Tax policy and open government

by Kent Aitken

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The Government of Canada has proposed changes to the tax framework, which has struck a wide variety of nerves. Moving swiftly past any discussion of that policy proposal itself, it provides a solid example of the environment in which government works today. I still get interest in explanations of what the idea of open government actually means, and this lets us move from the abstract to the practical.

It’s worth noting that while this public debate has emerged recently, the proposal comes from the 2017 federal budget, including some of the tax strategies the government was examining. Any policy discussion exists in the context of the government’s agenda, which shows up in party platforms, budgets, and the Speech from the Throne. And that agenda, of course, came from somewhere in turn: long-standing party positions, industry lobbying, think tank research, government advice, concerns of MPs’ constituents, international agreements, etc. There’s a complex ecosystem of inputs.

The Department of Finance started inviting comments on July 18. Far from the lightweight budget consultations of years past (essentially a webform and the question “What should the government prioritize?”), they posted a brobdingnagian backgrounder with rationale, data, and their calculations. If they posted the raw datasets, I couldn’t find them; the open government ideal would be linking to the same data that government analysts are using (i.e., on open.canada.ca). Economists, researchers, developers and transparency advocates have long been scraping or copy and pasting information from government websites, which is a barrier to use.

Finance has asked that people read the 27,000+ word backgrounder and provide written comments. There are design decisions baked into this.

One, it’s an email inbox, not an online discussion forum. The written comments aren’t automatically publicly visible, and organizations can consent to publishing or stay mum for privacy.

Two, while the consultation and backgrounder is public, their target audience is clearly a limited group of experts, academics, and businesses (most likely industry organizations that are funded and mandated to analyze and respond to such proposals). The most visible government consultations in recent years have been questions like Ontario Budget Talks, federal electoral reform, or the Innovation Agenda. Those are geared towards broad audiences. However, most government consultations, running quietly for decades under the radar, are closer to this Finance example. The standard has been that government posts an analysis or a draft regulatory change and asks a small community of experts for detailed comments (e.g., on wildlife management strategies or chemical allowances in products). Anyone could respond. But most wouldn't have any fun doing so.

There’s no right or wrong on these two items, just different approaches for different contexts. Making every comment publicly visible can be disenfranchising to many would-be participants. And governments should (generally) design and promote for their actual target audience of stakeholders.

For most people, including many small business owners, their engagement with this consultation will not be in reading the backgrounder and commenting. Instead, they’ll read analyses, op-eds, and updates in the media. Others may contact their MP with their concerns. Others will continue to pay dues to lobbying organizations to do this work on their behalf and trust that their views are represented. This reality will be true of most examples of “open government;” most engagement is through “info-mediaries” rather than direct contact.

The next important feature: government can strategize and plan for the public reaction, but once in the wild, it’s to a large degree out of government’s control. There has been a flurry of media articles written since July 18, taking many different tacks (e.g., that it’s unfair and disincentivizing to doctors specifically) (again, no value judgment here).

For the potential value for government, let’s use Dr. Kevin Milligan as an example. The start of his Twitter thread on the proposal is probably the most-liked tweet ever that starts with “I’ve made spreadsheets…”

I've made spreadsheets to explore tax on private corporations.

Blog post: https://t.co/MdayJmFtKE
Google docs: https://t.co/cUoYWr16px 1/

— Kevin Milligan (@kevinmilligan) September 4, 2017

Milligan, an Economics professor at UBC, reworked and re-calculated a lot of the data from Finance (and, admirably, posted his work and spreadsheets publicly for government officials or other observers to review). His analysis supports much of Finance’s work, calls some parts into question, but definitely adds value. This is the entire point of of open government and open data: recognizing that expertise exists outside government’s walls and creating ways to work it into public decision-making. Milligan’s analysis, alongside a number of other prominent Canadian economists who contribute actively to public debate, turned into blogs or columns in print and online media. That community, plus pundits and other observers, also debated parts of the proposal and each other’s analyses in short form on Twitter.

