we do not have written consent from all the

participants to do so. In addition to the author´s own material, some photos used in the document come from

Ton Zijlstra- and Martin Bauer´s flickr accounts ( tagged “wikicrats”) and are used under a Creative Commons

license. Special thanks to Fredrik Smedberg for his help in documenting the workshop.

Report by Nadia EL-Imam :www.linkedin.com/nadiaelimam.com Emailt: nnegash@gmail.com Skype: niasan

Table of Contents

Where we started 4

Our hypotheses 4

About the workshop 4

Where we got to 7

What happened 7

What was discussed 8

Discussion tied to expert presentations 8

Discussions tied to brainstorming sessions 11

Results 13

Where to go next 15

Final recommendations: the need for an interface 15

Aidanmedia

Workshop report: Future-building for Wikicrats, Reboot11, June 25-26 2009, Copenhagen 3Nadia EL-ImamToday, 12:59 f.m.Added Text

Where we started

Our hypotheses

It seems that European technology policy is not discussed by the people most affected by it. This had been the

subject of an ongoing conversation between Bror Salmelin, myself and others at Echallenges 2008 and

elsewhere. As a result of this ongoing conversation the following hypotheses were formulated:

• There is a significant difference in use of ICT amongst netizens and how public administrations work.

The way the net culture is using ICT can be a seen as a model for ordinary users in the near future. It is

therefor necessary to bridge this gap.

• There is a hidden interest to participate in and be involved in European policy processes amongst the

tech literate outside the Brussels circuit. Whether or not people wish to engage with government and

public administration depends on many different factors all of which together render any individual

initiative interesting and credible or not; initiatives that succeed in engaging the community are must be

grounded in the culture and values of the community in all its components from ideation though to

delivery and assessment.

• There is a gap between ICT innovation policies and ICT innovation practice. We think net culture and

communities can be engaged in helping to bridge it.

About the workshop

We decided to test our hypothesis by experimentally creating an interaction locus between Euro- tech policies

and people who normally don´t take part in the policy debate. The way we decided to go about this was to set

up a workshop at Reboot, a hacker conference.

This workshop was an experiment in engaging people outside the Brussels circuit in the discussion about

governance, policy modelling and technology innovation in Europe. The broader objective for doing so is the

pursuit of solid technology and societal policy in the knowledge society in order to achieve sustainable societal

behaviour;

“The workshop/event in Reboot is to be seen as initiator for a deeper debate on the future policy

modelling and governance in the knowledge society, enabling value community building, negotiation,

mediation across those communities and decision making structures; to explore new politics processes.”

We decided to set the workshop at Reboot as we wanted to engage users, creators and innovators of

technology from highly diverse backgrounds who are not the usual “technology policy experts” you come across

Report by Nadia EL-Imam :www.linkedin.com/nadiaelimam.com Emailt: nnegash@gmail.com Skype: niasan

in European Commission contexts. Why go about it this way? We believe that these meetings of value systems

and frames of reference could generate novel ways of thinking about technology policy.

About Reboot

Reboot is an annual 2-day event that takes place in Copenhagen. The organisers manage venue booking,

catering, ticket sales as well as maintain the website. The schedule is emergent: members of the community

sign into the website and suggest speakers, topics and presentations or workshops by posting proposals,

which then are rated by the other members of the community. The proposals which receive the most votes (or

“likes”) are given a slot on the program. Lacking a top-down schedule management, the quality of the

experience is ensured by the Reboot community´s co-creating the conference they want by having a very active

role in it´s making. Reboot is often referred to as an “unconference” due to its bottom-up structure.

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Workshop report: Future-building for Wikicrats, Reboot11, June 25-26 2009, Copenhagen 5

Every year the conference, its date schedule, location, speaker programme, ticketing, web site and many other

aspects are determined at the last minute. While it takes a little time to get used to, the consensus amongst the

community seems to be “it works out every year, just go with the flow”.

This formula is obviously quite successful. What started out in 1999 as an event with a Danish focus, has grown

into a meetup of the international hacker community that attracts 500 participants from over 22 countries.

Reboot 2009 sold out, and was attended by internet gurus like David Weinberger and Bruce Sterling.

Programmers, designers, innovators, entrepreneurs, thinkers, bloggers, and activists. And many others for

whom labels have not yet been invented frequent Reboot.

“Reboot is a place for people to come together once a year and reboot their minds with perspective,

inspiration and relationships.”

