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Empowering people through Web 3.0 + Gen Y + m-governance
By Kaufmann | July 31, 2008
As the Fortune Brainstorm Tech near Silicon Valley was getting going last week, I contributed a blog entry on ‘Governance-on-the-Go’, or ‘GonGo’, emphasizing the need to move away from static ‘e-government’ towards the highly mobile citizen becoming center stage in the next phase of IT interface with governance. The blog entry and the contributions I made during the BrainstormTech drew some discussion during the event and in the blogosphere, yet of particular relevance for me was what the rich gamut of contributions by others. See for instance here, here, here, here, and here.
The whole event was an eye opener for an IT amateur like myself. It brought out some of the best ‘Tech’ stars around, and also some great young and creative new entrepreneurs and innovators. It enabled me to dare to peer into future possibilities in putting IT to use in advancing governance and development. At the same time, the gathering made it clear that Silicon Valley is a world in itself, one that can also benefit by further exposure and interaction with mere mortals far away. Tellingly, one of the sessions I contributed to as a panelist was entitled ‘What the rest of the world wants from us’. As if there is Silicon Valley (oversized within a large US), and then the residual rest.
I started my contribution by showing an ‘upside map of the world’ to make the point that shifting our vantage point from North American-centric to Asian (and Latin, African) centric may not hurt as a way of forcing a ‘click refresh’ of our mental buttons regarding our world view (why does convention mandate North being up, South down?). One of the attendees, Rebecca MacKinnon from Global Voices, has just posted a critique on Siliconitis.
To the credit of the main organizer of Brainstorm Tech, the bright and indefatigable David Kirkpatrick, he was acutely aware of this ‘divide’, and had explicitly opted to bring it out in the open in some sessions, daring to invite non-IT, non-US experts on other subjects. [Disclosure: I obviously benefited from his approach, getting invited to the event to make contributions as one of such 'outsiders'].
A number of sessions made me think further about ‘GonGo’, the more mobile, participatory and broader notion of interface between IT and governance than traditional ‘e-government’. Years ago there was already a meaningful move from the traditional and static Web 1.0, where organizations constructed websites to post traditional know-how online providing web-access to information (the “read-only” web), to the more current Web 2.0, where the 
notion of the “read-write” web has been created to allow for all this data to be shared by the online community which vibrantly started to interact and provided the impetus for social networking.
Now with the dawn of Web 3.0, we are now traversing to an exciting new stage, where the web is to be tailored by the people themselves for their own needs: some day virtually any citizen should be able to modify the website or resources. It is people-centered, empowering citizens to innovate and find solutions in hyperspace using Web-hosted infrastructure – ‘the era of platforms’, as put by Marc Benioff. In stark contrast with the “proprietary IT” of the past where users needed to be locked into, now it is becoming possible to interface among various technologies and do “mashups” by using different platforms such as Google Maps, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter or Facebook. Dapper and Yahoo’s Pipes are some of the first mashups-enablers, while Panoramio, Housingmaps and Twixtr give us a glimpse of what Web 3.0 would look like.
Let us imagine further, though. In my view, crucially for governance and development, when combining mobile technology, Web 3.0 and the power of Generation Y, citizens everywhere will have more flexibility, freedom, and, crucially, the ability of actively participating in coming up with solutions. Consider what is already going on now: Dell’s 2 billion conversations with clients through its Ideastorm website, where people provide real inputs about simple issues, such as voting for the look of the clear side panel for a new XPS model, or more complex solutions about how to swap laptop batteries without hibernating. So far, Dell has put into action 30 ideas from this website. Similar cases are those of customers coming up with coffee cup improvements in MyStarbucksidea, or users answering most of the questions that other users post to experts in TurboTax.
No question: there is a major message to the aid community in this, including to large international organizations like the World Bank, which mostly are still somewhere between Web 1.0 and 2.0 – still viewing the web as a tool to provide a podium for internal notions and reports and for also listening to moderated comments from selected audiences, including having structured meetings with some representatives of civil society…
By stark contrast, if we take the potential of the combined power of ‘GonGo’ and Web 3.0 seriously, the era of static top-down management (and also ‘knowledge management’) should soon be over. A totally different approach to problem solving may be envisaged, much more bottom-up and people centered, leveraged by the multiplying and organizing power of IT. Imagine the potential power of mustering people’s participation and creativity in coming up with solutions to very difficult governance and development challenges rather than ’solutions’ decreed based on top-down templates from abroad or a government official.
It is not just a pipe dream. Innovations such as Estonia’s TOM (‘Today I Decide’ in Estonian), where citizens propose, debate, approve and send to the government policies and legislation that they would like to implement, or South Korea’s Ohmynews, a news site created mainly by citizens’ contributions (which had a profound influence in the 2002 presidential elections), potently illustrate. They can be a starting point for a different approach to concrete progress on governance and development, and also presage a very different way of looking at knowledge and problem solving.
Topics: Aid Effectiveness, Public-Private Linkages, Transparency, Voice and Human Rights | |