The email inbox is still central - Milligan encouraged people to write into it - but it’s one of many ways that people will try to influence the decision, even during a formal consultation with an “official” avenue for input.

Milligan’s work (here’s his blog post) is not far off what we’d trendily call “civic tech” (admittedly it’s relatively low-tech civic tech)*. The more common examples are people creating tech platforms for others to find and understand data and information (e.g., theyworkforyou.com or openparliament.ca). But the point isn’t the platform, it’s the analysis and the value in the context of a public decision. So Milligan’s analysis and spreadsheets meet that goal and that description for me.

Lastly on the timeline, there’s one big step left: the government will decide what it wants to do in Cabinet. The proposal as originally written by Finance will almost certainly still be the starting point, but the public reaction and expert comments will change or at least flavour that. While the final advice to Cabinet and the discussion is held in confidence, Access to Information laws, modern government communications, public engagement, and social media make that a more limited concept than it was in the past. The black box is getting smaller and smaller. But the point remains: even if the elected government talks to everyone about a proposed policy, it’s still on them to make the decision and to be held accountable for it. And they do this out of the public eye, by design.

So having walked through the example, what’s left? A couple closing thoughts:

One, a common theme is that as open government and telecommunications technology make the world horizontal and connected, government policy analysts will be less subject matter experts and more facilitators and convenors of stakeholders and external experts. I think this take is wrong, and Finance provides the counterexample. They started with a 27,000-word backgrounder, and I’d bet that there’s a much longer version behind it. They need to be able to understand, fact-check, and contextualize technical input from experts. They need to know if Milligan’s numbers are right or wrong when they lead to game-changing conclusions. So I’d actually propose that government analysts have to be better than they’ve ever been to navigate the modern governance environment.

Two, open government can’t be about changing governance models. How government does things always has to serve the things government needs to do. Open government is better found, in the long run, in the nuts and bolts of government policies and programs. In this case, in the data, principles, and analysis behind tax policy.

The future of citizen engagement is vinyl

by Kent Aitken

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For the last little while I've been expressing wariness about online citizen engagement, and I'd like to explain that.

Of course a lot of citizen engagement will be online. And it can be incredibly effective. The distinction between online and offline is culturally and practically fading. I've defended the idea that online platforms are no worse than in-person ones; just different, suited for different interactions. The term "online" may have a cultural shelf life itself.

So why am I wary?

Let's shift gears a little and talk about digital audio. When CDs came out, they completely sidelined vinyls and cassettes in a decade. Vinyl basically ceased to exist. Yet today we've seen seven years of double-digit growth in vinyl sales and they're now a $1B market, representing 15-18% of physical music revenues.

It's because we over-adjusted to the digital audio option. It was seen as the future, and we wanted to future-proof our collections. We wanted to virtue signal the idea that we were modern and technologically savvy. But over time, those psychological bonuses to the economic decision of audio formats subsided, and we returned to a level playing field between vinyl and digital. We could decide in a less biased way between the two options. At which point we rediscovered the virtues of vinyl - the quality, the packaging, the art, the ritual - for some situations.

Which doesn't change that digital audio is the absolute standard, and for good reason.

Back to online citizen engagement. It's seen as nearly free. It's seen as easy. But most of all it's seen as inclusive. That is, because engagement is online it's seen as fair. It's seen as plausibly reaching the entire intended audience.

More simply: online engagement gets used as a get-out-of-jail-free card for thinking through your goals, engagement design, and audience. It's seen as the future, ergo it's good.

It is sometimes. It it not always.

There are many reasons, but let's look at three:

Digital tends to be shallow. As Robin Gregory put it:

"When hundreds or thousands of stakeholders are asked to (a) speak before a panel for ten to fifteen minutes, (b) submit short written statements to a government body, or (c) participate as representatives of identified interests, then the invitation contains an implicit request to be either superficial or one-dimensional."

