The Elephant in the Corner...
...of this election cycle is the Internet.
Suppose for a moment that we're able to get past our sturm
und drang that says that the fascist NeoCons are going to sell our republic
out to the Republicans and that the pinko commie fag liberals will sell our
democracy to the Democrats. What would our government look like if it were
as customer-centric as Amazon?
I've been discussing the idea of e-democracy today with Doc
Searls and Phil Windley who are
having dinner in Las Vegas on the topic as I write this. (I told Phil I wish
I could be a fly in his soup). Our collective
assessment
is that no one is thinking about e-democracy on a large enough scale.
Everybody
wants smaller government except the government. Everybody wants government
to have a better User Interface. Everybody wants the government to be as
user-friendly as Amazon. Everybody wants transparency everywhere in government:
voting auditability, legislation, cloak room deal-cutting,
pork, contracting, etc. And we all want the cost of government to drop like
ISP pricing.
And no one wants politicians getting in the way of governance
any more. At some level, we know this is possible and inevitable. But should
we have to wait a couple of decades for our overdue upgrade?
Phil observes an interesting latency factor built in to government:
governments resist all management principles for 20 years after they've been
widely accepted in private enterprise. He says that
if you announce in a company that 20% of the people are going to be let go,
everyone assumes that it will be someone else, thanks to their high opinion
of their value to the enterprise. Apparently, though, if you make that announcement
in government, everyone assumes they'll be part of the 20%. He's
describing a culture founded on a sense of fraudulence.
I'll bet that most of us have a similar vision of e-government.
Once you describe government as a web app, the rest is mostly details. All
fifteen of us could sit down and sketch it out on a couple of flip chart
sheets. But to implement it, we need to cajole the bureaucrats out of their
bureaus.
Phil and I are willing to stipulate a couple of points:
- Many, maybe most of government employees could be replaced
by a well-designed web app.
- The big cost of government is not the payroll, but the
programs that bureaucrats dream up to justify their job/program/department.
- If only the bureaucrats would cooperate, an IT SWAT Team
could design that web app in #1.
Here's the secret to breaking the civil service log jam: Establish
a program under which a cooperative civil servant can qualify for reasonable
merit
raises and retirement on the pension they're aiming at, if they'll just go
home and stop causing trouble. First they need to cooperate with the SWAT
Team to manage the paperwork they currently handle. If they can demonstrate
that they really don't do anything, they get a bonus, since it saves everyone
so much trouble.
You say Republican and I say Democrat
With
a proper UI and scalability, does anyone care what servers are behind the
scenes at Amazon? Isn't it the same with e-government? If the systems run
properly, the party in power doesn't matter as much. Citizens should be discussing
the fine
points
of services
and decision-making rather than Dem vs. GOP. It's a granularity issue:
the finer the grain, the more useful the design discussions.
When the citizenry is significantly involved in rating programs
(think of epinions or Amazon reviews), defensive wars like Afghanistan are
more likely and preemptive wars like Iraq, perhaps less. I really don't care,
as long as
we all
share a sense of what's right and willing to commit wholeheartedly to, since
that's the benchmark for an effective program, whether it's military action
or AmeriCorps. I hope it's obvious that fine-grained citizen involvement
is the opposite of the citizen initiatives so popular in California. Those
are not fine-grained, but rather the bumper-sticker school of governance.
Along the way, we'd discover that all of us reasoning together
are a lot smarter than some of us. My sense is that smarter-than-average
people of both ends of the spectrum are scared to death of a broad-based
democracy.
The
Internet mustn't be simply a way to win
elections but a basis for governance.
If Estonia can
do this
stuff,
surely we can.
12:24:26 AM 
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