Web 2.0 in Government: WikiGovernment

The trendy line of books with a "Wiki" prefix has continued with Beth Simone Noveck explorations of Web 2.0 technologies to enhance collaborative democracy in WikiGovernment.

Noveck asserts that the culture and technologies underlying movements of self-selected experts working collaboratively (and usually voluntarily) on projects, in the model of Wikipedia or the open source community before it, should be applied to government decision-making. She uses the US PTO's peer-to-patent program as her preeminent example of this model of public-private collaboration, not surprisingly as she was instrumental in its formation.

As I described here , the peer-to-patent program involves self-selected experts finding and commenting on prior art that may be relevant to a particular patent application. The experts's findings are presented to the examiner, who ultimately makes the decision on the patentability of each proffered claim. Noveck reports that the examiners viewed the peer-to-peer results favorably, believing the experts to have found art that they would not have located.

The iterative processes of commenting and rankings are similar to open souce projects such as Wikipedia, and the numerous private entities that use such practices to harness the “collective wisdom” of the masses. However, the ultimate decision is still in the hands of the government. So Noveck's criticism of earlier public participation models usch as the public commenting on rule-making – that they involve public comments but not actual decisions, is misplaced. If peer-to-patent is the model, the lesson is that the public (and by public we mean self-selected epxerts) should be involved earlier in a way that could (but not necessarily will) influence public decision making, rather then comments on rules made after the fact when there will be little chance for meaningful change.

These ideas are obviously still worth investigating. A bigger role of the public in the beginning of government decision making processes will make it harder for agencies to ignore public participation. It is counterproductive to criticize attempts to use technologies to improve government services, particularly in this age of routine bashing of government.

The obvious problem in crowdsourcing is maintaining public participation. The patent system relates to technologies that affect our economy and society at all levels, yet Peer-to-Peer had a difficult time finding the right experts. Private crowdsourcing projects, such as Innocentive , use bounties and other cash incentives to spur incentives. If government agencies cannot similarly incentivize participation, there will be a great danger that the process will be captured by particular companies and individuals pursuing parochial, rather than public, interests.