This effect is exacerbated by our current culture towards online engagement. The idea that public policy issues are complex is repeated daily, but we ask people for bullet points. Yet! It's possible to do small, deliberative working groups that get into the complexities and nuances of an issue. They may report analyses or pros and cons to a larger interested audience, who may vote or be surveyed in a lightweight way. This can all be done online. But people to tend to assume online always means open, public, easy, and everyone.

Digital lets us think we can skip design and facilitation. When you're doing in-person engagement, the level of design is incredibly involved. Session designers or participant experience designers (that's a thing - do you have one for your online engagement?) think through to the individual personalities in the room. They adjust the timing of parts down to 5-minute increments. They pull from a library of techniques for group discussion. And they actively facilitate. We're only flirting with that level of sophistication online; this is where low-fidelity MP3s started getting replaced by high quality-digital audio but we're not quite there yet. It's a little bit about the technology, but far more about how we use it.

The digital divide is real. Canada's well-connected to the internet, but if you look at the top quartile for age, or the bottom quartile for income, those reassuring 90%+ numbers drop to more like 60%. Many people have to choose between home broadband and mobile and opt for the flexibility of mobile, but there are three activities with massive transaction completion drop-off rates on mobile: banking, looking for jobs, and interacting with government. To say nothing of skills, attitudes, and cultures.

All that to say: digital citizen engagement is going to be amazing for public policy-making and for the relationship between citizens and their governments. I really believe that. And digital will be the standard. But it'll only get amazing when we learn to love the record scratch of in-person engagement, realize the shortcomings of online and therefore get better at it, and choose deliberately between the right options for the right situations.

5 Things About Online Public Engagement

by Nick Charney

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Back in November I wrote a post entitled "Thinking, fast and slow about online public engagement" Today I'm going to push that thinking a deeper, provide some examples and generally expand the premise and reasoning behind the original piece. In so doing I will undoubtedly re-cover the some of the same ground so the original isn't mandatory reading. Oh and heads up this, is a long read.

Thinking, Fast and Slow about Online Public Engagement

Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow is from the increasingly popular field of behavioural economics. It was widely read in government circles in Canada and elsewhere, so if you haven't read it yet, you might considering picking it up. If that's not your speed you could sit down for an hour and watch the video below or just read my quick explanation underneath it.



At it's core Kahneman's thesis is that the human mind is made up of two different and competing (metaphorical) systems: System 1 (fast) and System 2 (slow).

System 1 operates automatically, intuitively, involuntary, and effortlessly — like when we drive, recognize facial expressions, or remember our name.

System 2 requires conscious effort, deliberating, solving problems, reasoning, computing, focusing, concentrating, considering other data, and not jumping to quick conclusions — like when evaluate a trade-off (cost benefit analysis) or fill out a complicated form.

The problem — according to Kahneman — isn't that people have two systems of thinking, but that they often rely on one system in situations when they should be using the other.

So, what happens if we apply Kahneman's fast and slow thinking to the realm of online public engagement, where -- presumably -- we can citizens to be deliberate and considerate problem solvers?

First, let's look at the technology of participation

Nearly all of the popular (or would-be popular) the technology providers out there are relentlessly focused on design as a means to make things as easy and as intuitive to use as possible, to make things fast, to reduce friction. That's because more online product and/or service providers want to 'conversions' (e.g. want you to take a specific action, such as click, share or purchase). in fact there's a whole field called Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO); here's how the ever popular Shopify describes it (h/t Jason Pearman for the link):

"Your store needs to be designed with your customers in mind.

While boosting your traffic can generate more sales, it’s just as important to focus on turning your current traffic into paying customers.

At every step of your customers’ purchasing journeys, there are new opportunities for you to make their paths shorter, easier, and more enjoyable. Through rigorous experimentation and analysis, you can fine-tune your website to push people closer to making a purchase. This process is called Conversion Rate Optimization or CRO.

Conversion Rate Optimization is a technique for increasing the percentage of your website traffic that makes a purchase, also known as a conversion.

And, on a much smaller scale, conversions are happening all the time leading up to that moment, too.

