A Conversation with Beth Noveck

Beth Noveck is one of the most important thinkers—and practitioners—of the new “open government” movement. While directing the Institute for Information Law and Policy at the New York Law School, Noveck created the Peer-to-Patent community patent review project in collaboration with the U.S. Patent Office. The author of the book Wiki Government, she served as the United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer from 2009 to 2010, and led President Obama’s Open Government Initiative.

SJ: It seems to me that one consistent theme through everything you’ve been involved with is the idea of widening the pool of potential experts, recognizing that there are gradients of expertise out there in a much larger part of the population. If government can engage some of that intelligence, we’re going to come up with more innovative solutions to the problems that we face. You’ve been a champion of the phrase open government to describe this movement, but there has been confusion about openness versus transparency, right?

 

BN: You’re exactly right that the notion of innovation is about generating new ideas faster through more interaction with new people and new ideas and creating new conversations. The question is how do you create the mechanisms for that richer and more diverse interchange of ideas so that you can get better ideas into government and solve problems faster. In the current political debates about budget cutting, I pull my hair out because to me the question is not how do I cut a particular service, but how do I deliver that same service using less money and innovative techniques to do the same thing for people that we did before. That’s the idea of creating an open government in the sense of open innovation.

If we talk about open innovation as the practices that many firms have adopted, [we’re talking about] being more collaborative, where it’s companies who are consulting their customers about what designs they should offer in their fall line or it’s companies who are talking to their employees about better ideas about how to do the work of the company more effectively, or talking to their suppliers about how they can be more efficient in what they do. A lot of companies are really beginning to get on board with this notion that we have to talk to everyone in the supply chain, if you will, including the suppliers, including the customers, including our employees. We think about not trying to do everything for ourselves, but instead, set up a network so that we can realize economies of scale.

So it’s this notion that we have the tools that allow us to be more collaborative and thereby act according to highest and best use. In the public sector, similarly, the question is how do we leverage, how do we collaborate better, across organizations of government, whether it’s federal, state, or local, across entities within government, and between government and the public, to solve problems better by being more collaborative. Now, there’s many different visions of ways of making government work better. One of which is “open government” in the sense of “transparent,” meaning if we make the workings of government more visible to people, government will become more accountable and work better. My own feeling is [that] that by itself does not produce innovation. We have in this country a very open government relative to a lot of other countries, and increasingly now we do things like publish records of who comes and goes to the White House. Ten Downing Street publishes the salaries, as does the White House, of the people who work there. That does very little in my view to actually change the way that government works. It’s very important, I think, not to be confused between transparency for its own sake and collaboration. Open government starts with the focus on how do I create greater collaboration between people rather than simply transparency for its own sake.

 

 

SJ: What are some of the mechanisms for that collaboration that you’ve been most excited about?

 

BN: I got into doing this work because of an experiment that I ran several years ago. Back in 2005, I posited the idea of what would happen if we actually tried to connect the patent office to an open network of volunteers who would help the patent office in making the decision about which invention deserves a twenty-year grant on monopoly rights. This is not the idea of crowd-sourcing the decision—it was again trying to preserve that independence and public mindedness of the bureaucrat by letting the patent examiner make the judgment. Instead, the idea was to crowd-source the knowledge gathering, the information that informs the decision, knowing that the examiner in Washington, with only a few hours in which to do the job of examining a patent, can’t possibly have access to all the relevant info from his or her desk to decide whether the latest component of your cell phone is actually new and original and deserves a patent, or whether the latest drug that’s been invented to cure cancer is actually going to, is actually a sufficient enough advance over what came before to deserve that very powerful twenty-year set of economic rights that you get. And so at that point, we didn’t have Facebook, we didn’t have Twitter. So we had to build the platform that would enable people to volunteer to contribute information to help the patent office, and we had to design a system that would respond to the incentives of the different actors involved. In other words, it wasn’t enough to simply say, “Let’s throw open the floodgates to any suggestion that anybody wants to give.” We have to create a very structured system and then we have to use rating and ranking technologies, something that’s very prevalent today, where people rate and rank on Amazon and other sites. That pilot continues to be ongoing with the USPTO [the United States Patent and Trademark Office], it’s been launched now in Australia and Japan, and is going to be launched in the UK as this notion of crowd-sourcing expertise becomes more accepted and prevalent. So this was kind of the first experiment of its kind, and it’s now something that’s in widespread use across government in many ways and in many countries.

