Bill's Notebook

I started my government career as a street-level bureaucrat. In the summer of 1990 I was a paralegal intern for the Richmond, Kentucky Department of Public Advocacy. This was a public defenders office that covered four counties and my job was to interview the clients that had been arrested and jailed. I would spend the morning in the jail interviewing clients and the afternoons writing up reports and doing legal research. Even for a small college town we were quite busy. The average caseload for our attorneys was between 200 to 250 cases a year. It was this experience that led to my lifelong interest in street-level bureaucracies (SLB).

What makes a SLB different from other government agencies is that SLBs have immediate and direct contact with the public while most employees in other agencies deal almost exclusively with other government employees. SLBs are where policy is realized and implemented. The bulk of government employment are street-level bureaucrats such as police officers, teachers, social workers, and so on. As Michael Lipsky observed these government employees are charged with implementing and administering an ever-increasing set of policies and laws to an ever-growing population while facing shrinking budgets and resources. It may not be as bad as being consigned to Hades and tasked with eternally rolling a boulder up a hill but there are some days that it is close.

Street-level bureaucrats (SLB) have devised a number of methods to cope with their job as Jeffrey Prottas details in his book People-Processing. The SLB picks the rules that they will follow because to follow every rule that comes down would immobilize the agency. The SLB trains the citizens it meets into becoming good clients who make life easier for the SLB by being compliant and not making extra work. The biggest advantage that the SLB has is their superior knowledge of the rules and processes through which the SLB can punish or reward clients by withholding or supplying information. Even though the SLB is required to exercise as little discretion as possible in fulfilling the agency’s objectives, they manage to carve out a good deal of autonomy.

The studies that established the characteristics of the street-level bureaucrats (SLB) and their practices were done in the late 60s and throughout the 70s. You will see an occasional paper on SLBs but nothing yet as to the impact of social networking technologies and how they affect the work and practices of the SLB. I think that social networking will have a profound impact on SLBs because it will destroy the information advantage SLBs have while better performance measurement tools will reduce the autonomy of SLBs.

Let’s discuss the performance management tools first. When dashboard cameras were installed in police cars the police officer’s actions in the field were now more easily observed and monitored by their managers back at the station. Dashboard cameras were first resisted by police officers but then they realized that this was objective proof of why they had to deal with someone the way they did and now most police officers welcome the scrutiny. Another related technology, GPS “tattlers” that record the routes taken by public service workers is not so well accepted but has helped cut down on abuse by some workers.

But where the most profound impact of the social networking technologies is in erasing the information advantage the street-level bureaucrat has over clients. Just think of how car buying, medicine, law, and so many other areas have been influenced when consumers can go to a website and research the history of a car, the symptoms of a disease, or create their own will with freely-available information and the advice of a community who had similar experiences. There is a large market out there for the person who writes a Dummies guide to the local welfare office or releases an app to help a citizen negotiate the process of applying for aid. I remember how empowered I felt when I first gained online access to my bank account and could see the same information the bank clerk saw as we spoke on the phone. The SLBs will lose a great deal of discretion when faced with a group of empowered clients who know the process and their rights even better than the SLB.

But these same social networking technologies can greatly benefit the SLB as well. A large part of the work is screening the client which could be done through an automated process thus freeing the SLB to deal with the exceptional cases (you can see this already in some jurisdictions). Another benefit is for SLBs to form online communities where they can receive guidance from their peers at their desk ans while working with clients. I also believe that the performance management tools will provide an objective view of the burdens SLBs work under and may discourage management to stop producing so many rules and erasing existing rules. We will not know the full impact of the new social technologies on the street-level bureaucracies for several years as the innovations diffuse through the agencies but I am hopeful the impact will create a better future for both Client 2.0 and SLB 2.0.

References:

Lipsky, M. (1980). Street-level bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the individual in public services. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Prottas, J.M. (1979). People-processing: The street-level bureaucrat in public service bureaucracies. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.

I succumbed to the hype and joined Quora last week. Two weeks before that I joined Academia which is a social networking site for academics. Friday night I joined Eegoes because they promised to help me organize my rapidly-expanding universe of social networking sites. I had a great time building profiles, looking for people to follow (like Stephen Hawkings!), and registering my interests (game theory and the Three Stooges). I post daily on FaceBook, participate in LinkedIn discussions, and haunt the GovLoop site at least an hour a day. Add in my Twitter activity and I put in a significant amount of time and effort creating content and interacting with others.