For instance, a conversion on your homepage might mean having a visitor click through to a product. A conversion on a product page might mean a customer clicking ‘Add to Cart’. Conversions can be entirely dependent on the purpose that a specific part of your website serves.

To optimize your online store for conversions, both big and small, you need to be constantly testing each and every aspect of your website."

To be clear, there is nothing inherently wrong with the logic of using design to reduce friction and increase conversions if that is your ultimate goal (with perhaps the exception of Dark Patterns, user interfaces which are designed to trick people); businesses need to make money and conversions generate revenue. It's obvious that these firms want you to buy, like, or share as effortlessly as possible. It's why they use browser cookies to keep you logged into their network, why they store your credit card and shipping information, why they offer delightful mobile experiences and single click checkouts. It is clear that the vast majority product and/or service providers purposefully deploy design online in a way that primes them for system 1 thinking; in many cases their entire business model depends on it. Thus it shouldn't come as a surprise that the dominate design discourse is one of ease of use (i.e. ease of conversion) because the discourse itself is being predominately driven by the product and/or service providers themselves. From a public administration perspective, this is inherently problematic for a couple of reasons:

• Private sector product and/or service leaders set digital experience expectations for citizens in the public domain
• Governments follow private sector leaders and design accordingly, hoping to meet citizen expectations
• Ease of use (system 1: fast thinking) may be congruent with some of governments objectives (e.g. reach and amplification) but not others (e.g. deliberate feedback on crunchy policy issues) which may require a more conscious effort (system 2: slow thinking)

Essentially my point here is a little bit of Marshall McLuhan's the medium is the message and/or if you prefer we shape the tools then the tools shape us.  In other words, if we use fast tools tools for online consultations then we ought to expect loose answers. Despite what anyone else will tell you Twitter is not a good medium for in-depth, meaningful, and sustained conversation. Sure it can be bent to suit that purpose from time to time but it certainly wasn't designed for it. Twitter chats are a great example of fast rather than slow thinking, the medium (Twitter) shapes the message. Participants have to be brief, reactive, and quick if they are to be a part of the conversation as it happens.



Second, let's look at language of participation

I recently read an interesting and related piece in the Atlantic entitled "The Decay of Twitter" that made a number of related arguments (as is worth reading in its entirety). The article discusses the work of Walter Ong (a student of the aforementioned McLuhan and his scholarly work on "the transition of human society from orality to literacy: "from sharing stories and ideas through spoken language alone, to sharing them through writing, text and printed media". Ong's work catalogued the differences between these two cultures. Noting that orality treats words as sound and action, emphasizes memory and redundancy and stays close to the real life experience while literacy treats words as something that can be looked up, abstracted, and analyzed. Ong's work perfectly illustrates how online communications channels such as Twitter shape the nature of the discourse that happen there on.

As a starting point I would argue that the differences between Ong's conceptualization of orality and literacy are congruent with the differences between Kahneman's fast and slow systems; and the similarities between their analytical frames, apparent. The article goes on to discuss at length the idea that the decay of Twitter has a lot to do with the notion that it blurs the distinction between orality and literacy and thus blends the lightweight nature of ephemeral conversation with the permanence of the declarative/analyzable nature of the Internet.

This blending is where all the faux-societal outrage comes from. Its why a single errant tweet can sink a brand, destroy a career, or make the entire Internet mad for the day:

"In other words, on Twitter, people say things that they think of as ephemeral and chatty. Their utterances are then treated as unequivocal political statements by people outside the conversation. Because there’s a kind of sensationalistic value in interpreting someone’s chattiness in partisan terms, tweets “are taken up as magnum opi to be leapt upon and eviscerated, not only by ideological opponents or threatened employers but by in-network peers.” Anthropologists who study digital spaces have diagnosed that a common problem of online communication is “context collapse.” This plays with the oral-literate distinction: When you speak face-to-face, you’re always judging what you’re saying by the reaction of the person you’re speaking to. But when you write (or make a video or a podcast) online, what you’re saying can go anywhere, get read by anyone, and suddenly your words are finding audiences you never imagined you were speaking to."