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Workshop report: Future-building for Wikicrats, Reboot11, June 25-26 2009, Copenhagen 6

Where we got to

What happened“it was a pleasure to participate. it was not smooth and flowing discussion, but this is the very reason we

need this stuff - for the difference and incompatibility of these worlds. you did good in pushing and

animating towards something concrete...”

“ How can the people get a place at the government table? lots of small individuals versus a few big

companies.”

“imagine all these digital visionaries used to instant satisfaction working inside a big government. This is

clash of civilisation”

Day 1 of the workshop consisted of participation in presentations held by various members of the Reboot

community, including engagement in the “Future-building for Wikicrats” Session; two consecutive 45 minute

sessions of expert presentations followed by a structured ideation session. Part of the audience from the

presentations joined us for a brainstorming and ideation session in a public space outdoors where we were also

joined by curious passers by who became engaged. The brainstorming session continued for another hour on

day 2 and was followed by some hands-on design work for one of the proposed post-Reboot actions.

Day 1 Session type Documentation

Session 1

15:00-15:40Expert Presentations See table 2

Session 2

15:40-16:20Expert Presentations See table 2

Session 3

16:20-17:00Discussions tied to expert

presentations

See “ Discussions tied to expert presentations”

Session 4

17:00-19:00Ideation session with post-its See “ Discussions tied to brainstorming sessions”

Day 2 Session type Documentation

Session 5

11:00-11:40Brainstorming See “ Discussions tied to brainstorming sessions”

Session 6

14:00-17:00Design and implementation session https://secure.cute.se/reboot/index_old.htm

Table 1. The “Future-building for wikicrats” workshop at Reboot11

Report by Nadia EL-Imam :www.linkedin.com/nadiaelimam.com Emailt: nnegash@gmail.com Skype: niasan

Nadia EL-ImamToday, 12:55 f.m.Formatted: British English

Six invited experts and an observer (Freek Van Krevel) from the European Commission. Also present were

members of the Reboot community who either listened to the presentations, participated in the brainstorming or

both. In addition we managed to engage two designers and a programmer from the Reboot community in doing

practical design work to implement one of the ideas generated during the workshop. On average there were

between 10-25 participants in the Wikicrats sessions at any one time. It is hard to give an exact overall

participation figure as people walked in and out of the sessions continuously; a rough estimate would be that

around 50 to 60 of the 500 participants at Reboot were involved at some point.

What was discussed

Discussion tied to expert presentations

Name Info Slides

Alberto Cottica www.linkedin.com/in/albertocottica http://www.slideshare.net/haiku66/technology-poli

cy-and-me

Robin Chase www.robinchase.org/ http://www.slideshare.net/guest861f59e/copenhag

en-robin-chase

Elvira Berlingieri www.linkedin.com/in/berlingieri http://www.slideshare.net/Elvira.Berlingieri/reboot1

1-elvira-berlingieri

Gianluca Dettori www.linkedin.com/in/dpixel no slides

David Osimo www.linkedin.com/in/osimod http://www.slideshare.net/osimod/reboot11osimo#

Gohar Sargsyan unavailable presentation not uploaded to slideshare

Freek Van Krevel www.linkedin.com/in/freekvankrevel presentation not uploaded to slideshare

Table 2. Contents of expert presentations

The distance between ICT innovation policies and ICT innovation practice

“Focus on how government can help new small companies”

“The public sector should start using one-man, start-up and small consultancies etc.- maybe creating a

special office that can facilitate this, a tender office for very small companies”

“When government use consultants/choose vendors they should consider not always using large

companies, but rather mirror the fact that the vast majority of companies are small”

“A lot of start-ups are small but very talented... Don't make laws/regulations. Just hire/use services that

work!”

“Citizens are experts! I know more about building an internet start-up than anyone who has not done it.

Please ask me.”

“We should invest in small businesses innovative research grants.”

