Demand a more opensource government Beth Noveck

so when the White House was built in the

early 19th century it was an open house

neighbors came and went under President

Adams a local dentist happened by he

wanted to shake the president’s hand the

president dismissed the Secretary of

State whom he was conferring with and

ask the dentist if he would remove a

tooth later in the 1850s under President

Pierce he was known to have remarked

probably only thing he’s known for when

a neighbor passed by and said I’d love

to see the beautiful house and Pierce

said to him why my dear sir of course

you may come in this isn’t my house it

is the people’s house well when I got to

the White House at the beginning of 2009

at the start of the Obama administration

the White House was anything but open

bomb blast curtains covered my windows

we were running Windows 2000 social

media were blocked at the firewall we

didn’t have a blog let alone a dozen

Twitter accounts like we have today I

came in to become the head of open

government to take the values and the

practices of transparency participation

and collaboration and instill them into

the way that we work to open up

government to work with people now one

of the things that we know is that

companies are very good at getting

people to work together in teams and in

networks to make very complex products

like cars and computers and the more

complex the products are a society

creates the more successful the society

is over time companies make goods but

governments they make public goods they

work on the cure for cancer and

educating our children and making roads

but we don’t have institutions that are

particularly good at this kind of

complexity we don’t have institutions

that are good at bringing our talents to

bear and working with us in this kind of

open and collaborative way so when we

wanted to create our open government

policy what do we do we wanted naturally

to ask public sector employees how we

should open up government turns out that

had never been done before we wanted to

ask members of the public to help us

come up with a policy not after the fact

commenting on a rule after its

written the way is typically the case

but in advance there was no legal

precedent no cultural precedent no

technical way of doing this in fact many

people told us it was illegal here’s the

crux of the obstacle governments exist

to channel the flow of two things really

values and expertise to and from

government and to and from citizens to

the end of making decisions but the way

that our institutions are designed in

our rather 18th century centralized

model is to channel the flow of values

through voting once every four years

once every two years at best once a year

this is a rather anemic and thin way in

this area era of social media for us to

actually express our values today we

have technology that lets us express

ourselves a great deal perhaps a little

too much then in the 19th century we

layer on the concept of bureaucracy in

the administrative state to help us

govern complex and large societies but

we’ve centralized these bureaucracies

we’ve entrenched them and we know that

the smartest person always works for

someone else when you’d only look around

this room to know the expertise and

intelligence is widely distributed in

society and not limited simply to our

institutions scientists have been

studying in recent years the phenomenon

that they often described as flow but

the design of our systems with a natural

or social channel the flow of whatever

runs through them so a river is designed

to channel the flow of water at the

lightning bolt that comes out of a cloud

channels the flow of electricity and a

leaf is designed to channel the flow of

nutrients to the tree sometimes even

having to route around an obstacle but

to get that nutrition flowing the same

can be said for our social systems for

our systems of government we’re at the

very least flow offers us a helpful

metaphor for understanding what the

problem is what’s really broken and the

urgent need that we have that we all

feel today to redesign the flow of our

institutions we live in a Cambrian era

of big data of social networks and we

have this opportunity to redesign these

institutions that are actually quite

recent think about it

what other business do you know what

other sector of the economy and

especially one as big as the public

sector that doesn’t seek to reinvent its

business model on a regular basis sure

we invest plenty in innovation we invest

in broadband and science education and

science grants but we invest far too

little in reinventing and redesigning

the institutions that we have now it’s

very easy to complain of course about

partisan politics and entrenched

bureaucracy and we love to complain

about government it’s a perennial

pastime especially around election time

but the world is complex we soon will

have 10 billion people many of whom will

lack basic resources so complain as we

might what actually can replace what we

have today what comes the day after the

Arab Spring well one attractive

alternative that obviously presents

itself to us is that of networks right

networks like Facebook and Twitter their

lean their mean you’ve got 3,000

employees at Facebook governing 900

million inhabitants we might even call

them citizens because they’ve recently

risen up to fight against legislative

incursion and the citizens of these

