The Elephant and the Mouse:will web 2.0 change public

services?

IPA, 24 October 2008

David OsimoTech4i2 ltd.

Contents

• What is web 2.0 in government?

• Why it matters?

• What are the risks?

• How to act?

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What is web 2.0 in government?

So far ICT has not fundamentally changed government

• 1990s: ICT expected to make government more transparent, efficient and user oriented

• 2005+: disillusion as ICT failed to drive real change in government

4

The e-ruptive growth of web2.0

70 M blogs, doubling every 6 months

YouTube traffic: 100M views/day

Wikipedia: 2M articles

Source: Technorati, Alexa, Wikipedia, Cachelogic

Peer-to-peer largest source of IP traffic

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Viral adoption also in public services, and not only by government

Source: own elaboration of IPTS PS20 project: see www.epractice.eu/communities/ps20

Relevant for key government activities

Back office Front office

RegulationCross-agency collaboration

Knowledge managementInteroperability

Human resources mgmtPublic procurement

Service deliveryeParticipation

Law enforcementPublic sector information

Public communicationTransparency and accountability

source: “Web 2.0 in Government: Why and How? www.jrc.es7

Regulation : Peer-to-patent

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Peer-to-patent: an inside lookGovernance

• Partnership of US Patent Office with business and academia (NY Law school)

• Self-appointed experts, but participants ensure relevance and quality by tagging, ranking prior art, ranking other reviewers

• Desire of recognition as participation driver

• Weak authentication: blog style

Usage: Started June 07. 2000 users, 32 submission in first month.

Benefits

• Faster processes, backlog reduction

• Better informed decisions

Other applications:

• Functions where governments have “to make complex decisions 9

Cross agency collaboration case:

• Based on Wikipedia software: collaborative drafting of joint reports

Governance• Used by 16 US security agencies – on a super-secure intranet (not public)• Flat, informal cooperation.• Risks: too much information sharing. BUT it’s “worth it”: "the key is risk

management, not risk avoidance.“

Usage: fast take-up, two thirds of analysts use it to co-produce reports

Benefits• Avoiding silos effects (post 9-11)• Better decisions by reducing information bottlenecksOther applications:• Social services for homeless (Canada, Alaska)• Inter-agency consultation• Environmental protection and disaster management (US-EPA, earthquake in

Japan)10

Knowledge management case: Allen and Overy

Answering key questions…

• Which articles do managers think are important this morning?

• Which newsfeeds do my favorite colleagues use?

• What discussion topics are hot in a project team (things you can’t anticipate)?

• Who is expert/working on this specific topic/tag?

…by using “Enterprise 2.0” tools:

• Blogs and wikis for discussion and collaboration

• Collaborative filtering of information, recommendation systems, bookmarks sharing (tags, RSS feeds)

• On top of this: algorithms applied to users’ attention data and behaviour

Not yet spread in companies – but used by individual workers

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Allen and Overy: an inside look

Governance

• Pilot launched on small collaborative groups – then upscaled

• Fast, iterative delivery (not big IT project approach)

• Strong authentication (integrated with company SSO)

• Kept the wiki spirit, low control (non sensitive content)

Usage: became internal standard for collaboration and sharing

Benefits

• Increased awareness of what others are doing – less duplication of effort

• Reduction in internal e-mail sent

• Better learning and knowledge creation

Other applications

• All knowledge-intensive areas of government

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Citizens monitoring government: farmsubsidy.org

Comment on this

Spinea, Italy: citizens monitoring as management tool

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Web 2.0 is about values, not technology

ValuesUser as producer, Collective intelligence,

Long tail, Perpetual beta, Extreme ease of use

ApplicationsBlog, Wiki, Podcast, RSS, Tagging, Social networks, Search engine, MPOGames

TechnologiesAjax, XML, Open API, Microformats, Flash/

Flex, Peer-to-Peer

Source: Author’s elaboration based on Forrester

It’s an incremental, yet disruptive innovation

• Technologic: minor improvements, especially in user-friendliness

• Social: diffusion of set of values which were already there (hacker’s culture)

• Economic: new business models based on advertising and open source -> lower cost barriers!

• Web 1.0: 200.000 personal webpages (Geocities), web 2.0: 70 million blogs

• It’s a difference of SCALE

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"the brilliance of social-software applications like Flickr, Delicious, and Technorati is that

they recognize that computers are really good at doing certain things, like working with

gigantic quantities of data, and really bad at, for example, understanding the different

meanings of certain words, like 'depression.' They devote computing resources in ways

that basically enhance communication, collaboration, and thinking rather than trying

to substitute for them”.

