Live blogging session #1: How to find the people who know the most about a topic

18 April 2013

The Govlab

SESSION #1 THEME: If Only We Knew…how to find the people who knew the most about a topic.

  • CHANGE AGENT: Hon. Jean Philbert Nsengimana, Minister of Youth and ICT, Rwanda
  • FACILITATOR: Beth Noveck, The Governance Lab and Chris Vein, Chief Innovation Officer for Global Information and Communications Technology Development at World Bank

The following is a liveblog of one of six sessions at The GovLab Experiment: Making Engagement Work. It will be updated as the sessions progress from 10:00 AM – 3:00 PM. For the full schedule, please see: http://thegovlab.org/events/making-engagement-work/. For more, read the session description at the bottom of the post.
(Live blog updates provided by N.Y.U. students Antony Declercq, Nicolas Galarza and Liane Tomasetti)
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4:03 PM: Discussion is a wrap! Arnaud Sahuguet from Google.org  will present the complete framework that has been laid out.
3:15 PM: Lots of discussion around aforementioned frameworks to build a stable of experts. Revised framework (advancing from Take #2 below) is:

  • Formulate or Announce Define success
  • Find/ask
  • Engage
  • Apply
  • Grow
  • Sustain
2:16 PM: Two interesting processes have been raised by the group on the best way to find experts, and interestingly, both groups have moved beyond “finding the people” to suggest much more comprehensive frameworks:

Take #1 on “How to build a network of experts”

  1. Announce a need. Before you take the anthropological-style approach of ” finding the tribe that has the magic solution,” create a consensus of what you are looking for.
  2. Identify what is working and and who is doing it.
  3. Determine how the organization can piggy back off of working solutions
  4. Invest in building local capacity.
Take #2 on “What is the route to accomplish a network of experts?”
  1. Formulate or Announce
  2. Find
  3. Engage
  4. Apply
  5. Grow
  6. Sustain
Interestingly, the two represented similar ideas, and both should be viewed as cycles and not as lists with a beginning and an end.

2:07 PM: Which are the attributes of a framework to develop a network of experts that we can access? One answer: nurture an ecosystem. develop Incubators, Find community engaging mechanisms to engage citizens.

Interesting counter-response from another participant:  there are two different approaches. One is building solutions from the bottom up and based on the aforementioned comunity engagement mechanisms. The second approach requires a top-down approach, in which we build a network where governments have produced solutions, to similar problems. The conversation shouldn’t be only focusing on community engagement.
12:45 PM: As lunch unfolds, our breakout sessions have emerged! The group has decided to organize and ground itself around institutional actors. The four institutions that have been chosen are:
  • Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)
  • The Department of Defense (DOD)
  • New York University (NYU)
  • Rwandan Government ( with Hon. Jean Philbert Nsengimana, Minister of Youth and ICT)
Experts in the room will each choose one breakout session, with individual institutional actors serving as group leaders.  Groups will work to specifically address the questions and challenges of each institution and will examine how to find and mobilize experts, hopefully planting the seeds for projects and solutions!
11:55 AM: Defining the Problem: Most of the participants in this session agree that there is no shortage of experts within our communities. Therefore it is not a question about aggregation, but rather one of mediating the process of procuring experts in order to mobilize. In many ways we have access to a lot of expertise and to the forms that could cultivate it, whether this is through crowd-sourcing or other platforms, but how do we moderate?

As one sitting government official pointed out, “you have to protect the money when the consequences could be decade long.” In some cases hierarchy and process are important, but how can we curate, sift, and systematize?

Other government officials have expressed the frustration of the current modus operandi of the current processes they are cultivating experts. The standard story, which was met with many nods and sighs, was “you define a problem, you find the experts, you don’t do anything.” So the suggestion or the hypothesis seems to be that if experts believed their opinions or solutions would be enacted they might be more willing to help, or they might even come running! The suggestion is if people knew their solutions would matter they would be eager to be involved.