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Workshop report: Future-building for Wikicrats, Reboot11, June 25-26 2009, Copenhagen 8

The discussion about which policies that improve out ability to nurture innovation and start-up activity was

initiated with Gianluca Dettori´s description of his experiences as a venture capitalist in Italy and the vast

difference in perspective between commercial investors and government business incubators; He gave one

example of a company that had remained in a government incubator for 8 years, and judging from other

comments and discussions at Reboot this is not an isolated incident. There were several suggestions that

popped up during these discussions, many highlighting the exclusion that many smaller businesses feel from

ICT policy making and investment in nurturing innovation activity in society. Public administrations who adopt a

problem solving attitude are very appreciated, like in the Portuguese case of Impresa na hora, a clever “hack” of

existing legislation which helps entrepreneurs wanting to create a business cut through the red tape. Impresa na

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Workshop report: Future-building for Wikicrats, Reboot11, June 25-26 2009, Copenhagen 9

hora did not require broad reform, and only minimal involvement of the political level. It can be a model because

it is a patch: it works and it can be deployed quickly, consistently with hacker ethics.

On government, governance and participation

“as we're talking about action the most important targets are not corporations, governments or

organizations. We the people are the number one agents for change in this world. In particular small

businesses, technologists, writers. The above mentioned 3 targets [meaning corporations etc.] have

vested interests in not changing things.”

“I... would suggest to create these '10 point' lists for different scopes of influence. What can you do to

create action directly around you, around local gov, around your organisation etc.? (I must admit that I am

highly sceptical about the need to use incumbent structures to act though)”

There was a larger discussion about the role of government and its inability to evolve and adapt to the major

social and technical changes we are all witnessing. Some participants attributed this inability to adapt to civil

servants lacking knowledge, incentive or confidence to push through important changes, or even to engage

with citizens for fear of repercussions;

“Civil servants are not educated to respond to suggestions from people...Government officials should be

empowered to engage in open conversations with citizens. It should be OK to admit failure as

government official.”

“We should discuss how to enable government officials to be participants in communities”

“I am impressed by how common it is for civil servants to be dismissive of their own culture, that of public

administration. They basically go out there and tell everyone “we are lagging behind, we are slow and

can’t achieve change”. And of course the hackers, who are very very proud of their own culture, buy into

that. But that is just plain wrong. Public administration is an ancient, powerful culture which achieved

wonders. It gave us water pipes, railways, roads: even the internet started out as a government project!

With all due respect, those achievements are more impressive than launching YouTube. I would like to see

more bright, enlightened civil servants at Reboot. The techies need to know that there are other

interesting people out there besides themselves. Self-referentiality is a poison on both sides.”

The question of the role of government and governance surfaced in many different forms. One underlying idea

that permeated several discussions was that government should focus on creating a simple, reliable and

publicly accessible infrastructure that "exposes" the underlying data. In other words, the government should

Aidanmedia

Workshop report: Future-building for Wikicrats, Reboot11, June 25-26 2009, Copenhagen 10

become a data platform, exposing their vast amounts of data to the public -- i.e., via API -- and let the private

sector mash it up to make helpful services for people: such as http://www.policymap.com/. Alberto Cottica on

the other hand pointed out the risks of having American companies as infrastructure of public services 2.0 from

his experiences of what happened with the Kublai community (funded and run by the Italian Ministry of

economic development) when their service provider suddenly changed the terms of service. Robin Chase

brought up a similar experience with Facebook suddenly changing the rules of the game when her latest social

transport project, Go Loco, went live on the Facebook platform. The demand for transparency and easy access

to government data it seems is a shared value in the Reboot Community;

“Open the structure of law/regulation making – make it open and transparent...we are already seeing

examples of where this is successful in journalism: http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/06/four-

crowdsourcing-lessons-from-the-guardians-spectacular-expenses-scandal-experiment/”

“ we need to have citizen involvement through the whole process, see review of power of information

task-force report, see stimuluswatch.org, or egov20.wordpress.com”

“Enable. www.wecollaborate.org- From attitude to action. Put the tool to work in contexts relevant to

average people.”

“It’s not a matter of ideas, it’s about doing and how it’s done. The ‘how’ is the ‘what’. Inviting to give ideas

is an illusionary participation system. How to implement?”

Discussions tied to brainstorming sessions

After an initial discussion tied to the “expert” presentations, we decided to make use of a structured ideation

methodology in order to generate actionable ideas as the discussion was being dominated by one participant.

We started by asking each workshop participant to contribute three ideas for change based on their Reboot

experience, and write each one on a post-it. All the submitted post-its were read out aloud and placed on a

board. In the next round they were clustered into groups, giving rise to tag cloud-like formations. The act of

determining where a post-it should be placed served as a trigger in generating many interesting discussions,

telling of anecdotes, and sharing of examples. It also made the contributors of the ideas elaborate on their

thoughts and gave them the opportunity to receive feedback, questions for further clarification which in itself

proved to be a useful exercise: it brought to light how important the differences in language use and terminology

is in engaging people outside the culture of public administration in important policy discussions. For example

Gohar Sargasyan´s use of the word “infrastructure” set out a keen 10 minute discussion in the group. Every time

a formulation was deemed ambiguous, the author was asked to re-write it.

