Live blog: The Map is Not the Territory

Live updates will be provided from today’s rotating sessions. Each new update will be from a completely different group of our guests discussing each room’s topics.
ROOM TOPIC: What are the dimensions that define open government? What are the hypotheses and assumptions that need to be tested? What are its intrinsic categories and why is it necessary to have a map? What are the various types of peer networks and how do they differ?
 
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3:32pm: Is perhaps this a School and not a Field? A school has its own biases, hunches and intuitions.  A field is much more rigid and academic.
3:26pm: Going back to the web analogy. “It’s bigger than the intersection and smaller than the union”…so what are the things in there?

1. data science
2. government and policy
3. various aspects of social science – but which one?

We have our first definition term of our sessions today!
“Collaborative Public Systems Design” – helps define the object. Problem solving methods, and methods around how to solve problems, and collaborative networks and group intelligence.
3:24pm: Exploring how the web and web services was defined might provide us with some guidance on how to map this space. There were 3 ideas that were key to web science

1. underlying math
2. engineering “the new ones”
3. studying the social implications

3:01pm: There is a public good component to this conversation. Those are really the “problems” that we are trying to solve.
Why do we care about open government? Because we want better life outcomes for people. We presume that their life outcome is somehow changed. The way you actually touch your government is the DMV, a public health facility etc. But technology is being used to improve the delivery of service. We can instead chart the terrain in terms of the outcomes we are trying to see.
2:52pm: Alright, we continue to charge ahead and purse the mapping of the field of open governance. Right out of the gate, a participant asks “what is the ‘it’ we are trying to define?”, and our moderator says “that’s right, that’s why we’re here”.
Participant says – “What we’ve got here is sort of a Justice Stewart-Potter’s definition of pornography…you end up including everything when you try and define a space”
2:26pm: What vectors are we talking about?
/knowledge
/skills
/values
“Values” seems to be a difficult pill to swallow for the group. At the same time, there is a normative agenda which the group can agree on – some more freedom, or some more transparency, for example.
2:19pm: Participants in this room have tried to define this field before, and failed. Just plain given up. But that was back in the early and late 2000’s…group believes that maybe now is the time to revisit this conversation because the field may be more well defined.
Point of clarification from the audience: Do we actually need to map it? If you think you’re in, you’re in! Why actually map it?
Moderator: It’s very hard to study, talk about and create within something unless you have clearly defined a particular space.
Other audience member: Words matter. And by using the word government, we’re really limiting ourselves.
2:17pm: Third session, but of course we are still pumping out new ideas here in the Lab. Several first time events just occurring. First time we’ve heard the following as possible verticals in the space:

• citizen empowerment
• innovation management
• public administration/scholarly work

First time we’ve heard an argument against proposing hypotheses in the Open/Gov/Tech space.
“We have a lot of baggage that comes from needing a hypothesis. We need to be more inductive in our reasoning. For example, how do things relate to each other in a neighborhood?”
1:55pm: Some pulled quotes from Participants:
“Do we focus on the principles that help define the way in which we approach the terrain, and create a normative frame?”
“By creating the map differently, we actually change the terrain”
“Things like Openness tend to feel like gospel in a way. How about we set up our things as experiments instead?”
“You shouldn’t constrain the methodologies that you are using. We need structured cooperative community action, that’s the territory you are working on.”
“It used to take a generation to change a man. Now we do it in a week.”
1:48pm:Woah! This group is charging forward looking to define this space. We’re firing out ideas faster than this author can blogger can capture. The group continues to evolve around the consensus that there is a common rule set which seems to guide the Movement – openness, sharing, tolerance, passion, and experimenting.
There is definitely a pattern between this second group and the first: society is now culturally more inclined to accept constant change. This is enabled by the materials that we use to instantly communicate knowledge artifacts. Therefore, people are encapsulating context and knowledge and expertise…that simply didn’t happen before.
1:37pm: We must define what the connective tissue that binds us. Perhaps that is developing a vocabulary, or creating a new taxonomy – a map must be created to define this field. The title of this session is “The map is not the territory”. Defining a map can be felt as top down, and that title implies that we all might have the same map, but we enter it from different territories.
The group is trying to wrap their head around what the central problems actually are in defining this group. For instance, trying to pigeonhole Tech/Gov ideas into one area implies a common methodology, which may not exist.
Seems to be group agreement that the commonality in this space is the persistent ability maintain optimal porosity.
1:13pm: Are we limiting ourselves by continuing to include the word “government”, in most of the phrases associated with this Movement? Government, the word, usually implies guiding, piloting and organizing. By reinforcing this top-down, hierarchical word, we might constraining ourselves.
Perhaps we need to almost create new words and use new lexicon in order to define this space. A group member just said, “We eventually want to get to a place where we don’t have to use 15 words to define what we are all about.”
1:13pm: The movement of Tech Governance must own power and the ability to effect change. That entire dynamic needs to be encapsulated by the tech world. Power is entirely distributed differently now
1:07pm: There are a lot of questions to ask as we push the Open Government Movement forward. For instance, how do we establish a research and training infrastructure to move this field forward? What is the next generation of skills that is brought to bear? How do you actually walk the talk? How do we properly provide for a next generation of leaders?
This session, packed with leading doers and thinkers in the field, is to define what a map of this field would actually look like. In fields outside of Open Government, people have been able to properly make classifications of thought, such as Modernism and Cubism in art.
Let’s the charting begin!