11:26 AM: Maybe directing questions to the entire crowd isn’t always the best way to get meaningful answers. Can institutions develop relatively permanent citizen consulting communities? How could those communities be built? Self-selection? Expertise?
11:24 AM: Sometimes it’s hard to remain optimistic about government’s ability to solve wicked problems, no matter the level of citizen involvement. Should it even be up to government to define problems and ask questions with an eye toward solving such huge, complex problems? If not, who should take responsibility?
11:18 AM: Crowdsourcing ideas is very different from eliciting public deliberation on big problems. How can institutions recognize that difference and structure projects accordingly?
11:15 AM: But we should not assume there is always a “best available answer” in government. These answers might exist on Quora, or StackExchange, but not in policy –precisely because people in government have different opinions of what success looks like, and what is important and what isn’t.
A bunch of experts might study various aspects of a problem but they cannot just sit around in a room and decide what the answer is. But maybe one COULD identify a group of people who have complementary skill sets, who could go in search of an answer, aware that the types of questions you ask will determine the kinds of solutions/answers you get.
 11:10 AM: Many of the decisions made in government have nothing to do with expertise. Some of the problems are not about procurement at all, but simply prioritizing what needs to be done. Government is usually set up to solve one thing at a time –they don’t do across-the-board problem-tackling.
So here, the challenge is not a question of aggregating information -it’s about the smart use of media:

  • How do we KEEP experts involved in projects once we’ve found them?
  • How do we form TEAMS between people with diverse skills?

People might have completely different ways of looking different schools of thought –how do we engage these differences productively and meaningfully?
 10:48 AM:  There are fundamental structural issues with institutions like government and public institutions like the United Nations. Processes for identifying and hiring experts are very formal, creating significant latency in one’s capacity to understand what is going on and one’s ability to act upon it. The traditional idea of who an expert is is no longer PhDs and professional experts –they still have a role, but we want to be able to identify expertise on a micro-level that can only be identified by using network-dynamics.
The only way to move forward is to create a transitional structure that incorporates networked information flows but also harnesses the institutional power that we have. We can benefit from regional, international, and local expertise. The expertise needed to solve a problem would ideally blend knowledge from different domains where that knowledge exists. We try to involve/engage many micro-experts rather than having a total expert on one subject. It is more effective to chunk a problem and find micro-solutions (and then merge those into bigger solutions) than to tackle a problem with a macro-solution.
 10:37 AM: How can we make something out of our collective –and yet individual– enthusiasm and expertise? Each and every one of us is knowledgable about something. The “Identifying Experts” session focuses on bringing experts from all sectors to collaboratively design solutions to specific problems.
Participants are discussing the potential use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to leapfrog from an agrarian economy to a service-driven economy that’s also driven by ICTs.
But how do you really strengthen that economy so that you transform a country in a very competitive environment? How do we really use these new technologies to impact the lives of people, in agriculture, education, health, government, and business? There is a massive challenge because the population is largely rural and non-networked. The jobs we create should be long-lasting.
Part of this problem:

  • How can use ICTs to deliver long-lasting solutions?
  • How do you really find out who knows what about a topic?
  •  When you are working on a problem, and you laid out a whole bunch of them, the challenge is that ICT is involved in every function of government –so how do you get the information now that you need to solve problems? Who do you call?

We have been operating in the “fire-fighting” mode –every problem comes at us as urgent, because there is so much expectation about the outcomes of particular solutions. The solutions that are applied to problems mostly don’t get the input that they should get. If we do evaluation afterwards, we don’t know if we have actually been successful.
Participants say the experts are there, but how do we access them in a specific way? We need “experts on demand”.
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SESSION DESCRIPTION: 
The private sector has many ways to tap the experts they need: A bank can convene the best minds to advise on an investment, a headhunter can locate talent from around the country, and a law firm can create a roster of persuasive expert witnesses. We need to develop ways for government agencies to rapidly find experts who can assist in the problem solving process.
This session brings together people with expertise in expertise. We will engage with those from network science who know how to mine for patterns in large datasets; from talent scouts and those who know how to pinpoint skilled individuals; from technology companies who design platforms to enable people to promote what they know; from legal scholars who understand current institutional impediments to identifying and communicating with experts; and from organizational theorists who understand the mechanics of collaboration to public leaders and officials who can talk about why this problem is so important to solve.
When developing a strategy to tap people’s intelligence, expertise and passion, we want to know how to:

  • Discover people’s skills and interests across myriad networks and platforms
  • Create incentives and mechanisms for people to volunteer the kind of expertise they are willing and able to contribute
  • Develop strategies for institutions to reach out and ask for help
  • Overcome the fear of government intrusion when agencies reach out for assistance
  • Design more efficient institutional alternatives (the future version of the
  • Congressional Research Service) to get better expertise faster
  • In order to create smarter institutions, we want to understand the current obstacles and then design cutting-edge strategies for identifying, sourcing, and targeting expertise.

GOAL: To design a platform for identifying and sourcing experts to aid government institutions in solving public problems.

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