Smart Citizens, Smarter State

The Technologies of Expertise and the Future of Governing

Beth Simone Noveck

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780674286054
• eBook ISBN: 9780674915459
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Administrative Law
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Government "of the people, by the people, for the people" expresses an ideal that resonates in all democracies. Yet poll after poll reveals deep distrust of institutions that seem to have left "the people" out of the governing equation. Government bureaucracies that are supposed to solve critical problems on their own are a troublesome outgrowth of the professionalization of public life in the industrial age. They are especially ill-suited to confronting today's complex challenges.

Offering a far-reaching program for innovation, Smart Citizens, Smarter State suggests that public decisionmaking could be more effective and legitimate if government were smarter—if our institutions knew how to use technology to leverage citizens' expertise. Just as individuals use only part of their brainpower to solve most problems, governing institutions make far too little use of the skills and experience of those inside and outside of government with scientific credentials, practical skills, and ground-level street smarts. New tools—what Beth Simone Noveck calls technologies of expertise—are making it possible to match the supply of citizen expertise to the demand for it in government.

Drawing on a wide range of academic disciplines and practical examples from her work as an adviser to governments on institutional innovation, Noveck explores how to create more open and collaborative institutions. In so doing, she puts forward a profound new vision for participatory democracy rooted not in the paltry act of occasional voting or the serendipity of crowdsourcing but in people's knowledge and know-how.

1

From Open Government to Smarter Governance

We have the power to begin the world over again.

—Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776

Public officials have limited access to the latest, most innovative ideas in a form they can use to solve real problems.¹ The promise of opening government is that, by connecting government institutions to people and organizations with diverse forms of expertise, government will be able to produce better results.

The push for open government can be seen as a response to years of growing disenchantment with closed-door models of governance. It has become commonplace to lament the incompetence or impotence of government attempts to tackle big issues. Only 17 percent of people report having confidence in the president of the United States. Congress fares even worse. Fewer than 10 percent of people—the lowest number since surveys first began posing the question—report having confidence in Congress.² Silicon Valley and the technology community display their own particular brand of we-can-do-better antigovernment sentiment. According to the Roosevelt Institute’s 2013 survey of a thousand young people, “While Millennials strongly believe in an activist government, fewer than 30 percent believe their voice is currently represented in the democratic process.”³

This pandemic of distrust is not unique to the United States. Around the world, only 44 percent of people surveyed in twenty-five countries say they trust government to do what is right. Only 15 percent have a great deal of trust.⁴ These perceptions that government is ineffective coincide with a growing disconnect between the potential and the practice of citizen participation. There are many knowledgeable, experienced, and well-educated people, as well as the tools to connect them to each other and to powerful sources of data and information, yet the institutions of governance persist in abjuring outside help and still underperform.

The potential for open government to restore trust in institutions is significant. Open ways of working in business (open innovation) and science (citizen science), as I shall describe, are hopeful antecedents that point to the direction democracy could take. But meaningful institutional transformation remains elusive. Previous efforts to adopt either traditional modes of citizen engagement or online participation known as crowdsourcing in any systematic fashion have failed. The lack of widespread opportunities to engage, coupled with a longstanding culture of closed-door practices, stands in the way of more open governance. Although crowdsourcing allows new groups to participate, such open call forms of engagement are still too ad hoc and unreliable to provide a safe basis for institutional reform or a blueprint for a different kind of democracy. But new technologies of expertise can change this equation by making new kinds of know-how manifest and searchable, which in turn makes it possible to target and match people to the right opportunities to participate. Such “smarter governance” holds the key for genuinely transforming the closed institutions of governance into open institutions that actively invite collaboration.

The core idea of open government is that governing institutions are not as effective or legitimate as they might be because they operate behind closed doors. Thus the great opportunity for them is to transition from an insular model to one in which they tap the expertise and capacity distributed in a networked society. This thinking builds on experience in the commercial sector. Many companies are enjoying great success from opening themselves up to the use of what organizational theorist Henry W. Chesbrough at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business calls the “purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge” from across and outside the organization.⁵ They are collaborating with customers and suppliers on the reinvention of key business practices. Such bottom-up engagement—what some call open innovation—is well known in the business literature as a significant driver of innovation.⁶

Pharmaceutical companies such as Eli Lilly started opening up their research and development (R&D) efforts in the early years of the millennium to get help from outsiders using a “solver network” called Innocentive. Synack offers companies a solver network of cyber-security experts. The “My Starbucks Idea” website asked coffee customers how to improve the company’s products and services.⁷ Dell Computers did something similar online with its IdeaStorm website.⁸ Netflix famously gave away a million dollars to researchers who came up with ideas to improve the system it uses to recommend movies for its subscribers to watch.⁹

