In Development

The internet is a deep and rich repository of information. That’s the thought that surfaced when I came across the work of Professor Beth Simone Noveck today. 

Among other things, Professor Noveck is a Professor of Law at New York Law School, with particular expertise in the impact of technology on legal and political institutions. She has written widely on this and related topics, including a recent article entitled Wiki-Government. It’s on that article that I wish to comment here.

Reading the article is rewarding. It’s a bit like reading a condensed version of Wikinomics but embedded squarely in a public sector, participitory, e-government framework.

For me, the key passage in Professor Noveck’s article is this:

“Non-governmental participants have something more to offer than voting once a year—namely, good information. 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.”

These comments are very much in keeping with the State Services Commission’s booklet When government engages: Online participation - an introduction, which itself is a distillation of the much more detailed and wiki-driven Guide to Online Participation.

The many gems in Professor Noveck’s article include:

• discussion of the reasons why traditional methods of public participation are no panacea to excessive reliance on governmental or selected professionals (see page 35);
• the desirability of designing practices for what she calls ‘collaborative governance’: “shared processes of responsibility in information-gathering and decision-making that combine the technical expertise of public experts with the legal standards of professional decision-makers” (see page 37);
• discussion of the US “Peer-to-Patent” project she spearheads, a fascinating example of the kind of collaborative governance to which she refers (pages 37-40);
• her encouragement to US agencies to begin piloting new strategies for improved decision-making (page 41); and
• her recognition that by “being explicitly experimental with new forms of digital instituion-building, we have an opportunity to increase the legitimacy of governmental decisions”.

If you’re interested in e-democracy, Professor Noveck’s article is well worth a read.

Technorati Tags: collaborative governance, e-democracy, Participation