It's Time to Wikify Government

Beth Simone Noveck has written a seminal piece on "Wiki-Government" for Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, and I recommend you read the whole thing. Noveck is Professor of Law and director of the Institute for Information Law & Policy at New York Law School and the McClatchy Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University, who has been advising the U.S. Patent Office on its new open-source approach to involving the public in helping review patent applications, and that experience informs her vision. She lays out a powerful case for reinventing government with "civic software" (a term I once floated and still love) that "can shift power from professional sources of authoritative knowledge to new kinds of knowledge networks" and create a kind of "collaborative governance." I love it. She writes:

In much the same way that we devise legal procedures to ensure fairness in the courtroom or open deliberation in Congress, we can design technology–and the legal and policy framework to support it–that elicits specific, structured, and manageable input, not from individuals, but from collaborative groups. If we can harness the enthusiasm and knowledge of "netizens" to the legal and political processes generally reserved for citizens, we can produce government decision-making that is both more expert and, at the same time, more democratic.

Her essay explains in depth how the Patent Office's pilot program is tapping the self-selecting public to help review 250 software patent applications, using specially designed software that is neither a blog nor a wiki, but a "structured environment that solicits specific information targeted to the decision-making process." This, of course, is the nub of the problem--none of the most popular tools currently available are up to the task of enabling broad community deliberation on complex subjects.

What I like most about Noveck's thinking is how she expands her approach to an array of government entities and processes that could benefit from collaborative governance.

To bring about the new revolution in governance, the next president ought to issue an executive order requiring that every government agency begin to pilot new strategies for improved decision-making. For example, he or she could require that each agency, as part of their Semi-Annual Regulatory Agenda delivered to Congress and as part of a new collaborative governance report to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), set forth at least one "Peer-to-Policy" experiment to see how it could make its decision-making practices more collaborative.

Experimentation with community feedback would provide the impetus for independent rulemaking agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, to post questions to the scientific community before enacting regulations. It would encourage the Department of Labor to create an online network to solicit the expertise of those with disabilities. These new opportunities for participation are not limited to rulemaking activity. The FCC can seek targeted but open advice on the economics of spectrum policymaking as part of its efforts to decide which rules to draft. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration might create an online marketplace for the collaborative creation of weather maps. The National Institute for Standards and Technology could award venture funding for scientific innovation and research, which would benefit from public collaboration and input. With public collaboration, decisions about everything from health care initiatives to housing programs to efforts to attract foreign direct investment could be improved by collaboration with public experts.

There's a movement coming here, folks. With some luck, the next wave of leaders in Washington will embrace it, and hasten its spread.

Technorati Tags: Beth Noveck, wikimania, Wikipedia