It’s not about “total citizens”

Source: IPTS estimation based on Eurostat, IPSOS-MORI, Forrester

4.Providing attention, taste data

3.Using user-generated content

2.Providing ratings, reviews

1.Producing content

100%3% 40% of Internet users (50% of EU population)10%

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delaware.gov

patientopinion.org

peer-to-patent

A new innovation model in public services

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Implications for public services

• A new WAY to innovate public services

– Exploiting the unique knowledge and skills of networked individual users:learners, teachers, parents, employees…

– Continuous and incremental,

– Open and non hierarchical, difficult to control

– Lowering costs of failure and of trial and error

– Building on voluntary engagement and free tools

Not only by government: civil society, citizens, civil servants

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Implications for public services /2

• A new effective DRIVER to address the challenges of innovating public services– citizens’ ratings and reviews: reducing information asymmetries,

exposing inefficiencies through citizen-to-citizen exchanges of information

– easier creation of pressure groups to make new needs emerge

Based on:

– a wider availability of free IT tools for citizens, civil servants, civil society (blogs, collaboration tools, geographical applications…)

– a culture of public speaking, and increased expectations of openness and transparency

Why web 2.0 matters

Peer-to-patent: an inside lookUsage and impact

• Self-regulated: need critical mass to control “bad apples”

• 2000 users

• 9/23 applications used by USPTO

• 73% of USPTO examiners endorse the project

• pilot being extended and adopted in Japan

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Peer-to-Patent Report June 2008 6

Project Summary

Highlights of Pilot Results

From June 2007-April 2008, Peer-to-Patent has attracted well over 2,000 registered users and 173 items of prior art submitted on 40 applications by participants from 140 countries.

• Public submissions of prior art have been used to reject claims in first office actions coming back from the USPTO. The first 23 office actions issued during the pilot phase showed use of Peer-to-Patent submitted pri-or art in nine rejections, with all but one rejection using non-patent prior art literature. At least 3 additional office actions suggest that, while examiners did not use Peer-to-Patent prior art references in rejecting the application, they were influenced by Peer-to-Patent submissions in their search strategy and understanding of the prior art.

• Of the 419 total prior art references submitted by inventors during the pilot, only 14 percent were non-patent literature. In contrast, 55 percent of prior art references cited by Peer-to-Patent reviewers were non-patent literature.

• Eighty-nine (89) percent of participating patent examiners thought the presentation of prior art that they received from the Peer-to-Patent community was clear and well formatted. Ninety-two (92) percent re-ported that they would welcome examining another application with public participation.

• Seventy-three (73) percent of participating examiners want to see Peer-to-Patent implemented as regular office practice.

• Twenty-one (21) percent of participating examiners stated that prior art submitted by the Peer-to-Patent community was “inaccessible” by the USPTO.

• The USPTO received one third-party prior art submission for every 500 applications published in 2007. Peer-to-Patent reviewers have provided an average of almost 5 prior art references for each application in the pilot.

“We’re very pleased with this initial outcome. Patents of questionable merit are of little value to anyone. We much prefer that the best prior art be identified so that the resulting patent is truly bulletproof. This is precisely why we eagerly agreed to sponsor this project and other patent quality initiatives. We are proud of this result, which validates the concept of Peer-to-Patent, and can only improve the quality of patents produced by the patent system.”

— Manny Schecter, Associate General Counsel for Intellectual Property, IBM

Patient Opinion: an inside look

Usage: 3000 comments in first 9 months, 38 health providers subscribed

Benefits of ratings/reviews

• Enabling informed choices (for citizens)

• Understanding users needs (for hospitals)

• Monitoring quality compliance for service improvement (for health funders)

• “Does feedback actually work”?

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Source: PatientOpinion blog

Reminder: citizens and employees do it anyway

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Are these services used?

• in the back-office, yes

• in the front-office, not too much: few thousand users as an average

• still: this is much more than before!

• some (petty) specific causes have viral take-up (mobile phones fees, road tax charge schemes)

• very low costs of experimentation

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Impact on effectiveness, not efficiency

• Some time savings: reduced e-mail congestion

• Better peripheral awareness, better relevance

• Bryolfsson: “access to information strongly predicts the number of projects completed by each individual and the amount of revenue that person generates”

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Why?