It was from Twitter that I came upon this posting from Derek Christensen that compared Google’s latest business efforts to Tom Sawyer’s scam to get his friends to whitewash a fence for him. As Mr. Christensen points out, the key is the packaging of the onerous task into an activity that people are fighting to do. You can go swimming anytime but it’s not everyday you can WHITEWASH A FENCE! Or answer questions from other people! Or share your academic papers with other academics so easily! Thanks to my efforts and the efforts of others we are helping to make Mark Zuckerberg a very, very rich man by contributing thousands of free hours of labor to make the FaceBook community valuable to other users who in turn contribute even more free labor.

I helped make FourSquare a major success and all I got was this lousy badge?

No, I am not that cynical. I benefit a great deal from the social networks. FaceBook allows me to keep in touch with friends on a daily basis when before I would occasionally call or only see them at special occasions. Twitter is a great resource for the newest stuff in my fields and GovLoop has given me a great platform to showcase my work and to connect with a great group of professionals. My Social Return on Investment (ROI) has been much better in the last three years than at any other time in my career. I am certain others have seen similar benefits from being on social networks.

But nothing fails quite like success. 2011 looks to be the year of the social networks as more organizations and entrepreneurs compete to build the next FaceBook/FourSquare/Twitter/LinkedIn. Look at the recent hype surrounding Quora. This will be a common event all through 2011 because the barriers to entry are so low and the potential payoff is so high. In a nice weekend afternoon and with a premium account on Ning I can build a competitor to GovLoop (BillLoop?). A three-day weekend, a six-pack of Five-Hour Energy, and a hosted Drupal account and I have a very sophisticated social networking site. Just add a critical mass of members and I will soon have a movie made about me.

Why does this matter to Gov 2.0? Because 2011 will also be the year of engagement fatigue. It will seem like everyone from your local grocery to your alma mater wants you to put a profile on their site and give daily status updates while constantly asking you your opinion on a quick survey. According to neuroscience findings, 150 is the maximum number of social contacts our brains can comfortably handle. Many people have quickly surpassed that number in their online social networking contact lists. By necessity people will start scaling back so expect to see major pruning as people determine just who are the most important members of their personal networks. And woe to the social network where people have just discovered they were tricked into helping the network owner into building a valuable body of knowledge that only the network owner will profit from.

So, how do you tell if you are benefiting from a social network or just whitewashing someone’s virtual fence?

1. What’s In It For Me? Put a dollar value on your time and treat your social networking time like an investment. Is being part of this network going to benefit me by keeping in touch with friends and family? Is it going to help me build a reputation in my field? Can I make a list of at least five ways I personally benefit from being a member?
2. How Much Can I Personalize the Experience? Can I form subgroups of interests? Can I specify who I will interact with? Can I determine the level of interaction I want and not be harassed to interact more?
3. Do I Have Ownership of My Work? At various times, FaceBook and Second Life tried to alter the user agreement so that they and not the user owned the work that was contributed to their respective sites. If you are in a social networking site that tries to claim ownership of your original work and/or does not allow easy exporting of your work, then you don’t want to be a member of that site.
4. Is the Site Owned by the Community? As the site grows has the social network owner ceded more and more of decision making to the community? Is there a diversity of opinion on the site? Is it easy to question and affect decisions about community operations? Is there a formal council of members that rotates membership on a regular basis?

In 2011, I expect to see the rise of many copycat social networking sites as more people try to gain in this emerging market. There will be many beneficial sites but I fear a greater number of social-fencepainting sites will also arise. The challenge for Gov 2.0 citizen engagement efforts is to first be heard above the din of all the new sites and then to survive the coming backlash from the collapse of many of these new social networking sites. The American people are great advocates for collective action but only if the benefits are clearly visible and evenly shared.

As the first decade of the 21st Century ends, I hope that the economic events of the last thirty-five years finally loosen the hold that neoclassical economics has on public policy.  It is widely recognized that the accepted economic models that governments use to shape policy are just not empirically valid.  Today’s economies are vastly different from the industrial revolution economies that shaped neoclassical economic theory.  Yet, these theories are the basis for setting interest rates, regulating the stock market, determining the level of environmental protection, almost every aspect of government regulation (Smith 2010, p. 65).  It is time to modernize the economic theories that are used to guide government and economic policies.

