Participation and Open Data

Participation & Open Data Lee Bryant, Social Strategy Talk, Amsterdam, October 2009

The Twentieth Century is over, but its political structures live on

Slow shift from old, tired ideological battles to solving problems & delivering services

smart government = bigger (inclusiveness) but smaller (bureaucracy)

this is our time and I think ‘we’ can do better

But even Obama’s call to ‘We’ is still more rhetoric than reality

We face problems that governments cannot solve alone

We face problems that multiply through networks

We face problems of fragmentation, identity, belonging

We need public services that can do more with less

participation + open data are part of the answer

Transparency Participation Empowerment http://www.endorsetheopendeclaration.eu/

lessons of the social web

(Simple actions * scale) ^ aggregation = potentially powerful network effects

cost of group forming & collaboration falling all the time

the power of feedback

some use cases

Make invisible data visible & leverage open data for improvement

Participation & feedback can drive evolutionary improvement, enable co-design of services

Treat government budgets as innovation funds & build solutions with people

The DIY / guerilla approach to opening up government data & services pioneered by mySociety

Why are governments not doing more?

why are we still working at the edges whilst government “procurement” wastes millions ?

contemporary critiques of transparency...

“Transparency is the new objectivity” Some limits of transparency ?

“More information does not always produce markets that are more efﬁcient … people may ignore information, or misunderstand it, or misuse it.” Full Disclosure: The Perils and Promise of Transparency

“...the problem of attention-span. To understand something--an essay, an argument, a proof of innocence-- requires a certain amount of attention.” Larry Lessig

issues of legitimacy?

“The fear is that, by forging a path between the ... Weberian defence of the state and the democratic Habermasian defence (a path manifest in the concept of 'civic hacking' that mySociety represents), that we get some hybrid of bureaucracy and democracy, that is neither quite as effective as the former, nor as empowering as the latter” Will Davies

limits to participation?

Who do we not want to participate and why?

Conclusion

participation + open data are ready for the mainstream

Key areas of focus for ecosystem online participation & open data projects ﬁlters co-design signals / data

there are many forms of online participation

We need to learn a lot more about different participation methods, & reach non-geeks better

Thanks for listening! I am lee@headshift.com I live at http://www.headshift.com Except where otherwise stated, photos courtesy of Flickr using Creative Commons license. Thanks to the following photographers: http://www.flickr.com/photos/greenpeace_italia/2430328823/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/markrjones/47761183/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/marcn/2174935053/sizes/l/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/wili/1999071010/sizes/l/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/andyarmstrong/4035014763/in/pool-stopthebnp http://www.flickr.com/photos/arenamontanus/375127836/sizes/o/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/pushandplay/2586461185/in/set-72157603886536530/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/pushandplay/2968259379/ Other references: http://potlatch.typepad.com/weblog/2009/10/what-is-the-postbureaucratic-state.html http://www.tnr.com/print/article/books-and-arts/against-transparency

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Participation and Open Data

by Lee Bryant

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Participation and Open Data Presentation Transcript