Because it does not impose change (e-gov 1.0) but acts on leverages, drivers and incentives:

• building on unique and specific knowledge of users: the “cognitive surplus”

• the power of visualization

• reducing information and power asymmetries

• peer recognition rather than hierarchy

• reducing the cost of collective action

• changing the expectations of citizens

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“it’s about pressure points, chinks in the armour where

improvements might be possible, whether with the consent of

government or not”

Tom Steinbergdirector mySociety

“A problem shared is a problem halved

...and a pressure group created”

Dr. Paul Hodgkindirector PatientOpinion.org

Why? /2

• Citizens (and employees) already use web 2.0: no action ≠ no risks

• Likely to stay as it is linked to underlying societal trends

- Today’s teenagers = future users and employees

- Empowered customers

- Creative knowledge workers

- From hierarchy to network-based organizations

- Non linear-innovation models

- Consumerization of ICT32

A new e-government vision?

Providing services online through portalsExposing web services for re-intermediation

Robinson et al.: “Government Data and the Invisible Hand “Gartner: “The Real Future of E-Government: From Joined-Up to Mashed-Up”

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A new flagship goal of eGovernment?

INPUT: IT investment

IMPACT: Better

government

high

high

low

low

eGov2.0 Reusable data

eGov1.0 Online services

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The risksWhat can go wrong? no impact and negative impact

scenarios

No impact scenario

It’s just another hype

• Web 2.0 business model is not solid, too reliant on advertising

• Online advertising is highly sensitive to GDP growth: bubble 2.0 in waiting

• Startups failing to deliver profits: Skype, Vonage

Source: IPTS elaboration of U.S Census, IAB

Few users are proactive – and we are reaching the peak

• Only 3% of citizens blogs, and growth of blogs and wikis is slowing down

• In public services, citizens are even less interested in participating/ discussing

Source:Robert A. Rohde, wikipedia administrator

It’s doesn’t matter

What matters is competence and high-quality services, rather than “conversations”

• In business, commercial success does not need openness (e.g. Zune developers blog while I-Pod developers are secretive)

• In politics, success in the blogosphere does not translate in success in elections (e.g. Howard Dean, Barak Obama),

• In public services provision, spontaneous cooperation (as “barcamp”) only rarely delivers after the initial enthusiasm (e.g. Italian Tourism Portal).

• Bloggers approach is not always constructive: “the philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point is to complain about it”

Negative impact

Creating inefficiencies

• Civil servants time diverted to non-core activities

• Web2.0 applications are cheap, but are human-resource-intensive: against the government trend to “do less, buy more”

• Excessive social control leading to increased risk aversion and immobilisation in the public sector

Undermining institutional credibility

• Opening confrontations, rather than dialogue and increasing distrust between government and citizens

• Government held accountable for bad/offensive user-generated content on the website

• Blogging is not for government (UK minister discussing the pension reform)

Damaging societal value

• Risk of populistic outcome, focus on short-term issues (beppegrillo, road tax charge)

• Citizens organize anti social behaviour, and government react through increased control

• Excessive social control, no privacy

• Balkanisation of society• Increased exclusion:

services 2.0 only for the elite

So what?Some suggestions and lessons learnt

Suggestions from web 2.0 experts

• Open your data, make them available for re-use

• Start from back office: knowledge intensive, collaborative culture teams

• Evaluate existing usage by your employees

• Subsidiarity: Partner with civil society and existing initiatives

• Provide governance, but soft: policies and guidance

• Listen and follow-up on users’ feedback

• But no ready recipes: don’t embrace, experiment! (it’s cheap!)

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Common mistakes

• “Build it and they will come”: beta testing, trial and error necessary

• Launching “your own” large scale web 2.0 mega- project

• Opening up without soft governance of key challenges:

- privacy

- individual vs institutional role

- destructive participation

• Adopting only the technology with traditional top-down attitude

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Thank you

david.osimo@tech4i2.com

Further information:Osimo, 2008. Web2.0 in government: why and how? www.jrc.es

Osimo, 2008. Benchmarking e-government in the web 2.0 era: what to measure, and how. www.epracticejournal.eu , August 2008.

Aral, Brynjolfsson, Van Alstyne, 2007, “Productivity Effects of Information Diffusion in Networks”, digital.mit.edu

http://egov20.wordpress.com

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