The case against neoclassical economics has been growing in recent years.  As Yves Smith (2010) details in her book:
1)  Economics is not a real science because it is difficult to do the empirical evidence to validate the models economist develop from their assumptions (pp. 20-21).
2)  Many of the core assumptions of neoclassicism (people are totally rational, have complete information, only act to maximize utility, etc.) have been disproved by experiments in behavioral economics (pp. 94-97).
3)  Despite the fact that they are working with faulty assumptions, economists claim that the implications derived from the assumptions are still valid because they are good approximations of reality (p. 41 and pp. 47-48).
4)  Hard sciences also use simplified models to explain phenomena but the crucial difference is that economists add unrealistic properties to validate their models.  For example, economists add the property of perfect information to make supply and demand models work (pp. 48-49).

Some economists counter by admitting that neoclassical economics has these problems but the cure is to do more empirical research.  But with more empirical research, the neoclassical assumptions are giving way to a new economic theory – complexity economics.

Eric Beinhocker (2007) surveys the rise of complexity economics in which researchers apply complexity and network theory concepts to economic activities.  The main advantage of complexity economics is that its assumptions can be empirically validated and that its findings apply to modern economic phenomena.  Thus, this is a better basis upon which to base policy decisions.

Beinhocker’s  (2007) core argument is easy to understand.  Businesses use a mixture (business plan) of physical technologies and social technologies to compete with other businesses.  The businesses that have more fit business plans out-compete businesses with less-fit business plans.  Based on this model Beinhocker details several implications for policy makers:
1)  The role of markets is to process the immense amount of information from buyers and sellers into the most coordinated and effective manner while also determining how fit a business is.  Thus free and open markets must be maintained by regulations that do not impede the flow of information available to all parties (p. 423).
2)  Government’s role is to provide and preserve the vast array of social technologies that make it possible for businesses and markets to exist.  Social technologies such as contract law, antitrust enforcement, and securities regulation (p. 425).  Therefore, government plays an important role in shaping the fitness determination role of markets (pp. 426-427).
3)  Behavioral economics indicates what kind of social programs will be more readily accepted and politically-supported.  People will support aid programs that have strong reciprocity – programs designed to help people become functionally independent (pp. 418-421).
4)  Countries that score higher on measures of societal trust also have higher economic performance than countries with lower societal trust scores (pp. 432-433).  Thus, an important role for American government is to build up social capital in the U.S. (pp. 439-440).

As the above demonstrates, government has a vital role in preserving and strengthening the U.S. economy.  The argument of neoclassical economics that government should have little or no role in market economies is a false one and has led to extreme reactions from the Left and the Right.  With a clearer understanding of government’s actual role in the U.S. economy policy makers can craft effective policies that preserve the best features of the market system while building up the necessary social capital to strengthen the economy and serve the U.S. people.  We just need to move beyond the false answers given by neoclassical economics to the insights of complexity economics.

References:
Beinhocker, E.D. (2007). The origin of wealth: The radical remaking of economics and what it means for business and society. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press.

Smith, Y. (2010). Econned: How unenlightened self interest undermined democracy and corrupted capitialism. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

Further Reading:
Berreby, D. (2005). Us & Them: The science of identity. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Cassidy, J. (2009). How markets fail: The logic of economic calamities. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Lehrer, J. (2009). How we decide. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Pfaff, D.W. (2007). The neuroscience of fair play: Why we usually follow the golden rule. New York: Dana Press.

Schelling, T.C. (2006). Micromotives and macrobehaviors. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Shermer, M. (2008). The mind of the market: Compassionate apes, competitive humans, and other tales from evolutionary economics. New York: Times Books.

Stiglitz, J.E. (2010). Freefall: America, free markets, and the sinking of the world economy. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Thaler, R.H., & Sunstein, C.R. (2009). Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness. New York: Penguin Books.

Ubel, P.A. (2009). Free-market madness: Why human nature is at odds with economics – and why it matters. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press.

I started this tradition in my Junior year of college thanks to an inspiring philosophy professor who applied Ancient Greek philosophy to his profitable management consulting practice.  His guiding concept was arête which has deep meaning but essentially means the pursuit of excellence in whatever you do.  It really resonated with me because I was fast approaching the reality of what I wanted to do after I was graduated in a year from that December.

