Tag Archives: European Commission

#LOTE2 gearing up: can citizens do actual policy design? (Italiano)

Non vedo l’ora che cominci #LOTE2. Parteciperanno alcune delle persone più interessanti che conosco: e se non bastasse, stiamo montando un bellissimo programma, interattivo e no-spectator-allowed. La mia parte preferita è la Policy Hero Challenge: l’idea è di prendere alcune delle raccomandazioni generate dal progetto Edgeryders e dare loro la forma di politiche pubbliche. Processi possibili, seri, compatibili con la normativa, accountable; roba che potrebbe essere presa così com’è e portata in Parlamento – o diventare una decisione amministrativa di qualche dirigente. Di solito i cittadini – anche quelli molto intelligenti – non sono in grado di fare questo. Quindi, a ogni sessione parteciperà almeno una persona che lavora nelle istituzioni. Il suo compito è è non permettere alla sessione di assumere un atteggiamento semplicistico.

Lasciatemi fare un esempio. Abbiamo una sessione su “ricablare le politiche per l’innovazione”. Molti edgeryders pensano che le politiche europee dell’innovazione si perdano l’occasione di sostenere persone innovative: non le vedono nemmeno, perché sono concentrate le organizzazioni. Come potrebbe essere una politica per l’innovazione centrata sugli individui? Immagino che la sessione comincerà circa così:

“CITTADINO: “I governi vogliono solo dare grandi progetti a grandi imprese high tech. Tutti sanno che non sono questi i soggetti più innovativi. Dilbert lavora per una grande impresa high tech! Stiamo davvero dicendo che ha senso finanziare il capo di Dilbert per produrre innovazione?”

POLICY MAKER: “Piano. Dobbiamo rendere conto di ogni centesimo, e questo è bene. Ora, le grandi organizzazioni sanno fare a spendere denaro del contribuente: hanno sistemi di contabilità sofisticati e possiedono beni di valore – quindi, se non producono risultati, possiamo sempre fare loro causa e recuperare il denaro. Per esempio, nel 2009 c’è stato un episodio sgradevole in cui alcune piccole imprese hanno montato una specie di truffa […] Certo, se avessimo indicatori affidabili della qualità dei progetti ex ante, potremmo correre qualche rischio in più sull’amministrazione in cambio della certezza di sostenere i progetti migliori, ma misurare la qualità di un’innovazione a priori è molto difficile. Ecco perché: […]

Alla fine è questo: se vuoi fare politiche pubbliche, devi misurarti con la loro piena complessità. Le versioni annacquate non funzionano: almeno, a me non viene in mente un modo di fare queste cose senza trattare tutti come adulti pensanti, e senza pretendere che tutti si comportino come tali. E a pensarci è un’idea bellissima. Esige completa onestà e trasparenza da parte dei policy makers; rigore intellettuale e duro lavoro dai cittadini; e rispetto reciproco da tutti. Porta alla luce il meglio di ciò che ciascuno ha da dare. E potrebbe funzionare.

Sono molto curioso di fare l’esperimento, e molto orgoglioso. Sono orgoglioso della comunità di Edgeryders che fa lo sforzo di autoconvocarsi (Dio sa che molti di loro sono poveri, e il loro investimenti di tempo e denaro per venire a Bruxelles a fare queste discussioni è un dono generoso); orgoglioso dei nostri policy makers, Prabhat Agarwal e i suoi colleghi alla Commissione Europea DG Connect, Justyna Krol e la sua unità a UNDP-CIS; super-orgoglioso dei miei colleghi al Consiglio d’Europa – Gilda Farrell, Nadia El-Imam, Malcolm Cox, Noemi Salantiu, Andrei Trubceac, Joel Obrecht – per sostenere l’evento anche se non è un evento ufficiale del Consiglio d’Europa

E sono orgoglioso di tutti voi, umani come me, così ben rappresentati a #LOTE2. Dopo tutti gli errori nella lunga, sanguinosa storia di ciò che oggi chiamiamo governo; dopo tutte le false partenze, le promesse infrante, le ideologie false, i leaders visionari traditi dai mediocri intorno a loro (e non parliamo nemmeno della roba davvero pesante dei Gulag e delle polizie segrete); dopo tutto questo, sembra che siamo abbastanza intelligenti da guardare la verità in faccia; abbastanza forti da perdonarci a vicenda; e abbastanza pazzi per riprovarci, e perfino per pensare che, questa volta, potremmo riuscire.

Se vuoi partecipare a #LOTE2, leggi qui.

The Internet vs. the democratic deficit: can online collaboration break the ice between citizens and international institutions?

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Global problems demand global governance: we have been repeating it for years. And truly, after World War II, international institutions have proliferated and ended up playing important roles in almost every field. It’s not just the United Nations, with their galaxy of agencies, but also the Bretton Woods twin institutions, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank; OECD; OPEC; the World Economic Forum; the structured military alliances like NATO and SEATO; the Club of Madrid; the International Atomic Energy; the WTO and many others. In Europe, this tendency is amplified by the continent’s unification project, and Brussels’s influence on public policies of EU member states has come to be very important. By some calculations, 70% of the activity of the average European country’s parliament consists in signing and stamping directives discussed and decided upon in Brussels and Strasbourg – which would make those parliaments little more than expensive decoration.

