1. Policy making for swarms
Alberto Cottica, Edgeryders – Big Picture Days, June 1st 2013
Hello, thank you all for showing up. I do research for a newly minted company called Edgeryders. The reason why the
company even exists and why its business model looks the way it does itself has a lot to do with what we are going to be
talking about today. But more on that later.
We are here to talk about swarm coops, or whatever you want to call these unorthodox constellations of people in action. At
the heart of this concept there is a fundamental paradox. Swarm coops derive their uncanny efficiency from radical
decentralization of decision making and action; yet, decentralization might and does cause such action to develop in directions
so different from what it had been intended to be as to be unrecognizable. I guess most of us will be turning around this
paradox in their head. The main tool I am using to debunk this paradox is network theory: I conceptualize swarms as people in
networks. In networks, nodes might be equal in the amount of top-down power over others, but they will typically be very
unequal in terms of connectivity, hence the ability to spread information (including narratives and calls to action) across the
network. Uneven connectivity adds some directionality to the swarm, in the sense that the most connected people get it to go
their way most of the times.
I am going to try and give you a perhaps slightly unusual perspective on swarm coops. I am a policy guy – public policy design
(and some deployment) is what paid my bills for the last ten years. Public policy is generally understood as a top-down
process: some leader somewhere makes a decision and that decision is enacted. Since the accepted modi operandi of public
policy are encoded into law, such top-down thinking is hardwired into organizational charts, remits and procedures. A decision
maker wanting to do things differently will not in generally be enough for things to happen differently. Think of this as an
especially hard area to do swarms in. That’s not a bad thing for today’s purposes, because it provides us with a clean
benchmark. If you can do it in the government, you can probably do it in most places.
All this is very tentative. I can’t claim I know how to do this stuff. I mean, I do it, and it kind of works, but I am not sure exactly
why, so I would be the first not to want to turn the revenue agency into a swarm just yet. In fact, the reason why I am here is
that I hope you guys can help me make some progress. I am also going to assume you guys have been thinking into it as hard
as I have, so I am giving you the full complexity of the argument. Stop me if I touch on something that does not make sense to
you, or that you don’t know about.

2. Iatrogenics: harm done by the healer
Just a word on why public sector agencies might want to think in swarms. As our societies get ever more complex,
they get ever more difficult to second guess. There is a real risk of what Nassim Taleb calls iatrogenics, harm done
by the healer.

3. 0
50
100
150
200
2007-2013 – Billion €
102
196
World Bank lending commitments
Italy, strategic national framework pipeline
The world
4 regions
in Italy
One of my favorite examples of that is with public spending. In my country, Italy, we have a situation. The north of
the country is well-developed, with quite a strong manufacturing economy, whereas its south is lagging behind.
This is a high political priority, and for at least fifty years we have thrown money and brains at it.

4. 0
1750
3500
5250
7000
2007-2013 – per capita €
6057
32.7
The world
4 regions
in Italy
World Bank lending commitments
Italy, strategic national framework pipeline
The world
The result is a huge pipeline concentrated on just four regions (the region is the most important spending
authority in Italy). They have a very hard time even just making it happen – let alone ensuring proper monitoring.

5. “Everyone was talking about
public sector tenders.”
– Tiago Dias Miranda in southern Italy, 2013
The result of this situation: smart, entrepreneurial young people in Italy’s Mezzogiorno are talking about public
sector tenders. They know all the acronyms of European programs. And why not? Though most of the money ends
up with networks of incumbents, even the crumbs can be quite a big payoff. But of course, in development terms,
this is just a distraction: as they write funding applications, they are not starting companies, or leaving the
country, or squatting buildings; they are not engaging in collective, trial-and-error discovery of the paths that
lead to the healing of the economy. And in fact, the economy does not heal. The government means mostly well,
but the amount of damage inflicted is terrifying. This is why I and others are exploring other ways. I am exploring
the way of smart crowds, or swarms. It is not a bad thing to explore: if you are low on the public policy food chain,
swarms give you an alternative power base.

6. Public policies as a buyer’s market
Photo: marsmet481
But doing policy in swarms has an immediate consequence: you need to recruit people, and those people do not
work for you, do not take (much) money from you and need to be convinced.

7. Photo: marsmet481
... and that’s a big reality check right there. I believe this has given some competitive edge to my own projects. I
just had to work harder to get ANYTHING off the ground.

8. Photo: marsmet481
Falkvinge’s Law: lead by getting skin in the game
So how to do it? Let’s start by what I am going to call Rick Falkvinge’s Law (in honor of the founder of the Swedish
Pirate Party): leadership in a network is exerted from the front. You start by saying: “I am doing X. Who’s in?” This
is more radical than it seems. Nassim Taleb has pointed out that modern society rewards non-risk takers
(corporates, politicians, bureaucrats), and that this is new (Alexander the Great led his own charges etc.).
Falkvinge’s Law restores the idea that risk-takers should be honored and rewarded.