When I went home for the Christmas break, I had the house to myself for the time after Christmas and just before New Year’s Eve.  I spent most of the time hanging out with friends and having those deep discussions of what we were going to do after we left college.  Of course we had big plans and it was during one session that I jokingly referred to this as the “Five Days of Arete.”  I liked the idea and so when I was graduated next December, I had another round of the Five Days of Arete that had more meaning because I was desperately looking for a job and coping with “real life.”

Over the years I have formalized this process and I thought I would share it with you all.  I hope you find it useful.  Feel free to modify it as you see fit.

The Five Days of Arete:
First Day – Start a journal that you will use for the next five days.  I prefer to mindmap so a large sketchpad and a good set of markers is what I use.  Spend the day contemplating these questions and record your answer before you go to bed:  What are the significant personal events of the last year?  Thinking back to beginning of this year, what were my expectations and how were they met or not met?  What were the biggest surprises of this year?

Second Day – Same drill but with a new set of questions.  1) What are the top ten things I learned this year?  2) How have grown as a whole person this year?

Third Day – One question today: what are the top ten things I want to accomplish by the end of next year?  Order by priority.

Fourth Day – Starting with your list of top ten things create a list of steps for each of the ten items that will help you reach these goals.  Try to be comprehensive but realize that this will change as you progress through the coming year so leave yourself open to serendipity.

Fifth Day – From your list of steps, create a 90-day action plan and starting January 1 or January 2 execute the 90-day action plan.  The goal is to build momentum to propel you in reaching as many of the ten items as you can in the next year.

Have a good holiday season and see you after the New Year’s.

Great story on how network analysis can explain the 2008 collapse.  Look at the four network diagrams in the middle of the article.  You can see the various sectors of the economy gradually merge together.  The most alarming trend is how real estate went from an almost isolated sector to being the center of the combined networks.  Graphic proof of how the growing interdependence between the sectors fueled by increasingly exotic investment instruments short-circuited the regulatory safeguards of  the economy.

A book that I constantly recommend is Beinhocker’s The Origin of Wealth for two reasons. First, Beinhocker demonstrates how traditional economics is inadequate for explaining today’s economic systems. Second, he introduces complexity economics which is still developing but does a much better job in describing how real-world economies work and how people behave economically. To illustrate, let me give a simplified description of his core theory.

You start with a business plan. A business plan is a description of how you will meld physical technologies and social technologies to create a business that competes in an economy. Physical technologies (PT) are “methods and designs for transforming matter, energy, and information from one state into another in pursuit of a goal or goals.” Social technologies (ST) are the “methods and designs for organizing people in pursuit of a goal or goals.” Your business then competes with other businesses on the economic fitness landscape.

The best way to think of a fitness landscape is to imagine a square piece of land with hills and valleys. Businesses want to climb as high as they can on the highest hills because the higher you are up on a fitness landscape the more successful you are. Conversely, if you are in a deep valley you are failing in being fit on that landscape. Various factors determine fitness such as profitability, customer relations, and so on.

So, what does this have to do with Gov 2.0 or government in general? Replace business plan with plan and business with either project or program. You still have PT and ST but instead of building a business to compete on an economic fitness landscape, you are building a project or program to compete in government agency fitness landscape or policy area fitness landscape. This may seem rather abstract but this new perspective helps to consider fundamental questions about your Gov 2.0 project.

1. What are the factors that determine fitness in your landscape? Is it citizen engagement, cost-efficiency, and ease of implementation? Or is it increased collaboration and knowledge generation? Understanding what constitutes success will help to determine what the goal or goals should be for your Gov 2.0 project.
2. What PT an ST will the project need? How will these technologies blend together? Are there barriers to a good blending? Will the proposed blend fulfill the fitness factors more effectively than other blends?
3. How do I know if the Gov 2.0 project is climbing hills in the fitness landscape? How do I find the highest peaks in the fitness landscape and keep the Gov 2.0 project from being stranded on a smaller peak? How do I keep the Gov 2.0 project out of the valleys?
4. What do I do if the fitness landscape shifts? How do I determine when the fitness landscape shifts and what can I do to move the Gov 2.0 project so it stays on the peaks?

Another concept from Beinhocker that is also useful to government agencies is the idea of social architecture. Social architecture determines how adaptable an organization is and is composed of three factors:
1. Behaviors of individuals in the organization (Mental Models)
2. Structures and processes that align people and resources in pursuit of the organization’s goals.
3. The emergent culture that arises from people’s interactions with each other and their environment.
A robust social architecture gives the organization better abilities to determine the shifts in the fitness landscape and to better adapt to the shifts.

