It remains to be seen just how far the administration will go toward implementing Obama’s vision of change fostered by making government more open, participatory, and collaborative. In part, this is because he is juggling many difficult priorities at once. In part, this is because he and the innovators he has appointed to pioneer these changes are traveling uncharted territory. And finally, by offering to involve and empower the public in “co-creating” government, Obama is unleashing an inherently disruptive force.
As his administration’s early experiments with crowdsourcing have shown, hundreds of thousands of Americans are eager to take up his call to participate in new ways—and that’s without his having pushed hard to publicize the opportunity. What happens when those numbers climb into the millions, and people who have been invited to have a voice now expect to be listened to?
It isn’t just that online collaborative platforms for public input and participation can be gamed, and thus special interest groups or semiorganized pranksters can seemingly hijack such sites to make mischief. Ideally, the more often government enables such interaction to happen, the less meaningful those disruptions will become. It’s when the chance to participate is kept rare that the value of gaming these sites is at its highest.
The more difficult issue for advocates of opening up a process of “co-creating” government is what may happen when newly empowered citizens inevitably collide with entrenched interests. Obama’s vision of enlisting the public in a new, socially conscious and transparent process of improving how government works—“You can be the eyes and ears”—may be exhilarating, but it also may lead to all kinds of unexpected consequences. The subcontractor who is skimming recovery funds that are supposed to be spent on building that new school may be a cousin of the local mayor, who may be tied to the Democratic Party, or his workers may belong to a construction union that endorsed the president’s election. In other words, local e-democracy, Obama-style, could easily crash head-on into local power politics.
We don’t know yet how this story will play out. But the evolving history of the social Web offers one encouraging hint. From Wikipedia to Craigslist to Amazon to Google, the Web keeps rewarding those actors who empower ordinary users, eliminate wasteful middlemen, share information openly, and shift power from the center to the edges. Applying those same principles to government will undoubtedly be messy, but Obama has one thing going for him: it is where technology is already taking us.