Why Technology Hasn t Revolutionized Politics, But How It Can Give a Little Help to Our Friends

Transcription

1 Why Technology Hasn t Revolutionized Politics, But How It Can Give a Little Help to Our Friends Archon Fung Hollie Russon Gilman Jennifer Shkabatur Harvard University for Liberation Technologies Workshop Stanford University March 3, 2011 First paper in the area of technology and governance First presentation of that first paper, so I m eager for the feedback but just a little bit intimidated. Let me say that I m presenting this paper for the team that wrote it, which includes not just myself but two talented colleagues Hollie Russon Gilman (PhD Candidate, Harvard U Government Department) and Jennifer Shkabatur (SJD Candidate, Harvard Law School).

2 I have a great startup idea that will save democracy... One motivation for this paper is that every other week, some eager Kennedy School Masters student comes into my office with an idea for some tech-based social enterprise project that is meant to dramatically improve the quality of democratic decision-making, civic engagement, and so on. At a very intuitive level, most of these ideas seem to me to have very fundamental and obvious problems. But evidently they aren t that obvious, and I wanted to think a bit about why not. A second motivation is that I have never really been interested in tech & politics, why not? (i) personally, I love technology, (ii) my academic passion is to find ways to enhance public participation and citizen engagement. So, given the hype around technology and politics, seems natural to delve into it. A second motivation for this project is that I had the opportunity to work with a couple of very talented graduate students to do some case studies of what seem to be the most promising technology-enabled public accountability efforts in low and middle income countries around the world.

3 Puzzle: Why No Killer ICT Platform in Politics? The last fifteen years have brought us amazing killer ICT platforms in commerce, social interaction, and even production. But not politics? Why not?

4 Killer Disruptive 1. Many users adopt an ICT platform and abandon their old way of doing something 2. Because ICT improves their experience by changing how they do that thing, and 3. Organizations harnessing new technology displace organizations using old ones

5 Scope Public Sphere Partisan Mobilization e-government e-services Decision-Making Problem-Solving Accountability

6 Level of Resolution ICT as a Social Force lower communication costs lower search costs, wide bandwidth interactivity, many-to-many, decentralized broadcast

7 ICT Platforms FaceBook, WikiPedia, OpenForQuestions, Recovery.gov, Ushahidi Why Platforms: mostly because we can say something more concrete about how they work, whether they work, what kinds of decisions they affect or not How to think about platform innovations: suppliers (inventors, developers, implementing organizations) - demand (users) - and in this chain maybe 1 out of 1000s becomes a killer platform in the social, commercial, productive domains. Through this lens of supply and demand side considerations, I ll argue that the rate of innovation, the dynamics of success, and so the probability of someone coming up with a killer platform, is much lower in the political sphere than in the realms of commerce, social interaction, and production.

8 Demand 1 Commerce & Social Interaction Politics Individual benefits and gratification Aggregative, Collective Action & Results Anecdote about

9 Demand 1I Production Politics Parallel, Collaborative Production Strategic Action WH Open for Questions experience...

10 Supply Side 1 customers want books sells them books In commerce, blockbuster ICT platforms take off because they enable sellers to provide goods and services to customers with less friction. It s a simple formula.

11 Supply Side 1 Citizens Want to Influence Public Decisions... Politicians, officials want to give them power to make decisions. Here s the political analogy to friction reduction...

12 Supply Side 1 Citizens Want to Influence Public Decisions... Politicians, officials want to give them power to make decisions. But we know that in many political contexts, politicians and officials don t want to reduce the friction in this way. They are reluctant to share decision-making power. So, one of the things citizen-users want most out of political engagement, whether on-line or off line, is the one thing that politicians and officials don t want to give them: power and influence. Jeff Bezos and the others who run Amazon.com would be a lot less successful if they weren t willing to part with the books in their warehouses. Now, I m not saying that politicians should share power in this way, just pointing out that their unwillingness to do so makes killer political ICT platforms much less likely to appear.

13 Q. How many people have heard of participatory budgeting Belo Horizonte e-participatory budgeting example: X dollars, 10% of electorate participated.