The article goes on to argue that not just that conceptions of orality and literacy are blending online, but also that the public and private blend, the personal and professional, and the subjective and the objective -- to which I would add Kahneman's the fast and the slow. This becomes especially troubling when we realize that the communications technologies we rely on for engagement and consultation are actively creating a disconnect between the what people say and how it is ultimately interpreted or understood (e.g. context collapse).


Third, let's look at the politics of participation

There was a lot of coverage on the confluence of Brexit and the social media ecoystem. It was an inflection point about how much ought we trust algorithms to decide what make it into our information diet. The Guardian ran a particularly interesting piece entitled The truth about Brexit didn’t stand a chance in the online bubble which argued that in the current media landscape the burden of being thoughtful and seeking out opposing views on particular political issue (in this case Brexit) falls predominately on consumers rather than producers of media and/or social networks. It opens:

"In the quaint steam age of Mark Twain it was the case, as the writer allegedly noted, that: “A lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes”. Owing to significant changes in the media landscape since 1900, the same lie can now circumnavigate the globe, get a million followers on Snapchat and reverse 60 years of political progress while the truth is snoozing in a Xanax-induced coma, eyeshade on, earplugs in.

Modern truth is not just outpaced by fiction, it can be bypassed altogether as part of a sound political strategy or as a central requirement of a media business plan. In an illuminating exchange with the Guardian last week, Arron Banks, the wealthy donor partly responsible for the Brexit campaign, explained leave’s media strategy thus: “The remain campaign featured fact, fact, fact, fact, fact. It just doesn’t work. You have got to connect with people emotionally. It’s the Trump success."

Again, this is classic fast/slow, orality/literacy playing out online. Success in the the political realm -- in the case of Trump and Brexit -- isn't about being slow or literate (or factually correct) it is about being fast and oral (or sensational). The article continues:

"Politics however is just exploiting an information ecosystem designed for the dissemination of material which gives us feelings rather than information."

And concludes:

"If we tolerate a political system which abandons facts and a media ecosystem which does not filter for truth, then this places a heavy burden on “users” to actively gather and interrogate information from all sides - to understand how they might be affected by the consequences of actions, and to know the origin of information and the integrity of the channels through which it reaches them."

It is clear that the media landscape currently favours fast/oral and thus hyper-partisanship over thoughtful discourse. Expecting citizens to exert more control over their media environment and actively slow themselves down in this environment is unrealistic. Anyone who has ever read the comments on an Ottawa Citizen piece about the government (regardless of political stripe) knows this to be true.

Fourth, let's look at the broader implications of this type of engagement on society

What if being reliant on technologies that prime the wrong system, falling victim to the hybridization of oralilty and literacy online, and the political exploitation of both, is only half the challenge? The half immediately in front of us. What if the net result of those two things coming together has a broader and longer-term impact on society? What if it is eroding the very idea of civic participation by over-simplifying the complex task of participating in governance. To wit -- from In the Clutches of Algorithms (also worth reading in full):

"Apple, with a reputation for simplifying large technological problems, making them manageable for most people. In other words, the company’s software masks the complexity of a task. But rather than helping us understand the task, this kind of simplification helps us ignore the task and instead understand the device. I now communicate with my phone as a surrogate for adjusting the temperature and flipping light switches. Modern living now applies the same obedience principle too often seen in classrooms: Our devices now teach us not how to do things but rather how to comply with their interfaces. We are, as Seymour Papert warns, not programming the machines, but instead being programmed by them." 

If you apply the same logic to governance as applied to Apple above, then the question becomes have we allowed our pre-digital understanding of public consultation to be re-programmed (re-imagined, re-understood, re-simplified) in the digital age? And if so, what have we lost in the process and what are the long term implications of that loss on our governing institutions? Who -- if anyone -- is looking at these questions? The closest corollary I can find is Rushkoff's Program or Be Programmed which makes the case that if you don't understand how the program works than you basically beholden to it (i.e. you are being programmed by it); another logical extension of McLuhan.