The National Archives, for instance, now has a citizen archivist project where they’re actually getting help from citizens and tagging old records and going through old records because there’s so many more things to go through than their librarians can possibly do alone. I can go on and on and on with examples now, especially now that the technology is so prevalent that the policy is there, the political will is there, increasingly around the world, not just in the United States, to try some of this work. And the tools exist to do this much, much better.

 

 

SJ: One of the things I really like about what you’re saying is that you’re not eliminating that individual judgment. You’re not saying individuals and official experts still don’t make assessments of things; it’s just that those individuals are much smarter if they’re connected to a broader network of people, and if they have a broader and more diverse range of inputs to draw upon in making their decisions.

 

BN: That’s the interesting thing about the kind of hybrid of bureaucracy and network, or hybrid of institution and network that I think is the really interesting form that we have yet to fully evolve. Because there are really good things about bureaucracy. The word bureaucracy obviously has a really bad connotation. But there are things that are good about this notion of independent, public-minded decision making that is not subject to the influence or capture of market forces or of the political popular will of the moment. So the notion that we have a state that is intended not to veer wildly from one direction to the other with changes within the administration—we have a very small political layer, and then we have this kind of ongoing, four million people whose job it is to keep the ship of state running, regardless of who sits in the Oval Office and to ensure that we don’t have these wild swings. Otherwise, we would be Libya. It’s one of the great inventions of American culture: the bureaucracy is one of the things we’ve done best, ironically. It’s the stability of the state, and having this regularized procedure and this notion of public-mindedness. One of the things I loved about my time in government [was] the people in the civil service who I met who are inspiring, truly public servants. The stereotype of the bureaucrat, somebody who shows up at 9:01 and leaves at 4:59 and is clocking a paycheck—I didn’t meet those people. These are people who are smart people, who do what they do because they care deeply, and they want to do what’s right and they believe in their mission of independence and public service. And so the combination of that set of values with the kind of rapid idea generation, creativity, and innovation that the network brings, put together, is a pretty powerful thing. But we don’t have the custom yet with how to ask questions or how to answer them across that divide. So that’s [what] the interesting, I think, experiments and work of the next couple of years looks like.

 

 

SJ: I’m also really interested in something else you’ve written about and worked on: prizes. A prize-backed challenge is a structure whereby the state creates alternate markets for innovation where the market refuses to incentivize people to generate something on their own. So you create this artificial market where the government or some other institution says: If you solve this problem that serves some social good, that the market isn’t solving on its own, you’ll make $10 million or you’ll make a million, and even in some of the software challenges we’ve seen, all you need is $10,000 in prize money. You don’t need that much money.

 

BN: You only need free T-shirts!

 

SJ: But I think that’s a pretty interesting space right now.

 

BN: What I love about the prize-backed challenge as a way of working is, first of all, it helps people on the institutional side frame a question. When you talk about things in terms of a challenge, particularly a challenge backed by a prize, it creates a certain discipline that gets those with the knowledge of what the public interest is and what the social imperatives are—call those the government people, although I think people on both sides of the divide have suggestions about what the suggestions should be. But it gets the public servants to frame the question in a way that people know how to help and how to respond. The big problem right now is, there’s lots of people right now who say, “I would love to be involved in and do public service. I would love to be involved in the life of my democracy. I’ll gladly do something.” But they have no idea what to do. During election season, I know what to do. I know about getting out the vote, I know what that means. I may know what it means to sweep up my local park, or do some kind of local volunteerism, but you tell me, be involved in policy making? What am I supposed to do?

 

 

SJ: By the way, one of the reasons why I think all this networked collaboration worked first in elections is that elections have built-in game mechanics. So people always know there’s a scoreboard—

 

BN: There’s a winner!

 

 

SJ: There’s a winner and a loser and I know how to play games. So here, if I do this, I can see this number go up and I’m getting better and I get new privileges. It’s as if there’s this giant video game that’s built into that environment and we have technologies and we have usage patterns that allow people to lock into that. But we don’t have them built into civic participation in the same way, once the election is over.

