Part One, in which we try to escape the trap of thinking of power as a limited resource.
Synchronicity is a useful thing - it allows us to begin to make connections we otherwise wouldn't have made.
For example, this morning's diverse reading brought together two articles that really need to be meshed. Hence this blog post.
First read Richard Veryard's post on Contradiction and Ambivalence .
Now read WeLoveLocalGovernment's post on whether Central Government cares about Local Government.
Both look at the ongoing issue of whether we should be more centralised or more decentralised. Reading through the speech that David Cameron made shows how embedded in our thought this issue is:
"When we see a problem, we don’t ask what central government can do...
...we ask what can local people do, what can councils do?"
...and...
"That doesn’t mean I want us locking horns on an ongoing basis.
In fact quite the opposite."
It's clear from this that the modern political model is fundamentally competitive. It views Power as tension, as a resource, as something that is owned and fought for and handed out by one group just like money can be.
Allocation of a resource depends on division. In the same way that we're forced to deal with party politics and left-vs-right, we're also shoe-horned into a political model that plays central-vs-decentral, inner-vs-outer, top-vs-bottom. Zero-sum all the way. A quantum of power can be given to one group or another, but not both.
Power-as-a-resource means it can be bargained with. I'll give you X power but it means I can do Y. A barter under difficult conditions. An assumption that there is a limited amount of power to go round.
This is wrong. It is a distraction. Smoke and mirrors.
Guess what? All the exciting stuff happening right now is all about people collaborating. Not just across parties, but across layers. Left/right/top/bottom/centre/edge/institution/freelance/private/public.
Synchronisation, rather than tension. Collaboration is a new form of power.
No, not a new form of power. A new form of power creation - collaboration is more than just a way of distributing power, it is a meta-power, a means of actually increasing the power available to all.
How it does this is another blogpost. What matters now is that this creation of power is essential. As the power/resource/money model gets itself into knots and ever-decreasing circles, things get more and more vicious. Things get underhand. Things get confusing. We divide ourselves and we end up conquering only ourselves.
We need a way out, to reverse the trend, to grow rather than shrink. And right now, collaboration is the one act firmly keeping real progress alive.
Showing posts with label competing vs collaborating. Show all posts
Showing posts with label competing vs collaborating. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Tis the Season To Be Open
I apologise in advance - this post was originally a small comment on Paul's post, then turned into a blogpost here, and a bit of a rambling one at that. Hopefully it raises some points of interest, and hopefully I can return to some of them in future posts. The area is, ironically, complex in itself.
Paul Clarke has a nice summary of systems complexity generally, and the eternal battle between getting things done, and pleasing everyone. Fortunately I haven't seen the original stories on the Christmas Tree in question, so have no idea what the context is. I prefer it like that.
I think Paul is right to highlight the role of open data as we move forwards into a technical democracy, and the possible solutions/problems coming in as a result - I think there's a good chance that transparency can lead to ever-decreasing circles of receipt-checking, process justification etc, and the whole country implodes in a swamp of exclamation marks and daily mail headlines.
These 2 questions seem rather pertinent, IMHO: "And with what discretion? Authorised by whom?" - Are these the same issues we've been grappling with for years anyway, in the form of representative democracy? On a broad picture, it's not necessary for all citizens to be involved in all decisions all of the time - so we vote for the person we think we can trust most with power. We, as voters, are handing over discretionary power so that someone else is creating a world we want to live in. I call this "trust", because even today there's no way I can know (or want to know) everything my MP is up to. I have a wife and kids and a job.
I've yet to be convinced that the drive for more transparency isn't just a way of getting us to trust politicians less. The over-riding message from on high seems to be that transparency is there to hold people to account - which I think is a real shame, as open data is far more powerful as a platform for collaboration than accusation.
Transparency as distrust leads to a bizarre situation in which people we've "trusted" via our vote are then afraid to apply that power - especially considering a vote is local, while headlines are national or global. Worse, it can drive important decisions further into obscurity and complexity to avoid such scrutiny (and here it's hard not to draw comparisons with the banking industry as a warning).
Perhaps part of the problem is believing that cost is the deciding factor in how accountable (and hence transparent) a decision-process should be. But cost says nothing of either complexity or impact - both of which are much more important in deciding the "suitability" of decisions, I would say.
Cf. two other realms - banking, as mentioned already, and open-source software.
On one hand, the uselessness of auditors in predicting the collapse of banks serves to show how bad it is to have systems that can rapidly create complex models around themselves. Compare this to how open-source software operates - for a project to be sustainable, it is vital that complexity is managed, and that the code is readable by anybody. If the code is unreadable, it grows more slowly, is more prone to bugs and security risks, and is less maintainable. Both designing and refactoring code are essential to ensure a solid output.
Can we apply these lessons to government decision-processes? If transparency is the way forwards, then I think we have to - sure, there are fundamental differences between software (which, for instance, can be forked) and a democracy (which can't, quite so easily). But as things become more open and "many eyes" start taking peeks, the productivity-gains and effectiveness of open data mean that we cna't just assume that openness is enough. Openness needs to be accompanied by feedback - the same constant re-factoring process that goes into software engineering.
In other words, it is not enough to use transparency to justify decisions already made, and to prevent bad decisions being made in future through the threat of later accountability. Openness in data needs to go hand-in-hand with an openness to change - to influence new ways of contributing, of collaborating, and of voting for those who we trust. Even new ways of thinking and feeling about why the decisions are being made in the first place.
Paul Clarke has a nice summary of systems complexity generally, and the eternal battle between getting things done, and pleasing everyone. Fortunately I haven't seen the original stories on the Christmas Tree in question, so have no idea what the context is. I prefer it like that.