networks work together to serve each

other in great ways but private

communities private corporate

privatizing communities are not bottom

of democracies they cannot replace

government friending someone on facebook

is not complex enough to do the hard

work of you and I collaborating with

each other in doing the hard work of

governance but social media do teach us

something why is Twitter it’s so

successful because it opens up its

platform it opens up the API to allow

hundreds of thousands of new

applications to be built on top of it so

that we can read and process information

in new and exciting ways we need to

think about how to open up the API of

government and the way that we’re going

to do that the next great superpower is

going to be the one who can successfully

combine the hierarchy of institution

because we have to maintain those public

values we have to coordinate the

but with the diversity and the pulsating

life and the chaos the excitement of

networks all of us working together to

build these new innovations on top of

our institutions to engage in the

practice of governance we have a

precedent for this good old Henry the

second here in the 12th century invented

the jury powerful practical palpable

model for handing power from government

to citizens today we have the

opportunity and we have the imperative

to create thousands of new ways of

interconnecting between networks and

institutions thousands of new kinds of

juries the citizen jury the carrot mob

the hackathon we are just beginning to

invent the models by which we can

co-create the process of governance now

we don’t fully have a picture of what

this will look like yet but we’re seeing

pockets of evolution emerging all around

us maybe not even evolution I’d even

start to call it a revolution in the way

that we govern some of it’s very high

tech and some of it is extremely low

tech such as the project that MK SS is

running in Rajasthan India where they

take the spending data of the state and

paint it on a hundred thousand village

walls and then invite the villagers to

come and comment who is on the

government payroll who’s actually died

what are the bridges that have been

built to nowhere and to work together

through civic engagement to save real

money and participate and have access to

that budget but it’s not just about

policing government it’s also about

creating government space hive in the UK

is engaging in crowdfunding getting you

and me to raise the money to build the

goalposts in the park benches that will

actually allow us to deliver better

services in our communities no one is

better at this activity of actually

getting us to engage in delivering

services sometimes where none exist Venu

shaheedi created after the post-election

riots in Kenya in 2008 this crisis

mapping website and community is

actually able to crowd source and target

the delivery of better rescue services

to people trapped under the rubble

whether it’s after the earthquakes in

haiti or more recently in italy

and the Red Cross two is training

volunteers and Twitter is certifying

them not simply to supplement existing

government institutions but in many

cases to replace them now what we’re

seeing lots of examples of obviously is

the opening up of government data not

enough examples of this yet but we’re

starting to see this practice of people

creating and generating innovative

applications on top of government data

there’s so many examples I could have

picked and I selected this one of Jon

Bon Jovi some of you may or may not know

that he runs a soup kitchen in New

Jersey where he caters to and serves the

homeless and particularly homeless

veterans in February he approached the

White House and said i would like to

fund a prize to create scalable national

applications apps that will help not

only the homeless but those who deliver

services them to do so better februari

2012 to june of 2012 the finalists are

announced in the competition can you

imagine in the bureaucratic world of

yesteryear getting anything done in a

four-month period of time you can barely

fill out the forms in that amount of

time let alone generate real palpable

innovations that improve people’s lives

and I want to be clear to mention that

this open government revolution is not

about privatizing government because in

many cases what it can do when we have

the will to do so is to deliver more

progressive and better policy than the

regulations and the legislative and

litigation oriented strategies by which

we make policy today in the state of

Texas they regulate 515 professions from

well driller to florist now you can

carry a gun into a church in Dallas but

do not make a flower arrangement without

a license because that will land you in

jail so what is text is doing they’re

asking you and me using online policy

wikis to help not simply get rid of

burdensome regulations that impede

entrepreneurship but to replace those

regulations with more innovative

alternatives sometimes using

transparency in the creation of new

iPhone apps that will allow us both to

protect consumers and the public and to

encourage economic development that is a

nice

line of open government it’s not only

the benefits that we’ve talked about

with regard to development it’s the

economic benefits in the job creation

that’s coming from this open innovation

work spare Bank the largest and oldest

bank in Russia largely owned by the