14 Supply Side II: Ambiguous Benefits More FaceBook, Amazon, Google users & transactions = More Money, Fame More public deliberation, more accountability =? Ambiguous benefits: public accountability example - the politics of transparency why are all Congressional websites the same, re: user interaction, low deliberation? Because more deliberation and more accountability opportunities hurt them - create risks.

15 In Summary: 1) supply side: smaller flow of ICT platform innovations in political sphere 2) demand side: if there is a killer ICT platform in the political space, its underlying principles & dynamics will be different from the principles that explain killer successes in the commercial, social, and productive domains NOT AN IMPOSSIBILITY THEOREM, just pointing out the disanalogies and the problem with analogical reasoning.

16 Better to light a candle than curse the darkness... Not an impossibility theorem...

17 Cherry Picking Case Location Issue Cidade Democratica Sao Paulo, Brazil Local Problem-Solving Reclamos Santiago, Chile Consumer complaints Budget Tracking Tool Nairobi, Kenya Budget monitoring Ushahidi & Uchaguzi Nairobi, Kenya Election monitoring Mumbai Votes Mumbai, India Legislative Agenda Kiirti (Ushahidi) Bangalore, India Complaint Resolution Fair Play Alliance Bratislava, Slovakia Watchdog, Advocacy GV/OSI Effort: they identified 37 cases as promising. We reviewed and picked the seven above. Looked at them in Fall and Summer Effort was to identify the interaction of political and technological dynamics in these cases.

18 Newly capable groups are assembling, and they are working with the managerial imperative and outside the previous strictures that bounded their effectiveness. These changes will transform the world everywhere groups of people come together to accomplish something, which is to say everywhere. Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everyone

19 Newly capable groups are assembling, and they are working with the managerial imperative and outside the previous strictures that bounded their effectiveness. These changes will transform the world everywhere groups of people come together to accomplish something, which is to say everywhere. Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everyone

20 1. Not Everybody s Coming, But Professionals and Organizations Are Basic reason: demand side difference #1, individual incentives are low - what do we expect them to do, exactly. Again: example of who uses ARRA stimulus information: (i) people trying to get a job, (ii) journalists Sunlight Foundation in the United States - main users are journalists, activists. In several of our cases, ICT entrepreneurs began with the here comes everybody thesis, but then realized that this wasn t going to happen and adjusted their platform and strategy.

21 Ushahidi Uchaguzi 1. low individual incentives -> NGOs mobilize observers 2. low individual capabilities -> NGOs train observers 3. invidividual reports do not improve elections -> channel results to journalists and regulators

22 Cidade Democrática [insert image] Began as ICT urban problem-solving platform for citizens. Then, became platform connected to NGO mobilization and advocacy.

23 II. ICTs do not displace mainstream media ICT-MSM in symbiotic relationship

24 Main users are journalists Mumbai Votes Fair Play Alliance Reduces research costs ICT is neutral source ICT is credible source Transparency enhances credibility

25 III. ICTs don t go around or undermine tradional NGOs and Government ICTs operate through NGOs & Government

26 Kiirti (Bangalore)

27 Allocation & Spending Information Budget Tracking Tool (Kenya) Local NGO Campaigns Government Accountability

28 Priority Problems Cidade Democrática (Brazil) On-Line, Off-Line Mobilization NGO Advocacy Municipal Action

29 Crowd-Sourced Monitoring Report Verification Uchaguzi (Uganda) NGO Advocacy Government Action

30 Getting Context Right More Important than Getting Right Technology

31 ICT

32 Politics is the strong and slow boring of hard boards. Max Weber, Politics as a Vocation (1919) Weber s famous adage about politics remains true The ICT initiatives that we examined do not fundamentally alter this adage.

33 [summary slide for this section] However, properly designed and cleverly deployed, ICTs can ease the way a bit. Maybe a little bit like moving from a hand drill to a power drill. Boring those boards becomes a lot easier. Still, you need to know where to drill the hole and how many. A carpenter is going to drill a straighter, more aligned hole than a weekend warrior. You need a cabinet maker to make a table, a bookshelf, or a cabinet with the boards. [this is unlike, for example, WikiPedia].