Milano, 27 ottobre 2009

David Osimo - Tech4i2 ltd.

Government 2.0: tra utopia e realismo

Struttura dell’intervento

• il contesto: web e governo 1.0

• le promesse del government 2.0

• i limiti del government 2.0

• l’impatto concreto del government 2.0: lavori in corso

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Background: delusione sull’impatto dell’ICT nella P.A.

• 1990s: ICT promette di rendere la gestione della cosa pubblica piu’ trasparente efficiente ed orientata all’utente

• 2005+: delusione per il permanere di una cultura burocratica weberiana

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Offerta Domanda

Innumerevoli applicazioni del web2.0 nei servizi pubblici, ma fuori dalla p.a.

Source: own elaboration of IPTS PS20 project

Il caso Peer-to-patent

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Il caso: Patient Opinion

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Monitorare la spesa

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Prima

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Governo

cittad.

Dopo

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Governo

cittad.

amici

amici di amici

pubblico

informazione fiducia attenzione

Apertura totale dei dati pubblici

UK Cabinet, “Power of information task force report” Robinson et al.: “Government Data and the Invisible Hand “

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Alcune citazioni

• “A problem shared is a problem halved ...and a pressure group created” (dr. Paul Hodgkin)

• “it’s about pressure points, chinks in the armour where improvements might be possible, whether with the consent of government or not” (Tom Steinberg)

• “There are more smart people outside government than within it” (Bill Joy)

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Perche’ e’ importante?

Perche’ non richiede cambiamenti, ma cambia gli incentivi al cambiamento:

• “cognitive surplus”

• il potere della visualizzazione

• riduce le asimmetrie informative

• meritocrazia e peer-recognition invece della gerarchia

• riduce drammaticamente i costi dell’azione collettiva

• cambia le aspettative dei cittadini

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I limiti del government 2.0

• i casi di successo sono eccezioni, le evidenze sono aneddoti

• la maggioranza delle iniziative non ha partecipazione

• il tasso di partecipazione e’ basso e limitato alle elite

• alta partecipazione si ritrova solo su temi populisti

• le tecnologie attuali funzionano solo in un contesto di bassa partecipazione

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non parla

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parla e non e’ ascoltato

parla ed e’ ascoltato

Il government 2.0 finora coinvolge Lisa, ma non Bart Simpson

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Hat tip: Carter and Dance, Nytimes.com

Lavorare per un impatto reale

• gestire le aspettative ed eliminare i falsi miti• non si parla di democrazia diretta ne’ di

partecipazione totale• diminuire i costi di partecipazione per attirare i

“casual participants” • continuo fine-tuning e gardening• mirare alla rilevanza e qualita’ invece che alla

rappresentativita’• il governo e’ sempre necessario - si’ all’

augmented government, contro il no government

• intervenire sull’educazione e sulla media literacy

• passare dai progetti “cool” ad una proposta politica

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www.endorsetheopendeclaration.eu

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1. Transparency by default: public data in open, standard and reusable formats

2. Participation: The capacity to collaborate with citizens should become a core competence of government.

3. Empowerment: Public organisations should enable all citizens to solve their problems for themselves by providing tools, skills and resources.

As citizens, we want full insight into all the activities undertaken on our behalf. We want to be able to contribute to public policies as they are developed, implemented, and reviewed. We want to be actively involved in designing and providing public services with extensive scope to contribute our views and with more and more decisions in our hands. We want the whole

spectrum of government information from draft legislation to budget data to be easy for citizens to access, understand, reuse, and remix. This is not because we want to reduce government’s role, but because open collaboration will make public services

better and improve the quality of decision-making.

Grazie

david.osimo@tech4i2.com

Maggiori informazioniOsimo, 2008. Web2.0 in government: why and how? www.jrc.es

Osimo, 2008. Benchmarking e-government in the web 2.0 era: what to measure, and how. European Journal of ePractice, August 2008.

http://egov20.wordpress.com

http://eups20.wordpress.com

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A new vision starting to take shape

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To sum up, transparency, which enhances accountability and choice, can be a powerful driver, a catalyst and a flagship for “transformational government”, rather than for “eGovernment” only.

6 What is new? Government transparency is by no means a new issue. It has been the subject of policy action for three centuries, and substantial literature has been written on the topic. The first laws on access to public documents were implemented in 18th century Sweden. Over the last 20 years, most OECD countries have adopted ¨freedom of information laws¨ that allow access to public documents as a fundamental right. “Open government” has been a buzzword for many years, and on a more light-hearted note, it was already a subject of irony in the 80s. For example, the first episode of the BBC comedy “Yes, Minister” was entitled “Open Government”.

However, it seems that policy attention is growing. “OECD countries are moving from a situation where government chose what it revealed, to a principle of all government information being available unless there is a defined public interest in it being withheld” (OECD 2005). In 2007-2008, the Council of Europe is debating a ¨European convention on access to official documents¨.

Why should we take transparency as key driver of government innovation today? There are some specific novelties that make transparency particularly important now.

a) the wide AVAILABILITY OF WEB TOOLS to elaborate on public data makes the impact of transparency much bigger. Just think of free publishing platforms such as blogs, mash-ups like GoogleEarth, visualization tools like ManyEyes, plus all the free and open source software used in web 2.0 projects to, for example, distribute the work of monitoring government activities between many people (crowdsourcing). These tools make public data much more relevant and understandable – and enhance the impact of transparency.

b) the concept of MANY-TO-MANY (Pascu, Osimo et al. 2007) changes the power relationship. Before, transparency was an issue of the individual citizens versus the government, and this limited the impact of the information obtained. Now, the first thing a citizen does when he obtains interesting information out of a Freedom of Information request, is to post it on the web – see, for example, what happened in Italy with the information on the cost of the Tourism portal. The refusal by the Italian government to disclose the information became a boomerang once published on IT blogs,4 and the bureaucratic answer became a monument to inward-looking government. Indeed, even Freedom of Information requests are now monitored by non-governmental services such as whatdotheyknow.com.

4 http://punto-informatico.it/p.aspx?i=2124310

European Journal of ePractice · www.epracticejournal.eu 6 Nº 4 · August 2008 · ISSN: 1988-625X