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Workshop report: Future-building for Wikicrats, Reboot11, June 25-26 2009, Copenhagen 11

Though these discussions were lengthy and generated much frustration, it seems there was a consensus about

their importance as people stayed involved and engaged in the workshop. Apparently they were engaging and

accessible enough to get the attention of people who happened to be nearby - new participants spontaneously

joined the workshop and made contributions to it. After more discussion and moving around of post-its four

themes emerged. For each theme I have reported the content of the post-its in its tag cloud.

THEME 1 - Creating a new culture of Government:

Post-its tag cloud: Translating government culture into net culture and vice versa, less rules and more

rights, finding a common language, strategic policy making, Internet governance, better rules for

government procurement of technology, open standards and open platforms methodology, bring the

Reboot spirit and energy to Brussels, Better processes for government investment into IT.

Example ideas:

• invest in putting a 2.0 public infrastructure in place

• “Brunch with Brussels”: build on the success of the experiment at Reboot with regular informal

meetings between civil servants and members of general public in a “safe” environment.

• create a directory of Reboot-minded civil servants, to act as a communication channel between the

public sector and the techies.

THEME 2 - Transparency and how to get it:

Post-its tag cloud: Mapping out power structures, more informed decisions, publish user feedback of

publicly funded projects, promote information on law regarding internet in the EU states, open APIs

between government services such as tax services and bank services etc., open up public data sets,

make peaceful attempts to get local government to publish data.

Example ideas:

• Deploy a small, test project where processes of design, implementation and evaluation of calls for

projects and project-funding applications are crowd-sourced and social-network based.

• Engage civil servants in pushing for change from centralised IT structures.

THEME 3: Citizen engagement/ Inspiration and sharing of best practices:

Post-its tag cloud: create debate on technology, attract talents with challenges, figure out how to engage

innovators and make the system work for them, adopt a politician or civil servant and get him into the

conversation, collective action, find rewards for openness, gather stories about people and personal

insights based on experience, , (investigate) how to be representative of users, larger public ownership of

policy decisions

Example ideas:

• “Adopt a civil servant” program for advanced web users to bring civil servants knowledge and use of

various technologies up to date.

THEME 4 - Incentives:

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Workshop report: Future-building for Wikicrats, Reboot11, June 25-26 2009, Copenhagen 12

Post-its tag cloud: Accountability on results not procedures, open up the pre-selection of projects to be

funded by government, create new business models for politics, invest money in good ideas, find win

win--> why change?, if a government is ineffective or slow...what can we do about it? will private

companies be more effective and if so why?, the cult of done to deliver (close the loop of projects).

Example ideas:

• Create social incentive structures for engagement, participation and exemplary performance amongst

civil servants and members of the general public “citizens” in everyday life and work.

• Invest in finding new business models for political engagement

Results

Both objective and subjective indicators such as feedback from the participants lead to the conclusion that the

workshop went well. After running the workshop it seems safe to say that yes, there is a very clear agreement

that “bridging the gap” (David Osimo) between net culture and public administration culture is needed and yes,

people are indeed willing to participate. Participants offered several suggestions for ways in which this could be

done. Suggestions tended to be framed as projects to be deployed by groups of civil servants and hackers. By

way of example: someone proposed creating a directory of Reboot-minded civil servants. We even got as far as

actually designing and programming an interactive form to launch the initiative (with the help of students from

CIID and Fredrik Smedberg) : https://secure.cute.se/reboot/

The workshop proposal, “Future-building for Wikicrats” was amongst the top 10 most voted for proposals out of

the 188 submitted for this year´s event. The overall number of participants in the Wikicrats sessions was around

50 persons in total. On average there were between 10 AND 25 participants in the Wikicrats sessions at any

one time. It was given three slots in the official program schedule (which is exceptional). Thomas Madsen-

Mygdahl, the organiser of Reboot, offered access to the Reboot mailing list for one of the proposals to come out

of the workshop sessions. An article about the Wikicrats workshop and initiative is being published in the