I think Paul is right to highlight the role of open data as we move forwards into a technical democracy, and the possible solutions/problems coming in as a result - I think there's a good chance that transparency can lead to ever-decreasing circles of receipt-checking, process justification etc, and the whole country implodes in a swamp of exclamation marks and daily mail headlines.
These 2 questions seem rather pertinent, IMHO: "And with what discretion? Authorised by whom?" - Are these the same issues we've been grappling with for years anyway, in the form of representative democracy? On a broad picture, it's not necessary for all citizens to be involved in all decisions all of the time - so we vote for the person we think we can trust most with power. We, as voters, are handing over discretionary power so that someone else is creating a world we want to live in. I call this "trust", because even today there's no way I can know (or want to know) everything my MP is up to. I have a wife and kids and a job.
I've yet to be convinced that the drive for more transparency isn't just a way of getting us to trust politicians less. The over-riding message from on high seems to be that transparency is there to hold people to account - which I think is a real shame, as open data is far more powerful as a platform for collaboration than accusation.
Transparency as distrust leads to a bizarre situation in which people we've "trusted" via our vote are then afraid to apply that power - especially considering a vote is local, while headlines are national or global. Worse, it can drive important decisions further into obscurity and complexity to avoid such scrutiny (and here it's hard not to draw comparisons with the banking industry as a warning).
Perhaps part of the problem is believing that cost is the deciding factor in how accountable (and hence transparent) a decision-process should be. But cost says nothing of either complexity or impact - both of which are much more important in deciding the "suitability" of decisions, I would say.
Cf. two other realms - banking, as mentioned already, and open-source software.
On one hand, the uselessness of auditors in predicting the collapse of banks serves to show how bad it is to have systems that can rapidly create complex models around themselves. Compare this to how open-source software operates - for a project to be sustainable, it is vital that complexity is managed, and that the code is readable by anybody. If the code is unreadable, it grows more slowly, is more prone to bugs and security risks, and is less maintainable. Both designing and refactoring code are essential to ensure a solid output.
Can we apply these lessons to government decision-processes? If transparency is the way forwards, then I think we have to - sure, there are fundamental differences between software (which, for instance, can be forked) and a democracy (which can't, quite so easily). But as things become more open and "many eyes" start taking peeks, the productivity-gains and effectiveness of open data mean that we cna't just assume that openness is enough. Openness needs to be accompanied by feedback - the same constant re-factoring process that goes into software engineering.
In other words, it is not enough to use transparency to justify decisions already made, and to prevent bad decisions being made in future through the threat of later accountability. Openness in data needs to go hand-in-hand with an openness to change - to influence new ways of contributing, of collaborating, and of voting for those who we trust. Even new ways of thinking and feeling about why the decisions are being made in the first place.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Are we competitors? Or collaborators?
This week I've managed to catch up a little with the Power of Information Taskforce "beta" report, geniously (not a real word) put into a Wordpress site allowing anyone to head over and comment on each section.
Today I also had a quick squint at the Digital Britain interim report - or the executive summary a least. Those of you wanting to check this one out in Wordpress will want to run over to the rather less official version at writetoreply.org.
Comments and access aside, what struck me was the division in attitude taken by each. On the one hand, the POIT report seems to be about working out how we can start opening the doors, giving people access to data, encouraging experimentation, and shift data from where it's created to where people want it.
On the other hand, the exec summary for the Digital Britain report seems ensconced in the idea that we need to keep up with other countries - or, preferably, lead them in all the league tables we're able to league in.
From experience and instinct, it seems to me that those who are open to collaboration are more likely to a) produce things and b) collaborate again in future. On the other hand, seeing the world as a race just means we worry more about how we're doing in relation to others, rather than in relation to ourselves.
Perhaps, in other words, we're falling behind digitally precisely because we want to keep up with others, rather than work on what actually needs fixing, and what people actually want. Competition gives us excuses, collaboration gives us energy.
If we're going to change things, we need to start seeing everyone - and by this I mean our neighbours, our councillors, our politicians, and our friends in other countries and other industries - as potential energy, as possible links. We need more collaboration, but as long as we think of collaborators as potential competitors in some made-up chart that really doesn't mean anything, we're never going to seize the full potential of those links.
I'm not saying competition is a lie, or isn't sometimes useful. Just that being "better" than others shouldn't be our motivation - we should instead simply try to be better than ourselves.
Progress doesn't care about league tables.
Today I also had a quick squint at the Digital Britain interim report - or the executive summary a least. Those of you wanting to check this one out in Wordpress will want to run over to the rather less official version at writetoreply.org.
Comments and access aside, what struck me was the division in attitude taken by each. On the one hand, the POIT report seems to be about working out how we can start opening the doors, giving people access to data, encouraging experimentation, and shift data from where it's created to where people want it.
On the other hand, the exec summary for the Digital Britain report seems ensconced in the idea that we need to keep up with other countries - or, preferably, lead them in all the league tables we're able to league in.
From experience and instinct, it seems to me that those who are open to collaboration are more likely to a) produce things and b) collaborate again in future. On the other hand, seeing the world as a race just means we worry more about how we're doing in relation to others, rather than in relation to ourselves.
Perhaps, in other words, we're falling behind digitally precisely because we want to keep up with others, rather than work on what actually needs fixing, and what people actually want. Competition gives us excuses, collaboration gives us energy.
If we're going to change things, we need to start seeing everyone - and by this I mean our neighbours, our councillors, our politicians, and our friends in other countries and other industries - as potential energy, as possible links. We need more collaboration, but as long as we think of collaborators as potential competitors in some made-up chart that really doesn't mean anything, we're never going to seize the full potential of those links.
I'm not saying competition is a lie, or isn't sometimes useful. Just that being "better" than others shouldn't be our motivation - we should instead simply try to be better than ourselves.
Progress doesn't care about league tables.
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