One of the exciting outcomes of the four shifts is that, like the Internet, they commoditize information. As public servants are able to network and self-organize, information will flow more freely. This, for example, is what occurs with the deputy minister briefing notes at Natural Resources Canada. This freedom of information further increases if governments tap into the long tail of public policy and ask citizens to submit “patches” to the system. As public servants are better able to access one another through social media and find information through wikis, the nature of power and influence within that system begins to shift. While hierarchy will not disappear from government, a networked civil service will evolve a new culture.
Presently, the information economy in many governments is scarcity-based. Information can be hoarded—and deployed to maximize the influence of its owner—because of government, silos, the sheer size of those silos, and the hierarchical structure that controls and filters the flow of information. But something frequently happens to scarcity economies when their underlying currency becomes abundant: they transform into gift economies. For an example, consider Eric Raymond’s description of the gift economy that operates within an open source system:[158]
Gift cultures are adaptations not to scarcity but to abundance. They arise in populations that do not have significant material-scarcity problems with survival goods…. Abundance makes command relationships difficult to sustain and exchange relationships an almost pointless game. In gift cultures, social status is determined not by what you control but by what you give away.
As public servants are better able to locate and share information across silos, the incentives around hoarding will begin to shift. For many in civil service, gift economies become more prevalent than scarcity economies. Sharing information or labor (as a gift) within civil service increases one’s usefulness to, and reputation among, others within the system. Power and influence in this system thus moves away from the ability to control information, and instead shifts to a new set of skills: the ability to convene, partner, engage stakeholders, act creatively, and analyze.
And here is both the most important lesson and the most exciting implication for governments as platform. The traits that make people successful in a gift economy culture overlap with the type of culture that makes platforms successful. Platforms work first because people want to use them: because they are both useful and easy to use. But they sustain themselves when those who manage them recognize they are a shared space. A government platform that seeks out patches and gifts from the long tail of public policy, treats internal and external input equally, and is persistently transparent in how the platform is being managed will be a government that thrives in the twenty-first century. Such a culture is not a foregone conclusion. Today there are open source and online communities where, because of choices made by early participants, ideas are shared, people are dealt with respectfully, and contributions are acknowledged. There are also less functional communities where positive values and behaviors are not modeled. The key here is that governments have an opportunity now, as they manage the shift, to create an underlying culture that will support a sustainable platform people will want to build upon.
[158] The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary, Eric S. Raymond, O’Reilly, 2001.