Reboot Book. The conversations generated are still ongoing after the workshop both through the mailing list I

set up, and through blog posts by Wikicrats workshop participants and comments left by their readers. A few

excerpts;

HACKER CULTURE AND PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION CULTURE: A FREE SPACE FOR COMING TOGETHER

From Reboot, besides a healthy immersion in the web’s countercultural matrix, I brought back good

news: it can be done. The gap between the culture of the European Commission, that designs policy

technology in this continent, and that of the producers and advanced users of technology can actually be

bridged. I think so because the Reboot community, which kind of stands for the most hack-tivist and

tech-savvy part of society, showed a clear interest for Wikicrats, the “European” session on technology

policy designed by Nadia El-Imam and Bror Salmelin: participation was strong and very diverse. The

session produced many interesting comments and at least one good idea, building a resource list of civil

servants that share - or at least are friendly to - the Reboot Culture...

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Workshop report: Future-building for Wikicrats, Reboot11, June 25-26 2009, Copenhagen 13

REBOOT11 FOLLOW-UP: A FRESH LOOK AT EU POLICIES

My first time at reboot, and I really enjoyed it. At the beginning I felt there was too much hot air, but then I

really liked the design and inspiration that the overall discussion gave me. I particularly enjoyed the mix of

non-technical talk, and technical hands-on workshops.

Overall very inspiring especially as a way to organize conferences: incredible how interesting workshop

were added on the same day. I loved the light management touch applied to it, and hope to apply it

elsewhere. In particular, it was important to get confirmation on the importance of design skills in today

complex world.

Anyway, the real reason I was there, was to discuss in a workshop set up by the EC and Nadia on the

future of EU ICT policies. We all recognized the problem: the ICT innovation policies are SO FAR from ICT

innovation practice. We need to get them closer, to bridge the gap...

LET THE HORSES RUN FREELY

At Reboot11, joining the discussion after the talks in the workshop “future building for

Wikicrats” (organised by Nadia El Imam) and discussions after other things are merging as well and the

past days I seem to be talking about nothing else...

Aidanmedia

Workshop report: Future-building for Wikicrats, Reboot11, June 25-26 2009, Copenhagen 14

Where to go next

Final recommendations: the need for an interface“In Wikicrats we had two very different, very interesting cultures trying to have a dialogue with each other.

One is the hacker culture which spawned Reboot: a culture of sharing, meritocracy, radical transparency.

The other is the culture of public administration, shared by the Commission and some participants: a

culture of accountability, impartiality, equal access. Right now they are not talking to each other. Bridging

the gap between them would be an invaluable contribution.”

The workshop at Reboot was an experiment at getting people from two very different worlds engaged in a

dialogue on future policy- modelling. This resonated with many presentations related to how we re-imagine

citizenship and government in the age of participation, which took place at this year´s Reboot in contexts other

than Wikicrats. Most highlighted the implications of whether the Internet is conceived as an Information source

or as a platform for citizen participation on the outcome of attempts to engage citizens in government and

policy-making. It is clear that in this context, netizens see the Internet as a platform for common action; they will

not accept the role of people who partake in surveys alone. It is not enough to just tell people that there are

European programmes out there - Rebooters can very well Google-search, click on links and download calls for

submissions or read posted programme information. But they don´t.

Why not? Because this material does not convey any genuine interest in engaging netizens on behalf of public

administrations or governments, neither in content nor in form; it is clear that the appropriate interfaces are

missing. These interfaces must consist of people and interaction loci; Wikicrats worked well because for

duration of two days during Reboot and few weeks before it, there was interface. The interface consisted of

myself, Bror Salmelin and our working together to design and implement the workshop at Reboot; and of

Reboot itself, with its orientation towards knowledge sharing and its informal atmosphere.

Of course, Wikicrats was only a small-scale experiment. A fully functioning interface needs to be persistent and

to address the problem of interaction among the different agents.

The interface needs to be persistent

Interface building is an ongoing process, and the interface evolves as it is maintained over longer periods of

time, gaining effectiveness as people move from getting to know each other to actually contributing. An

occasional one-shot attempt at interaction is both costly and ineffective at building and maintaining trust and

engagement.