The advantages of the fitness landscape perspective is that it starts the dialogue on what the goals of the the Gov 2.0 project are and how the current environment will help or hinder reaching those goals. It also requires an honest assessment of the agency’s abilities to understand their current environment and to adapt when the environment changes. Beinhocker’s book is dense with ideas but he writes in a approachable style and his last chapter is especially vital in understanding government’s role in complexity economics.

Reference:

Beinhocker, E.D. (2006). The origin of wealth: The radical remaking of economics and what it means for business and society. Boston: Harvard Business Press.

In the last twenty years, I’ve probably read hundreds of books and articles on organizational change. My dissertation was a case study of a major organizational change. In all that time and all that I read, I found very little that dealt with how to best communicate a vision for change. The advice was mostly anecdotal and boiled down to “communicate early and often.” In a 2006 Public Administration Review article, Fernandez and Rainey surveyed over one million articles on organizational change and they concluded that the field was filled with conflicting theories and very little empirical evidence supporting these theories. One area that needed further research was the process of initiating change by which the change leader(s) communicate the need for change.

Then I came across a recently published book that offered specific advice on communicating a change vision. Written by Dr. Nickerson, the concept is called changecasting and it is a simple method. The leader records a series of weekly or biweekly videos that are no more than two-to-four minutes in length. In these videos the change leader speaks directly to the camera while explaining the change vision using only one idea per a video. The videos are released through a secure website for the entire organization to view simultaneously. The members of the organization are then encouraged to give their feedback to the videos through an anonymous web-based communication method. The change leader answers the feedback in subsequent videos.

In support of changecasting, Dr. Nickerson offers a case study of two firms (identities hidden) where the presidents initiated a major organizational change. One president used the changecasting method as outlined by the author while the other president used video but didn’t follow the changecasting method. The firm that used changecasting of course prospered while the other firm failed at its organizational change effort. There is a website and, for a fee, your organization can have their changecasting videos reviewed for effectiveness.

I’m usually wary of such books because many business books have plenty of anecdotes but not much empirical evidence to support the author’s claim. In this case, I think the changecasting method is a good idea because it does track well with what I found out in my research on organizational change and general theories on communicating effectively.

When change is communicated the general model is that the change leader(s) creates a vision and then broadcasts the vision to organization through different communication channels such as posters, newsletter, all-hands meetings, intranets, etc. Rarely is feedback encouraged and even rarer is the opportunity to offer anonymous feedback. Much of the advice on handling resistance to the change vision is either by marginalizing the dissenters or enforcing compliance with the change effort. Most change efforts are initiated because of a threatening situation to the organization so there is little time for dissent or even questioning of the change effort. As you can imagine, there is very little interactive communication about the change vision.

This explains why a large majority of change projects fail despite the fact that organizational change must be one of the most studied topics in management science. According to research by the Standish Group, roughly 70% of projects will not deliver promised results, go over the budget, use more time than scheduled, and/or consume more resources than planned for . Clearly, current methods for organizational change are not working effectively. There are many reasons for this but the biggest reason is resistance to change due to uncertainty about the proposed change.

Now, I don’t believe that people in general are naturally resistant to change. If that were true, people wouldn’t buy lottery tickets. What people are naturally afraid of is not understanding the implications of the change that they are compelled to follow. And it also human nature to imagine the worst in situations we do not fully understand.

This is what attracted me to changecasting. I like the aspect of keeping the messages short and simple so as to fully engage your audience. I also like the frequency of communications but what really interests me about process is the anonymous feedback. Opening up a dialogue about the proposed change can help to reduce the uncertainty and thus the resistance to change. There will probably be some residual resistance but I believe that the change leader(s) will gain more acceptance of the change vision than if they simply broadcast the change vision.

Organizational change is a fascinating area of study that also has major practical implications. Methods that can switch the 70% failure rate to a 70% success will be extremely beneficial considering the vast amounts of time, money, and resources the government now wastes on bad change projects. I am greatly interested if any readers of this blog were engaged in a change project where feedback was encouraged and if this feedback led to a successful outcome. I think the changecasting concept is a good method but it needs more empirical support.

References:
Fernandez, S., & Rainey, H. G. (2006). Managing successful organizational change in the public sector. Public Administration Review, 168-176.

