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@dino-dynamics
Pia Mancini and her colleagues want to upgrade democracy in Argentina and beyond. Through their open-source mobile platform they want to bring citizens inside the legislative process, and run candidates who will listen to what they say.
To me, it seems like the 18th-century slogan that was the basis for the formation of our modern democracies, "No taxation without representation," can now be updated to "No representation without a conversation." We want our seat at the table.
The Theory of Everything
Recent US elections, the reading of Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus, today's premier of Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything, and yesterday's conversation with Ben Knight co-creator of Loomio, a tool for collaborative decision-making and democratic organizing, reminded me something I wrote some months ago for a class called Imagination and Change. But before I talk about it, here the context:
On the US elections, a coworker was explaining us what was at stake, the key players, etc etc... And while I understand the importance of having the right people with the decision-making power... My concern has always been the system itself. When I was a kid I loved to play Monopoly. For me, the climax was always at the point when everyone starts to have hotels in their properties and all was reduced to luck. We all know how fast the game ends after this point... Recently, I just learned to play Cards Agains Humanity. The game develops in such a way that it doesn't really matter who wins at the end, because what we are all trying to achieve in the process is making everyone laugh and have a good time. The other is what matters. My conclusion was, you make me play monopoly, and I will only think of me and my victory. You make me play cards against humanity, and I will think of my friends and them having a good time. Can we translate this logic to the political world and the political institutions? The turnout of the US elections indicates we must. We are tired of politicians playing monopoly and us only invited to elect who's next... because the rules of the game, structurally, will always make them forget, why they are there in the first place.
I shared all these concerns with Ben who was visiting the office to showcase Lomio at Demos4Democracy, an ongoing series of demos featuring the latest tools that foster openness and collaboration to how we govern. The conversation quickly went from politics, to the self-alleged sharing economy models like Uber, to again trying to imagine how could these work differently. That reminded us of the Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange model... so much knowledge is generated through these platforms, however, the success is not about the product itself (no one is storing and organizing it for further dissemination, etc) but on the interaction of the people who visit the communities. What matters is that there is always someone willing to teach and someone willing to learn, for the love of it. And they have achieved it. Clay Shirky puts it better in a conference of What the Internet can Teach Us about Love. Okok... going back to Uber and taking inspiration from the SO and the SE model, what if, the management responsibilities are organized with enough granularity that anyone could jump in and solve them, so the cost of the app maintenance is the minimum, the drivers and riders stay with almost the complete benefit and the everyday helpers can exchange their help for free rides? Something like collaborative distributed management systems for facilitating public services.
What gives me hope is that the internet is empowering us to learn. Because of the Internet, knowledge matters more than ever... because thanks to knowledge, the Internet will always be ours. Before, power and information belonged to the government and the wealthy. Now, it can also belong to us. Who can keep us from learning? Programmers and hackers around the world will always find a way to over-ride, re-create, re-build a space that will allow us to connect, engage, help each other out, teach each other, and find almost everything we need in our community.
Finally, going back to The Theory of Everything and what I wrote for my class:
When our guest speaker from “The young people’s project” spoke about “collective living to sustain our humanity…” he was speaking about commitment beyond organizational boundaries… human connection as our guiding principle. For him, working on TYPP was about replicating love, dream and imagination to move forward.
As it is said in the TED talk The danger of a single story, "Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person but to make it the definitive story of that person." Industrialization and utilitarianism became our only lens to measure success in life. However, as stated in The Culture of Possibility right now we are being able to create a paradigm shift, were “it isn’t the world that changes, but how we see it and the story we construct to describe it.”
Arlene Goldbard identifies as “our most powerful survival traits: awareness, empathy, creativity, our capacity for beauty, for meaning, for moral grandeur.” From the organizational structure perspective these principles are guiding design-driven community planning and more participatory and place-based concepts of economy, citizenship and democracy. But together with these organizational shifts, minds and hearts need also to be inspired by them. It is not enough that the notion of success related to money or power changes, the belief in new values and principles needs to go together with allowing ourselves to make mistakes, stop the guilt we may sometimes feel by them and go through the experience of life as an experiment itself.
Community building needs that the notion of change transforms itself. Now, we need to accept that small is big; that our life, love and actions do matter. That the impact will not be measured in the traditional metrics we have developed… as a matter of fact, there’s the possibility that we will never find a technology with the ability to project the chain-of-events unleashed by our good will and hard work. Fortunately, as Grace Lee Boggs argues it in “The Next American Revolution” the new discoveries in physics can prove that even though we cannot measure the impact of our individual actions, they do contribute in a meaningful way to the better of our communities and to better the meaning of life itself:
“A quantum view explains the success of small efforts quite differently. Acting locally allows us to be inside the movement and flow of the system, participating in all those complex events occurring simultaneously… However, changes in small places also affect the global system, not through incrementalism, but because every small system participates in an unbroken wholeness. Activities in one part of the whole create effects that appear in distant places. Because of these unseen connections, there is potential value in working anywhere in the system. We never know how our small activities will affect others through the invisible fabric of our connectedness.”
However. Community building is just one part of the challenge. We need to re-imagine everything.
In his book “The Grand Design”, Stephen Hawking cites Einstein: “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible”. He then explains that the universe is comprehensible “because it is governed by scientific laws”.