Report by Nadia EL-Imam :www.linkedin.com/nadiaelimam.com Emailt: nnegash@gmail.com Skype: niasan

The interface as an interaction design problem

The “coming together” of the public administration culture and the hacker culture can be framed as an

interaction design problem. For example, the Reboot workshop highlighted the need for “safe spaces”, contexts

in which civil servants feel they have permission to interact and engage in common action with interested

citizens as individuals, as opposed to representatives of large impersonal institutions. No safe space, no

interaction, no result.

Interaction design decisions contributed to shaping the Reboot workshop. In particular:

• the experts were selected so as to achieve a finely tuned mix between net-literate civil servants/public sector consultants

and technology makers/users interested in (and generally sympathetic to) policy making. Diverse enough to propitiate out-

of-the-box thinking, not too much to ensure good communication.

• a high level of attention was given to organisation and administrative details, from centralising hotel-booking to give

experts a chance to informally hang out together to speeding up reimbursement of expenses (thanks Anni!), in order to

convey the message that the experts’ input is valued

• the Reboot context, with its high energy and “creative chaos” rhetoric, encouraged participants to “go with the flow” and

interact more or less freely across cultural barriers

Final recommendation

Given the overwhelmingly positive response at Reboot, I would recommend that the European Commission

attempts to unlock the potential in bridging the gap between the two cultures in Wikicrats by building an

interface between them. However, successfully designing and delivering such an interface means addressing a

number of nontrivial interaction design problems. What is the appropriate mix of online vs. offline interaction?

Should the interface try to group people who live and work in the same place or those interested in the same

issue, Europe-wide? Should offline meetings be spread (seminar series) or concentrated (yearly conference)?

Should they be stand-alone events or piggyback on existing conferences and meetups? And which ones? And,

most important of all: what is the appropriate mix of debate and action taken jointly by civil servants and

hackers, given that common action was strongly called for in Wikicrats?

I strongly recommend that these problems are addressed explicitly, with a interaction design approach, in the

planning stage of any further move. Failure to do so might lead to ineffective action. It would probably make

sense to start out with a small-scale, pilot activity to reduce the cost of failure as the interaction design learning

curve is climbed.

By way of example

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Workshop report: Future-building for Wikicrats, Reboot11, June 25-26 2009, Copenhagen 16

CONNECTING HANGING OUT

Phases of development of a community

Time

HELPING OUT

There are several ways that pilot activities could be rolled out. Two examples are sketched below - many more

can be thought of.

1. “More of Wikicrats, but better”:

• Further develop and expand the Wikicrats concept as a series of regularly occurring participatory and web-enabled

face-to-face events that brings together citizens, policy-makers, technologists, design-thinkers, change agents and

media creators.

• Future Initiatives should include building on the success of the Reboot initiative by deploying workshops that piggy-

back on existing events as well as stand-alone events, on a regular basis.

• In addition to further developing and improving workshop formats, it is clear that people require a plausible (and

attractive) promise to be made explicitly if we are to elicit their participation. For example, one of the realities of

running a workshop at events such as Reboot, where people are investing personal time and funds in order to attend

is that there is an opportunity cost attached to participating in our workshops i.e missing other interesting ongoing

sessions. A significant attraction of the Wikicrats workshop lay in the line-up of expert presenters from various

backgrounds to whom participants could listen. A few of the experts had presentations styles that catered to more

formal “death by powerpoint” cultures than the one at Reboot and could have benefited from coaching ahead of the

event; We could significantly increase the traction of the workshops if we invest in bootstrapping expert presentations

to match the presentation culture of the events at which workshops are held.

• Another valuable improvement would be to invest some resources ( time and code) into finding and aggregating the

on-line presences of participants and people who express interest in participating in Wikicrats workshops in a manner

that makes it easier for us to connect with them and them to connect with one another. One idea for how to do this

is by way of a search agent; You would provide such a search agent with your own account data of all the

environments you are part of that you want to have searched. And then it comes back with a number of likely search

results that might contain any or all of the following for instance:

• Possible blogs of that person

• Possible Flickr Feed, or 23 feed

• Possible Skypename

• Profile in OpenBc.com

• Profile in LinkedIn.com

• Profile at 43people.com

• Possible Plazes account

• Possible del.icio.us account

2. Common action:

• Launch small initiatives where people from hacker communities and civil servants can work together on small actionable

projects. The notion of participation tat hackers have calls for common action, on the other hand the cultures of hackers

and civil servants are very different, so the projects must be handled with care, led by very credible people, etc.

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Workshop report: Future-building for Wikicrats, Reboot11, June 25-26 2009, Copenhagen 17