Crowdsourcing Government?Kublai – A Social Network of Creatives for

Regional DevelopmentAlberto Cottica

Version 1.1 of 20 November 2008Released under Creative Commons 2.5 attribution noncommercial

http://www.progettokublai.net

E-government 2.0

● harvests participation and collective intelligence to design policy

● “transparency is the killer app”

Regional development policy issues in Italy

● Adverse selection: well-funded policy measures attract opportunists, who focus on attracting subsidies rather than on local development

● Information asymmetries lead to process managent skills dominating on vision, creativity and achievement

● Lack of trust – getting worse

PEOPLE, not capital, are theengine of development!

Meet Italy's creatives, see their work, hear their stories at:

http://current.com/users/ProgettoKublai/all/0.htm

Solution: a social network of creatives for regional development

● No money handouts (scares off greedy types!) but endorsement to approach existing policy measures and investors

● Talk to people from a creative industries background, strongest on core creative competence and vision

● Strong commitment to openness, meritocracy, transparency, peering (hacker ethics!) to foster trust

● Small project - €250K for the first year (all-in)● => Kublai - a project of the Ministry of Economic

Development – Department of Development Policies

The community on ning.com

● 360+ registered users from all areas of creativity (since May 2008)

● 46 projects (since July 2008)

Keeping in touch

● project fora on the Ning ● a blog● an island in Second Life for help desks and

meetings

Creative Development Awards

● the best projects honoured at Kublai Camp – Rome 24th January 2009

● win Ministry endorsement + € 5000 in high-profile consultancy

● Take part, be there! All ideas welcome.

The future (if any)

●bring the first wave of projects to implementation●consolidate the community●more user-generated project coaching●open up to public and private partners●towards a diverse ecosystem for creativity and innovation, from Vcs to foundations to policy ●all of the above is useless if the community does not continuously reaffirm its belief in its values and the people within it

A social network is an act of love