Learning by Doing: The GovLab’s Living Labs

The Governance Lab is a Living Lab.  We seek to understand new ways to improve governance by creating and testing practical designs for processes, technologies and institutional arrangements that enable greater collaboration between organizations and individuals in problem-solving.
We practice what is called  “action research” precisely because we believe as MIT Professor Kurt Lewin, who coined the term, that “research that produces nothing but books will not suffice.”  Hence we are committed to learning by doing. We work on real world projects with leaders interested in implementing more open and collaborative decision-making and with researchers interested in studying those projects and their impact on people’s lives.
Our Living Labs tackles important problems to the end of improving people’s lives in practical ways as a path to developing new and better concepts of governance.  But not every challenge is a project for the Living Labs. We’re in the process of selecting projects that:

• Are aimed at improving real people’s lives by changing how we govern.
• Are focused on how to open up and make governance more collaborative and diverse.
• Involve multiple institutional partners who are committed to change and to sharing what they learn with each other.
• Include a commitment to research and analysis of what worked including the use of randomized controlled trials.
• Can help solve a pervasive problem in a generalizable way, so that the results can be widely applied.

Our first Living Labs projects are focused on a core challenge that all organizations face:

How can institutions become “open” to bringing in new ideas and new kinds of expertise?

Or, as one of our GovLab Fellows puts it: “How do we layer in all kinds of smart.” Institutions seeking to tap new input for decision-making have at least two challenges. First, they have to identify the best, most relevant expertise; and second, they need to motivate those with know-how and others to help them solve their most difficult problems.
A Living Lab crowdsourcing project with two complementary partner institutions will develop and test approaches to sourcing expertise and “matching” expertise to inform decision-making and problem solving.
Today in Durban, South Africa, an organization with a key role in managing the most important infrastructure of our time, the Internet, announced that it will be working with the Gov Lab on a Living Lab project.  The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has managed the system of Internet domains for a decade and a half. We are delighted to be working with ICANN to engage netizens in smarter policymaking. Through a Living Lab project, Gov Lab will be an independent advisor to ICANN’s President’s Strategy Panel on Multi-Stakeholder Innovation, which I have the honor to Chair. The Committee will convene global thought leaders to:

• Examine how Internet policy issues might best be managed in the future;
• Propose new models for international engagement, consensus-based policymaking and institutional structures to support such enhanced functions; and
• Design processes, tools and platforms that enable the global ICANN community to engage in these new forms of participatory decision-making.

The goal of this work is not institutional innovation for its own sake but the stability and longevity of a free and open Internet.
Gov Lab will support the Strategy Panel with research and convening and by articulating designs informed by research for platforms that can engage outside experts and help bring their knowledge to ICANN’s policymaking process. We’ll also design the research protocols to study what works.
In a parallel Living Lab that will afford an opportunity for comparative research and analysis to the ICANN work, we will work with New York University to design more effective ways to tap expertise in the university community to the end of enhancing university life and educational opportunities.
The GovLab’s role will be to design processes and platforms for eliciting information in a form and format that is manageable and useful, and gathering input that is focused on scientific, technical, and factual information, more than on opinions or values, as well as designing metrics to evaluate how these new processes improve outcomes and the ability to solve problems better.
Ultimately, we hope that the Living Labs will help develop new approaches to governance and ultimately to government itself. Most people interact with government through the limited acts of voting annually or volunteering in their local communities, or perhaps answering an occasional public opinion poll. There are limited channels for people to contribute to the full extent that their unique talents, experience, or training could enable them to do. Recently, software developers have created new platforms for identifying expertise, and the private sector has started to use them; for example, sectors like banking regularly use expert networks to inform investment decisions. The Living Labs can help create models for public institutions and governments to tap the expertise of the constituencies they serve.