Moreover, what this does is make it incredibly hard to shift the normative discourse to one that is more thoughtful and civically minded. You simply can't introduce slow issues into fast environments and expect meaningful discourse. A normative fast culture also is anathema to the very discussion of fast versus slow because in order to understand the latter you need to actively engage in it for a moment. In other words, you need to slow down to understand how slowing down could work. The fast pace of the internet is running head long into the slow pace of governance, and while speeding some things up is important (e.g. current service delivery) speeding up others could be counterproductive (e.g. designing future services) if that speed causes them to miss the mark.

Fifth, let's consider what slower, more literate online public engagement could look like

The technology has to be different. It needs to prime people for a slow/literate process rather than a fast/oral one. That means its not likely not something that is already mainstream like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. It is also likely that these companies will not be the birth place of slower more deliberative technologies.It will also need to crack the anonymity nut which exacerbates all of what I have outlined above by removing accountability and the consequences that flow therefrom (Placespeak is a good example in this regard).

The context needs to be clearly articulated. People need background information. They need white papers, videos explaining the problem, and links to additional information. Moreover, the process (and the technology) needs to nudge them into consumption and reflection before it asks solicits their input.

The questions need to be well articulated, specific, directed, and perhaps even technical and/or exclusionary. The truth of the matter is that you for any given engagement the proponent likely doesn't want everyone's input but rather a highly specific subset of it. Failing to narrow the scope of the engagement means receiving input that needs to be 'looked at' (which has a cost) but ultimately goes unconsidered.

All in all

I think the field relatively new, poorly understood, and littered with varying degrees of amateurs. There are a lot of interconnected pieces and insights from complimentary fields (I've strung together but a handful in a cursory way above) that have yet to gel. When this finally happens we will start to have a better sense of how to execute more sophisticated online public engagement, produce better outcomes, and ultimately create more public value and improve our system of governance.

Oh and in case you managed to read your way down this far -- yes, I am perfectly aware that I engaged your fast system with a click-bait title. It was deliberate and hopefully the irony wasn't lost on you.

Cheers

Impossible Conversations: Smart Citizens, Smarter State

Smart Citizens, Smarter State makes the case that governments are woefully under-using the knowledge, expertise, and talents of their citizens - and that bridging that gap is “the future of governing.”

Author Beth Simone Noveck has been at the forefront of changing trends in government and governance for a while now. She’s the Director of NYU’s Governance Lab, and led the U.S. Open Government initiative as Deputy Chief Technology Officer of the White House from 2009-2011.

Having been at the forefront, she draws on a variety of case studies and examples of how government got to novel solutions through more engagement with the public, which covered a broad spectrum of models:

• Crowdsourcing: gathering ideas, suggestions, or feedback on ideas from a broad base of participants
• Citizen engagement on policy-making: involving people in decision-making through online townhalls, discussions, surveys, polls, or other approaches
• Collaborative coding: getting a variety of people to work together to build open-source software
• Citizen science: creating technological platforms through which people can contribute to research, like mapping star fields, taking photos of sea level rise, or measuring PH in a river system
• Public challenges: posting a monetary prize for the first person or organization to design a solution to meet a particular technical, scientific, social, or governance challenge

To add to those models (some of which were covered in her 2009 book Wiki Government), Noveck lays out the concept of “technologies of expertise,” which go beyond the platforms that allow governments to communicate back-and-forth digitally with citizens and into models that help government officials not only find specific types of experts, but also proof and demonstration that those people actually do possess the expertise they claim to. For instance, Github is a website that hosts code repositories, but it also tracks users’ actions and how much they contribute to different coding projects. Or, this proof can be offered through reputation (e.g., eBay ratings), certification (e.g., online education programs), or badging (e.g., Code Academy).

So is this the future of governance?

Nick Charney

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Overall, I enjoyed Noveck’s book, though there were a few chapters that where more US-centric and thus less germain to the Canadian experience (but one can hardly hold that against her). Here’s a few insights from the book (including page numbers) that I think are worth sharing, followed by my commentary.