Nickerson, J. (2010). Leading change in a web 2.1 world: How changecasting builds trust, creates understanding, and accelerates organizational change. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press

Take a moment and look around your personal office space. Now look at your computer and notice what your desktop icons are and what programs you have open. According to Richard Ogle, the books, documents, computer programs, and other work aids are parts of our extended mind. We create documents, spreadsheets, whatever to offload our intellectual task load so that we can function better in our tasks.

In doing so we have made our tools more intelligent so that they could do some thinking on their own. Think of a spreadsheet you created. Building it took concentrated intellectual effort on your part. But now, you just open the spreadsheet, enter a few numbers, and it does the thinking for you. The spreadsheet has embedded intelligence. Embedded intelligence can also exist in organizational procedures, processes, documents, and even culture. Put enough of these embedded intelligences together and you have an Idea Space.

So what does this have to do with innovation? It is through exploring different Idea Spaces and using analogical thinking that many innovation breakthroughs were achieved. Ogle gives the example of Frances and Crick’s discovery of the structure of DNA. Frances and Crick succeeded where other researchers failed because they were able to apply concepts from other fields and applied it to their problem. Instead of analytical thinking where they reduced the problem to its component parts they used analogies to view their problem from different perspectives and discover a solution.

This happens all of the time. You are working on a problem and then you think of something similar you did on another project. You apply the solution you created before and, with a little tinkering, it works just as well for the new problem. Real innovation occurs when you can apply a seemingly dissimilar analogy and make a truly creative breakthrough.

What all this means for you and your agency is that Idea Spaces follow the common laws of networks. Richard Ogle posits nine such laws such as the “fit get fitter” and “tipping points.” These laws boil down to two: Idea Spaces self-organize into networks and creative leaps occur by connecting Idea Spaces through analogical thinking.

Go look at your colleagues offices. What is their extended mind like? Think of your agency procedures and practices. What Idea Spaces exist there? How would you characterize the network of Idea Spaces? Is it easy to navigate? Can your apply analogical thinking from your colleagues’ Idea Spaces? What barriers exist in agency policies that prevent navigation and analogical thinking?

Nick Charney wrote in a recent blog posting about what is the goal of collaboration. He is correct in that just getting together to talk is not enough. I suggest that the goal of collaboration is to share our Idea Spaces and help others navigate the Idea Spaces so that we can apply analogical thinking to solve our collective problems. We should map our Idea Spaces, help the network of Idea Spaces grow, and clear away the underbrush and barriers to navigation. That is the return on investing in collaboration.

This is why Gov 2.0 and Open Gov are so important. They are not ends in themselves but they make the Idea Spaces network stronger and easier to navigate because the Gov 2.0 tools make it easier to embed intelligence while Open Gov encourages more collaboration. As you go about your work try to see your agency as a collection of Idea Spaces. Is the network strong or does it need help? What barriers are preventing you from applying analogical thinking in your work? Can Gov 2.0 and Open Gov help your agency create a better Idea Spaces network?

Reference:

Ogle, R. (2007). Smart world: Breakthrough creativity and the new science of ideas. Harvard Business School Press.

Appendix A – Formal Definition of Idea Space: “a domain or world viewed from the perspective of the intelligence embedded in it, intelligence that we can use – consciously or not – both to solve our everyday problems and to make the creative leaps that lead to breakthrough” (p. 13).

I believe that the best argument made by Eggers and O’Leary in If We Can Put a Man on the Moon was the need for lawmakers to consider how their proposals will be implemented when the programs are passed to the agencies. I was thinking about this when I was visiting the Woodrow Wilson Center’s electronic archives for the (now defunct) Office of Technology Assessment.

For those not familiar with OTA, it was an agency that performed deep technical analysis of current science and technology topics. Founded in 1972, it produced reports on the impact of the supersonic transports, how to best prepare citizens for disasters, and the benefits of early childhood health programs. OTA provided objective and succinct guidance to Congress on technology issues until it was shut down in 1995. The science community has continually called for OTA’s reestablishment and in 2008, GAO was tasked with producing technical assessment reports.

This year, the Woodrow Wilson Center argued [PDF] for creating a network of nonpartisan organizations to provide objective technical assessments (Expert & Citizen Assessment of Science & Technology – ECAST Network). This is a great idea but I think it should be taken one step further: a nonpartisan network of scholars and practitioners to provide analysis and strategies for implementing major legislation.