Russian government has started

practicing crowdsourcing engaging its

employees and citizens in the public and

developing innovations last year they

saved a billion dollars 30 billion

rubles from open innovation and they’re

pushing radically the extension of

crowdsourcing not only from banking but

into the public sector and we see lots

of examples of these innovators using

open government data not simply to make

apps but then to make companies and to

hire people to build them working with

the government so a lot of these

innovations are local in San Ramon

California they published an iPhone app

in which they allow you or me to say we

are certified CPR trained and then when

someone has a heart attack a

notification goes out so that you can

rush over to the person over here and

deliver CPR the victim who receives

bystander CPR is more than twice as

likely to survive there is a hero in all

of us is their slogan but it’s not

limited to the local British Columbia

Canada is publishing a catalogue of all

the ways that its residents and citizens

can engage with the state and the

co-creation of governance let me be very

clear and perhaps controversial that

open government is not about transparent

government simply throwing data over the

transom doesn’t change how government

works it doesn’t get anybody to do

anything with that data to change lives

to solve problems and it doesn’t change

government what it does is it creates an

adversarial relationship between civil

society and government over the control

and ownership of information and

transparency by itself is not reducing

the flow of money into politics and

arguably it’s not even producing

accountability as well as it might if we

took the next step of combining

participation and collaboration with

transparency to transform how we work

we’re going to see this evolution really

in two phases I think the first phase of

the open government

is delivering better information from

the crowd into the center starting at

2005 and this is how this open

government work in the u.s. really got

started I was teaching a patent law

class to my students and explaining to

them how a single person in the

bureaucracy has the power to make

decision about which patent application

becomes the next patent and therefore

monopolizes for 20 years the rights of

an entire field of inventive activity

well what did we do we said we can make

a website we can make an expert Network

a social network that would connect the

network to the institution to allow

scientists and technologists to get

better information to the Patent Office

to aid in making those decisions we

piloted the work in the US and the UK

and Japan and Australia and now I’m

pleased to report that the United States

Patent Office will be rolling out

Universal complete and total openness so

that all patent applications will now be

open for citizen participation beginning

this year the second phase of this

evolution yeah they deserve a hand first

phase isn’t getting better information

in the second phases in getting

decision-making power out participatory

budgeting has long been practiced in

Porto Alegre Brazil they’re just

starting it in the 49th ward in Chicago

Russia is using wiki’s to get citizens

writing law together as is Lithuania

when we start to cede power over the

core functions of government spending

legislation decision making then we’re

well on our way to an open government

revolution there are many things that we

can do to get us there obviously opening

up the data is one but the important

thing is to create lots more create and

curate lots more participatory

opportunities hackathons and math ons

and working with data to build apps is

an intelligible way for people to engage

and participate like the jury is but

we’re going to need lots more things

like it and that’s why we need to start

with our youngest people we’ve heard

talk here at Ted about people bio

hacking and hacking their plants with

Arduino and Mozilla is doing work around

the world and getting young people to

build websites and make videos when we

start by teaching young people that we

live not in a passive society a

read-only society but in a writable

society where we have the power to

change our communities to change our

institutions that’s when we begin to

really put ourselves on the pathway

towards this open government innovation

towards this open government movement

towards this open government revolution

so let me close by saying that I think

the important thing for us to do is to

talk about and demand this revolution we

don’t have words really to describe it

yet words like equality and fairness and

the traditional the elections democracy

these are not really great terms yet

they’re not fun enough they’re not

exciting enough to get us engage in this

tremendous opportunity that awaits us

but I would argue that if we want to see

the kinds of innovations the hopeful and

exciting innovations that we hear talked

about here at Ted in clean energy and

clean education in development if we

want to see those adopted and we want to

see those scale we want to see them

become the governance of tomorrow then

we must all participate then we must get

involved we must open up our

institutions and like the leaf we must

let the nutrients flow throughout our

body politic throughout our culture to

create open institutions to create a

stronger democracy a better tomorrow

thank

you