1. We have no good mental models for what smarter institutions look like -- i.e. the next iteration of governance (page 30), which leads me to conclude that we are slowly negotiating what those look like through ongoing societal discourse within and about the nature of democracy in a globalized world. Indeed many of these conversations have permeated our political discourse as of late (e.g. US election, Brexit, North American Leaders Summit, etc).
2. There’s a lot of discussion about the role that professionalism plays in crowdsourcing in Noveck’s book (page 48) and I’d like to sit her down with Cult of the Amateur author Andrew Keen (See: New Thoughts from an Early Adopter) to discuss it at length.
3. There’s some discussion about “the spoils of new, middle class jobs for thousands of people” (page 69) which to my mind simply signals the fact that any change in governance will have huge economic implications as those changes cascade through our complex and interrelated systems, that and that the stakes are obviously high and interests are vested.
4. Noveck also talks at length about the “We the People” website (pages 77-79) which simply confirmed for me that we have no good models for engaging people in policy making in large numbers, that level of sophistication is still relatively low, and our technological systems are too fast for slow and thoughtful deliberation (See: Thinking, Fast and Slow About Online Public Engagement)
5. I found the concept of “thick” versus “thin” engagment (page 82) to be interesting and likely helpful in framing discussions with others (e.g. do you want thick or thin engagement on this or do you have enough dedicated resources for thick engagement?).

Finally, if you read anything from the book, read pages 144-145. It's insightful and aligns with how the policy innovation and experimentation winds are blowing in Ottawa right now. Here’s a snippet:

“Although there is a lot of writing about improving the use of science in policymaking, Nudge work included, there is still little attention to the science of policymaking itself and only the whispers of an effort to test empirically new ways of deciding and of solving problems. Even if we vary where and how and at what level of government we restrict abortion or legalize prostitution or change the design of the forms used to enroll people in social programs, we do not often question the underlying assumptions about how we make these policies in the first place…

Examining the choice between policies arguably helps to spur a culture of experimentation, but it does not automatically lead to an assessment of the ways in which we actually make policy. To be clear, the Nudge Units often test choices between policies, or sometimes test the the impact of changing default rules, such as how and when to enroll people in a social service. Typically however, they do not experiment with approaches to making policy. They do not examine how governance innovations, such as open data, prize-backed challenges, crowdsourcing, or expert networking translate into results in real people’s lives …

The first step toward implementing smarter governance, therefore, is to develop an agenda for research and experimentation ”

Kent Aitken

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I want to start by doubling down on Nick’s fourth point, with some nods to his first. Large-scale digital citizen engagement is still in its Myspace phase, and we’ll need to keep designing and experimenting to get to models and platforms that work really well. No one's really cracked the online deliberative dialogue nut. Here's a solid, if dated, overview, and here's MIT's work, but the long story short is: polarization around views, in-person power dynamics being replicated online, the order and timing of comments influencing debates, and people sometimes just being lousy.

That said, the exceptions prove the rule for intentional design: for crowdsourcing, some of the really successful case studies are incredibly specific to a particular activity (e.g., spotting supernovae or folding proteins).

During our book club discussion on this one we spent a lot of time on questions about the value of citizen engagement, and the perceived success of governments at both soliciting and using feedback and ideas. My reaction tends to be along these lines: of course it will be of benefit, in many cases, to work with people outside of government to solve public problems, whether that means niche experts, demographically representative samples, or broad public engagement. The question is knowing when to do it, and being able to design the approach such that it’s worthwhile for everyone involved. Subtitles of books like this tend to be hyperbolic (probably well beyond the authors’ claims), so I’d nuance the line to “part of the future of governing.”

Lastly, there’s one area where I tend to be very skeptical, which is the “technologies of expertise” that Noveck refers to: that is, platforms that are designed to surface experts and make them findable by governments. I suspect that if you dig beneath the connections made through platforms that allow people to use, and publicly prove, expertise (e.g., Github, Stack Overflow, Wikipedia, etc.) the lines will map to the interpersonal social networks of the people using those platforms. This argument could be a little chicken-and-egg (when the relationships start virtually over shared interests), but the social context isn’t going away.