This system is extremely efficient. With 736 MEPs (the German Bundestag has 622) and a bureaucracy of only 33,000 employees the European Union runs the world’s largest economy, with 500 million inhabitants (Oxford Economics estimates public sector employees at 2.5 million in the UK in 2009, though the two figures are of course not directly comparable). But such efficiency comes at a price; many Europeans perceive the Union’s institutions as distant, inaccessible, unaccountable – at least to them. The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, is not elected, but appointed by the member states. The European Parliament is elected, but MEPs find it hard to reconcile the day-by-day work in Brussels with the need to stay in touch with their constituency, which tend to be very large. As a result, these institutions feel like they are working in a vacuum. They study official reports from far-away places, but the everyday life of citizens is perceived as some remote radio transmission with a lot of static on top. The combination of isolation and need for high quality information creates a space for lobbying, and, unsurprisingly, lobbying ensues. In the European political jargon, this problem is called democratic deficit.

The social Internet, I believe, has the potential to break the barrier separating the women and men working for international institutions from citizens. Social filtering allows to entertain massive-scale conversation without too many information overload problems. My past experience with Kublai showed that a central administration can open a direct dialogue with individuals in peripheral territories, leapfrogging all the local administrative levels, and that such disintermediated discussion is an very effective learning tool for the institutions that engage in it. My team and I are trying to enact similar tactics at the European scale with Edgeryders. Individual elected and appointed officials are exploring this space in a more agile way than large organizations can: Dutch MEP Marietje Schaake and Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes are notable examples.

International institutions are interested. Tomorrow (November 29th 2011) the European Parliament – led by its vice president, Gianni Pittella – hosts a discussion on this issue, with a lively program: I have the honor of presenting Edgeryders. On December 9th I will hold a webinar with United Nations Development Programme/Eastern Europe and Central Asia. It is a promising path: I hope it takes us far, because we are are in dire need of reinforcing supranational governance with democratic legitimacy.

Inclusion is disruption: the future of European funding

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The European Commission manages a lot of money. Just regional development projects are allocated a little less than 350 billion euro over the 2007-2013 period; research is allocated another 50 billion, and on it goes. Many critics complain that these resources end up funding mainly “the usual suspects”: universities, large corporations, public authorities, trade unions. These players can deal with the bureaucratic complexities of mounting a European project (for example, build a consortium with at least X partners in Y countries, one of which should be a new member State to increase chances of being funded); but they are not necessarily the most effective at using the money to everyone’s advantage. On the contrary, large organizations tend to have large overheads, a lot of middle management as opposed to line-of-fire staff, low propensity to risk.

Small and micro enterprises, young entrepreneurs, social innovators, creative businesses – often the most interesting players, who can contribute substantially to regional development, research and many more things beside, are left out of the game. As a rule they get demoralized by the formalistic, bureaucratic culture of these processes, and they don’t even bother to bid for funding; when they do bid, they almost always lose. All this has been clear for a long time; as of lately these people have been making themselves heard in a an unusually clear way, and Europe is starting to react. The video above, produced by my friends at CriticalCity Upload, proves the point: it has been shown in a plenary session at the Digital Agenda Assembly, as 1,200 people – including Commissioner Neelie Kroes – watched. Attendees reported the audience responded with thunderous applause.

With this problem in mind, the Department of Regional Affairs at the Prime Minister’s Office is building a project called Opera, a tool to build European project in a peer-to-peer modality (an open community will launch in September). One of its most fascinating features is the possibility to search for possible partners, and to comment and rate their performance. The community spots reliable, fast, collaborative partners and makes it easier to find them — and this will help the emergence of better partnerships and better projects, increasing the efficiency of that funding. The Opera project is explicitly inspired from Kublai, a project I helped launch in 2008 and directed until earlier this year. The Opera team promanates from Studiare Sviluppo, an in-house company of Italy’s central administration that also worked on Kublai. I am happy and proud that the work done by me and my tea, has helped inspire other Central administrations.

Kublai and Opera make use of Web.20 to get to a fascinating result: making public policies more inclusive and more efficient at the same time. Enhanced inclusivity stems from opening the door wide open to get on new agents that are fast and innovative; and these, cutting a slice of the pie for themselves, increase overall efficiency (the efficiency gain is impressive: CriticalCity Upload – incubated in Kublai – has a cost per user reached that is one thirtieth of European e-participation projects). It is not so surprising, because public policies work through people, and chaning the players is a great way to change the game. It remains to be seen whether policy innovators will manage to protect iniatives like Opera from the inevitable backlash of incumbents, that have so far gotten a very confortable deal under the present system. For all the talk of Creative Destruction, not everybody likes creative destrucion.