This is a simplified systems view of an emerging e-government system where many if not all services are characterized by a digital portal or contact point. How does someone approach these services? How do we prepare people, including children? How can we begin to bring about constancy amidst all this service-delivery upheaval?

When we discuss how something comes to be, we always talk about pre-conditions. This seems unnecessary. We can just as easily speak about the conditions of something. Yes, 'conditions' does imply some aspect of how a thing presently is ("You visited there, right? So, how are the conditions?"), but for the most part refers to the ways things were during a nascent opportunity. Until recently, Open Government could be described as such. That is, from within the moment of experimentation, publishing, conferences, directives, and so on, a fever persisted. "How can we shift from solving problems to creating the (pre-)conditions for solutions to emerge?" Many solutions will be guided by government organizations but not all. In the pockets and at the periphery, civil society and philanthropy double-team. They create solutions to problems, or put differently, essential connections between essential things are made. But inside public organizations, the right technical infrastructure is needed. The narrative of Open Government nearly gets drawn in to a classic battle, wherein a few groups capable of installing and monitoring 'the new large systems' become the better bidders de facto. It is a narrative that deals heavily in technological infrastructure and is therefore prone to growing oligarchic interests, unlike say the managerial musings of Peter Drucker who looks to the gaps between people.

“Citizenship in and through the social sector is not a panacea for the ills of post-capitalist society and post-capitalist polity, but it may be a prerequisite for tackling these ills,” Drucker wrote. “It restores the civic responsibility that is the mark of citizenship, and the civic pride that is the mark of community.” 

Open Government discourse relies on or desires to use technical metaphors, equating the administrative organization of government to things like operating systems, networks, etc. This alone makes it a movement in the history of management theory. At first, this metaphor is a confusion between tactile worlds of coffee cups and chairs, desks and people and the world of circuit boards, fans and USBs. But this way of describing things will likely avoid the trap that past generations of management lingo fell victim too, namely fashion. Open government discussion uses a vocabulary that is infrastructural, material and durable. Rather than discussing Drucker's affective community, open government discussion focuses on what those affective communities need to thrive.

Because of Open Government's reliance on standards and installed infrastructure, the guiding ideas of the movement must hold to open technical specifications at each stage. In most quarters, that goes without saying. By staying "Open", the movement avoids being too connected to the corporatism involved in outfitting services and organizations. So the movement holds to the open principle as a matter of respectable course and a matter of technical principle. But open standards also establish and delineate marketplaces. Complete towns pop up. Industries. It's awesome. And it's happening now. As we speak.

Open Government becomes just open government after some exercising. First thing. Identity all needs internal to an organization. Begin batching needs based on social concepts. Then pair up with your cool IT team. Talk about technical solutions, like computer languages. Map technical language to the social language used when discovering needs and overlaps in the organization. Let the whole world know about your needs. Then tell them your thoughts on the matter. Identify the language(s) that solutions providers must speak if they want to do business with you, your department, your organization, your company.

Whoever is Open for business, they can do the same. Discover a group's keywords. Map out their relationships. Transfer these relationships into computer language. Encode social and professional terms and words into the customized computer language. This becomes an overlap in the use of languages. Some metaphors are about infrastructure. Needs mapping and computer language development are not metaphorical. But they are about infrastructure. 

The insightful operating system metaphor can lead to a confusion between a description of government and government as a dynamic human system. The two are not the same. But this leading metaphor which merges infrastructure and human process seems to be gaining favour. Philip Ashlock took the metaphor to deep levels when in 2009 he wrote "The Root, Braches, and Fruit of Government as Open Platform." This metaphor between infrastructure and organizational setup is new in the history of management and organizational theory. In a way unlike the past, the language and tools which support us may become so proximate to our social conditions and interactions, that in fact we speak of each as one through interchangeable language. This is merely one dangerous path we should be aware of. 

Government or its laws are similar to an operating system. So it's tempting to promote the fluidity of a term like that, saying 'operating system' IS now the right way to describe law. No easy answer. We say and do what works for now. When to hold to certain terms and when to let go? Hard as hell to say. But I do know that what began as a metaphor is becoming an equation, that is a whole way of describing government and affecting alterations to it. Because the transformation of the whole bureaucracy will be linked to this movement in descriptive language, the use of such devices should remain a central concern as the change of State from analog to digital accelerates. 

To refer briefly to Drucker, if government seeks to alleviate the ills and obstacles of society, and if citizenship in and through the social sector is the pre-requisite to tackling these ills as a collective, then I reason government must act as a platform for the social sector, with citizens realizing themselves in and through the social sector. Citizens are the third act. The fourth act involves each State or country getting... it's act together. Easier said than done. The point here is the language we use to describe this clean-up effort is crucial. Given the spectrum I've just portrayed, how do the narratives cascade up and down between each level? There is no answer set answer to this question. Varies country to country, city to city. And like the Open Government/Open System metaphor, this last question is one preferable device among many. How long each will be of utility, only the citizens can tell. The condition of open government is an understanding that it comes first, then a background element in a series of priorities that culminate in no one and nothing but the actual ills and obstacles to which the whole apparatus has been erected.

The web and democracy as open platforms

SOURCE

In my first post, titled Are you taking notes? I introduced Canadian writer Gourlay and his (a)musing history of the Ottawa Valley, Canada's seat of government. Inspiration has zany origins. With Gourlay, we're dealing with a well-read, fervently Christian Canadian who was highly versed in the Valley's history. Lucky for us, he didn't bury the main jewel a number of pages in. He placed it on the front page. He argued that human history is marked by the loss of records and repeating of errors, that is "to indolence and carelessness may be attributed the meagre information we possess regarding the origin, progress, growth and decay of so many branches of the human race." Government is plagued with the same routine forgetting. Government 2.0 (slang for: a restored and renewed civil service) is a way of discussing government that is positive, that emphasizes strengths while acknowledging critical challenges. Gourlay's prescription is one of the earliest intimations of Gov 2.0 that I've come across. In 1896 he wrote:

Intelligent young people should keep short notes of stirring events that come within the range of their observation as these must be of interest and in the hands of one who could classify and arrange and generalize they would not be heavy, but readable.

The implications of Gourlay's insights requires that we (those concerned with the cultural-technological transformation of Government -- Gov 2.0) focus on: intelligent (young) people (1) [young as both age and zeal], short notes (2), stirring events (3), ranges of observation (4), those who classify, arrange, and generalize (5-A,B,C), the notion of heaviness related to accessing records (6), and the notion of readable relating to the records and their accessing (7).

Click here to download:

Access_Design_Interaction-copy.pdf (178 KB)

Woke up. Checked Twitter. Saw @Digiphile's article over at O'Reilly. Something unexpected. Australian Senator Kate Lundy was at Gov 2.0 Expo in Washington a few weeks back. Didn't realize! Not that I could have done much more than tune in and watch her talk live. And I would have. But watching it after was equally affective. Perhaps more so. Seems like so much is happening in the Gov 2.0 space nowadays, after 3 weeks who knows what other media I've consumed and how much. But listening to Kate speak brought many things together. Had I heard her framework elsewhere? Don't think so. Here's Lundy's post about the Washington event.