Gov 2.0: do we really know what we're asking for?

glasnost (in the former Soviet Union) the policy or practice of more open consultative government and wider dissemination of information, initiated by leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985.

perestroika n. (in the former Soviet Union) the policy or practice of restructuring reforming the economic and political system. First proposed by Leonid Brezhnev in 1979 and actively promoted by Mikhail Gorbachev, perestroika originally referred to increased automation and labor efficiency, but came to entail greater awareness of economic markets and the ending of central planning. See also glasnost.

government n - the agency or apparatus through which a governing individual or body functions and exercises authority.

"What I've learned from all these conversations," O'Reilly says,"is about government as a platform. It's not just social media use by government, or government using wikis. No, it's something more profound. How do you think like a platform provider? We've moved our government from a lean vehicle for collective action, and over the last 200 years it has become so strong that it's now 40% of GDP. I want to go back to the original vision of the role of government: a convener of things that we as individuals and companies can't do alone."

Tim O'Reilly as quoted by Marshall Kirkpatrick
Read Write Web Aug 20th 2009

I am going to revisit a theme that has been -- at least in my circles -- at the center of many a conversation: the application of a 2.0 concept (and by extension that which has been labeled social media) to the role of government.

The first question I have is what is to be considered success in this application.  Traditionally, when we look at technology adoption, especially within the context of an organization, it has been driven by notions of efficiency and effectiveness in accomplishing a given aim.  For a company, this usually means profitability, and strategic choices about technology and corresponding procedural and cultural changes drive toward that goal.  Participating in organizations and interest groups (Robert H. Salisbury 1969 "An Exchange Theory of Interest Groups." Midwest Journal of Political Science 13 (1969): pg 1-32. - pdf), seem to be driven by this contractual arrangement between individual self interest and the joining of self interests to an organization.  The metric for businesses is usually clear: profitability in an existing market, or creation of a market which then results in profit.  This is an a priori motivation in the creation of a firm, at least in a capitalist and market driven society.  A technological investment which isn't tied to a strategic notion and framework that is driven toward this goal is, by definition, out of alignment with the goals of a firm that competes in this game.

While it is difficult to define and deal with risk, the underlying criteria that guide decisions about adoption of new technologies and architectures (and I mean this in the expansive sense) have a delineation and goal.  It is a referential delineation and goal built in relation to other actors in a given market by which to judge the success of initiatives.  The “fitness” of technological solutions  (and how they support existing business models) is determined by the relationally defined successes in accomplishing this goal. The nature of success is further defined within the firm by its corporate charter and the way that firms dispense with profitability amongst their stakeholders...but all stakeholders can agree that profitability of the firm is the underlying mandate.

What analogous criteria exists for government?  Government, unlike firms, is driven by a different motivation.  Government's role, broadly speaking, is about the mechanisms for exercising authority, and as such is concerned with how to balance the interests of participants in the polity against each other.  So it follows that government success metrics are also driven by different, unclear, and at times, contradictory motivations.  For some, it might be the preservation of security, for others the preservation of reactive freedoms, for others the promotion of proactive or capability-based freedoms and opportunities, and yet for others by concepts such as equity and equality.  Indeed, the list could go on.

The process by which we ensure that government functions as a system is through the mechanisms of law.  Law, and its adaption, is created, executed, and judged in situations by our branches of government to effect a balance of power, for which a system like democracy functions as a type of market for competing goods (philosophical) and their artifacts in execution (policy and interpretation/application of law).

How then are we to judge the effectiveness of technology toward those aims?  What would a 2.0 implementation of the patriot act look like for example? Does the application of new technologies and architectures require a corresponding structural reformation of the process of governing?

The lack of ability to answer the question about relationship of technology to the constitution of governance is at the heart of the conflict about the use of  2.0 technology in the context of government.  How is a more effective government to be measured and understood?  How do we know new technologies offer us more security, more justice, more freedom, more equity...and can it do all of those things without, as law has done, creating balances between these concepts bound by a current social context and political process?

Is the realm of Gov 2.0 a policy and law issue or is it a technological one?  Which questions are part of one domain and which are part of the other?  Does not reinventing government around the codified assumptions embedded in candidate architectures (often contradictory in terms of use and policy, and themselves bound by law) of social relations in technology, presuppose a model of governance independent of law?  Does it not fundamentally call for a type of perestroika assuming that the models of social interactions represent a new technologically-enabled glasnost?  And how are we to be sure that such movements result in a governance structure that the polity wants (or do we no longer care)?

It has been said so often as to be taken for common knowledge that technology outpaces law and policy.  It seems to me then, that the implementation of technologies that have outpaced the apparatus made to execute laws by that very apparatus, is an end-run around the question of governance and proposes an alternative bound by a techno-entrepreneurial, political, and economic process.  This inversion, while it may be a natural evolution toward a "market state" to use Phillip Bobbitt's term, or some sort of new technocracy, is one in which alternate architectures become more than questions of technology, they become questions of political philosophy.  A real danger exists that in such transitions, we too may be left with techno-entrepreneurial oligarchy at the helm of our new governance mechanisms with little accountability to the serfs that inhabit their spaces. This is not a continuum, nor would it represent progress for either our polity or the social model of the Internet.  If the future of the Internet increasingly becomes the future of our work and the future of our government, it might behoove us, as Johnathan Zittrain has pointed out, to learn how to stop it.