Across North America and around the world, citizens and public servants—influenced by social media, Web 2.0, open source software, and other social and technological developments—see growing pressure on governments to evolve. Seeking to respond to increasing citizen expectations around service delivery and effectiveness, these reformers envision governments that act as a platform: that share information (particularly raw data), are transparent in their operations and decision making, enable and leverage citizen-led projects, are effective conveners, and engage citizens’ requests, ideas, and feedback more intelligently.
Government as a platform holds enormous possibility. But most present-day government institutions are not designed with this role in mind. More importantly, their cultures usually reflect the corporate values of a hierarchical system: centralized decision making, risk aversion, a strong delineation between insiders and outsiders, and deference to authority and specialization. In short, our governments are analog systems, not just in their structure and processes, but also in their values and culture. Understanding first the exogenous forces that are driving governments to evolve, and second how these forces will affect and manifest themselves within government, is essential to successfully managing the transition from Government 1.0 to Government 2.0. This is the goal of this chapter.
Based on my experiences working with civil services, as well as open source communities in the public policy and software space, the first half of this chapter describes four core shifts that are pushing governments from hierarchy to platform: Shirky’s Coasean collapse, the long tail of public policy, patch culture, and finally, the death of objectivity. In the second half of the chapter I outline the preconditions to shifting government from an analog/hierarchical structure to a digital/network structure, some strategies for extending the network to include citizens, and some ideas for the basis of a new culture to support public servants. My experience has been that most public servants, particularly those who are younger, are not only dedicated but keen for new models that would enable them to serve the public and their political masters more effectively. Many recognize that getting government to serve as platforms in a digital world will be a difficult transition. We have many allies for change, and so we also have a collective responsibility to provide them with language and frameworks to describe why government will change, as well as suggest a map for how to manage it effectively.
At the beginning of Here Comes Everybody,[152] Clay Shirky cites the work of Ronald Coase, who in 1937 published his famous paper, “The Nature of the Firm.” In it, Coase answered a question that had vexed economists for some time: what is the value of hierarchical organizations? Why don’t people simply self-organize in a manager-free environment to create goods and deliver services? Coase theorized that managing transaction costs—the costs of constantly negotiating, coordinating, and enforcing agreements among collaborators—creates efficiencies that favor organizations. Interestingly, as transaction costs fall moderately, large firms can become larger still, but a greater number of smaller organizations also emerge as the costs to coordinate the production of niche products drop.
Shirky, however, takes Coase’s thesis to its logical conclusion and asks the question that ultimately forms the basis of his book:
But what if transaction costs don’t fall moderately? What if they collapse? This scenario is harder to predict from Coase’s original work, as it used to be purely academic. Now it’s not, because it is happening, or rather it has already happened, and we’re starting to see the results.
So what happens to some of the world’s largest and most important institutions—governments—when transaction costs collapse?
The most important outcome of the Coasean collapse is that self-organizing groups can perform activities—more effectively and cheaply—that were previously the preserve of large hierarchical institutions.
One of the most compelling examples of an emergent network within government is the advent of the DIRECT Launcher project. A few years ago several NASA engineers and scientists became increasingly concerned about the direction of the planned replacement for the Ares I and Ares V rockets. Specifically, they believed senior decision makers were overlooking designs that could achieve the projects’ objectives more quickly, safely, and cheaply. Ultimately, these scientists and engineers began to meet in secret, working together online to scope out and design an alternative rocket. As word spread, non-NASA employees joined the group, providing additional support. According to Wikipedia, as of September 2008 the DIRECT team consisted of 69 members, 62 of whom are NASA engineers, NASA-contractor engineers, and managers from the Constellation Program. A small number of non-NASA members of the team publicly represent the group.
This is a classic Coasean collapse scenario—not in the marketplace, but in a government bureaucracy. A group of individuals, thanks to lowered transaction costs, have created a virtual, unofficial “skunk works” capable of designing a rocket that many argue outcompetes that of the large bureaucracy to which many of the participants belong. The network is more effective and efficient than the hierarchy. It is also more nimble: the capacity to involve outsiders is especially important as the NASA employees fear they could lose their jobs. The external volunteers—some with significant expertise—are free to represent and advocate for the project’s design.
So how serious is DIRECT Launcher? Serious enough that on January 9, 2008, President Obama’s transition team met with the project’s representatives.[153] Subsequently, on May 7, 2008, the administration announced the launch of the Augustine Panel, an independent review of planned U.S. human space flight activities. It is very hard to imagine that this review was not a result, at least in part, of the DIRECT Launcher initiative.
The lesson here is that the structure of government will change. Today there are more efficient means of coordinating activities, sometimes exponentially so, than the large bureaucracies of government. To be clear, this is not an argument to end government. But it does suggest that if governments are too slow or too unresponsive, citizens—or even government’s own employees—may find new ways to tackle projects that, due to high coordination and transaction costs, were previously exclusive to the governments’ domain.
But the Coasean collapse isn’t just making self-organizing easier, both within and outside government. It poses a still larger challenge to government: it blurs the line between the value of “insiders” versus that of “outsiders.” In a world where expertise is spread across government agencies, not to mention among institutions outside government (to say nothing of Charles Leadbeater’s Pro-Ams or even just hobbyists), the Coasean collapse allows for an even greater shift: it opens access to the long tail of public policy.
[152] Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, Clay Shirky, Penguin, 2008.