The interesting stuff for a lawyer and public policy amateur with only basic knowledge of science and physics, came when he explained that the known forces of nature (gravity, electromagnetism, weak nuclear force and strong nuclear force) have opposing scientific laws. So, after explaining how our molecules obey very different rules (quantum physics rules) than what we, as a full object obey (the mechanical physics rules), etc… he manages to create (and unify all these alleged differences with his M-theory (were he claims that M can stand indistinctly for “master”, “miracle” or “mystery”), AKA The Theory of Everything, as follows:
“Each theory may have its own version of reality, but according to model-dependent realism, that is acceptable so long as the theories agree in their predictions whenever they overlap, that is, whenever they can both be applied.”
So even though it is too soon to have a specific conclusion, this physic's theory gave me an idea of what we can strive for a new king of governance: instead of trying to have one big vision of how democracy should work, maybe we can take into consideration all of its branches (representative, participatory, deliberative, etc) and just focus on figuring out how to work them so when they overlap, they can both be applied. This way, I can rescue the idea of a world that has enough space for us to live in, at the same time that we acknowledge the different versions of reality that we as humans may have about life and how we must deal to live inside a community and a specific form of government.
Experiments Notebook
As a kid I frequently dreamed in becoming a scientist... but then I realized I didn't had to wait to grow up to be one because we can do experiments all the time. Thus, I found a notebook, decorated it as The experiments notebook, grabbed it with a pen, and went to the backyard to register my observations... Now it comprises a considerable amount of weird notes, drawings and crazy potions.
Images of labs, test tubes with fluorescent liquids, weird electrical wires hanging all over the place and computers doing really cool stuff still haunt me... GOOD NEWS is that being a mad scientist doesn't have to become my frustrated dream #37.
Now, we can all be one. Task can be big or small. Simple or complex. Whatever you prefer. Varied topics. Etc... your choice!!! Isn't it exciting?
I can't stop being amazed by how technology is opening spaces - creating opportunities for us to participate, engage and sometimes even fulfill one of our childhood fantasies.
Enjoy:
http://www.iflscience.com/technology/thinking-outside-lab-ascent-citizen-science
How can technology support community building rather than replace it?
For PB to be successful, voter outreach and engagement are necessary. The number of votes may matter less than the quality of the vote (informed and representative).
Technology based ideas to improve the PB process:
1)…
The open-source world has learned to deal with a flood of new, oftentimes divergent, ideas using hosting services like GitHub -- so why canât governments? In this rousing talk Clay Shirky shows how democracies can take a lesson from the Internet, to be not just transparent but also to draw on the knowledge of all their citizens.
Take a look at this brief introduction to the project: "Citizen's Open Agenda"
As the World Bank points out governments are increasingly opening a wide range of data. However, much of the public has been left behind having as a result low participation and use of this information. Efforts regarding the awareness and imagination of a bigger spectrum of users are now necessary to continuously grow communities of data users, and encourage data 'ownership'.
In these sense, technology can improve engagement and efficient use of the new data available with a constantly bigger crowd that wants to be heard and do something to rebuild Monterrey’s social fabric. Under the understanding that citizen’s participation in public policy through well managed technological tools has the ability not only to include more people wisely but also to improve government accountability, this proposal focuses on developing different tools that can enhance citizen’s engagement in several on-going projects in Monterrey, Mexico.
How it all came together.
The power of data visualization.
Can government be run like the Internet, permissionless and open? Coder and activist Jennifer Pahlka believes it can -- and that apps, built quickly and cheaply, are a powerful new way to connect citizens to their governments -- and their neighbors.
What is it about open government anyways? Why is it so important to have access to the information? What's behind crowdsourcing?
Yes, it is about the wisdom of the crowds. Yes, it is about transparency. But beyond that, I believe is about having a place in building the world we believe in. Is about having a space or building a platform, where we can all collaborate. And maybe, we will get home from our boring jobs, the ones we do to survive and “win a living”, but after finishing with all that, we would have the possibility, or the opportunity, to get online and engage and create. And it will not be about solving our own personal problems and maybe we wont get a direct benefit, but by building stronger and more human communities we can bet, in the long term, it will. In the meantime, we wont have to wait anymore for someone to solve the problems we are concerned about. And we won’t need to become a politician or even have a degree. The only thing we would need is to care and want to do something about it. And maybe, the feeling of being insignificant and powerless would go away, because in the end, this new social trend is about creating a chance to take matters into our own hands and realizing that there is something that we can do, if we engage.
Because now it's not about the government/authority and the people, but about rethinking and daring to imagine new ways to organize ourselves that would result in a better and more sensible way of living, and the building of a new "us".
Some useful tips for effective crowdsourcing (by Daren C. Brabham) #Gov30 #GovCap
Students in Matamoros, Mexico weren't getting much out of school -- until a radical new teaching method unlocked their potential.
"Access to a world of infinite information has changed how we communicate, process information, and think. Decentralized systems have proven to be more productive and agile than rigid, top-down ones. Innovation, creativity, and independent thinking are increasingly crucial to the global economy."
Monterrey, my hometown, has one of the lowest citizen participation rate of Mexico. Furthermore, President Calderon’s war against drugs led to the City’s worst social crisis. Tragedies like the killing of 2 graduate students by Mexican army crossfire inside the university campus ...
Crowdsourcing according to Daren C. Brabham
#GovCap #Gov30 @bethnoveck