Now, your first response is probably that we already have more than enough organizations that provide detailed advice on how to implement almost every bill before Congress. Very true but the problem with their advice is that it is often politically-motivated and rarely deals with the realities of how the agencies will make the programs work effectively and efficiently. Also, I’ve yet to see these proposals consider how their strategies will impact other program and government operations as a whole.

We have a unique community of practitioners and scholars from all levels of American government on GovLoop. I envision developing some type of online structure that could tap into the expertise and practical knowledge that this community possesses and channel it into implementation strategies for such topics like health care, emergency preparedness, and similar topics. We already have tools for collecting ideas, judging those ideas, and crowdsourcing innovations and best practices.

I’m just tossing this idea out there to see if anyone would be interested in discussing it further. I have a few concepts for next steps but I really want to just start the dialogue. This could also serve as a general conversation on creating virtual agencies and better citizen engagement through crowdsourcing (like Beth Noveck’s concepts in Wiki Government).

“Greetings, my friend. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember, my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future.”
(From the opening of Plan Nine from Outer Space)

The idea for this posting came from a remark by a participant at the OpenGov Summit at NASA. It was a great event with some wonderful ideas for OpenGov and Gov 2.0. I was in a session where we discussed applying social network analysis to knowledge management when one person stated that agencies have to implement Gov 2.0 or it will be forced on them.

A rather provocative statement! I thought about this as I took the afternoon off to wander around the Air and Space Museum. Being a student of scenario planning, I thought of four scenarios where the government takes the lead in Gov 2.0 or misses the Gov 2.0 change. Now the idea behind scenario planning is not to predict the future but to use the scenarios to understand the potentials and challenges of current trends. A good example of this is Business 2.0’s 2006 scenarios concerning the future of Google.

I offer the following to set the stage for a discussion on Gov 2.0’s future. Please feel free to agree, disagree, or come up with your own scenario. We have some amazing thinkers out in the Gov 2.0 community and I am eager to hear your ideas so, please do respond!

First Scenario – SteamGov
Borrowing from the steampunk genre, this scenario describes a future where government attempts to implement Gov 2.0 but the rest of the world has already moved on to Web 3.0 or even Web 4.0. Government IT is still a generation behind the current technology available to citizens thus limiting the amount of engagement offered by the agencies. Large, centralized IT architectures dominate the agencies and employees are continually frustrated by the underpowered workstations they have to deal with especially when their own personal technology is much more powerful. There are small pockets of innovation and pilot projects but organizational cultures prevent scaling up these innovations to the agency as a whole.

Second Scenario – Google.Gov
Following a Supreme Court ruling that greatly narrows the definition of inherently governmental, almost all government functions are outsourced to the private and nonprofit sectors. A Google-like company consolidates most of the outsourcing contractors into one large contracting firm that applies the latest technology and business practices to delivering a diverse range of government services. The Executive Branch now consists of the White House staff and a larger GAO. The new GAO administers the megacontract that governs the quality and accountability of government services provided by the large contracting firm.

Third Scenario – LabGov
Still suffering under crushing budget constraints and frustrated by the continuing number of programs forced onto the states by the Federal government, state governments see Gov 2.0 as the way out of their fiscal mess. Fully living up to Justice Brandeis’ metaphor as “laboratories of democracy,” the various state governments experiment with the latest open-source technologies, agile project management, and any other IT or management innovations that promise greater efficiency at lower costs and higher citizen satisfaction. Citizens respond with enthusiasm and petition to have more federal programs (and funds) transferred to the states because they can manage services better, faster, and cheaper than the federal government. States form into regional and programmatic associations that shift the federal-state balance-of-power from the national government to regional governmental organizations (As an example, see Utah’s Laboratory of Democracy Act of 2010).

Fourth Scenario – InnoGov
In 2011 the civilian equivalent of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration is established. Its mandate is to be the project management office for Gov 2.0 and the office seeks out innovative Gov 2.0 projects, funds the development of these projects, and helps other agencies to copy the innovations. New radical management techniques are introduced and organizational cultures become more collaborative and innovative as a result. By 2014 the federal government is the leading innovator in IT and management practices and helps to revitalize the private and non-profit sectors with its technology/best practices transfer programs. Citizen engagement and trust in government begins to rise while the cost-savings and greater efficiencies bring about an era of budget surpluses.