From an impartiality perspective, this is a tad dangerous because it means it’s not a perfectly level playing field, but the relationship between government and citizens is going to grow through the aggregate relationships between citizens and government officials (see: Why Government Social Media Isn't Social (and the comments)). The Smart Citizens we're talking about will engage with government when government starts to get to know them.

What is open government?

by Kent Aitken

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Note: if you've never noticed it, now might be a good time to briefly divert your gaze to the disclaimer on the right.

I've probably answered that question - What is open government? - a thousand times in the last couple years. With varying degrees of clarity and convincingness.

This is an attempt at a more universal, albeit less concise, version.

First, some competing definitions

It's an occasionally murky concept, and gets defined differently in different countries, by different people:

"Open government is the governing doctrine which holds that citizens have the right to access the documents and proceedings of the government to allow for effective public oversight."

[Wikipedia]

"[Government that is] sustainably more transparent, more accountable, and more responsive to their own citizens, with the ultimate goal of improving the quality of governance, as well as the quality of services that citizens receive."

[Open Government Partnership]

My go-to today might be something like this: open government is a commitment to making data and information about government operations and decisions open to citizens, and creating opportunities for people to engage in public decisions that interest or impact them.

But that still doesn't really connect the dots between the ideas that make up open government, so I'm proposing another lens.

The government-citizen relationship

Let's think about information flows between government and stakeholders.

Actually, that's a bit unwieldy. Let's collapse the left side into a simpler ecosystem, while recognizing that there's a lot going on in there. 

There have always been information flows. There was never a point where government was completely closed then suddenly became open. In the 1800s Canada conducted the census to get information from Canadians, created awareness campaigns to encourage people to move west, kept parliamentary records in Hansard, and published changes to laws in the Canada Gazette.

None of which we'd consider "open government" today. But it's part of the ecosystem of information flows on which we're building.

Really, anything that was once "open government" over time eventually just gets called "government." Which is why we'll skip right past huge advances like Access to Information laws to get to 2012-ish. The modern push for open government might look something like this:

Since the digital age, governments have provided far more information about programs, policies, and services. This could be web content, emails, or publications. However, the ability for digital communication also created demand, so governments have started releasing the raw data behind research and statements, collecting more public feedback on policy, and posting documents for the sake of transparency, like expense reports.

However, while there are new formats and documents to release, there are also just fundamentally different types of information. For example, consider data on water levels and invasive aquatic species, the first line in the following diagram. It's been available to citizens for a few years. 

But, while people outside government can use that data, more people can use that data better with a few other links made between Country and Government. In this case, a group called Aquahacking was able to express their needs to government (Environment and Climate Change Canada), who showed up to present and provide context and clarifying information about how the data was collected. To close the loop, the Water Rangers system can now provide reliable measurements back into the data collection process, by enabling kayakers and beach-goers to do citizen science.

Open government is about adding more information flows, to more people, in more ways that are more appropriate to needs (see: Innovation is Information). This is both about government releasing information, as well as creating new opportunities for citizens to provide ideas, concerns, and expertise into public decisions.

On that note, there's another expansion to the model that's taking place. The information flows were once largely between small groups in those two circles, Country and Government: lobbyists, the well-connected, and bigger businesses and NGOs for the former and parliamentarians, communications shops, and top executives for the latter. Now those circles look more like this, with many more information flows between many more nodes throughout the ecosystem.




But we'll collapse the model again for simplicity, and end on this: dense, layered, multi-channel information flows between country and government. For a given policy issue, it could be something like this:

Open government really describes a period of acceleration. It's a term than connects these information flows and expresses a commitment to adding more while strengthening the ones that exist. Not just data and information, but more abstract concepts like context, reliability, rationale, understanding, lived experience, trust, and simplicity. Going both ways and back-and-forth.

Which means the question isn't "How do we open government?" but perhaps: "What do we actually need?" "What can we do better?" "What do we open next?"