The evidence that companies can benefit from outside input is now well established. Many succeed by cleverly leveraging collective intelligence across distributed networks in marketplaces traditionally dominated by closed models of production. Threadless, a T-shirt company, crowdsources designs from its customers instead of employing a stable of designers. Local Motors crowdsources the design of vehicles and then sets up “microfactories” where customers can come together to collaborate on the designs and also participate in the manufacturing (think 3D printing) process. SamaSource connects people in the developing world to jobs by enabling employers to farm out tagging, research, and online data and content projects to poor workers around the world—doing well by doing good. Facebook, whose 1.44 billion active monthly users, not its ten thousand employees, create the site’s content, such as forty-five billion messages sent each day, has a valuation more than four times that of traditional media companies Viacom and CBS combined, and it continues to grow in value (if not in profits).¹⁰

Although there are no well-developed theories of the firm that take community innovation into account, there is ample evidence that co-creation between institution and network can lead to highly relevant knowledge at low cost.¹¹ Studies confirm what we would expect: getting customer input and even co-creating products with customers can lead to myriad organizational benefits: original products and services, a better reputation, and useful online communities. Those who participate in these innovation processes stand to gain in various ways: from professional accomplishment or a sense of inclusivity and belonging to the pleasures of friendship, knowledge, intellectual stimulation, and fun.¹²

Technology writer Clay Shirky talks about a “cognitive surplus,” by which he means the thousands of hours we spend passively watching TV that could be dedicated to creative pursuits. Today it is becoming increasingly obvious that the most valuable resource in our society is the smart citizen. We see the evidence not only in open innovation projects in the commercial world, but also in connection with the “massive outbreak” of participation in the domain of science known as citizen science. Citizen science typically refers to scientific tasks, such as data collection, measurement, and classification, undertaken collaboratively either online or off between volunteer members of the general public and professional scientists. There is a “civic surplus” too, and citizen science makes use of the enthusiasm and willingness of ordinary people to participate in measuring air or water quality in their communities, cataloging flora and fauna in museums, or analyzing satellite photographs and making maps after a natural disaster like the Nepal earthquake in 2015.

Take Galaxy Zoo, for example. There are estimated to be one hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe, each containing billions of stars. For many years, deep-view telescopes like the Hubble Space Telescope have recorded images of the Milky Way and other galaxies to help us understand how galaxies form. The resulting volume of data is enormous. After more than twenty-five years in orbit, Hubble alone has recorded more than a million observations. To begin to translate this raw information into useful scientific knowledge, the scientists at NASA have turned to “citizen scientists”—volunteer hobbyists, amateur science buffs, and space enthusiasts—to classify the images according to their shape: elliptical, spiral, lenticular, irregular. This information, in turn, illuminates the age of the galaxy.

Helping understand how galaxies form is one of dozens of such online citizen science projects. On Old Weather, volunteers do the painstaking work of retyping nineteenth-century naval shipping logs in order to create a computable database of historical weather records, which are potentially vital to unlocking the mysteries of climate change. On Old Weather, people compete to become the “captain” of a historical ship by doing more work. After it was begun in 2010, volunteers completed the work it would have taken one person twenty-eight years to do in a mere six months.

In the Open Source Drug Discovery initiative, nonprofessionals are developing life-saving advances in biomedical research. In India and around the world, thousands of primarily poor people die every day from tuberculosis. There have been no new TB treatments developed in forty years, and resistance to existing drugs is increasing. Because TB disproportionately impacts the indigent, traditional pharmaceutical companies lack the economic incentives to commit adequate resources to so-called neglected diseases. In response, Samir Brahmachari, former director general of India’s Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, started the Open Source Drug Discovery project in 2008 and continues to serve as its chief mentor.

At the outset, a few thousand college students, academics, and scientists collected, annotated, and extracted data from the scientific literature on the biological properties and mechanisms of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) pathogen. Where the articles were not freely available online, students wrote to thousands of authors to request a free copy. The genome, says Brahmachari, is like a “beautifully written Shakespearean sonnet, but we don’t understand the language or the meaning of it.”¹³ With vast quantities of data to sift through, OSDD volunteers applied the concepts of open innovation and citizen science to accelerate research and test a multitude of hypotheses. In 2014, this distributed amateur effort began clinical trials for a new experimental drug called Pretomanid.