9. Interface: the fishing rod model
Photo: Joel Obrecht
You are going to need an interface – in fact, probably several layers. Governments are Weberian bureaucracies for
very good accountability reasons. Swarms are very clearly not. So you need some smart relaying between the
inside of the government agency and the outside, with the swarm having some kind of legitimacy without being
subject to the hard constraints of public servants. It’s like a fishing rod, thick and rigid atthe handle, but thin and
flexible towards the end.

10. Timing: get friends to start the bandwagon
Photo: flod
Scholars of swarms, social networks etc. focus typically on the behavior of the formed swarm. But if you’ve ever
tried it, you know that the hardest part is to kickstart one. We need a much better developed embryology of
swarms. Me, the better method I know is still to leverage trust network of friends. This is how Vinay jumpstarted
Big Picture Days: he wrote an email to twenty people trying to get the first, say, six to commit. Then, he could tell
everyone “You don’t want to miss this cool event. Why, Alberto Cottica is coming!”. Even if you don’t know who
the hell Alberto Cottica is, such a call works with the deep wiring of human psychology. We have plenty of
experimental psychology results around that by now.

11. Randomness: shake things up (hence parties)
Photo: Medhin Paolos
You are making policy because someone perceives a situation that is not fixing itself. Rather than going in with a
heavy intervention (traditional economists will “maximize the welfare function” and push the economy towards the
maximum), which is iatrogenetic, you can simply shake things up a little bit to see if the system gets unstuck from
its present undesirable attractor and starts moving towards a better one. Complexity thinking has given us,
among other things, an attractive theory of innovation based on generative relationships: innovation stems from
people being similar enough that they can communicate well, but different enough to give each other mild
cognitive shocks, inducing new ways to look upon things. It is not hard to assess the generative potential of a
relationship, but it impossible to predict in advance which potentially generative relationships will actually lead to
breakthroughs.
So, I just like to throw parties. Curated parties increase the number of new connections in your network and
therefore, in probability, the number of new things being tried. This, in turn, increases the probability of your
situation unmooring from where it had been stuck. And no iatrogenics. Win!

12. Transparency: requests for comments
Photo: Elena Trombetta
I find a radically transparent behavior to be advantageous when running a swarm: it’s a buyers market, and you
need to win trust. Transparency also doubles up as a management tool: most people will just appreciate that you
are being honest about, for example, how much money you spend and on what, but occasionally somebody pays
close attention and ends up making useful suggestions. If you have to fight a narrative of public policy as corrupt
and self-referential (I do) transparency is an amazingly effective tool in reducing conflict and suspicion.

13. TIme bombs: zero entrenchment
Many swarms tend to lose their magic after a while – the mavericks of the early days get suitified, their project
becomes a job or what have you. I like to build time bombs in my projects: if a swarm is active enough, it will find
a way to survive it. In fact my company, Edgeryders, formed with the intention of providing a new core to a
community that assembled around a public sector project I used to direct. The project ended, but some of us felt
the community was too good to pass on, so we decided to build a small organization to provide it with the
scaffolding initially provided by the public sector project.

14. Efficiency: don’t touch the wicked problem
Photo: Alberto Cottica
When you are doing stuff with a swarm and it appears to be working, outside people will try to get it onto
problems they care about. I try to resist this. It implies a revision of the social contract, which tends to be
conflictual: also, it might destroy that feeling of effortless impact that core community members find intoxicating.
Generally, bad idea.

15. Trust: no strings attached (even give people cash)
Photo: Maxymedia
Control is costly and boring. Relinquishing it, and rather focusing on enabling people to take initiative makes you
save a lot of time and money, and is a huge motivator, as people feel empowered and trusted. If you can, you
should give people a little cash with no strings attached. There is a recent Ugandan study that provides evidence
that, even without swarms, even giving money to young rural poor results in increased hours worked and
increased income for the people in question.

16. Measure: do you have enough complexity?
Photo: Maxymedia
To do this stuff, you need a minimum of complexity. A nail does not evolve; you can’t jumpstart a swarm in your
family, and you probably can’t in a village either. In the natural world, complexity has mathematical signatures
that scientists can look for. Swarms that do most of the heavy lifting online leave behind them a trail of data that
you can search for self-organizing behavior. I am personally involved in an effort to find cheap, quick methods to
investigate the matter. If you care about this, we should definitely speak, there’s not many of us out there.

17. Dogfood: eat your own (and we do)
Photo: NikonColucci
Edgeryders eats its own dogfood. It is a pretty unique case of a company that grew out of a community that grew
out of a public sector project. The company exists to provide the scaffolding for the community to stay connected;
and to empower community members to jumpstart cool projects that benefit everyone, like the unMonastery.

18. So,what do you think?