On May 29th the Media Lab hosted a conversation with Beth Noveck. The following liveblog was compiled by Ed Platt, Matt Stempeck, Erhardt Graeff, and myself.
Joi introduces Beth Noveck, “a unique breed of nerd-lawyer,” a small but growing hybrid of a profession. Beth is a visiting professor at both New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service and the MIT Media Lab. She served in the White House as the first United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer and founder and director of the White House Open Government Initiative. She is now director of the Governance Lab, funded by the Knight and MacArthur foundations, which she will be discussing with the Lab today.
Beth begins her presentation with a series of examples of innovation from the private sector. Zara’s product design cycle, informed by big data, is among the most rapid and effective in its industry. Pharma giant Eli Lily uses the Innocentive network of external researchers to solve problems their internal R&D deparments cannot. Nick Grossman advises companies built to harness and power the peer economy.
Beth got here in an Uber ride, but NYC’s recent ruling that Airbnb is illegal in the city shows the distance we still have to travel to merge private sector innovation and public sector regulations. When we think of government, we still picture onerous forms and bureaucratic offices. Our interaction with government is centered around the act of voting, which occurs annually at best. We’re beginning to see platforms to help citizens engage with government.
Big data is being used by governments to track complaints, by health care providers to improve service, and even by the Whitehouse with We the People.
Against all odds, change has indeed come to Washington. While serving as US CTO at the White House, Beth was told not to use the word ‘hack’ in public. Only a couple of short years later, we see the White House logo emblazoned with the word for their official hackathon.The Peer to Patent project brought together volunteers and scientists to reduce the US Patent Office’s backlog and help the public find prior art. But It’s hard to begin a culture shift towards this new way of working because o many of these experiments are divorced from traditional institutions.
“How do we create a design science for democracy?” asks Beth. She believes we have to redesign institutions to take advantage of big data, new communication technology, and work in new, decentralized and progressive ways.
ExpertNet was a White House effort to gather expertise from experts online. Since then, we’ve seen Vivo, ScienceCV, FDA Project, and Harvard Catalyst Profiles Project. These projects seek to provide incentives for the public side to ask for expertise, and for those in the private sector to answer. Successful examples like StackOverflow have been able to convince people to contribute their knowledge. Developing more solutions like these is the purpose of the GovLab Beth has been charged to create and direct.
Joi opens the discussion by telling an apocryphal story about Beth ordering government lawyers to allow public-domain textbooks to be released under Creative Commons. The purpose of the story is to demonstrate the divide between tech culture (focused on openness) and government culture (focused on rules). The goal of releasing these public domain materials under CC was to make it more explicit that they could be broadly shared for educational purposes and economic development. As part of a broader shift, two weeks ago, Obama signed an executive order on open data.
The philosophical commitment to open data is now there, but we have a long way to go towards the implementation. Joi points out that you don’t know how open data really is until you try to use it and find out what the actual permissions structure is. He points to the government crackdown on Wikileaks as an example of a swing against openness, or perhaps an alternate understanding of what openness even means.
Beth refers to the “app generation” of civic-focused apps to solve public problems around which there is a broad, unproblematic consensus, like finding buses and toilets. The second stage, and the stage we need a lot of help with, is to help groups define the problems that need solving. Beth points to the recent controversy where the IRS targeted specific political groups, and believes data could help highlight likely areas of tax abuse so we don’t need to rely on biased officials.
Joi asks if smaller, local governments are more agile and willing to adopt new technologies. Beth notes that it’s easy to tackle small local issues and infrastructure issues like the ones she mentioned, but if we don’t also try to tackle larger, politically fraught issues, the potential of open data could be dismissed.
Sometimes we need help noticing phenomena before we can even realize they may be problems. Beth tells how Mayor Cory Booker’s office told her that in Newark, when foodstamps come out, the prices of food in certain stores jumps. You have no way to know where and how this is happening unless someone is collecting data, which could be done with peer-to-peer and mobile technology.
Joi describes the Media Lab as a place of applied technology. At the Media Lab, we don’t study or research things in great depth unless we do so in order to build things. For that reason, we don’t have many lawyers or anthropologists or such here. But the reason we want you here is that you’re working on applied policy.
Beth notes that she has a normative, values-based mission about changing the world via more open, engaged ways of working. She grew up studying the failure of democratic institutions in Europe in the 1920s and 30s, and how they weren’t designed to cope with difficult economic times. They didn’t bend, they broke.
And audience member asks whether Beth was conflicted about the prosecution of Bradley Manning given her commitment to openness. Beth notes she wasn’t in the administration at that point. She was excited by the level of engagement generated by Wikileaks. It was a missed opportunity. Concerns over security can make the language of openness a political hornet’s nest. Intelligence agencies are using wikis internally, and could consider opening up their wikis to do better intelligence.
An audience member asks what Beth’s vision for GovLab is. She notes she’s received a grant to investigate creating an action-oriented research network that spans disciplines and serves as an observatory to follow the innovations taking place and how they’re changing peoples’ lives. One possibility is an ‘action lab’ could develop actual platforms in partnerships with institutions. The role of government should still be about creating public goods and protecting common good. An example is the expert connection platform to draw out knowledge.
Another is a MIT CSAIL project, NoMB, a response to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). The idea is that data should tell us in real-time about a government project’s impact and effectiveness. We’ve got lots of examples of innovation, but we need metrics because we’re all wondering what actually works. Other potential projects could take on peer-to-peer governance not working within existing institutions. Any projects should be developed in networks of people, not by small teams sitting in Cambridge.
Audience member says three institutional flaws that create a democratic deficit: disproportional representation of the senate, voter-suppression, winner-takes-all elections. How can we address these?
These are systemic flaws in institutional design. What are the ways we can combine different tools? What are the alternatives? We could redesign the voting system, to choose your delegates based on topic rather than geography. Things that are broken don’t fix themselves. Without new mental models, it’s hard to galvanize the public to drive change. We should look globally for institutional actors who are open to trying new things.