 

BN: And that’s why there is some really interesting thinking being done increasingly on the question of game-ification and you’re hearing people like Jesse Schell and others who talk about, wow, if we actually turned it into a game that could get [me] tax credits for turning down my heat, how cool would that be? Jane McGonigal has talked about this: within a game, I know what I’m supposed to do—it’s as simple as that. And what prize-backed challenges do partly is this: they tell me what to do. The other thing that’s really exciting about challenges is that I think it creates this kind of wonderful, flourishing ecosystem of innovation around a particular problem. What I like is that in some cases, it responds to a market failure by offering a prize to compensate for a lack of funding within the private sector. But in many cases, what it also does is [it] just generates attention and eyeballs and demand around something, and actually allows people to create ideas that then become successful businesses.

 

SJ: You’ve seen a lot of projects up close from your work inside the Obama administration and in other capacities. What’s one of your favorite examples of open government at work?

 

BN: One favorite project that I have is the Federal Register 2.0 project. The federal government publishes the Register every day. It’s one of the great innovations of our democracy, above all other countries in the world: the fact that we have a daily gazette, a daily newspaper for our government, in which we put out, every day, all the news about grants that are available and regulations that are pending, actions that are taken by the president.

 

SJ: I’m not sure I knew that’s what the Federal Register was! I’ve heard about it a million times, but I don’t think I fully realized exactly what it was until now.

 

BN: You don’t know what it is because it’s never been something that the average person would read because it’s so densely written in legal jargon; graphically, it’s an interface culture we live in and it’s very hard to read a document that’s intensely small print; it’s very hard to look at. So companies hire lobbyists and lawyers who read the Federal Register for them and tell them that there’s something they should be aware of. So there’s a lot of middlemen that make their money in tracking the Federal Register. Journalists also read the Federal Register to find out what’s going on in government. So we have this practice that’s existed for seventy-five years, since Roosevelt, of publishing this daily newspaper—we put the information out but you have to get people to read it for you. It’s as if we were publishing it in another language known as legalese.

But then a few years ago, in response to a prize-backed challenge to do something with a government data set, three guys sitting in a coffee shop in San Francisco went on data.gov and looked for the biggest data set they could find. And that was ten years’ worth of Federal Registers in a raw, downloadable format by the National Archives. They said, “We’ve never heard of the Federal Register; we’ve never looked at it, but man, is this hard to read. We could make this look better.” Long story short, they enter their prototype in the competition; they don’t get first prize, they get second prize, but the National Archives and government printing office that publish the Federal Register noticed and saw their entry and thought, Wow, that’s pretty good. And they called up the three guys in the coffee shop and they said, “How would you like to remake the Federal Register for us?” So three guys, never done business with the federal government before, know nothing about government—they’re three citizen coders—they get the job, and within three months, in the rotunda of the National Archives before the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, the new Register 2.0 is announced by the archivist of the United States, with a copy of the Magna Carta in the background. I mean, the Founding Fathers might as well have been in the room, and these three guys who had to buy a suit for the occasion unveil the new Federal Register. If you go look at it at federalregister.gov, it’s beautiful. It has pictures, it’s searchable, if you want to find out what’s new today in your home state. Now, it’s still written by government bureaucrats in a language that’s not yet as accessible as it should be, but the fact that it’s now published in a form that people can read is, I think, if you go and look two years from now, I would bet you the language will be easier to read, because people are now writing it for a new, wider audience. The short of it is, making transparent a government data set, reaching out to citizens with a prize-backed challenge, to do something with that data, is enabling citizens to play a role in making their government work better, make it more effective, and efficient. These are people who you would not have thought of as experts in the Federal Register, but what they knew something about was good interface design, how to use technology to solve a problem in a way that folks within the government never would have thought of for themselves. So now we have an innovation that has made the government work better for all Americans.

And the story gets even better—they took the code of their project and made it freely available as an open-source project. And now other people can take it, and in fact I know of other people who are working on the platform, a totally different set of people, who are seeing if they can adapt it so that any city that wants to create its own newspaper can now use that code to be transparent [and] to publicize opportunities for people in the municipality.

These three guys still, at the moment, have day jobs, but it’s very likely that what will happen as a result of [their] work is that they will be able to start their own business. So there will be another happy ending to this story, which is generating entrepreneurship, creating new jobs and economic growth. So I love the story because it’s very high-minded, involving the National Archives and the Declaration of Independence and three guys sitting in a coffee shop who end up making government work better for all Americans.