Opening Government: Collaborative Strategies for Tackling the World's Hardest Problems

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is funding a multidisciplinary group of thinkers and doers to explore the possibility of creating a Research Network on “Opening Government.” This “pre-network” group will analyze the potential impact of technology on democratic institutions—specifically, how we can use technology to create more collaborative ways of governing to tackle the world’s hardest problems.
We start from the premise that our government institutions do not yet adequately use the public’s collective know-how to govern effectively, and in order to address this governing deficit, our society must use technology to open our institutions and bring our diverse talents to bear.

During the course of 2012-2013, we’ll plan how to design and study the effects of more participatory governance practices, policies and technologies and to promote the application of those that work to address pressing problems.
Over the course of this planning process and the possible multi-year Research Network, we will endeavor to:

1. Promulgate a new theory and vocabulary of open, decentralized, and networked democracy.
2. Create methods with which to gauge the effectiveness of open and collaborative governance practices.
3. Design a research and action agenda to support open government innovation, including technology-enabled policy experiments.
4. Define a new curriculum for teaching participatory governance and problem solving to the next generation of public servants and civic innovators.

Our research agenda will allow us to address how openness changes what we mean by the traditional values of democratic governance: accountability, transparency, representativeness, and participation.
More specifically, we will want to discuss how governance is evolving in the era of networks:
– What laws, policies and technologies make for successful participation and collective action, and how do we overcome problems of security and privacy?
– What data do we need to have in order to empower and enable participatory action?
– How do we make online collaboration more effective and engaging?
– How do we create incentives for open innovation?
– How do participatory and other approaches to urban innovation compare?
– How do we devolve power from institutions to diverse groupings of individuals and groups? –What are the risks, dangers and downsides to open governance?
These are among the many big questions that call for bringing together expertise across multiple domains of public policy, including legal scholars and political philosophers, computer and network scientists, political and social scientists, economists, and organizational psychologists as well as public servants, entrepreneurs and practical technologists to work together on developing a new vision for governance in the 21st century. By marrying research on open problem-solving practices to specific challenges, the hope is both to test and refine our assumptions about collaboration while having positive, real world impact.
We cannot address every research question during the first year. But by tackling some major issues of general interest and importance during the planning phase, we will get a better sense of different disciplinary approaches and how to construct effective social design experiments that could form the basis for further research and experimentation if a Network proceeds. We will also articulate questions for other researchers and students to begin to address.
Our planning group will meet in London, New York and San Francisco. We will do the bulk of our work — including efforts to map the field — online and in the open. As we grapple with these issues, we’ll share our discussion and invite your participation. We’ll publish essays and debates, video clips, and reading lists, create competitions, and above, all invite your collaboration. It is only by engaging a much wider audience that we can move the conversation forward toward understanding what government and democracy could be in the digital age.
If you would like to write a blog post, suggest topics or questions, articles, projects, books, and resources, and point us to related work, please contact us. Join the conversation @openinggov!