Just as blogs turned nonprofessionals into citizen journalists, forever transforming the news industry, sites like Crowdcrafting, for performing science-related tasks that require human cognition such as image classification, transcription, and geocoding, are breeding the next generation of citizen scientists. On Crowdcrafting, participants use photographs to classify melanomas, helping researchers to better understand cancer. Ordinary people and professional scientists are making science together.

Cornell University’s Project Feeder Watch employs sixteen thousand volunteer birdwatchers across North America. Digital Fishers asks citizen scientists to annotate terabytes of raw undersea video from the Neptune Canada seafloor observatory. Earthdive is a United Nations project that asks divers to record and share their experiences, including sightings of species, to create a “global snapshot of the state of our planet’s oceans.”

In contrast to Crowdcrafting and OSDD, which use amateurs to assist professional scientists, the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (Public Lab) dubs itself a “Civic Science” project. Public Lab views citizens not as mere amanuenses to the secret and exclusionary society of scientists, but as scientists fully capable in their own right. In one project, it provides people with the tools to make maps and aerial images of environmental conditions using balloons and kites. This “grassroots mapping” project has been used to contest official maps. For instance, in Lima, Peru, members of an informal settlement developed maps of their community as evidence of their habitation. On the Gulf Coast of the United States, locally produced maps of oil spillage are being used to document damage that is under-reported by company or government officials.

In science as in commerce, people are using new technology to coordinate work across physical distances and produce products without traditional market incentives or hierarchical control. The number and quality of valuable amateur peer production projects are enough to drown out any chorus of naysayers wishing to declare the notion of online collaboration naïve. It makes intuitive sense that getting ideas from outside should be just as vital for the performance of public institutions as it is for private institutions.¹⁴ Neither can innovate in isolation. As Friedrich Hayek wrote in 1945, “The knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form.”¹⁵ Networks enable institutions to gain access to the wealth of creativity and insight that exists in the wider society.¹⁶

Given the plummeting rates of trust in government, the appeal of such ideas is no surprise. Following scandals both sexual and financial, even the Catholic Church turned to the laity for input in the rewriting of Church doctrine.¹⁷ Clearly there is widespread enthusiasm for the potential of open innovation. As President Obama declared at the launch of the Open Government Partnership at the United Nations in 2011: “Put simply, our countries are stronger when we engage citizens beyond the halls of government. This, I believe, is how progress will be achieved in the 21st century.”¹⁸ Similarly, European Parliamentarians have stated that “the public must have the opportunity to participate in policy-making,”¹⁹ and Prime Minister David Cameron has argued “the best way to ensure an economy delivers long term success for all its people is to have it overseen by political institutions in which everyone can share.”²⁰

Open government, pronounced East African civil rights leader and philanthropist Rakesh Rajani, “is the most apt response to the democratic human impulse to be involved, to count, to matter.” We want this kind of change in government because technology has transformed the material conditions of social life leading to “a massive cognitive and emotional transformation,” according to political commentator Moises Naïm, “which is a growing dissatisfaction with political systems and government institutions, public and private.”²¹

The Potential Benefits of Open Government

To understand why working “openly” in government, not only in commerce or science, could improve how we produce public goods and manage the allocation of scarce resources, consider how a more open government might address the challenge of reducing recidivism among prisoners.²² A few facts: the past two decades have seen a dramatic reduction in the number of prison-based college education programs, from roughly 350 in 1995 to 12 in 2005.²³ This reduction has come at a cost. Studies show that college classes for prisoners reduce recidivism significantly.²⁴ There is an economic justification for doing more, too, since the average cost of housing an inmate for one year is almost $32,000, nearly six times the size of a Pell Grant, the funding awarded to needy students to subsidize their college education. But spending on such programs is at the same level that it was thirty years ago, even though spending on corrections has steadily increased over the same period. One of the few remaining college education programs for incarcerated felons, Boston University’s College Behind Bars, reports that, of the hundreds of prisoners who have taken its college classes and participated in a parallel volunteer mentoring program, only two have returned to prison.²⁵

Tackling the issue of recidivism would benefit from outside input at several stages. First, understanding the problem requires an empirical understanding of the status quo, which could be improved by sharing the data government holds about the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. From Open Government to Smarter Governance
• 2. The Rise of Professional Government
• 3. The Limits of Democratic Theory
• 4. The Technologies of Expertise
• 5. Experimenting with Smarter Governance
• 6. Why Smarter Governance May Be Illegal
• 7. Bringing Smarter Governance to Life
• 8. Smarter Citizenship
• Conclusion: The Daedalus Project
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index